Tag Archives: Mt. Evans

Listening To The Fog

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Carl Sandburg wrote a poem about the fog saying that it crept in on little cat feet, sat on its haunches and then moved away. When you are at 14,000′ and the fog moves in you can hear the sound of those little cat feet. Sound travels magically in the fog. You can hear little hooves click on the boulders a half a mile away. You can hear the rustle of the fog moving over the lichen. There is no wind when the fog comes in, but you feel the movement of the fog as it envelopes you and goes along its way.

The inhabitants of Mt. Evans are used to the comings and goings of the fog. They are comfortable with it. Although there are few predators up this high, none the less they listen to what information the fog brings them. Mountain lions have been known to walk through this high country seeking the unwary kid and in a fog like this when you can barely see the wool in front of your eyes, the sound travels best. Even the sound of big cat feet moving silently. So you listen to the fog. And you listen close.

Last Call

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A week ago the road leading up Mt. Evans to the summit was closed due to impending winter. The road goes way up into the sky until at 14,000′ plus, it stops and you can get out of your car and wheezingly look at the animals living here that have absolutely no trouble breathing. In fact they find it amusing that many of the visitors keel over and have to be dragged by the back foot to the waiting emergency vehicles where they get oxygen and the advice to go home.

So on the 5th of September you had last call to go up and see the mountain goats and their neighbors the Bighorn sheep, pictured here. In a very short time it will be soooo cold and snowy, what with the mountain top area being completely filled with weather, that it would be really miserable to be here. Guys who regularly go to Antarctica don’t like going here.

If you look closely at the picture above you will see adolescent bighorn sheep frolicking. They’ll run and leap from rock to rock and jump for the sheer irritation factor of it knowing it bothers the older ones a lot. If you were to try even one frolic your heart would explode in your chest and your eyeball would pop out. That’s right, pop right out of your head. Eyeball popping is very possible in super high altitude places where extreme cold is involved. That’s why they shut the road down. Otherwise people would go up there and try one frolic and then there you are, exploded heart and eyeball popped out. Plus you’d have to lay there for the rest of the winter because they don’t open the road until May or June.

Well then, there it is, if you didn’t make it to the summit of Mt Evans on September 5th too bad for you, you missed it. Now you have to wait until next year. The sheep and goats will still be there. They live up there fulltime. No exploded hearts or popped eyeball for them, they’re trained and experienced on how to survive living in ridiculous places so they’ll be just fine. Meanwhile if you are hell-bent on being miserable there’s lots of stuff you can do between now and the opening of the Mt. Evans road next May.

You can watch every single one of the debates between the candidates and talk to your friends about them until one of them sticks a pencil in your ear. Or you can intern on one of those crab boats up on the Bering sea. It’s just below eyeball popping cold up there. You could attend a seniors only party and listen to all of their recent medical procedures. There’s more, that’s just a few of the things you can do to keep your misery index up to your own personal comfort level. If you lack the imagination to figure out your own miserable activity to do this winter we have a list here at The Institute that we would be happy to send you. Just send us a stamped self-addressed envelope with $80 dollars cash in it and we’ll get it right in the mail for you. If you don’t have the exact amount in cash send five twenty’s instead and we’ll try like heck to get your change back to you.

P.S. Don’t think you can outsmart the system and sneak up to the summit and hold one hand over your eyeball and get away with it. Doesn’t work, trust me on this one.

Hiding In Plain Sight

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Mountain goats aren’t really known for being stealthy. They don’t have a lot of need to be. There aren’t that many predators up here at the top of the world at over 14,000′ to get them so they usually just hang out not caring very much about who sees them.

Yet Nature, who is in charge of animal protection here in this world, has chosen to give them life saving camouflage anyway. When you enlarge this image by clicking on it, and you know you should, you’ll see that even with them standing out in plain sight your eyes will drift right over them and you’ll often miss seeing them. This effect is even more pronounced when the herd is scattered out and the individuals take on the coloring and look of the boulder field they like to forage in.

Occasionally a coyote and on the rarest of occasions a mountain lion will find its way up here in the hopes of catching a lamb or a sick billy-goat but they’re usually so whacked out by the lack of oxygen up here that their efforts are half-hearted at best. Still the camouflage is there in case they need it.

This is Mt. Evans by the way, and it is 14,264′ up in the air. It is also one of the tallest of our national parks with all kinds of neat facts that you can read elsewhere about how cool it is. The road up here is not for the squeamish and will often involve some or all of the passengers in your vehicle crouching on the floor to avoid the sheer terror of the incredible drop offs just inches away from your tires. Drivers Pay Attention! Gravity is not your friend up here.

For those of you who are going to ask “Is that blue real?” the answer is no. It’s actually bluer than that. I had to tone it down in Photoshop from the real color because it is SO blue, and that is the famous Colorado blue you hear about, that my staffers walking by catching a glimpse of it on the monitor would be frozen in their tracks, stunned into immobility, so totally hypnotized by it blueness, that they would be paralyzed and fall over in what we call the Blue Coma. Since some of you may be viewing this on portable devices and doing things like walking or chewing gum I thought it best, in the interest of your safety, to bring it down into a more tolerable color.

Soon and that is in a couple of weeks, the ewes will start having their lambs and the tourists will start arriving to see them. The park opens later in the year than most other parks because this geography and weather up here are similar to arctic conditions. There’s tundra scattered around everywhere with arctic plants growing and biting winds and fast-moving storms that race in just to catch everyone unaware, so they, the people in charge of these places, want to give the inquisitive tourists every chance of making it up and back down alive. Plus the roads are mostly snowed shut until sometime in mid June. But life is an adventure and you’re alive or should be so jump in the old Celica and get on up to the top of the world. There’s views, and vistas, and far-reaching sights that will make you say “oh Wow” or even “Holy Moley” and you can see the Mountain goats hiding in plain sight. It’s worth it.

Foggy Foggy Dew

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The other day when we were up on Mt. Evans investigating why Mountain Goats didn’t get struck by lightning we observed other baffling but explainable weather phenomenon.

Fog for one. Fog is a condition where at one moment you can see clearly as far as you want to, and the next, the air changes to a semi-solid, opaque substance that gets all around you and fogs up your glasses so you can’t see where you’re going and you stumble over the rocks and ding up your lens hood. It also makes it scary to drive when you can not see your hand in front of your face and you have drop-offs of hundreds of feet just a foot away from your wheels. Fortunately we had an intern that we made walk in front of the vehicle tapping the roadway with a stick to determine whether it was solid or not. It, the intern, also made foghorn noises at the top of his voice to warn other fools that we were on the way down. As we had only one intern on this trip we couldn’t afford to lose it so we tied a rope around him and fastened it to the bumper on the jeep and whenever he would wander off the road we could feel the rope jerk and could stop and haul him up. His foghorn noises were always noticeably louder after we hauled him up. That made us feel a little more confident and we would be nudging him forward with the front of the car as we felt better about our chances.

When the fog arrives at Mt. Evans there’s none of this “entering in on little cat feet” stuff.  No way Jose, It slams in with all the force of Bill Clinton pushing his way to the front of the line at McDonald’s. One moment you’re fat dumb and happy looking at the wonders of a clear mountain day, the next you’re wet, cold and lost in the wilderness. But that is life in the mountains, always extreme but always exciting.

The question at hand though, was, How do animals, especially Mountain Goats, handle the fog. What do they do. They don’t have running lights or any kind of internal radar our instruments could pick up. How do they manage to move around in the fog without going over the edge and falling for two days. It seemed a mystery tailor-made for The Institute.

As we were frozen in place by the fog and terminal fear we had time to closely observe the animals and found the most amazing fact. The pure white coats of the mountain goats acted as a solar collector and stored up energy to be released on their command whenever they needed it. This ability to release an energy force acted as a “Fog Dispersal Device” and would dissipate the fog for a distance of approximately three or four feet in all directions allowing them to maneuver about the mountain as if they had good sense. We stuck close to them and it saved our lives as we heard the screams of those not so lucky as they plummeted past on their way to oblivion. Eventually this pair of mountain goats, a mother and her kid, led us back to the parking lot where they happily licked our Jeep’s tires for the salt remaining on them. It seemed a small price to pay for our safe return.

If you look closely at the image above you will notice that the fog around them is dispersed to a distance of several feet allowing them to comfortably forage as they slowly wended their way back to the parking lot. This ability is what keeps the mountain goats fed and safe as they wander around places that are extremely hazardous to humans. The glow they emit is subtle but effective. As the fog would ebb and flow you could see other little bubbles of light, sort of like fireflies, blinking on and off as various small groups moved around the mountain completing their daily chores.

There must be some expenditure of energy to produce this phenomenon as they didn’t keep the lights on constantly. Maybe they were part of some larger co-op that charged them according to the power they used. Or it worked like your cell phone and if they weren’t careful they’d zero out and be without lights just when they needed them most and they’d be stuck in place until the sun appeared again and they could recharge. We saw evidence of rationing this ability as you can see in the image below.

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Here is a goat with the Fog Dispersal Device turned off. Notice that there is no glow around it and the fog has completely encased it. This goat is here for the duration if he squandered his usage. It could be that he’s also eaten his fill and is using this down time to catch up on things. Check his email, have a latte, or just people watch. Whatever the reason it clearly shows lights on, lights off, and although we need more time to study all the ramifications of this ability I believe we have pretty much figured it out.

As you can tell by the fact of this posting we made it down the mountain safely although our intern’s hair turned white. We could laugh about it as we applied a natural herb salve to his rope burns, and decided we would schedule another trip to observe this phenomenon more closely the next time fog was scheduled. We would bring more interns too.

Nanny McFree

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We are in the middle of our annual monsoon season here in Colorado. What that means is everyday around 2 to 3 o’clock in the afternoon, although it sometimes happens sooner, or sometimes later depending on the whims of Mother Nature, it clouds up, the skies get dark, thunder rolls in from the west and it rains. Little gentle rains where things slowly get wet, the air smells fresh and moist and you sit by the open door and drink a nice, slow, hot cup of tea as the entire experience washes over you. A Camelot kind of rain.

On the other hand when some poor misbegotten soul has done something to irritate Mother Nature we get something else entirely. Instead of the Camelot rains we love and wait for, we get the full wrath of weather that you only get in the high mountains. Torrential rains, 30 -40 -50 mph winds that drive the rain against everything in its path with the power of a force 5 hurricane. And if you’ve done something particularly heinous you can have hail, which as you know from your experience of being alive, is really hard rain packed into the size of a BB all the way up to size of a steamer trunk. This falls from the sky and breaks things. That is bad when that happens. Stay indoors. Then because Mother Nature rarely holds a grudge, the storm passes, the sun comes out to shine it golden rays down upon you, the bluebirds return and all is right with the world again.

So what? you say. Well first that’s kind of rude and you might just keep an eye on the skies above in case Mother Nature heard you. The monsoon affects everyone and everything here in the mountains. Even the Mountain Goats on Mt Evans. They and anyone else unlucky enough or unfortunate enough, to be above tree line when one of these big storms hit are in imminent danger of being struck by lightning. Lightning is a whole bunch of electricity, like all the D-cells and other batteries you have in your house, even the ones in your smoke alarms, all wired together at one time, all stuffed into a very narrow place in the sky and when it’s good  and ready it shoots down to the ground and incinerates what ever it hits. This can have adverse effects on your ability to remain alive. This is called “Being Struck By Lightning” or as we know it “Bad Luck.” Every year people are struck by lightning and killed. Like totally. It’s over and that’s that. This is unfortunate and not a laughing matter but it is a fact.

But you rarely see Mountain Goats struck and killed. Why is that we wondered. If anyone is at risk it should be them. They live above tree line, they stay out in the weather even when they shouldn’t and they do not carry any life insurance, nevermind health and accident. So how does that work then.

It turns out that over time, at least over the last 8000 years since the world was created, they have evolved a system that helps them stay alive and well during inclement weather. First the big ones run like the devil and hide. But if you look at your average herd of Mountain Goats you’ll see a large percentage of them are young ones, the kids. Like most kids they are not smart enough to come in out of the rain and so, and here’s where it gets cool, the mother goats got together and devised a plan where everyday one of the mothers is chosen to watch over the kids and if it looks like it’s going to rain,  or especially lightning, she gathers them up into a bunch and stuffs them in the crevices between the rocks and guards them until the storm passes. Nobody gets struck by lightning, they all live and the group survives. Neat, right? Well the mother of the day is called a nanny. Just like Nanny McFree in the image above.

This was documented yesterday as a couple of us trudged up to the top of Mt Evans, all 14,265′ of her, to stand there in the rain and lightning with our tinfoil hats on, and steel toed boots, to see if this was true. It was.

Dunyasha Zarya Irinushka

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Irinushka0205Mountain goat ewe Mt Evans Colorado   click to enlarge

She arrived suddenly one spring bringing nothing but her fur coat and her pale skinned beauty. She was aloof, always remaining at the edge of the herd, saying nothing and rebuffing all who tried to approach. Grazing alone she would wander the meadows stopping occasionally to select the newest petals of the spring flowers, looking always to the North, watching, searching, waiting, not anxiously, but with a constancy that could be felt. She was a mystery to the herd. They wondered about the mantle of sadness she seemed to wear and speculated quietly amongst themselves about her origins. Who was she ? Why was she here? Who did she wait for?

Some thought that she had come down from the far reaches of the Canadian north, Kootenay, Nahanni or even the Kluane perhaps. Others thought that she left the Russian mountains and followed the Kuskokwim river down until she eventually arrived here. That might account for her look of weariness. Right now it was all speculation however as she wasn’t speaking and maintained her solitude. They’d leave her alone for now. They had their own lives to live and if it was her wish to stay near the herd for whatever comfort she could gain they were willing to allow her to stay. There was time, you can’t stay alone forever.

Looking West, Into Tomorrows Weather

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IsThatSpring0066Mountain Goat Mt. Evans Colorado                              Click to enlarge

Is that Spring? From up here on the top of Mt. Evans at 14,000′ you can see for nearly a month in a straight line and it looks like way out there, just past a week or two, there might be some Spring. If you stand real still and look hard just past that snow squall you can see the tip of it.

That would be good if it is. I have to use this picture from early spring which was July that year because they, the people who run this place and have the keys to the gate, won’t even let you up here until Memorial day which is May 26th this year and then you are probably going to get snowed on, big time. There isn’t much that is more memorable than standing in a brisk 45-50 mph wind in a spring snowstorm at 14,000′.

I heard once that for every 1000′ in elevation you go it is the same as traveling 300 miles north. I don’t know if that is true or not but if it is, then standing on the top of Mt Evans at 14,000′ puts you close to 479 miles past the North Pole. The North pole being approximately 3721 miles from Denver, give or take a mile or two. I didn’t even know you could go past the north pole in terms of cold. Maybe you have to go straight up those last 479 miles to get colder. But at this point I think cold is cold, right? I mean how much more are you going to freeze your keester off 479 miles in space than you would at the North pole. A frozen keester is a frozen keester. But if you’re one of those that are always looking for the ultimate experience then State Highway 5 will get you there.

But then we were looking for Spring not a way to freeze your keester off, so I recommend waiting just a little while longer and there is every chance that Spring will come to you. No traveling, no climbing mountains, no freezing one’s keester off. Just wait a bit then go outside. It should be Spring. Enjoy it.