Why We're Choosing Mount Sherman First

People who know Colorado's fourteeners sometimes ask why we aren't starting with something harder. Fair question. Sherman is widely considered the easiest standard 14er in the state, and we're choosing it on purpose for exactly that reason, though maybe not the reason people assume.

This isn't the mountain we're worried about. It's everything else.

We've talked about this climb for months. We haven't actually done it together yet. We don't know how we'll handle a long day at altitude as a team, tired, cold, further from the car than any of us are really used to being. Sherman gives us one variable we can trust: the mountain itself, since so many people before us have proven it's survivable. How the three of us actually move together out there is still an open question. We don't need the first climb to be the hardest one. We need it to be the one we can finish together, so everything that comes after has something real underneath it.

That doesn't mean it's nothing. Sherman still tops out above 14,000 feet, on a ridge with real wind and real drop-offs, in weather that can turn fast even in September. People call it the easiest fourteener in Colorado, not the safest place to get careless. The last stretch narrows onto a summit ridge with loose rock underfoot and nothing to hide behind if the wind picks up, which around here, it usually does. Along the way you pass the rusted remains of old mining operations, a reminder that people have been testing themselves against this particular mountain for longer than any of us have been alive. From the top, on a clear day, you can see Mount Elbert, the highest point in the state, and Mount Massive right beside it. Easiest doesn't mean small.

We're also climbing it now, in September, close enough to the edge of the season that we're not pretending otherwise. Colorado's real climbing window is already narrowing by the time you're reading this. Rather than wait eight months for a bigger mountain, or pretend we could pull off something harder before winter, we're choosing the one that lets us actually go now and still keep the promise that started all of this: no Summit Edition gets released before it's earned.

Sherman is Peak 01. Not because it's the biggest test we'll ever take on, but because it's the first one, and the first one has to actually happen before any of the harder ones can.