First, let me say a few words about the importance of maps in the back-country. A good map can mean the difference between a successful expedition and a tragic descent into delirium, discord and rampant cannibalism. Maps require a degree of protection; if placed within the wrong area of a hiker’s backpack, such as against the shoulder blades, the sweat and friction will steadily reduce the paper to shreds of pulp. Trust me on this one.
So when I pulled out my maps at the top of Signal Mountain and found myself holding a collection of damp, tattered fragments of paper, I should not have been surprised. I was six miles into an epic-length hike in an obscure corner of Rocky Mountain National Park, and it was not a convenient time to be lacking reliable maps or directions, considering how much off-trail bushwhacking I had ahead of me. The photocopied pages had been faint and blurry in the first place, thanks to malfunctions in the only Xerox machine I’d managed to locate the night before. And the abrasions didn’t make the contour lines any easier to read.
I flipped through comments in the summit register while my maps dried in the sunlight. In 2006, Tyler, in the company of a woman named Liz, wrote: “I asked her to marry me, but she said no! I hate you, Signal Mountain!” Poor Tyler.
After attempting to visually memorize the alpine topography before me, I descended into the forest and began to bushwhack across to Stormy Peaks. The region was an unruly thicket of fallen logs and branches strewn across steep, uneven ground. As I picked my way through the timber maze, I quickly grasped that no one had attempted to hike through here in quite a while. Several trunks of lodgepole pines simply crumbled into sawdust beneath my weight, and I’m not a heavy man.
It felt thrilling to walk through country that was so rarely visited by humankind… and slightly creepy as well. There is a shift in perception that affects visitors to the wilderness: the more isolated you are from humans and from human influences, the more aware you become of the consciousness of nature. In other words, the more alone you are, the more you realize you’re not alone. Creatures surround you, both seen and unseen. It’s not a welcoming sensation…. it’s more of an unsettling feeling of being observed by inhuman intelligences. If I lingered long enough, perhaps I could begin to feel accepted by the denizens of this woodland environment. But today, I was on the move.
Branches blocked the view of my destination, so I pulled out my compass frequently to keep myself moving in a straight line. Eventually I resurfaced above treeline, and navigation became much easier. My route was obviously still unpopular; the edges of many granite boulders had eroded away underneath, creating ledges that were brittle enough to collapse under a human’s weight. I gained lots of practice at falling and jumping simultaneously as I hopped through the boulderfields, seeking out the lonely mountain summits along the rim of the Lost Lake alpine basin.
A quest to climb the 50 highest peaks in the National Park had drawn me to this distant corner, and once I touched the summit cairn on Mount Dunraven, only three peaks would remain un-conquered on my list. But as the day wore on, I grew anxious that I had underestimated the vast distances required to fulfill my current ambitions. I cut corners, sliding down Rowe Glacier and stepping gingerly across the frozen surface of its adjoining lake. I traversed across to what I believed to be Mount Dunraven, then bypassed several minor summits to reach Mt. Dickinson – my final mountain of the day.
Success! However, my weary and oxygen-deprived brain failed until now to realize that I’d made a serious navigational error. I stared at the blurred and shredded maps and couldn’t believe what I’d done… one of the “minor” summits I’d dodged during the last hour was actually Mount Dunraven! I’d been too busy following a herd of elk to make sense of the topography, and the damaged maps had only increased my confusion.
Now it was too late to retrace my steps. It was 7:30, and I needed to bushwhack 2,000 feet down the side of Mt. Dickinson, enter another dense forest and locate the North Fork Trail before darkness made the path impossible to find. I groaned at the thought of returning all the way out here someday to claim Dunraven, but there was nothing to be done about it. As it was, twilight shrouded the valley before I could even reach treeline.
I plunged into the forest and attempted to bushwhack my way to the Big Thompson River using the meager light that remained. In other circumstances I might have been worried about stumbling across wild animals, but tonight I was crashing through branches, snapping decayed logs underfoot, and generally making enough noise to wake up a bear that was dead and hibernating. I could be heard for miles.
I didn’t want to get caught wandering out here in the dark with just a dim flashlight, so I trekked heedlessly through bogs, made a lucky leap across slimy rocks in the Big Thompson River, and breathed a deep sigh of relief when I set foot upon the North Fork Trail at last. I still had six miles left to travel on what turned out to be a thirty-one mile hike – the longest day hike of my entire life – but now I didn’t need a map to tell me how to reach my destination. The trail glowed silver in the light of the rising moon, and getting home was as simple as putting one foot in front of the other.