On my first day of graduate school I posted a notice on the student bulletin board enquiring if there were any rock climbers about – being that this was in the middle of Dallas, it was not a sure thing I would receive a positive response. To John Ferguson’s everlasting misfortune, he answered my advert and thus embarked on three plus decades of buffoonery and misadventure. We commenced our adventures with weekend climbing trips to Enchanted Rock in the central Texas hill country, where John impressed me with his calm mind on sketchy leads and I impressed him with my utter lack of good sense. If not exactly a dream team, at least we weren’t suicidally stupid. Having survived these initial shakedown cruises we endeavored to up the ante over spring break by ski traversing Rocky Mountain National Park from west to east.

Our adventure began in early March when a friend dropped us off at the Green Mountain trailhead and then high-tailed it out of there for warmer pastures. Two days of skiing up the Tonahutu drainage basin in fabulous snow conditions took us to the upper reaches of that drainage to near timberline below Sprague Pass. On the third day we crossed over the top of the divide and down the east side. As is typical of the Colorado Front Range, snow was deep and abundant on the west side of the continental divide and pretty marginal and sketchy on the east side. We skied over to Flat Top Mountain as much as we could, but resigned ourselves to carrying our skis where the wind had scoured the ridge free of snow. This same wind had deposited impressive patches of hoar frost on the windward side of rocks and boulders. As we marched across the top of the ridge we encountered a herd of Rocky Mountain big horn sheep just hanging out. It was probably 5 to 10 degrees above zero, the wind was steady at 20 to 25 mph, we were bundled up in survival mode, and these sheep were just hanging like it was all a pretty casual deal. Truly, humans are not the sharpest tool in the backcountry toolshed. These sheep followed us over the top of the continental divide, no doubt out of curiosity, until we started descending the east side of Flat Top Mountain towards timberline (probably getting too warm for them). Once in the trees there was enough snow to ski so long as we were mindful enough to avoid rocks and stumps, of which there were plenty. We descended without incident to the Bear Lake trail head where we relied on the kindness of strangers to give us a ride into Estes Park. While waiting for our friends to drive up from Denver to fetch us up, we were befriended by a young coed from CSU who thought we looked like more fun than the date she had arrived with. She tried to convince us that a good time could be had by all if we just took her under our wing and all went to a St Patrick’s Day green jello bathing suit wrestling party. Lives lived are influenced as much by the choices we don’t make as by the ones that we do, so one can only imagine what adventurous turns of fate John and I missed out on that day in a bar long ago, in a world long since passed.

Postscript: This was the first of many backcountry ski adventures John and I were to have over the years, many of which involved the overnight comforts of the Tenth Mountain Trail Association huts. These ski trips augmented our more typical climbing adventures to RNMP, the high Sierras, and the Tetons. Of late, as the knees get crabbier, we have taken to paddling our boats gently down the stream, which has also been wonderful (you can carry far more beer in a canoe than you can on your back, dontcha know).