extensions of thought, of being. Music began to flow from our happiness into the air, and from the air into the world around us. And from the world around us, into us and back out again. Butterflies that had been fluttering nearby came closer and fluttered near our faces. A hawk that had been circling overhead came in low and slowly passed—passed so close, in fact, that the wind moving through its wings made a sound we all heard above and in complement to our music. One by one we put down our double ocarinas, our wood blocks and sticks, and waited for Nancy to pick up her oboe. She did. A few tentative notes came out, notes that seemed to be searching for an anchor in the soil of the valley and a lift from the blue sky overhead. More notes came. Finally, a song. A song that flowed from the oboe as if the earth itself had written it. The light changed. A brightness of an intensity never seen down in the valley grew to envelop the mountaintop. Distinctions between rock and sound, light and rhythm ceased to exist. I cannot recall ever having heard a song so beautiful or so appropriate. That it was improvised, that it will never be heard again, that it belonged to that place and time made the memory more precious.
Is my description of this experience hyperbole? This telling isn’t the half of it. Romantic? I guess so. Maudlin? I don’t know. Sometimes life is more important than art (whatever art is) and truth more valuable than restraint. I’m a firm believer in passion and stupidity and life. I think these experiences are not ours to hoard; rather, they are ours to share. To pretend that the experience was less or other than what it was is not sophistication. It is pretentiousness in the extreme. Compared with a mountain some hundredmillion years old, we’re all a bit stupid and naive and unsophisticated. Coming down from the mountain, as we reluctantly did, doesn’t mean abandoning the joy and wonder we shared there, no matter how strange it might have seemed when we got back to town. Part of holding the experience of a climb is being able to realize that it all really happened.
MANY PEOPLE EYE NORTH TWILIGHT PEAK, THINKING SOMEDAY THEY might like to climb one of the ridges or snow-filled gullies that lead to its apex. Many, I suspect, wonder what it would be like to sit on top and see what the surrounding mountains look like from that vantage point. The desire is partially rooted in the knowledge that North Twilight Peak, unlike Engineer Mountain, sits in close proximity to the incredibly jagged and steep summits of the Needles Mountains and the Grenadier Range of the Weminuche Wilderness to the east. Few, however, make the climb.
The reasons are numerous. Any easy route up Twilight, any route that might be taken by an inexperienced hiker or climber, involves a fairly long slog through difficult country. Any direct ascent involves some rock climbing skill if the path follows one of the steep ridges or snow and ice climbing skill if it’s a gully route. Still, vastly more difficult peaks are climbed in the San Juans, some frequently. North Twilight Peak is protected from the hordes of hikers because it’s more than a hike, from the bulk of climbers because it’s not one of the better-known climbs, and from both, I suspect, because it has escaped the rather dubious distinction of becoming a well-known destination, even though it has achieved some distinction as a scenic wonder when viewed from afar. North Twilight Peak is not a particularly high peak. Many who climb mountains seek vertical; a 13,000-foot summit is not as attractive as a 14,000-foot summit. While the logic of this attitude escapes me, I don’t mind. It leaves some very nice country relatively untrammeled.
Strange wishes are known to develop and linger in the hearts of residents in this mountain-filled world, and I suspect the content of those wishes in some way sketches the outline of our response to the surroundings. A desire that began very soon after my arrival here, and grew until it became something of an obsession, was the wish to climb every peak that I could see from my home. The desire then grew to include all the peaks I see often. Nothing, as you might imagine, would be worse than having a wish whose limits are so obscure that they make fulfillment impossible. This was precisely the nature of this particular desire. I believe the technical term for this condition is neurosis; the common term, no-win situation. Climbing the peaks visible from home was relatively easy and very rewarding until I moved a few blocks and could see a few more peaks. The desire to climb all those, however, was never very realistic. My weekly fifty-mile trip south to Durango for groceries, to see a movie, to buy a book reveals scores—no, hundreds—of peaks. A twenty-six-mile trip north to the Ouray Hot Springs reveals hundreds more. And what of the summits that emerge when one of these peaks is finally climbed, summits that are seen repeatedly, with different aspects and personalities, as a person climbs more and more?
It didn’t take me long to realize that a desire like the one to climb every peak often seen would soon lead me to madness, if indeed I had not already arrived. Being a practical person, I found my wish slowly transformed into one even more diffuse, even less definable, but one less likely to cause insanity. This wish was to climb peaks I see from home or peaks seen often that for some reason I find particularly attractive, either by virtue of their beauty, their mystery, or their ability to make me think of them at the oddest moments and say, “Someday I’ve got to climb that thing.” This desire was infinitely more manageable and infinitely more pleasant. In a very natural way it guided my choices about where I would go and what I would do for quite a while.
North Twilight Peak, or simply Twilight, as it is known by locals, was one of the peaks on that wish list. I saw it from the highway every time I went to town for groceries. I saw it across Lime Creek from the summit of Engineer Mountain every time I made a trip there. Often I would see its snow-covered flanks bathed in the pink glow of twilight when I returned from winter ski trips. Its steep snow-filled gullies and ridges rose up before me when I was hiking or fishing in the creek bottom. It is a strikingly beautiful mountain.
There was only one problem. A pleasing ascent by a good route would require a degree of skill I did not possess when the idea of climbing Twilight first came to me. When learning to climb I found myself woefully inadequate on steep ice and snow. I discovered this when I attempted in ignorance an extremely difficult route up the north face of Mount Sneffels, about thirty miles north of Twilight, a route I thought might make a good warm-up climb for one of the snow-filled gullies I particularly liked on Twilight’s north face. I escaped from Sneffels with my life and some very precious lessons in humility, but my confidence had been damaged severely in the process. After that escape, Twilight, for all my desire to climb its north face, looked to me more like K2 in the Karakoram than it had any right to do. Still, wishes being what they are, with something about falling off a horse dimly echoing in the deep recesses of consciousness, I set out to climb North Twilight Peak by the direct route up a steep snow gully on its north face. With me was a friend in whom I had great confidence as a snow climber and another friend with whom I had escaped physical damage if not ego-deflation on Sneffels.
While nearly everyone we knew who climbed at all could talk very authoritatively about the mountain (mountaineers, I was to learn much later, are very much like fishermen), they all responded when pressed, “Well, no, I’ve never actually climbed it.” This great reservoir of experience and profound knowledge of the mountain among the climbing fraternity did little to soothe my fears. On the hike in—five miles of rolling limestone benches with alternating meadows and woods on a trail above Lime Creek—I stared at Twilight’s face with the intensity of a convicted man gazing into the eyes of a towering judge who would soon pronounce sentence. My share of our bright and cheerful conversation was, I sadly admit, a sham. I was whistling in the dark.
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