Summit Journal Chat

I'm fairly sure that BBob was kidding, as was I, except for the islands part. My Crestone Needles, when I was a kid much younger than Colin, was Rib Mountain - at the time reputed to be the highest peak in Wisconsin. (I wrote about this once before on the old site) I and two friends rode our bikes along the back way to Wausau, which takes you to the base of Rib. We stashed the bikes in a farmer's yard and found our route as we went. The beauty of small mountains is that you may have enough time and energy to go over the top and down the other side, then back up and over again to your starting point, which we did. Double pilgrimage, if you will. A heifer that chased us across the field at the bottom was our avalanche, which narrowly missed us. For mountains like Rib, it's what you don't know that makes it an adventure. For those with more obvious hazard, what you don't know, but think you know, will make all the difference.

And hazards can lurk where you least expect them, like at the Blues Festival I attended Sunday evening. A lady friend (not Jill) had climbed a mountain of a picnic table, then decided to include me as part of her route down the damn thing - all premeditated, but in an alcohol clouded mind. The sudden load atop me sent us both sprawling to the pavement, but when I got up I had three broken and dislocated bones in my left foot. Surgery is scheduled for Thursday. They'll screw me back together and I will have found new understanding regarding the realms of what I don't know. From my new found perspective, the scariest part of what you don't know often exists in someone else's head.