Episode 185 - Longs Peak

Welcome to another world, I'm your host, Jack Wagner. This episode comes from a guy named Alex Waterfield. He's 37 years old from Northern Colorado. He is a chef and also a very experienced and avid hiker. Alex's story takes place on Long's Peak, which is said to be Colorado's deadliest mountain. Now for me, growing up in the infinite, flat landscape of Illinois, we had nothing like this hike. In fact, I don't even think I could have comprehended a hike like this while I was growing up. I always knew parks to be managed outdoor spaces with trails and signs and rangers or some kind of help nearby, more like a city park than real wilderness. They were places that had a metaphorical safety net. I never felt like I could be in actual danger, besides maybe getting poisoned ivy or something like that. Later on though, I moved to Montana and ended up visiting a lot of the national and state parks around the country. I was very shocked at how dangerous many of the trails were and how vast and unforgiving the wilderness was. One slip on an exposed edge can mean falling hundreds of feet, the weather can flip from sunshine to lightning in an hour and help maybe half a day away if you even have cell service to call for help. A while back, I had just finished a hike, late in the season, and noticed a very dusty car parked at the trailhead. In fact, my car and this dusty car were the only two cars left in this parking lot and it had multiple parking tickets on the windshield. This car really caught my eye because it looked like it had been there for at least a week. I also noticed that it was a rental car which seemed pretty strange. I was curious so I looked in the window of this car and it didn't look abandoned. It looked just kind of like your car would look if you were planning on leaving it for a couple hours, like you were going in a hike. They had drinks, a backpack, personal items sitting out. It just clearly did not look like a car somebody left there on purpose. Later that night when I was back in cell reception, I looked it up and saw a news story about a hiker who had just died in that trail recently. He was a man on a work trip who decided to go hiking on his day off. He slipped on a particularly dangerous cliff and died. Now I don't know why his car was still sitting there. Maybe the Rangers didn't realize it was his car. Maybe they didn't get around to towing it out of the park yet. Either way, seeing that abandoned car was a very haunting image that has stuck with me for a really long time. I think because it made me realize how quickly things can turn for you, even in a place that feels so safe and so beautiful. In this episode, Alex sets out for a hike that is significantly more dangerous than that trail where I saw the car. And as he moves through the many difficult sections of this hike, he has a strange encounter that he has never forgotten. By the way, if you want to see some visuals of this trail, we're going to include a few links to photos in the description of the episode. But for reference, I would say that for most of this hike, it's not so much a trail as it is moving across and up a giant frozen cliff. This episode is called "Longs Peak" and you're listening to "Other World." [Music] My name is Alex Waterfield, I'm 37 years old. I'm an executive chef in Northern Colorado. And I like to spend a lot of my time playing music, doing fun art things with my friends, and then as much time in the mountains as I possibly can. Climbing, snowboarding, all the cool things you can do if you live in Colorado and your backyard is just the most fun mountain playground you can ever imagine. And my story comes in one of those mountains. There is a mountain in Rocky Mountain National Park called "Longs Peak." And it's a kind of legendary. It's on the Colorado quarter. It's the most frequented 14th. A 14th is any mountain that the peak reaches beyond 14,000 feet. I don't know how many are in Alaska. Colorado has the most in the contiguous United States. In California, I think Washington has two of them, and then Colorado has 52. And of those 52, "Longs Peak" is known as being the most deadly, which is simply because it's the only 14th in Rocky Mountain National Park. So it's frequented by people that aren't prepared. And a lot of times what will happen is there are thunderstorms that roll in unexpectedly, where there will be ice on exposed part of the mountains that like novice climbers just aren't expecting or have the gear to handle or a combination of those things. So I believe somebody dies almost every year on the mountain. What got you into hiking in the first place? I attended a wedding close to Denver where the person that invited me, my date to the wedding, was in the wedding. So while she was doing a rehearsal dinner or whatever, I kind of fucked off and went to the movies, and it was one of those movie theaters where they served beer, and they were playing the movie Everest, which I always had kind of like a passing interest in the mountains. Living in Colorado, I drive past them every day. Like it's pretty remarkable. Anybody who's driven down I-25 in the front range of Colorado, you could just look to your right and see just the most magnificent like picture-esque mountains. So I've always had like a very pedestrian interest in mountains. Something about seeing Everest and having like two beers made me really emotional and like about the mountains, and I remember thinking, dude, this could be me. I could be a mountain person. And so some of my hardcore friends, like everybody has friends out here that are either hardcore into technical climbing, which is like climbing with gear or ropes, or the opposite of that outside and climbing, which is what I got really into, which is you don't bring any technical gear. You just sort of free-solo your way up and down the mountain, or like snowboarders, like we all know pretty gnarly people out here. So I got with one of my gnarly people, and we planned to climb Longspeak. And I didn't know anything about Longspeak. I didn't do any research for it, we just went and hiked it. And at first it seems like a pretty basic hike, a very difficult one because it's so steep. The trail head starts at about 9,000 feet, so you're doing 5,000 feet of elevation gain. And even for somebody that grew up here, that is quite a bit of acclimation for your lungs. Altitude sickness is very common. I can always tell exactly when I'm at 12,000 feet, because my body starts really fighting for air. That's where I really start to huff and puff. But the first part of the hike, like I said, is a pretty basic, simple hike, and then you go through what's called the keyhole. And then all of a sudden, it's like you're on a different planet. And the first time I did it, we were in the perfect conditions. Maybe the best conditions I've ever seen up there. When the sun was out, not a hint of a storm cloud in the sky. So the first time I did it, it was pretty magical. But it's intense. There's a lot of scrambling climbing up rocks that are the size of like semi-trucks. And a big thing you have to worry about is rock fall, so I was learning a part of the mountain called the trough. Everyone would yell rock. And you're supposed to stay like 100 feet away from everyone else in case someone knocks a rock above you, down to you, obviously. It would take you out. And so I got to the summit there with my friends, and we all came back down, and everybody was in the worst mood ever because it's such an intention. sleep long hike and we were making jokes the whole time that somebody moved the parking lot on the way back down. We made it back to the trailhead and everybody was fine. One of my two friends that I went up there with was kind of having a very slow moving panic attack, the entire second half of the climb. So they were stopping a lot and I ended up going up ahead and waiting for them on the summit and we all came down. My point is they had a terrible time and I had the best time ever and I knew I was going to go back. So I started just kind of knocking off Colorado 14ers and there are a lot that are dangerous in the way that was attractive to me where it really felt like you accomplished something if you could go up and down. But Long's Peak is very close to where I live and I started to find out I would look up people do it in the winter time and so that's what I kind of became obsessed with and to set the scene during winter conditions. You don't generally see other hikers up there. If you do it's like really hardcore famous mountain climbers that live in Colorado. I was coming down one day and I saw Alex Honald and Tommy Caldwell climbing part of the peak. I met John Krakauer on Long's Peak one time in the winter and it's just like it's it's this very barren place because it gets so remote and sketchy. I'm imagining like five to six specific dudes listening to this episode right now nodding along to those names very impressed. Well Alex Honald is the free solo guy. Oh yes of course. There are only like hardcore people up there and you don't really need to do the standard route. You don't need ropes in the winter time but you need like the utmost like mental clarity and you have to have a pretty good grip on your own risk management I would say which comes kind of into play with my story but there's a part of the mountain called the Narrows basically it is foot and a half path going along the mountain for maybe an eighth of a mile. Maybe that's maybe not quite an eighth of a mile. Really really fun in the summertime but as you're hiking across it if you look to your right it's just a sheer 800 foot drop so if you slipped right there there's no chance you would survive the fall and then in the winter time that little pathway has a giant snow-packed mound of snow going over it so you're basically climbing over the Narrows on a giant piece of ice so you need crampons or ice axes or both. It's a very small part of the mountain but the exposure is such that if you're not like stuck to the mountain like the wind blows a little bit and you step wrong on ice it's certain death and it's where a lot of people have slipped and fallen and died and even when people survive it it's very very very hard to mount a rescue especially that time of the year in the winter time. There was a time I was up there in October which isn't quite winter conditions but usually it's very intense and windy and there's a lot of ice and snow up there. I checked in at there's like a little sign-in spot right after the ranger station like one of those steel boxes that closes and opens almost like it's bear proof where people can sign their name and somebody had hung missing posters for a guy named Ryan Albert from some town in New Jersey, Hazelett from Hazelett, New Jersey and I found out from the missing poster where he went missing hikers contacted him at a spot on the mountain called Granite Pass which is kind of the gateway to the sketchy side of the mountain and they said he was going the key hole route which is the standard route which is the one that I'm going to talk about and had been missing for about a week and I kept going and I got to the Boulder Field which is a place if you get a permit you're allowed to camp and there was a man up there who claimed that he was a private investigator hired by the family of Ryan Albert because they were really upset that the National Guard weren't willing to hike into the wilderness to look for him which made perfect sense to me and I was telling this guy that like beyond this key hole which we could see from his campsite the weather is really inhospitable it's very slow moving and it just so happened that the day after Ryan attempted his hike we got like three feet of snow up there and I told the guy I was like I'm pretty sure just based on the route I could tell you exactly where they're going to find the body next spring and I thought they were going to find that he had tumbled down what's called the trough and he was just going to be at the bottom of that and next spring that's exactly where they found the body so it's like it's very not for the inexperience but even sometimes experience people get into some trouble up there so the standard route is called the key hole route there's this giant rock formation that you're heading towards the entire hike called the keyhole and once you climb through the keyhole it kind of feels like you crossed into another dimension I was up there a week ago and my friend Liz and I crossed through the keyhole and her hands froze and mine were pretty cold too and it was so intensely windy I think it was like 80 mile per hour gusts and the wind chill was 25 degrees and it was I think it was July and we had to turn back because we couldn't move our hands anymore and then the thing about the weather is if the entire route is covered in ice it's just a bunch of like rock outcroppings with a huge drop to your right a slip and fall there could be catastrophic and usually deadly so you have to be really really really careful and the way the wind blows it just kind of like stuffs the snow into the side of the mountain it's almost creating like a 45 degree angle ice rink on the side of the mountain and there are rocks sticking out of it so you can kind of make your way along the rocks safely but not very easily and a lot of times you know people find out oh long speak it's in the park I'm gonna go try to hike it but that could happen in late September so people get up there and into all kinds of trouble all the time and that's just the beginning of the sketchy part that's called the ledges so you go along the ledges very carefully in winter conditions and even a lot of a lot of times the the rocks that you can step on are covered in ice I've found the best thing to have are called micro spikes they're these almost like chains that you put over your hiking boots and you can just walk over solid ice the crampons are the ones that have like the spikes sticking out the front they're really good for kind of like vertical climbing which this mountain has towards the end but uh micro spikes you can kind of walk across anything but even then you got to be really careful because like the snow fields could break cause like a mini avalanche and if you're standing on it obviously that would be game over for you I remember when I started doing this my friends all pitched in and bought me an ice axe for a birthday present for those of you who don't know an ice axe one end of it is a very pokey it looks like a walking cane with a huge like like point on one end so you can shove it down into ice and find out if the ice is going to break and the other end like what appears to be the handle end kind of has this giant sharp claw sticking out of it and the idea is if the ice breaks and you fall you pull the axe towards you and you rotate onto that claw to do what's called a self arrest seat so it digs into the mountain and it stops you from falling and those are pretty standard equipment basically between September and I want to say early June on the mountain so the the climbing window for casual people is usually late July until the end of August and that's really the only really safe window you have so like I said even then the wind will knock you over uh wind even before the keyhole one time blew me over so bad it broke my arm I was dealing with wind gusts and what I would do is I would slowly anchor myself to a rock into the wind whenever it blew so the wind was blowing really hard in my face and I started to like bend down to grab the rock and hold on to it for dear life while I was leaning forward slowly the wind completely reversed directions but it's still going the same speed so I fell towards where I was leaning and it dragged me across I think like 11 feet of boulders and shattered my headlamp that I was wearing and I broke my arm that day I've broken a lot of bones on longspeak but it's thank god I haven't like broken my femur done anything that hasn't that's like prevented me from getting back home that's crazy dude yeah it's nuts the standard route on longspeak is also known as the keyhole route and you start uh the trailhead is that the longspeak ranger station which is at about 9,000 feet of elevation and it's a pretty beautiful hike through a a forest called Goblins Forest. It's called Goblins Forest because all the little trees apparently look like goblins to the people who named it. And you do that hike for a while and you cross over a giant log bridge that goes over a waterfall. It's really scenic. And then you keep going up a pretty easy hike until you break tree line. Once you get to the tree line, it becomes a pretty intense hike. Huge steps, lots more elevation gain. Lots of rocks that you have to like, just step up. I was on the summit with a friend in April and there was about a foot of snow up there. And she was exhausted, but like a pretty avid mountain climber. And she wanted to go down a face of the mountain that you can't access without ropes in the wintertime. And she had decided we were just going to go down it. And I humid her for a second. So I showed her the edge. We went down slightly. I was like, see, we can't possibly get down here. We have to turn around and go back the way we came up. And she committed to dying right there. She's like, well, that's it then. We're just going to die. And she sat down. And I, everything I knew about altitude sickness and how it can affect your brain. I could tell that's what was happening to her. So I just got her up and moving as soon as possible. We were slowly making our way back down. And I kind of knew we were going to be OK. We were crossing back over the narrows that I was talking about. And my ISACs broke part of the snow. And it slid off right in front of me and took my left leg with it. But my right leg was planted into the snow. And obviously, we made it back in one piece. And now we live to tell the tale. She's my roommate now. We tell that story all the time. Because I didn't occur that we were in trouble until we were literally as far away from the trailhead as we could be. So all that to say, it's quite the exhilarating and dangerous climb. It takes every box I could ever have for like thrill seeking. All of that to say, it was a super dangerous sketchy mountain. The last thing on my mind was encountering anything that I couldn't explain, basically. And there was one early spring day that I went there. And it was like half winter conditions, half springtime conditions. Basically, springtime means there's a ton of snow and ice still on the technical scary part of the mountain. And I decided I would go alone. So it's one of those days where all my friends knew exactly the route I was going to be. And all my way up, I thought I heard thunder in the distance a couple times. So I was already planning on basically you get to one part of the mountain and you can see behind the mountain that's been in front of you the entire time, which is where all the storm clouds come because they're coming from the west. And a lot of times you get through there and you see these cells starting to kind of combine. And that's when it gets really dangerous. Like individual storm clouds will just rain on you. But when you're watching the swirling clouds, like become one giant mega cloud, that's usually where the lightning storms happen. And there's a storm shelter up right next to the keyhole but it's not very effective. You can fit maybe five people. And it's just in a really strange place for a storm shelter. It would protect you from lightning though. So that's always like a backup plan in the back of my mind. But this one spring day I was hiking up alone and I was coming up to this giant boulder field that exists right before the keyhole. And I'm coming through the boulder field and at this point I was the only person on the mountain which is pretty normal for me at this time of year. But I kinda heard a hiking poles behind me and I turn around and like a hundred yards, maybe 50 yards away, I saw a figure coming up behind me through the boulder field. And he was going fast like he was on a mission this guy. And it's pretty standard when someone gets near you. That's going fast obviously. The etiquette would be you step aside and let them go. So he was gaining on me pretty quick. I wasn't in a hurry. I could hear what I thought was thunder. I wasn't planning on summiting. I didn't have my heart set on getting to the summit that day. And this guy comes up behind me. We'll call him the guy in black because he was wearing all black, black hiking wind resistant pants, black boots. He had hiking poles. He had an orange ice axe attached to his pack. And his hood was drawn like the strings of his hood were drawn kind of like Kenny from South Park. He was wearing dark black sunglasses. And he had like a salt and pepper goatee. Moving so fast, just huffing and puffing, breathing so hard. And he walked past me and I said good morning and he nodded at me and he kept going. And I watched him. I kept hiking too, but he was at such a clip. I watched him kind of disappear ahead of me through the keyhole to go along the same standard route that I was planning on going. So that day I got up to the keyhole and I noticed there were storm clouds forming. They weren't forming very fast. I could see very far away the source of the thunder and I wasn't too worried about it. The rule up there is kind of you're about an hour away from safety. If you go really fast. So if it seems like you're about to get lightening dawn, basically you turn around right there and go right back to the tree line where it's a little safer. But I made the decision to go a little bit further because I knew I wasn't going to try to get all the way to the summit anyway. So then I was on the ledges kind of poking around the ice trying to very leisurely us taking my time, trying to find my way safely across to the next part. Mind you, I'm following a man. The guy that I saw go through the keyhole, basically you can only go one route from there. Basically from the keyhole, there's a pretty clear path forward. The point of this route is it's a stretched out way to get to the summit safely. Instead of just climbing straight up the mountain, you have to walk completely around the mountain. You can either go left, which is the only way. Or you're staring down, I think about 500 feet of a very rocky cliff. Those are very intense technical climbs that lead nowhere. And I've never heard of anybody ever doing that. I'm certain if you lugged ropes up to that point, you could, but there's just nothing at the bottom. And it would be completely pointless for this man to have gone any other way. Assuming he had a car at the trailhead, if he somehow supernaturally found a way to climb down, that side of the mountain with our ropes, he would have had to climb right back up to get back on the trail, to get back to his car. Nothing else connects right there. So I knew he was on the only route, which is the standard route. And he had to have been on the ledges ahead of me. [MUSIC PLAYING] All right, we'll be right back after this quick break. [MUSIC PLAYING] Get ready for more of the gripping mysteries you love, because forensic files is back. And they're revisiting some of your favorite episodes. Come along as investigators, scientists, and experts piece together evidence, clues, and data in search of the answers behind violent crimes, unexplainable mysteries, and other strange occurrences. Listen to forensic files on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. The wilderness can hide a lot, but it can't hide the truth forever. I'm Dilya DeAmber, a host of park predators. And every week, I investigate true crime cases hidden in national parks, forests, and beaches. I follow every lead, every clue, and every overlooked detail. Because even when a trail seems to disappear, the truth has a way of resurfacing. Listen to park predators, wherever you get your podcasts. [MUSIC PLAYING] So I'm following him, kind of trying to keep pace. I didn't see him on that side of the mountain from where I went to the keyhole. It was like pretty customary for there to be way more hardcore people up there than me. Like, if there was one or two souls, they were usually pretty quick doing endurance tests for whatever. It's like professional athletes sponsored by whatever, like outdoor company. It saw famous mountain climbers up there quite a bit. And I just assumed this guy was-- he was bundled up in a way where I couldn't see his face, and he was wearing sunglasses. I couldn't make out his identity. But I assumed if I checked forums the next day or whatever, I'd find his ascent. So I kind of assumed this guy was up there with me, which made me feel a little bit better. And I knew he was just up ahead of me climbing. And so I started making my way across the ledges very carefully, avoiding the snow. I could sort of walk across the ice with my microspics on. I was going very, very carefully, since I wasn't planning on submitting. There was no point to rush it. And I made it across the ledges pretty easily to a spot called the trough. The trough is-- like a thousand foot, it looks like a horse's trough that you drop to about, I don't know, like a 60 degree angle down the mountain. So you're kind of like walking up a very, very, very steep slide. It's about a hundred feet across for a thousand feet. And in the, in winter conditions, you do that with your ISACs, microspics. Some people use crampons. And it was looking like it was gonna be one of those situations. But I never made it to the trough because I came basically to the point where the ledge is traversed into the trough. And there was an ice field that didn't have any rock croppings down below it to protect me. So normally I could hop onto the rocks and like kinda, use those as like safety anchors to walk across the ice. Basically like a 20 foot like sideways ice ring stepping on it with your shoes and no metal or ice spikes or anything. It's a death sentence. You would slip right away, fall with all of your weight on do. Basically like the world's biggest ice slide. It's kind of, if it was a ski slope, it wouldn't even be a double black diamond. I think it would be like cord and doff. They'd have to like build a wall to protect skiers from going down it. You would not survive walking across the ice field. I could tell this is where I needed to turn around. So I stopped for a second. I was watching the clouds roll in. And by now I kinda had confirmed that there was definitely a storm rolling in pretty slowly, but I could tell it was gonna rain at some point on the mountain. So I was being pretty leisure right there. I think I set my pack down and I pulled out my water and I was just kinda taking it all in and catching my breath. And I hear a man say, "What you thinking?" And I turned to look at this guy. He was standing across the snow field at the bottom of the trough. The thing that I wasn't gonna cross, he was standing across from. And he's wearing clothes that look like day belong in the 1990s, like in a climbing catalog. The best way to describe like his jacket, it looked like if your listeners remember in elementary school we'd bring out this dumb parachute and we'd throw it all around. Sky's entire clothing looked like it was made out of a parachute, just like windbreakers from the '90s or something. And he was wearing trail running shoes that also looked like they were from the 1990s, just like really primitive technology. And it occurred to me something, I didn't have a conscious thought of this, but something about the way he looked did not belong in the space where we were. Generally people that make it this far on the mountain are sponsored by like Black Diamond. I've never in my life seen somebody just wearing straight up trail running shoes and like a windbreaker. And so it was really tough for my brain to understand how I'm in all this gear struggling to get to where he is to the point where I wasn't even gonna attempt to get to where he was. He had gotten there without the use of an axe or ropes or any kind of micro spikes or anything like that. He couldn't have been there unless he teleported basically. I'm looking at this man and I'm thinking, I've seen people do some pretty remarkable things up there, just like fearlessly jump across a waist deep snow in a part of the mountain with the most intense exposure and just kind of hop across. But I've never seen it without an ice axe. I've never seen it without some kind of assistance up there. And so all of that kind of happened in an instant when I glanced at him, but I didn't really suss out all my thoughts until he really started talking to me. So I answered his question because he was asking me, he saw me looking at the ice in between us and he was asking me what I was thinking. And I think I mentioned the storm clouds and I said, I don't think we can be up here very much longer and there's a storm blowing in. And so I was already planning on turning around and I have my ice axe, I have my micro spikes, but I don't think I can get across that snow field. And I asked him, I said, how did you get across the ice in between us? And he pointed up at rocks and he had this really confused look on his face when he said, we sort of just clipped out up there. Cliffing out in mountain terms means you climbed rock, basically until you couldn't climb it anymore. Generally during ice climbing, you look for any rock that you can anchor yourself to since ice gives way, rocks don't usually. So at his point was he climbed along this ridge to get to where he was. And that didn't make any sense to me. The ridge he was pointing at, there's a route to go up where he was pointing at. It's called the keyhole ridge, but you definitely need ropes, especially in icy conditions. And so that was kind of like the first conscious red flag I had where I was like, well, that doesn't make sense. And then I started really looking at his gear. And I could tell he was wearing nothing, but running shoes, basically. And he was on the side of a very sketchy ice field that would have taken me minutes to get across, even though it was only about 20 feet. And I changed the subject. I asked him what his name was. He told me his name was Tim. And he said he lived in Longmont, which is a town very close to where we were. It's named after Longspeak, which used to be called Mount Long. So Longmont, Mount Long. So I'll never forget. And then I remembered when I asked him how he got across, he said, we. And so I realized he wasn't up there alone. He said, we clipped out. And then I remembered the guy that had blown past me in the Boulder field. And I said, oh, that guy in between us, he was moving so fast. Of course, he's trying to get to his friend. I was like, are you here with the guy that was in between us? And I'll never forget. Tim looked at me and he said, Alex, there's no one else up here. He explained to me that he and a buddy had tried to climb and Tim got tired at the base of the trough and was gonna wait for his friend to climb to the summit and climb back down to him. I've seen that happen all the time in the summertime. It wasn't that strange that he told me that. But when he looked at me and said, Alex, there's no one else up here. That was that cliche moment where all the hairs kind of stood up on the back of my neck. And I said to Tim, well, then he must have been a ghost. And I started sipping my water. Tim stared at his feet for a second, same confused look on his face and he goes, I think I saw a ghost up here one time. (dramatic music) And I told him, okay, go on. Tim started telling me this story where he was camping in the Boulder field in the wintertime. It basically makes it to where you can break your climb into a hike and then you camp for the night and then you wake up super early the next day and then you finish the mountain with the climbing side. The technical side, I'll say, the dangerous side. It's really virtuous because the hike really burns out your legs that you're gonna need to basically do all the really technical moves on the next part of the mountain. Doing it in the wintertime, obviously the risk is a lot more. You might as well like try to get a little bit of rest. So Tim starts to tell me he heard someone walking up to his tent very, very early in the morning in February and he opened his tent window and saw an old man coming up to his tent in full gear, wearing a headlamp and the man walked up to Tim's tent and said, hey, would you like to come to the summit with me? Or something along those lines? The man invited Tim to come on his climb. So Tim pulled on all his gear and said he was pretty stoked to have a fellow hiker to go with him and he said it was really slow going and there was a lot of snow and ice and they finally made it to the summit as the sun was coming up and that's a pretty dangerous time for a winter climb because the sun comes up on the mountain and starts to melt all the snow so it starts to fall down. So some of the things that you use to climb up the mountain in the dark and cold are now sliding around and if there's anything melting, the already pretty slick rock being wet makes it pretty hard to get down the same way you came up which is the traditional way down. The key hole route, the standard route is you go up one way and you come down the exact same way. So Tim and this old man realized they could not go down the way they came up and I'm riveted. I'd been in that situation where my friend wanted to go down a way that we couldn't go down and there was this sense of panic in me that was like brewing that I couldn't nail down and then he said the thing that kind of made my jaw drop. He told me, I don't remember how I got down and he seemed really confused by that. He like furrowed his brow and I think he said it a second time. Thank you. And I don't remember how I got down. And then he looked at me and he goes, part of me thinks I died that day. And that's when the panic inside me really kind of swelled to like a fever pitch. And everything started to make sense about this guy. How his clothes didn't belong. How he just like popped out of nowhere it felt like. And I remember looking down at my analogy in the water bottle, trying as fast as I could to like screw the lid back on and just having trouble with it and I gave up. And I threw it in my backpack very hurriedly said my goodbyes to Tim and turned around and started booking it back to the keyhole, back to safety. The problem was I didn't have my wits about me and I kind of turned the wrong way. The way back is a little bit deceptive because that part of the mountain you want to go down and I actually went up and I heard a voice behind me. I heard Alex and I turned around and Tim was now standing on my side of that ice field. Like when we were having the conversation, he was standing where I was standing. So all of a sudden he was really close to me and he's pointing down the mountain at the correct route without looking at his hand, just looking me dead in the eye and he said go down. And I can still hear his voice say that. And my brain was struggling to understand how somebody wearing zero safety equipment somehow got across this cliff of ice and it felt to me honestly the amount of time it took him to get across it was nothing. It felt like he had just blinked and was there. He had done something that my brain didn't understand that scared the shit out of me but he was also pointing me to safety. And I kind of scrambled down to the correct part of the mountain and hurriedly walked back through the keyhole. So at that point when I was running back across the ledges, I noticed that the clouds that I was watching were starting to combine with each other. It's this kind of magical thing that happens. You can see it from my house when you're looking west and looking at the mountains. I swear along speak has its own weather and it's almost like the clouds are attracted to the peak like a magnet because there will be clouds from opposite ends of the sky. You can like feel the wind kind of shift a little bit and start blowing in directions you don't think it should and those clouds start to combine with each other and it presents all kinds of dangers for people that are exposed on the mountain. I do think most people up there have died from lightning strike but I could be wrong. But that's always my fear. And so now I'm hustling against weather blowing in and feeling the wind blowing against me when it should be at my back. That's not good. It feels like it's creating what's called an upslope and now I could start to hear actively thunder coming from the clouds as well. So I knew I only had so much time to jump back through the keyhole, climb down the boulder field, change my shoes because I did bring running shoes with me and basically I'll ask back to the tree line so that I can be protected from the lightning. And so that's exactly what I did. And as I'm approaching the tree line, the clouds are now descending upon the mountain. My sight line was obscured, maybe I was at like 50 feet of visibility. You're at such an altitude, sometimes you get a ton of fog before it starts raining. And right as I broke tree line, it was almost like a cliche sad movie where there's a lightning strike, thunder right away and then just pouring rain. So I'm running at this point, trail running as fast as I can because in my heart, I'm kind of not willing to accept anything paranormal happened because to me, it feels like there is at least one, possibly three people up there trapped in a lightning storm. And so I'm running with everything I have back to the, back to the ranger station so I can report it. There aren't always rangers at this ranger station unless it's in the summer months. So I was really lucky to get back to the ranger station and see it was open for business and there was a ranger inside. And so I went in and I told him my whole story and told him that I think there are three people trapped up there. And he was looking at weather patterns and talking to other rangers who were in touch with search and rescue on his walkie talkie. And he came, he had me, he had me wait outside the ranger station in the rain and he came out and he said, there's nothing anyone can do tonight because the storm is so bad. So hopefully they all found shelter and they would mount a search the next day when the weather cleared up. Nothing can get like up or down in that kind of weather. The main fear would be a lightning strike hitting somebody and even if you survive that, the rain would make the granite so slick that it would be impossible to climb up or down. Especially if you didn't have equipment as I knew Tim not to have. So if the lightning didn't get him, he basically would have had to just been an exposed sitting duck until lightning hit him. So to get to where he was when the rain would have had to start happening to any sort of shelter, it would have taken him, it would have taken him an impossible amount of time and you just can't move your feet won't work. It's like wearing like roller skates. And as we're having this conversation, we heard somebody coming down the trail and I was pretty relieved to see it was the man in black that had passed me in the Boulder field and I was so relieved that somebody made it and really, really, really eager to talk to him and he came over to me and the ranger and he pulled out, it felt like earplugs but it was probably just some kind of air pods or something. And I asked him first of all how he got down and he told me he had made it up to the summit and he saw the same clouds blowing in that I saw and knew he needed to get down as fast as possible and he's a lot more familiar with the route that's called the loft route. So he came down a different side of the mountain than I did because it would be a lot faster which is the only other way to get off of the summit without ropes in the winter conditions if they're good enough. So he went basically I took like route A off the mountain and he took route B and we basically made a giant circle so we didn't run into each other on the way down and I asked him if he met the other two climbers up there and he told me there was nobody else up there. It was only he and I as far as he knew. So he didn't run into Tim or Tim's friend on the summit. At first I didn't believe him. I told him exactly where I saw Tim so we went into a pretty detailed discussion. He went up the trough, did not see a single person, made it up to the summit, did not see a single person. At this point I started to think well maybe somehow each of them were on a weird part of the mountain that made them invisible to this guy but that doesn't make any sense because that part of the mountain doesn't exist. So in my head I thought I was wrong or confused about something and this guy somehow blew right past them. Although I talked to him about his route, he was on the standard route just like Tim was, just like I was. After that I was confused. Nothing added up, I couldn't make it make sense and I figured I would see a news story about two hikers that had gotten stranded up there and somehow died. But every day I searched for it and I never saw the news report. I called the ranger station a couple of times and they told me they sent climbing rangers up the next day and didn't find any sort of evidence of anyone being stuck up there. So I would Google Long's Peak every day and hit the news tab on my phone. That's usually where you see hikers stranded or unfortunately somebody fell off the face and didn't make it. I did that every day for a long time and then I started looking for people named Tim that might have died up there and I did find somewhere in a book at the library a list of people that died on Long's Peak and one of them was a guy named Tim who died in, I think it was 1991 on the mountain. Something about the details of his death didn't line up to the Tim I met but I can't remember exactly what it was. But the real bummer was there was no picture of him because I can still remember exactly what this guy's face looked like. in my head. It's like etched into my mind. Have you seen this one before? This is one that I found. It's from a guy who died up there in 1990 from Longmont, Colorado, and his initials are TF. No way. Wednesday, August 1st, 1990, Rocky Mountain, Colorado, Fatality, Park Rangers receive a phone report of an injured person southwest of the summit of Long's Peak around noon on the 29th. A helicopter was called in, but weather conditions were too bad for the flight. CPR was begun in the victim at 1.30 p.m. and continued by the ranger who arrived half hour later. It was suspended on the recommendation of a doctor just before 3 p.m. The victim who suffered a head injury from a fall was TF 26 of Longmont, Colorado. Wow, that's kind of weird, right? Southwest of the summit. So that would make sense, then, because if he fell off, he'd be on that side of the summit crazy. And of course, I mean, I don't think the park's release as much info as the police do for normal situations like this. So I don't really know anything more than this, but it's definitely interesting. And it's the same town. It's very interesting. Same town, same initials, same spot. Weather conditions were too bad for flight. That's fascinating. I always feel a little weird like insinuating somebody as a ghost, but it lines up. It does line up, which-- I mean, I'm pretty skeptical. I just couldn't explain any of this, you know? Which is why I wanted to tell you about it. But that's pretty hard to ignore. Having a few years to process it all, I'm pretty skeptical about spirits that I'm always trying to look for a plausible way to explain anything. And unless I'm willing to admit that I had lost my mind on the mountain that day, which isn't out of the question, but it's never happened to me. I think this might be just one of those truly remarkable experiences and unexplainable. And my friends feel the same way. I think I'm more skeptical than all of my other friends about the paranormal. So a lot of my friends think that I was haunted and it was a spooky ghost. One of them, in particular, has a theory that I had what's called hypoxia, which is basically just where you're deprived of oxygen. So clearly, it happens all the time at altitude. I've never experienced anything like this beyond this moment, this experience. And I've been at altitude for a lot of my life. And I've seen it in other people. Basically, what hypoxia does is it causes you to have any number of medical events, but one of the big ones is confusion. I'm not sure I've ever heard a story about people hallucinating, but I'm certain it's happened. And since it's never happened to me before or since, and I have such a clear and vivid memory of that whole day, I don't think that that's what happened to me. I think it's more likely there were two souls up there that one other guy just didn't see somehow than me having hypoxia. But I don't know. Anything's possible. And so I like to tell the story to try to ask if anyone else has had any experiences like that on Longspeak. And I haven't found anybody yet who has. It's had kind of a profound effect on me as far as my belief in, or like my agnosticism, I guess I'd say, about the paranormal. It's definitely made me feel a little bit more open to the idea that there could be things happening out here that we can't explain. It just feels very uncomfortable for me that I can't explain something that happened in a place where I feel like it doesn't need any added danger to it. Because it's already pretty terrifying on its own. That was a point where I should have turned around. And it was almost like he was preventing me from continuing, because I had to have a conversation with him and talk about kind of, oh, man, wouldn't it be crazy if I tried to walk across this ice cliff to get to you? And it sort of reaffirmed, no, I'm turning around. And then he told me about his buddy that was on the summit as I'm watching a storm blow in. And I'm thinking, man, I should probably get back and report these people up here if anything happens. I thought this element of taking the risk about the storm was a lot more crazy than trying to walk across the snow field. And so I got all the way back down thinking I was just doing my civic duty and reporting that there were climbers stranded. But the more I thought about it, the more I thought, that is what turned me around. Talking to him is what turned me around. And I was very, very close to not making it back to the safety of the tree line before the thunder and lightning started if I was just a little bit behind, I would have been in some serious trouble. So that's another angle I think about sometimes. It kind of deterred me from dying in two different ways. I don't remember feeling like this before, but definitely after this day, every single time I'm up there, it feels almost like the mountain is watching me or something. Feels like there's something up there that I can't quite put my finger on. I haven't felt the same up there. Like I've been going, I haven't gone alone in a while. I don't know if I've gone by myself since that day, to be honest. Camping in that Boulder field is the scariest thing in the world to me. Nothing really scares me that often. I don't get rattled and I can't bring myself to do it. I've been invited a few times and I find a way to just go. I'll just hike up to you guys and meet you in the morning. I'm going to face my fears someday and stay in a tent in the Boulder field, but it's going to suck. I'm really not looking forward to it. Or maybe something else will happen when I do. Thank you so much to Alex for sharing this story. Going into this, I was really excited to interview Alex and just hear this story. I genuinely did not expect to find anything out about this mysterious man. In fact, I didn't even plan on looking for anything originally. I mean, he told me over email that he had tried this already and failed. But for some reason, while we were talking, I just kind of started poking around in the background. I really cannot believe I found anything at all. To be clear, I am not certain that this TF person who I found referenced in the incident report is indeed the man that Alex encountered up there. I originally couldn't find a full name listed or photos or any other information about it. But since this was first recorded, I have been able to confirm that TF was indeed named Tim. And we also found a few photos of TF in the newspaper that I showed to Alex. And to my surprise, Alex said that it does look like the man who he met on Long's Peak. I was honestly shocked. When you do this for long enough, you learn that attempting to investigate these sorts of things is not as cut and dry as you'd hope. Like, you're looking for answers within realms that would maybe not even follow the same rules as our world if they exist at all. So, I never get my hopes up. But this time, really surprised me. That being said, I do have very strong opinions about implying that somebody is a ghost. First of all, I could never know for sure. But even if I did, I don't know. Sometimes, I see paranormal YouTube channels or something on TikTok. And I just think about close friends of mine who I have lost in the past, tragically. And the idea of seeing their name pop up on some sort of paranormal show in that context of entertainment, it just kind of rubs me the wrong way. So, I think the dead should be treated with respect. So, I'm keeping this person's name anonymous. We're just going to call them TF. And I ask all of you listening to please do the same. Either way, whoever this man was, likely saved Alex's life that day. If it wasn't for him, I think that Alex would have definitely gotten stuck up there when the weather took a turn for the worse. This is such a weird story, especially when you see the photos of this trail and get a sense of it. I mean, where these two were talking, and where this man basically glitched across is a giant icy cliff. Like, in the photos, it's almost straight up. As a casual hiker, I can't even believe that they are climbing up this at all. Climbing up this at all. And I certainly don't think a human could move across that space the way Alex described, especially when it was icy. So, no matter who or what that man was, I'm glad that he was up there to help Alex on that day. I'm certain Alex feels the same. Thank you once again to Alex for sharing his story. This episode was called Long's Peak. And you've been listening to The Other World. The Other World is executive produced and hosted by myself, Jack Wagner. Our producers are Theoshafer, Theocrants, Haley Persson, and Nikki Kate Delgado. Our theme song is by Cobra Man. The soundtrack of this episode is by Wicca Phase, Springs Eternal, Juice Jackal, and North Americans. Our artwork is by Koldisak Studios. Please show us your support by subscribing, leaving a five-star review, and telling your friends about the show. If you want to hear bonus episodes of The Other World, you can become a patron at patreon.com/otherworld. Our social media is @otherworldpod. Thank you to the team at Odyssey, Leo Riestennis, Laura Curran, Josephina Francis, Eric Donnelly, Kate Rose, Colin Gainer, and Hillary Schuff. Follow and listen to The Other World now for free on the Odyssey app, or wherever you get your podcasts. And finally, if you or somebody you know has experienced something paranormal, supernatural, or unexplained, you can send us your stories at [email protected].