The 70/30 Principle

3:00 a.m. Karen and I quietly packed up camp, switched on our headlamps, and began the 4-mile, 2,000-foot climb to the top of the Tenmile Range west of Breckenridge. For more than two hours, we followed the trail by headlamp and the light of a nearly full moon, one foot in front of the other.

Eventually, we emerged above treeline just as the eastern sky was beginning to glow deep orange. Ptarmigans were clucking and flying about on the tundra, as they often do just before sunrise. A herd of elk grazed on the tundra a half mile ahead of us. We crested the pass just as the sun appeared on the eastern horizon, bathing the mountain peaks in alpenglow.

We dropped our packs, sat down on the grass, brewed some coffee, and ate our breakfast. We sat there together and drank in the moment—the warmth of the rising sun on our faces, the mountain views stretched out around us, and the quiet of an early morning high above the treeline.

“This is why we do it,” I said to Karen. “Seventy percent of the time, we’re just putting in the miles—hot, tired, sleeping on the ground, and doing what we need to do to complete this 491-mile trail. But then you get a morning like this. This is the thirty percent that makes the other seventy worth it.”

It reminds me of those breathtaking photos of mountain climbers in the Himalayas standing beside their tent on some precipitous campsite in the snow. The sky is clear and calm, and they’re looking out over the clouds and spectacular mountain peaks. It’s an amazing moment, for sure.

But what the photo doesn’t show is the effort and misery those climbers have endured to be there in that spectacular moment.

I’ve come to believe that this is the reality of adventure. Perhaps seventy percent of the time, it’s simply doing the hard things, enduring the bad weather, and putting in the long miles so that we can be there for those thirty-percent moments that just seem to happen, often unplanned.

Filling in the Gaps

This past weekend gave us another dose of both sides of that 70/30 equation.

We went back and filled in one of the gaps we had left on our Colorado Trail journey. You may remember that we finished Segment 6 back in late May but then skipped forward to Segments 9–11 in mid-June. We were fortunate to have done so because the Willow Fire broke out less than two weeks later and is still burning through Segment 10, just west of Leadville.

On Saturday, August 1, we parked our car at Tennessee Pass and hitchhiked down to the Copper Mountain ski area, then rode the free bus back to the Gold Hill Trailhead just north of Breckenridge. Over the next three days, we backpacked about 38 miles and climbed nearly 8,100 feet of elevation on our way back to our car.

It’s been an unusually warm, dry summer, and we frequently soaked our sun hoodies in the creek and put them back on wet just to keep cool. Those were the seventy-percent miles—just walking, walking, and more walking.

But then came the thirty-percent moments.

As we descended the western side of the Tenmile Range, two brightly colored paragliders swooshed right over Karen’s head. On the morning of day three, we once again found ourselves hiking over another 12,000-foot pass at sunrise and descending into a beautiful alpine valley.

The long, hot miles will eventually blur together. But the paragliders overhead, the elk grazing on the tundra, coffee at sunrise, and walking into that alpine valley—those are the thirty-percent moments we’ll remember.

And they’re why we’ll keep coming back.

~ Ptarmiglen