Looking For Coffee on Fifty Hikes: 2010

Mitchell Trail was built as part of an Eagle Scout project to provide community access to the fantastic ponderosas and spectacular views of the Santa Fe National Forest. For years, I lived with my kitchen window facing this forest and my car parked at what is now the official trailhead parking pad.

For four years, I lived at the corner of 45th and 46th in Los Alamos, while working at Los Alamos National Laboratory on the Human Genome Project, perfecting my rock-climbing-performance excuses, and when forced to make progress, working on my Ph.D. dissertation. My half of the duplex at 4397B Arizona Avenue hosted many wonderful bacon, egg, green chile burrito breakfasts and a particular Wednesday night tequila tasting party that left the electric lime juicer too hot to handle for a whole day. One lived outdoors in Los Alamos, as a graduate student - when not in the lab, and the houses and the outdoors both suited this. The houses were drafty and temporary and maintained with nothing short of eccentricity. The outdoors on the other hand was world class. Ponderosas with their vanilla-scented bark, aspens with their single-organism-covering-the-mountain display, all turning yellow in a single autumn day; dark canopies and deer and coyotes and trail runners.

The Hash House Harriers knew about the trails, always providing men in dresses and beer in coolers and songs I still don't want to know what the lyrics meant. Being a small town, most of these hashers were also in the High Altitude Athletic Club, meaning they'd strap on flashlights and down some gel goo and run for 26 miles up Caballo mountain and back. They were also in charge of the nation's nuclear arsenal but that's how that works.

My friend J and I were wannabes: coffee drinking, thirty-something women who had come from markedly nonathletic backgrounds. J had worked as a jackhammer operator once, which meant she had much more physical activity in her background than I did. Los Alamos was perfect for us. Of all people, we ended up lead climbing - traditional, placing gear not sport clipping - on rock, and following on ice.

It was fun and it was therapy. After a particularly aggravating week at the lab, we went out to Cochiti and found a sweet overhang to work with our climbing and established a route known only to us but called "Moon Shot". You can guess why we felt better afterward.

The lab had its stresses. Still does. Every place does. The stakes were higher, though, there as you had no real public resume to use to go find another job. And you either had to make a job or move if you left the Lab. People either hated Los Alamos or loved the place. You could tell how someone was going to fare within a week of their arrival.

So the outdoor activity also held its share of therapy. We pretended we too were training as we slogged up and down the Los Alamos ski hill, as others trained for Condoriri or Annapurna. They trotted by with sixty pound packs of ropes and wands; we chose a thermos of coffee and some breakfast burritos. We later went to the same place to remember some people who didn't come back from their climbs.