Rookie Mistake – Altitude? No Problem

If you’re a seasoned hiker/climber you might be reading this headline and think “Oh no!” this could end really bad. Well this story doesn’t end too bad.

As a competitive person I wanted to add a 14er to my list of accomplishments. I honestly thought you could hardly call yourself a good hiker without hitting a 14er. We had a 4-night 5-day trip planned to Colorado where most of our time would be spent in Rocky Mountain National Park (RMNP). The 14er I was set on Mount Bierstadt (14,065 ft) was a bit of a detour from RMNP, but it was supposedly the easiest 14er to summit, because there was no technical portion.

Now like most bad ideas, this one stemmed from someone else doing it first. Naturally because they did it, I thought I could do it too. Our game plan was simple. We would fly from our home in Minnesota at (866 ft) to Denver (5,280 ft). Rent our car and be up at the trail head of Mt. Bierstadt (11,600 ft) by 9 am, hike it and be down in time for dinner. (Note: I had a friend that did the same thing and said it was easy).

Disclaimer: Don’t try this. It’s a really really dumb idea to go from 866 feet to 14,000 in a day.

What started out as hard hiking, turned to incredibly hard hiking which then turned into walking 10 feet and having to stop for five minutes. We got to a point where we could see the summit, but we were exhausted and running out of time. (I at least knew you were on a race against the storm clock when hiking a 14er). We were experiencing the effects of altitude and our bodies not having acclimatized at all were taking a hard hit.

Thankfully my husband made the call that even though the summit “looked close,” we were going to have to admit defeat and climb down. I convinced him to take one more photo of me before we turned around.

At this point I had a raging headache and the hike down seemed just as long as the hike up; my legs felt like lead.

As we got back to our rental and began winding down the mountain I began to feel very nauseous and I still had a massive headache. We pulled into a gas station that had a gorgeous creek bubbling behind it. I poked my head into the gas station but realized I didn’t have time.

There was a lady out behind the gas station with a very expensive camera working on getting the perfect shot of the creek, sun, rocks and expansive mountain view overhead. Unintentionally, she also got a person vomiting into the creek.

She got in her car so fast, I never got the chance to apologize. I really hope that photo never turns up on the internet someday.

I didn’t feel well for the rest of the day, but after a good night sleep I was cured and the rest of our trip, where we ACCLIMATIZED turned out fine.

Altitiude: 1 Me: 0

Lesson Learned: ACCLIMATIZE ACCLIMATIZE ACCLIMATIZE ALWAYS! And in general you get dehydrated when you fly so it’s probably best to not hike much on your first travel day. Instead spend that time ACCLIMATIZING!

One Positive: I’m really glad we did turn around. I can only imagine how much worse things could’ve been had we continued on and got caught in an afternoon storm or I would’ve felt sicker while on the mountain.