The trail uphill ended abruptly, somewhere above the icy waters of Summit Lake and below the looming crest of Mount Evans.
An informal footpath twisted up through the tundra, though, to who knows where. I glanced around. Nobody in sight. Up I went.
And up, and up, until even the footpath reached a dead end, on a big slab of black rock angling up to a pointed precipice.
That’s when I noticed I was not alone.
An old guy sat at the edge of the precipice, legs crossed, gazing into the void. A walking stick lay beside him.
Curiosity overcame me.
“How old are you?”
“Eighty-nine.”
I gasped. “What’s your secret?”
“Just keep walking.”
I’ve followed his advice ever since.
Call me the happy hiker. I hike and I hike and I hike. In 13 years in Colorado, I’ve hiked about 6,000 miles on its trails. That’s like hiking from Seattle to Miami and back, but with better scenery and less flat ground.
And I still pursue my peculiar passion every weekend, even though I’m . . . well, let’s just say I’ve been 50 and climbing for a while.
Lately I’ve noticed that on many trails, many other hikers appear to be AARP-eligible. (AARP — that’s the acronym formerly known as the American Association of Retired Persons. You get invited at 50 now.)
This should come as no surprise. Since 1980, according to the census, the number of 50-and-up Colorado residents has grown from 608,000 to almost 1.5 million.
At the Colorado Mountain Club, “about 65 percent of our members are over 50,” said Katie Blackett, its CEO. “Our age has definitely gone up.”
So, there. Not all of us treat our second half-century as over-the-hill years. For some of us, it’s over the hill and up through the woods to a grand marmot’s house we go.
Marmots reside near the panoramic summits of Colorado’s high mountains. They look like beavers, but galumph among the boulders a mile above the ponds — and sometimes approach hikers at mountaintops, hoping for spilled bites of lunch. Tiny mouse-like pikas also dwell above tree line, along with waddling ptarmigan.
Why do I keep hiking in my AARP years?
For many reasons. The animals, for one.
On Colorado trails I’ve encountered more than 100 kinds of animals, including moose, elk, deer, antelope, mountain goats, coyotes, foxes, eagles, cranes, wild turkey, hummingbirds, rattlesnakes and a mink, I think.
My most startling wildlife encounter came in a canyon southwest of Denver, where a Rocky Mountain bighorn sheep walked up as I was snapping photos and proceeded to lick my left leg. Guess he needed the salt.
Power and peace
Gawking at nature’s power is another reason I hike.
In midsummer, if you hike to Ouzel Falls in Rocky Mountain National Park and climb to its base, the roar of crashing water overwhelms your senses, and bouncing water droplets envelop you in a misty forest.
Those grassy-looking ridges above tree line in the Colorado mountains? In summer they’re actually covered with millions of delicate tundra flowers, some identical to those that grow above the Arctic circle.
The view from a fourteener? It’s like standing at the top of a frozen ocean, with wave after wave of mountains undulating toward the horizon.
I hike for peace — my peace. On a sunny summer weekday, I can hike for one hour on some trails and be alone among the animals and the trees. Or pause by a mountain lake and soak up the sounds of silence: light breeze rippling over the water, rainbow trout leaping into the air, plopping back into the lake.
If there is an age barrier to savoring such treasures, I haven’t found it.
Last summer I huffed up Mount Sherman, perhaps the easiest of Colorado’s 14,000-foot peaks. I took the shortest route, which nevertheless required a 2,000-foot vertical ascent in thin air. At the summit I met a retiree from Colorado Springs who had chosen a harder trail.
He was nearly 90 years old. He had climbed all of Colorado’s fourteeners in retirement, and on this day, he had climbed Mount Sherman for the 14th time. We hiked down together. He said he thanks God every day for letting him hike one more day.
This summer I drove to Brainerd Lake, a beautiful place at the base of the Indian Peaks. To my surprise, the parking lot for a trail above the lake was full in midmorning.
“Seems like Wednesday is senior citizens day,” the retired guy who took my entrance fee had warned.
So I parked somewhere below, walked to the starting point and ended up taking a trail that climbed Niwot Ridge, which features a 1,200-hectare biosphere preserve for the long-term study of tundra flowers.
Sure enough, everyone I met was AARP-eligible.
Finally I found Bill, reclining alone on the hill in a field of flowers. He had retired from a job that required flying to Europe, visiting wineries, tasting their products and delivering wines to high-end restaurants in the Denver area. Now, at 66, he was thinking of joining the Colorado Mountain Club.
We hiked down together and agreed to keep in touch. Weeks later, on a hike to Sandbeach Lake in Rocky Mountain National Park, Bill got caught in a severe storm that forced him to hike through ankle-deep water and piles of hail for 90 minutes — and then spotted a mountain lion as he was climbing back into his car.
Did that slow him down? No way. He bought better rain gear and kept hiking.
Agony and ecstasy
Some hikes do get harder with age. These days, every big one seems to bring a moment of agony — when I mutter, “I’m too old for this” — and a moment of ecstasy, when I remember why I do this.
It’s what my wife calls a “holy moley” moment. You stand in awe, mouth agape, and utter, “Holy moley!” or something similar.
This summer, I hiked to Lake of Glass in Rocky Mountain National Park with Mark, a hiking buddy who just turned 62. He’s in great shape. As a young man he once ran a half-mile in less than 2 minutes. Four decades later, he can still outclimb almost anyone I know.
My moment of agony came when the foot trail vanished, requiring a climb up a moist rock wall beside a waterfall. I gripped slippery rocks and tried to follow my friend up to a ledge above us. I slipped. I tried again. My leg refused to take a 3-foot step up. My feet felt way too big for the litle cracks in the rock wall. I glanced at the waterfall roaring inches away, crashing onto boulders beneath me. Panic time.
A hairy forearm shot out. “Grab my arm,” Mark said. I hesitated, thinking I outweighed him by 30 pounds. But I grabbed, he pulled, and my belly slid safely onto the ledge.
A stranger in the 50-and- climbing club paused to help me. He demonstrated the Three Points technique for getting up and down rocks: two hands and a foot, or two feet and a hand touching the ground at all times.
Personally I prefer the Five Points technique on anything that slippery: two hands, two feet and a cheek.
Minutes later, Mark and I stood at the shore of Lake of Glass, a lake framed by towering rock pinnacles. And I knew why I came.
Holy moley!
You don’t have to be young, stylish or rich to hike.
Hiking, unlike baseball, football, basketball or hockey, is a sport that can be undertaken anytime before you drop.
You don’t need to be stylish. I range the Rockies in Little Red, an old Honda CRV with 181,000 miles and climbing, and sport a black baseball-style cap from a friend’s bar mitzvah.
You don’t need to spend a lot of money. My lightweight list of hiking essentials for hikers of a certain age: light jacket, rain poncho, ski cap for blustery winds, extra socks, bandages, baggie of painkillers, compass, a few sheets of toilet paper, a one-page trail description torn from a hiking book, lunch.
By carrying my water bottle, I can hike all day with less than 3 pounds on my back, including the backpack.
I keep the backpack as light as possible because I still get flashes of pain from an old war injury: I hurt my neck and shoulders trying to move a whole bookcase by myself at a Navy shipyard library.
Now, for those of you considering that great leap off the couch, a few words of caution: Sudden changes of weather are the biggest threat to your life in the mountains. Pack a poncho and jacket on any long day hike, and don’t walk toward thunder clouds above tree line.
David Olinger
