1991/10 Rocky Mountain trip - Black Lake |
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On the Sunday morning the weather was still beautiful, and I wanted to have at least one memorable hike out of the weekend. Back in the summer, from the top of Longs 
Peak at 14000 feet and more, I’d seen a lake far below the peak, and someone told me that it was Black Lake and a good hike. So that was where I headed, starting again from Glacier Gorge. Black Lake was a ten-mile round trip from there but I was starting early.
I didn’t have the trail to myself; I shared it with a bunch of noisy teenagers, but they disappeared partway up the trail presumably to another destination. 
Mostly the trail was just a steady climb up to about 10000 feet, but there were a few places I had to scramble up the rocks, a bit difficult because of the ice.
It was a great hike, with Longs Peak and the Keyboard of the Winds high above me. Back in July I'd come through the Keyhole, somewhere on the left of the picture and made my way to the Keyboard on the right and then climbed that cliff, not as hard as it looks.
Black Lake turned out to be a dramatic spot. The lake was shallow and so clear and still it looked to be empty from some viewpoints. Behind the lake was a cirque wall, so the general effect was of an empty amphitheatre. The cliffs barred the wind and the sun was warming the rocks, so I had a very pleasant lunccch basking in the sunshine. It ended abruptly; there was a sudden cold wind and I was in the shade. I looked up at the cliffs, and saw a line of black cloud advancing over the rim. The cloud was moving very quickly, filling half the sky in no time. It was 
definitely time to retreat!
I should have taken a picture of that sky but instead I grabbed all my gear and jogged back down the trail. I was still five miles from my car, and I was already in light snow. I launched myself down those rocks I’d scrambled up, ignoring the ice.
Half an hour into this retreat my head was pounding with serious altitude sickness. I’ve found that I can take thin air quite well as long as I breathe appropriately, but my instinct when bounding down the rocks was to hold my breath while I concentrated on which rock to jump to. I had to force myself to breathe all the way down and subdue the headache. (I’d like to say that this was a lesson well learned but I’ve 
had the same problem in later years!) 
I made it back to the car without any serious falls, and set off to get back to Denver and Stapleton airport. It snowed all the way down the mountain, but the car performed well and I rolled into the airport in plenty of time for my flight. To my surprise we got out on time even though we couldn’t see much out of the windows of the airplane.
Although the weather was a background concern, this was also the final Sunday of the 1991 World Series. The Minnesota Twins were up against the Atlanta Braves in one of the closest series ever. In the sixth game, Kirby Puckett had made a fantastic catch to save the game and then hit a home run to win it. This evening was the seventh game, and the captain of our flight came on every few minutes to report that there had been no score. Just before we landed he came on with the news that Minnesota had won in extra innings. A cheer went up; either there were no Atlanta supporters on board or else they hadn’t packed their parachutes.
As well as the baseball scores, the captain had mentioned “unusual weather” in addition to the snowstorm that was lurking around Stapleton. He was right; that Sunday was the beginning of a week of very unusual weather that did an enormous amount of damage and killed dozens of people. By the end of the week, we in the Twin Cities were digging ourselves out of thirty inches of snow, and trying to scrape six inches of ice off our roads, after a battering from the Halloween Blizzard. Off the east coast, a “nor’easter” was combining with a hurricane to generate the exceptionally violent storm that sank the Andrea Gail fishing boat. However, those of us in Minnesota were too busy with our own problems to take any note of weather in the North Atlantic. I didn’t see the connection between these events until I saw the movie “The Perfect Storm” and realized that they all occurred in the same week.