(Note: I'm a writer, and I'm between projects right now, so expect logorrhea. A less-wordy and more visually pleasing take on yesterday's adventure is available courtesy of SpringsDuke; you can come back to mine when you have a worktime bathroom visit or are waiting at the DMV or whatnot.)

At the start of 2019, I had 31 Colorado fourteeners under my belt, only one of which was harder than Class 2. For some reason that probably boils down to weed being legal and especially easy to access in my neighborhood, I decided that last year was going to be the one in which I seriously leveled up in badassery. I was going to climb ten new fourteeners, some of which were going to be Class 3 (in no small part out of necessity - I was rapidly running out of Class 1 and 2s)...and I was going to earn a snowflake.

I tagged my ten new fourteeners, four of which were Class 3. As for the latter goal, my first attempts were on Culebra in mid-March. Suffice to say that there is a reason I use the word "attempts"; I was and am fairly certain that I do not have the lung or legpower to complete the 14 miles from Cielo Vista Ranch HQ on snow in under 12 hours, and I'd had enough of getting SAR called on me with my first summit of Longs. While I eventually succeeded in summiting Colorado's most expensive fourteener (along with its Centennial neighbor, Red Mtn A!) and did have to contend with snow in doing so, the only way it would've counted as a winter ascent is if the sunny July air had magically teleported the summit and its occupants to Australia.

It seems like I should at least have earned a pink snowflake to match the color of my backside after this glissade back to Culebra's uppermost parking area.

My March misses meant I had the last ten days of December if I wanted to make my snowflake happen in 2019, which would get shortened to eight when my family booked reservations at a swanky hotel in Tucson, AZ for what would've been my Stage IV lung cancer-diagnosed grandmother's last New Year's if Death hadn't made like everyone's least favorite in-laws and shown up far sooner than expected. The hotel rooms had already been booked, however, and we were committed to keeping the whole family thing going despite the loss of its central figure. In short, downers abounded in both my hiking life as well as my family relations!

I was nonetheless determined to make do with what I had. An out-of-state hiking buddy* and I racked up some ranked and unranked Centennial snowflakes on the second day of calendar winter, then decided to attempt Columbia on National Jewish Playing in the Mountains Day...or, as the rest of America calls it, Christmas. We got maybe 1/5 of a mile past the end of the county's road maintenance before the snow proved too deep for my Subaru Outback, and the process of dislodging her resulted in a coolant leak.

"Merry f---ing Christmas, you heathen!" - The New Testament God, I assume.

I was still not to be deterred, however, and after I finagled a loaner car out of the Silverthorne dealership on Thursday, my buddy and I set our sights for Friday on Yale, whose trailhead was accessible, according to Chaffee County. The serene snowfall below treeline turned into a whiteout blizzard shortly above, however, and I concurred wholeheartedly when my buddy declared that we were turning around.

Continued issues with my poor car, Booger, prevented us from making yet another attempt the following day (one which, I keep reassuring myself, would likely have been just as futile as Friday's due to conditions looking identical, if not slightly worse), and I needed to get back to Denver on Sunday to pack for Tucson. My buddy would go on make a revenge summit on New Year's Day (with my ice axe, which I bumped loose while involuntarily glissading down the slopes above treeline and which he found and retrieved on his successful climb). Since it wasn't New Year's Eve, I felt slightly better about the fact that my snowflake resolution was gonna have to get recycled for 2020.

Though this totally counts for an Arizona snowflake.

Things did look promising for the new decade, however. I got back to Denver before my out-of-town buddy returned to his home, and I'd been in contact with SpringsDuke, with whom I'd made my first attempt of Culebra (he succeeded!), about climbing another peak together. Despite the fact that he'd already earned a snowflake and summited Bierstadt, he was game to join the outing.

We left the Woolly Mammoth Park n' Ride a bit before 4:30; while the forecast called for plenty of sun (and plenty of wind), I know my Saturday morning I-70 ski traffic. It was about as dark and frigid as one might expect when we hit the trail at 5:35 a.m., though the occasional meteor passing overhead livened the warm-up road walk.

Views of the alpenglow subsequently livened our ascent out of the willows as well.

I had successfully summited Bierstadt 5 times before; this was, in fact, part of the reason why it felt proper to have it be my first fourteener 'flake - routefinding, I felt confident, wouldn't be an issue even with a decent covering of snow. We did manage to stray away from the trails whose cairns were far more obvious once the sun had stretched itself all the way above the peaks dominating our sights, but even rock-hopping up the slope, while perhaps a bit more time-consuming than was absolutely necessary, wasn't that big an issue.

As I fell into my natural role of wind-sucking group sweeper, I mused to myself that this mountain was, in some ways, not such a great introduction to true winter hiking, as it is overall so forgiving as to feel more like an outing with an old friend (albeit one with a caustic enough personality that you like to limit your visits to once or twice a year) than like the potential threat any peak can quickly become in a Colorado winter.

The summit was chilly, but the winds the National Weather Service had warned about were nowhere to be found. We all made friends with fellow summiters with exchanges of congratulations, picture-taking, and summit signs, but our group’s Kansan likely made Best Friends For Life thanks to his offers of Fireball shots.

Seriously, there are so many summit signs on that mountain that there must be a law requiring them...!

Gotta give TallGrass credit for environmental friendliness with his super-reusable sign!

The descent of Bierstadt's most scrambly segment breezed past, and it wasn't long before Duke and I were reluctantly following boot tracks off the trail in hopes of retracing our own steps to our snowshoe stash. We met our faster-on-descent partner at the spot, but before we could properly hash out whether to buckle them back on or reattach them to our packs and count on the packed-down nature of the trail continuing as it had up to the point we'd temporarily parted ways from it, the NWS' promised wind gusts kicked up with a fury.

I spent much of the descent from our resting/stash stop to treeline (or, since true trees are few and far between above Guanella Pass, willowline) with one hand vainly trying to protect my face from snowblasting as I squinted through the galloping gales of white for the trail, or at a minimum, the least posthole-y track down to safety. The wind pushed me off the trail on a number of occasions, and as I weigh 160 lbs. without clothes or a winter-fattened backpack, that should be some indication that neither SpringsDuke nor I were exaggerating about how fierce those gusts were!

The willows (or, more likely, the lower elevation in which they thrive) did provide some relief, and reaching the low point of the trail was, so to speak, a breeze in comparison. The re-ascent to Guanella Pass - a mere annoyance, in summer - struck me as being one of the most painful elements of the whole hike, and it was with great reluctance that I allowed the resurging winds blowing across the parking lot to force me up from the small shelter the trailhead's (locked) outhouse offered and stagger down the road.

If only the parking lot usually had that many spaces available.

Fortunately, the road is all downhill and has legit tree cover not long into it, so while there was plenty of fodder for Duke and I to groan about how there can't have been that many switchbacks in the morning, it was nevertheless a no-brainer to reach the parking lot, which we did shortly before 3 - much better than I had anticipated for a winter fourteener summit by someone as athletically challenged as I am!

We were much less successful at avoiding ski traffic on the way home, but since we only had a few miles of stop-and-go before the impatient drivers with disposable income could save themselves five minutes by darting into the express lane, it wasn't anywhere near as bad as it likely would have if we'd gotten stuck going up; one poor fellow proved as much when he told us he had intended on an alpine start, got stuck in the morning rush, and had to turn around well short of the summit when the wind made its appearance.

At least it had been kind enough to allow us time to faff about on the summit - it's always a pleasure to get an unobstructed view of Pikes *and* take a picture of it without worrying about losing a finger or eight.

I could've done without the wind, of course, but in a way, it wouldn't have felt right if I hadn't encountered weather on Bierstadt - that mountain was my first fourteener, and I got caught in a thunder/hailstorm on that occasion. It would only be fitting to have my first fourteener snowflake come with a reminder that even the easiest peaks can still catch you short, especially at a time of year when daylight and warmth are precious commodities.

Still, it was a fantastic day overall: one of my new-old resolutions got checked off a mere four days into the year, I've got some great hiking buddies to go tackle more of my resolutions with, and the Pats lost! At home! In the Wild Card round! Happy New Decade, everybody!

*I hadn’t wanted to post his name without his consent; now that I have that, the buddy in question is TallGrass. Not only did I thoroughly enjoy his company on and off the mountain, he was also just as instrumental in getting poor Booger unstuck from the snow on Christmas as he was in retrieving my ice axe after I lost it on Yale.