flat Irons 1988

I have lots and lots and LOTS of outdoor stories that probably should have ended worse than they did. Like the time I went rock climbing in high school with 2 equally fucked up friends, and we were in the Flatirons just outside Boulder, Co. It was around midnight, our acid had just kicked in, we'd just smoked a fatty, and it was time to climb! We decided to climb up the 3rd one, which in this picture is the left of the big three, because it was the only one whose top we could see against the sky in the moonlight from where we were sitting.So anyway, we're pretty buzzed, and one of us stayed on the ground because he was a big pussy when it came to climbing. OK, so we're climbing, and it's only like a 5.6 or 5.7 (easy, for you that don't climb) but it's dark, we're fucked up, and the thing is so massive it seems like vertical.We have one flashlight, a lighter, and a pack of smokes between the 2 of us.About 1/2 way up, I start freaking out. Normally I was the solid one, but I was so high I was literally having an out of body experience. One second I was there, 200 ft up the rock, reaching for the next handhold right there above my head, and the next, I was looking down on myself from miles up in the sky. I could see those massive rocks like they were tiny hangnails on the Earth’s skin, and myself just an insignificant parasite attached tenuously to them. Then I was back again, having managed the last handhold without really realizing it, looking a few feet further up for the next one.I kept bouncing between these two perspectives about every 5 seconds, and I was afraid I was going to fall off the face in my confusion. My friend talked me down (from my panic, not off the rock) and we eventually made it to the top. As you can see in this pic, the front side is very angled, and an easy climb, but the back side is a straight drop, and at midnight, it looks as though it drops off into oblivion. Fortunately, I was no longer popping in and out like I had been as few minutes earlier, but I was still freaked out. Ryan however, was enjoying our role reversal, and was more bold than usual. At the top he lit a cig, then swung himself over the backside of the cliff and lodged a foot into a crack somewhere below. Then he starts swinging his free arm and leg, making goofy noises, having the time of his life seeing how much he was freaking me out. I was totally convinced he was about to plunge to his death, but no amount of begging or whining was working to get him back safely on my side. I finally convinced him by saying "Dude, I'll show you the coolest thing ever, but you've got to come back first.""What is it?" he asked, not believing me."Just trust me. Here. Take my smokes and if I'm lying, you can keep them." That convinced him. He crawled back on my side after I handed him my smokes, and then I said, check out THESE trails!" and I threw our flashlight as high as I could off the cliff.The trails (tracers to you Texas folk) were amazing, and nothing like them had ever been seen before or since.We watched it fly, leaving a long, purple-green smudge across the sky that lingered on for what seemed like minutes but was probably only about 7 or 8 seconds. Our silent contemplation was soon shattered though, when we heard a painful cry from far below.“You hit me in the fucking hand!”Dave, our friend who had been waiting below with an increasing amount of impatience, was not usually someone to be afraid of, but he did often get short-tempered on our occasional climbing trip, because we left him alone while we climbed and teased him mercilessly for his fear of heights. “I’m going to kick your ass when you get down here,” he yelled up at us, missing, like us, the greater significance of the fact at hand, which was that I had just thrown away our only source of light and we would now have to down-climb nearly completely blind. We eventually bumbled our way down to the ground without killing ourselves, and when we got to the bottom, Dave had decided not to beat me into a pulpy mush. His hand had an ugly purple welt on it, but he didn’t appear to have broken anything, and amazingly, our flashlight had survived the fall. Dave had picked it up and claimed it as his own, in payment for the accident. We then smoked a victory/survival/ appeasing-Dave bowl, which kicked off our peak all over again. I nearly left my car keys in the grassy meadow, but fortunately Ryan saw them, so we counted our blessings and started heading home.Unfortunately, we didn’t make any farther than the Coors brewery in Golden, where we were pulled over by a cop for driving down a one-way street the wrong way… but that is a story for another time.