The Last Mountain Pass
pete eich alone and bitterly cold on another 9600 foot summit
November 05, 2008
During the entire transcontinental journey, everybody wanted to warn the team of the terrible mountain passes that were necessary for crossing the Rockies, Appalachians, and Ozarks. It was always these three mountains that people seemed to adamantly warn them of…. And not to disrespect any of the extremely exhausting passes that the team spent an accumulation of weeks trying to pass, but they were wildly dumbfounded and shocked when they came to the state of Utah… a land that nobody seemed to have warned them about. For one, the lowest point of Southern Utah is at least a thousand feet higher than the highest roads of Appalachia. And yes, the two passes over the Rockies were brutal, but what about the three passes of Boulder, Utah which just missed the same altitude of the Rockies by a mere 400 feet? Trust the team on this one: if you just climbed 5000 vertical feet in an afternoon, climbing an extra 400 is just another song on the ipod. The west just seems to get so much bigger the further one goes. In a way, these unknown passes would haunt the group all the way to Victorville, California. But on the evening of November 5, 2008 while families sat down for supper, prime time television followed closely the historic election progress, and the world seemed nestled in warm homes in anticipation of the coming winter, four young men and two guest riders in the cold dark evening had just reached the summit of the infamous Cajon pass at 4300 feet, the final pass which would guarantee that the final 86 miles of the voyage would be downhill. No more unknown mountains, no more sheer cold, no more shock, no more feeling so alone and so lost in a land so desolate and diverse. The work had been done, and what remained would be the recognized streets that lead to the finish line.
Tags: cajon pass, last pass, pete eich, victorville