My second 14er

It all started when Scott heard that it was possible to climb Mt Democrat, Mt. Lincoln, and Mt. Brass in one day, and that they were all very easy. Moreover he decided to make it a real adventure by taking his family along with him. This, in turn persuaded my parents and the out neighbors, the Millers, that our families should go along too. However, being the middle of summer, my dad and Mr. Miller had to stay home and farm. This left our moms in charge. Our plan was to drive to Kite Lake where Scott's brother and his family were to meet us. We would then camp there and hike the peaks in the morning. Upon arriving at the lake we got out to pitch camp. The first words out of Scott's mouth were, "Look how huge that mountain is (Mt. Democrat)! We'll never be able to climb that." Shortly thereafter Scott's brother Aaron arrived. He walked up and said, "That mountain looks easy, we should be able to climb it in just a couple of hours." which is what I had been thinking. We had barely finished setting up camp when it started to rain. Scott threw his gear and his family into his mini-van and went home. After thinking for a while we all packed into the Miller's Suburban and headed to Denver to stay the night.
The next morning we woke up and headed back to the hills. After parking the Suburban in the parking lot we started up the trail. The first people we met were a rescue team that was bringing a guy down who had broken his leg. The trail was absolutely beautiful. There were wild flowers, nice green grass, and the sun was shining brightly over head. As a measure against dehydration, I was carrying three gallons of water. In such beautiful surroundings we all felt very happy and barely noticed the clouds rolling in. After a while it started to get foggy. Though our spirits were a little dampened, we were still too overcome with awe at the beauty of God's creation to start worrying about the weather. In some ways the fog only enhanced our awe. After a while we noticed that the beautiful alpine tundra had given way to rocks, in fact Mt. Democrat seemed to be just a big pile of rocks. If we looked down the slope, we got the impression that it went down for an eternity and if we looked up, the peak always seemed to be right there. After reaching what we thought was the top several times, we were starting to wonder if it had one. Suddenly we could see a line in front of us and before we knew it we were standing on the top of a saddle, looking down into a storm.
There seemed to be a distinct line where the weather changed. On our side of the saddle it was mostly calm and warm but if we stepped onto the other side we would get hit by cold air and hailstones. We were all sanding there watching the lightning jump from the cloud in front of us to the ground below, when all of a sudden the storm jumped the ridge and was on top of us. We all turned and ran straight for the only shelter we could find which was a slight indentation in the otherwise uniform terrain. It was about a foot deep and four feet across. I was almost to the dent when I heard my mom call out for me to wait up. I looked back and saw everyone else hurrying to catch up. I still don’t know why they wanted me to wait for them but I did anyway. We all dove into the indention and started covering ourselves up with rocks. What good we thought it would do, I don't know. Later, I found out that in a lighting storm you shouldn't get into any indentations because the water that would sit in such a place would create a stronger ground and could attract lightning. Also we should not have all been lying down together because while lying down we have more contact with the ground and if we were all struck together there would be no one to administer CPR. But as I said, I didn't know that at the time. Everybody but me was as quiet as the grave. I was blabbering about lightning statistics and I couldn't seem to shut up. Needless to say we were all awestruck. The lightning was coming so fast that there seemed to be no time at all between every deafening CRACK! Some of the bolts were within thirty feet. My youngest brother finally broke the silence by asking my mom if we were going to die. She answered that we might and then started praying. The fact that mom thought there was a chance of survival shocked me. I remember thinking that since heaven was going to be even prettier than this storm, we were going to be in for a real treat. Also, to my surprise everyone in my family was relatively calm and seemed to almost be happy. Though storm seemed to last an eternity, it was probably only five minutes; just as quickly as it had come it was gone.
I think that we were all in a state of disbelief that we were still alive. No one even mentioned continuing up. We all started heading down the mountain, sing at the top of our voices. The sun had come out again and everything was beautiful. I decided to come back and climb that mountain sometime, which I did; but that is another story for another time.