Off Trail: Finding My Way Home in the Colorado Rockies - Softcover

Parnell, Jane

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0806159006 ISBN 13: 9780806159003

Verlag: University of Oklahoma Press, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

Only one person believed Jane Parnell when she reported being raped at twenty-one: the mountain man who first led her up one peak after another in the Colorado Rockies and who then became her husband. Parnell took to mountaineering in the Rocky Mountains as a means to overcome her family's history of mental illness and the trauma of the rape. By age thirty she became the first woman to climb the 100 highest peaks of the state. But regaining her footing could not save her by-now-failing marriage. Unprepared emotionally and financially for singlehood, she kept climbing-the 200 highest peaks, then nearly all of the 300 highest. The mountains were the one anchor in her life that held. Finding few contemporary role models to validate her ambition, Parnell looked to the past for inspiration-to English travel writer Isabella Bird, who also sought refuge and transformation in the Colorado Rockies, notably by climbing Longs Peak in 1873 with the notorious mountain man Rocky Mountain Jim. Reading Bird's now-classic A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains emboldened Parnell to keep moving forward. She was not alone in her drive for independence. Parnell's memoir spans half a century. Her personal journey dramatizes evolving gender roles from the 1950s to the present. As a child, she witnessed the first ascent of the Diamond on Longs Peak, the "Holy Grail" of alpine climbing in the Rockies. In 2002, she saw firsthand the catastrophic Colorado wildfires of climate change, and five years later, she nearly lost her leg in a climbing accident. In the tradition of Cheryl Strayed's Wild and Tracy Ross's The Source of All Things, Parnell's mountaineering memoir shows us how, by pushing ourselves to the limits of our physical endurance and by confronting our deepest fears, we can become whole again.

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Jane Parnell is a freelance writer and independent scholar. She has taught journalism at Utah State University and writing at Colorado Mountain College, and her articles, editorials, and essays with the byline Jane Koerner have been published in High Country News, Mountain Gazette, and Outdoor Adventure.

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Off Trail

Finding My Way Home in the Colorado Rockies

By Jane Parnell

UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA PRESS

Copyright © 2018 Jane Parnell
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8061-5900-3

Contents

Acknowledgments, 
Part I: The Chase, 
1. Solo, 
2. Continental Divide, 
3. Queen of the Mountain, 
4. Serious Moves, 
5. Pinned, 
6. Roped, 
7. Souljourners, 
8. Choking, 
9. Vanishing Act, 
10. Slippery, 
11. Free Fall, 
12. Off Belay, 
13. False Summit, 
Part II: After the Fall, 
14. No Name Peak, 
15. Farther Off the Beaten Path, 
16. Extremity, 
17. Pinned Again, 
18. Homecoming, 
Epilogue, 
Timeline, 
Notes, 

CHAPTER 1

Solo

The file cabinet in my study houses my share of the topo maps. After the divorce, Karl and I split them fifty-fifty. For nearly fifteen years they ensured our safe passage, steering us around marshes and mine shafts, through cliff bands, to the top. Stained and torn now, they are missing vital pieces of information. When I remove them from their folders, they fall apart in my hands. I piece them back together with Scotch tape so I can spread them out on the carpet, and tantalize and torture myself with possibilities.

There are six hundred and thirty-eight mountains over thirteen thousand feet high in the Colorado Rockies. If I were sensible, it would take several lifetimes to do them all. But I want to climb them all in this lifetime, provided my joints will tolerate the punishment. I want to leave my mark — my signature in every summit register or glass jar left by a previous party. I want to possess these mountains as they possess me. I want to know everything about them — the density and condition of their forests; the scent and variety of their flowers; the angle, age, and condition of their rock; the size of their summits. I rank them by altitude and divide them into logical, achievable categories. One hundred and fifty highest. The bicentennials and tricentennials. The four hundred highest. I was the first woman to climb the one hundred highest peaks of Colorado; mathematical precision makes the remaining task more manageable.

From Memorial Day until the snow sticks, every weekend is dedicated to the peak-bagging objective, each triumphal date and my companions' initials recorded in the same notebook with a birdwatcher's fanaticism. The solos with my most loyal companion, my dog, are signified with his nickname spelled backwards: God.

I hike for the exercise, burning off bad memories as if they were Christmas calories, transforming grief into muscle. "What's the rush? Are you training for an ultramarathon or something?" my friend asks when I return to camp an hour after he does. He turned back at timberline, exhausted by the pace I had set. It is my third summer without Karl, and I still have something to prove.

I hike for the thrill of it, scaring myself speechless on more than one occasion. But my body is up to it — legs of granite, heart and lungs a two hundred horsepower engine that drives me upward at eighteen hundred vertical feet per hour. Sixty-five heartbeats per second, three thousand six hundred per hour. On the trail my body ceases to be an object of curiosity or despair. It has a weight to it. My footsteps land lightly while my feet feel rooted. Every step a declaration of intimacy with the rock, the turf, the soil. The tapping of my hiking poles synchronizing with each inhalation and exhalation. My breath distilled into the clarity of light.

The divorce decree arrives in July, cementing our on-off separation of the past three years. Now it's official. Karl is no longer my guide, the expert with years more experience, a battering ram of a four-wheel drive, enough gear to equip a Himalayan expedition. The responsibility for transporting myself to the trailhead, for determining the routes and assessing the risks rests entirely on my shoulders.

Mummy Mountain, Rocky Mountain National Park, early August: I glance back at the dilating, bruised clouds and pick up the pace as I scramble up the last two hundred feet of the summit block, beating the lightning-charged cloudburst to the top by ten minutes. I outrun the storm's progression by choosing the correct shortcut down. Back at camp, I am welcomed by a Boy Scout troop leader who covets my spot for his party of ten. I'm happy to comply, confident I can beat nightfall, too, and make it out in time for a luxurious dining experience. No pine needles in the teacup. A steam-cleaned fork. USDA-certified beef on a porcelain plate. I don't want to break my dinner date with my parents, who rented a condo in Estes Park for the week. I told them I was hiking with a friend.

How do I explain that even though I am alone for the first time in my life, I am not as alone as they might assume? That I feel safer in the mountains on my own than among strangers in the city. That this is my belated rite of passage at age forty. I earned it; I paid for it — the scar tissue on my shins and in my heart a map of the interior topography of my life. Maps can be revised.

Pole Creek Mountain, San Juans, late August: Eight miles up Lost Creek, I find a safe place to cross, where the elk have flattened the bank and narrowed the channel with their habitual crossings. Their hoofprints in the mud provide stirrups for the leap to the other side. I land without a splash. Several hundred feet below the summit, another set of elk tracks guides me through the cliffs without a scratch. I will reach the top before the hailstorm and return to camp by lunchtime.

Uncompahgre Wilderness, mid-September: The whoosh of a low-flying hawk awakens me from a midafternoon nap in a basin beneath Mount Silver. It is three hours back to camp and the sun will set in two. The persistent bark of a coyote encourages me to keep moving. She is safeguarding her pups, spiriting me away from the den with the primeval song she spins out of thin air.

Cuatro Peak, Culebra Range, early October: A trail of fresh bear scat through the forest issues a warning. I'm trespassing on someone else's territory. I hustle along at warp speed even though I know it is not a grizzly. The last one in Colorado was killed by a poacher in 1979.

"You love the mountains more than you will love any man." A remark as hard to shake as a bruised toenail. Having announced my return to the condo in Estes with a thunk of shed boots, I am rewarded with Mother's best dish — fresh salmon marinated in soy sauce, lemon juice, and garlic — and some unsolicited advice. Her remark irritates me, and still does, because she is probably right. I don't know how to cope with the internet dating scene, where virtual specimens have replaced live ones. Rather than getting to know one another in increments over the course of our daily lives, waiting for the spark to combust spontaneously, we check each other out on Match.com and eHarmony. In a flurry of email exchanges, the candidates must be culled to a handful of must-meets who agree to a rendezvous site nowhere near my house in Colorado Springs.

The conversation with the architect who agreed to meet at Wild Oats comes to a halt when he looks down at my bandaged feet in the post-op sandals. He says he's running late for his doctor's appointment and he'll have to skip the coffee refill. We hadn't gotten to my mountaineering résumé yet, or the bunion surgery.

The accounting professor is willing to meet at my favorite Mexican restaurant in Denver, sixty-five miles away. He arrives...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of Oklahoma Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2018
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0806159006
• ISBN 13: 9780806159003
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 146
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Deutschland