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Preface

No Time Like the Present

It’s hard to believe that Best Summit Hikes in Colorado has been in publication for five years now. I am humbled and grateful to all those who helped make the book a success and warrant a second edition.

The first edition of Best Summit Hikes was a lesson in tenacity and endurance. When I signed on to the project in the autumn of 2005, I had a flexible job, a decent 4x4 truck, and enough money to do the project right. I owed readers the authenticity of personally hiking every peak in the book. I was ready to rock.

When the business of actually hiking rolled around in May 2006, the flexible job had unexpectedly gone out of business, my once-mighty truck blew its engine, and my budget dissolved. Times were tough. Peanut butter or jelly tough.

I had a decision to make. I could delay the whole endeavor until things got better. If I went for it, it was an uncertain proposition. I scrambled to buy an 18-year-old Honda Accord, just to have something—not the ideal mountain vehicle. Though I desperately wanted a new camera, I was going to have to work with the humble digital in my possession. I couldn’t eat out much nor gather my bearings at hotels. And I had to stay out in the field for extended periods since the price of gas had rocketed in 2006 to roughly $3 a gallon, an all-time high at the time. In other words, I had plenty of reasons to stop before I even started.

From the top of Pacific Peak, which is just shy of 14er status, it’s easy to see why size doesn’t always matter when it comes to deciding the best summits in Colorado.

It was fortunate that the subject matter happened to be a wonderful metaphor. We have every reason not to climb mountains. They are cold, barren places where exposure, rockfalls, avalanches, and thunderstorms batter the body and the spirit. You have to get up early to visit them, and for most of us, that means a rushed weekend of bleary-eyed driving between the actual business of wandering into brain-cell-dissolving thin air. As with many of the challenges of life, it’s easier to sleep in.

Perhaps because the task was so grandiose and the end so far away, the entire process became very simple. Put one foot in front of the other. Walk uphill. Repeat.

From May to September, I adapted to a spartan but incredibly fulfilling existence, intimately connected with the spirit of the mountains. I wrapped up my final hike in a dance of golden aspen leaves on a crystal-blue September afternoon on East Beckwith Mountain. Somehow I had done it. All I really had to do was find a way to get started.

Mountains occupy a unique place in the human heart. They are gratuitous and essential. Every peak is flush with glory and peril, and they demand great things from us. Mountains haunt our dreams and engage our spirit. They will outlast us in every way, and when we are long forgotten, the connection we forged in those high reaches will silently sustain.

There’s no time like the present to find your mountain.

James Dziezynski

July 2012

Boulder, Colorado