Mt. Sherman: Sleet on Scree
CO 14ers Trip-Report Part II
Sunday, Aug 10, 2025 | ~9:15 a.m. – 1:15 p.m. MT
Summit: 14,043 ft.
Route: Southwest Ridge | Total Gain: 2,100 ft. | Distance: 5.25mi.
Ice pellets land on the scree: percussion with melody. This sleet/hail is dense enough to strike and the rocks hollow enough to ring—on pitch, even; the many surrounding me seem to be in key. Everyone else has forthrightly vacated the summit, evacuating to lower altitudes where the hail is rain. I’m still seated on a limestone cushion, my legs splayed out in front of me, tinkering with my rock-balance. The clouds have a risk of being thunderous, I guess, so I should head down soon. I will, as soon as I get this to balance.
To reach the trailhead for Mt. Sherman’s southwestern ridge, I drove eleven miles on an unpaved road, which may have been the most arduous part of the climb. Given the pilgrimage required, I figured Sherman would feel more wild. I am grateful to be up here and to have experienced this mountain, but the mountain itself is not much of a spectacle. Sherman bulges up above a few abandoned mining shafts and, at least from its surface, seems to be composed entirely of loose rock. The whole thing is a pile of debris. There is not a single boulder. It’s hard to imagine what broke it all up; I’ve seen glacial moraines with more rock intact. Sherman is like a sand dune if every grain were scaled up by 1,000 times in size. Throughout the latter half of the trail, I didn’t notice any vegetation other than lichen.
Seeing Sherman for the first time, so menacingly bare, I assumed it would be one of the harsher Class-1 climbs, but I made it here, to the summit, in under 90 minutes. Sherman is easy enough, I noticed, that a mother was hiking it with her young, bundled-up son who looked no older than four. We crossed paths during their descent, and the mother’s vice-grip was the only reason the boy wasn’t sliding down the steep, loose rock. He was practically hovering downhill, swinging his legs and smiling the whole way. This boy had summited a 14er on his own two feet and had earned a 21-year head-start on me, on his way to 53.
One thing giving me trouble with this rock-balance is that I’m trying to incorporate a rock that I had picked up at the bottom. It was snow-covered when I got it, and I spun it around in my hand until it melted dry. All the way up, I had fidgeted with it, thinking that I would intervene in the eons of geological work done on this now palm-sized piece of quartzite by bringing it to the summit and incorporating it into a balance. So, I have this vision that isn’t quite coming to fruition. My rock-balance’s base is wonky, and I’m trying to do some counter-balance action on one side of the composition. It’s already after noon, so I should head down soon. I look at the clouds as if I had been taught to read them and decide there’s no risk of lightning today.
Near the top of the trail, as I was winding up one of the final pitches, I saw a man trail-running barefoot down the ridge of this scree-pile. I watched him descend, and as he picked up his feet, I saw how callused they were. While I didn’t envy his soles, few other encounters had ever made me feel so soft and incapable.
The wind has also been an issue; it keeps switching direction, which means that it has been catching my rocks’ faces and use them as sails, toppling the balance repeatedly. The wind moves behind me, so I shield the rocks with my body and try to get the balance to hold before the gale shifts again. And it holds. I satisfy the arbitrary commitment I had made to myself by successfully integrating the rock I had carried for 2,000 vertical feet. Inhale: I take in the view with my balance in the foreground. In the background are these strewn out clusters of cumulous clouds with gaps in them, letting light through. From other high vantages, I have marveled at the shadows that clouds cast on the ground, how one alone can cover an entire town, but here is the first time I notice shadows in the air. Looking straight out, above the mountains on the horizon, I see an expansive band of blue textured with broad, vertical brushstrokes of light; I see sunbeams highlighting the atmosphere itself and clouds shading the blue beneath them like blinds trying to conceal a streetlamp. Exhale: I knock the balance over, returning the sediment to the mountain.
I sling my backpack on and start jogging downhill. Another arbitrary thing I decide to, for a challenge, is to descend in half the time it took me to ascend, and pass the men who had been on the summit with me, to prove to myself that, in fact, I had not been reckless by staying to complete my rock-balance.
Forty-five minutes later, having completed my descent-goal, I reach my car feeling satisfied and successful, and I begin the eleven-mile drive over dirt and gravel back to the highway. I leave in a sort of limbo; it's late enough that no one is driving up to start hiking and early enough that most of my morning cohort has yet to finish. Five miles in to that elven-mile stretch, I have yet to see a car, and I spot someone on the side of the road, running. I don't have to get very close before I recognize him as the barefoot trail-runner. I had never fathomed that someone would—or even could—run barefoot on sharp scree, and now I was seeing the same man running on gravel miles from the trailhead towards what I assumed was the place he began running, somewhere back by the paved road. Not only had this man run up a 14er barefoot; he was running a marathon that included a 14er—barefoot. The majesty of Sherman wasn't so much the mountain as it was that mother and this man transforming what I had previously understood as the paradigm of human possibility. ❛❜
Thank you for reading,
Co 14-ers Trip-Report Series Contents
Part I: Quandary Peak
Part II: Mt. Sherman
Part III: Mt. Bierstadt
Part IV: The Decalibron
Part V: Mt. Elbert
Part VI: Mt. Sunshine via Redcloud Peak