Author’s Note: My father, Sandy Jacobs, passed away on Sept. 4 after a long and dignified fight with Lung Cancer. He was in the youth of his retirement and more fit and active than the average 20 year-old. To help me better come to terms with his loss, I solo backpacked on a recent weekend in the Indian Peaks Wilderness that he so loved. This page captures some of my experiences and reflections from that trip.

By all measures, Dad at age 73 was in the prime of his life. Shortly after retiring to Boulder with Mom, he began to collect every means of human-powered conveyance one can imagine. These included hiking boots, snow shoes, x-country skis, a mountain bike and a road bike. Other accoutrements of Dad’s retirement included a backpack, a vacuum cleaner-style softball glove and a sport ute to haul it all around in. I don’t mean to make this sound like “a life told in gear”. Dad generally eschewed worldly possessions. Casual inspection of these items reveals the scuffs, dents and scratches of heavy use. None of these items was purchased on a whim only to adorn a garage. This was serious equipment for serious adventures. “Stuff” needed to serve a purpose. Dad was not a home decorator or collector of tchatchkes.

He was a member of the Boulder Tuesday Hikers, Colorado Archaeology Society (with Mom), a seniors softball team, and Seniors on Bikes (SOBs). In his retirement Dad tried his hand at free-lance journalism, audited neurophysiology courses at CU and reacquainted himself with chess so he could play his grandson. Since Tuesday hiking was a once-a-week opportunity, Dad maintained his fitness by exercising at the Y for up to four hours each day.  There were dinners with friends, concerts, home chores, rock art expeditions and stacks of books and journals to read.

In short, Dad was simply much too busy and full of life to be interrupted by cancer…

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My sojourn in the mountains gave me the respite and reflection I was looking for… along with a healthy dose of early season sleet later in the day.  I had solicited recommendations on an itinerary from some of the folks in the Tuesday Hiker group who were all very eager to provide input. Each person in his or her email included fond memories of previous hikes with Dad. There were many great options but I finally decided to depart from the 4th of July Trailhead west of Eldora.  This would take me up to Arapaho Pass and a choice of either Dorothy Lake just East of the Continental Divide at 12,000′ or Caribou Lake on the other side of the Divide at approx. 11,200′. I decided that Caribou Lake would afford my best chance for solitude on a busy Autumn weekend.  Its lower elevation might also make for slightly warmer accommodations.

As any Front Range hiker knows, many of the Indian Peaks trailheads have limited parking.  I made it to the 4th of July TH at just past 9am and managed to snag the 2nd to last spot in the TH parking lot.  I took this as a sign that I would have good karma for my trip.  As I readied my backpack for the trail, I made a fateful decision to leave my trekking poles in the car (less stuff to carry and I wasn’t expecting to encounter much snow or ice on the trail).  I should have known better.  I would wind up longing for those poles during my final descent to Caribou Lake.

As I hit the trail, I knew that the blue sky was just a teaser. A weak front was forecast and I was expecting cold and rain later in the day.  If my mettle got tested a little this weekend, it would somehow be fitting. When we camped as a family growing up, Dad would largely take the burden of the elements on himself.  I recall more than one occasion when Dad arose in the middle of the night during a driving storm to dig a trench around the family tent. He’d return to the tent dripping, doff his poncho, slip into his sleeping bag and commence staccato snoring within 30 seconds.

Each family vacation to Nova Scotia featured Mom reading excerpts from “The European Discovery of America” by Samuel Elliot Morrison. To fully appreciate a place, our parents taught us, you need to understand its human history as well as its natural history.  So it was fitting that my remembrance hike included a little reminder of our Colorado heritage.  Native Americans originally carved the 4th of July Trail as a route to cross the Great Divide.  It was later used by Colorado miners when they established the 4th of July Mine.  Remnants from the mine are visible just off the trail, near where it joins the Arapaho Glacier Trail.  A rusty boiler, winches and some holes in the ground are reminders of time gone by.  Nearby stream crossings still have the orange stain of mine tailings.

The weather remained relatively warm and clear as I steadily climbed to timber line. South of the trail, the Lodgepole Pine forest was giving way to the tundra transition zone and alpine meadows. Many shrubs and grasses displayed the red, orange and yellow hues of autumn. As I surveyed the landscape, I thought about how Dad had experienced this terrain when he was in grad school. Recreation was certainly his primary pursuit. However, as an active member of the Rocky Mountain Rescue Group, he had helped to find lost hikers and was a first responder to at least one downed airplane. I wondered if Dad had participated in any rescues in this area.

One of my big regrets is not having recorded an oral history with Dad as I had done with my maternal grandparents.  I sat Grandma and Grandpa down with a cassette tape recorder nearly twenty years ago and captured stories as they used turn-of-the-century family photographs as prompts.  I later rolled a video camera as Grandma simply told whatever stories came to her mind. It wasn’t Dad’s nature to draw attention to himself so he seldom spontaneously volunteered a story.  One generally had to ask a question–offer a prompt.  But then the stories would come, often told with understated humor. Seth, my 13 year-old, reveled recently in stories his Grandpa Sandy told of Sir Timothy Terrington (Dad’s faithful beagle and boyhood companion).

How does one ask someone who is terminally ill to speak into a video camera and tell stories?  I was waiting for a period of resurgent vigor to somehow broach the subject with Dad.  While he was severely fatigued and in pain, it just didn’t seem appropriate.  Perhaps if Dad started feeling better and his spirits improved, the moment would present itself. Stories of Rocky Mountain rescues and Bronx Beagles would be recorded for the family to enjoy forever.  Sadly, this opportunity never came.

As I approached Arapaho Pass, the wind and chill increased and I stopped to add more layers.  After a brief trek northward along the ridge, I stood at the top of the Continental Divide and truly in the middle of the Indian Peaks Wilderness.  North and East of me I could see Mt. Achonee, Apache Peak, Navajo Peak and North and South Arapaho Peaks.  In front of me loomed Santana Peak.  A slightly treacherous 800′ decent on icy switchbacks below would lead me to Caribou Lake.

This is where it dawned on me that leaving the trekking poles in the car had been a bad idea.  I was loath to change my itinerary at this point so I started descending.  On each switchback, my downslope foot was generally on ice while my upslope foot sought purchase on rocks or by “postholing” in the snow.  Oh, did I mention that the soles of my hiking boots are worn smooth in spots?  I’m guessing that Dad would have been better prepared at this point.  Actually, let’s be honest.  Dad might not have been better prepared but he also would have taken the descent more in stride and not made a big deal of it.  In that spirit, I’ll shut up now and stop complaining.

The vista North of the lake (above photo) was quite stunning and everything felt, well, simply right.  The moment was right.  The place was right.  This was the right way for me to be reflecting on my relationship with Dad and a world suddenly without him.

While the sun was out, I walked around the lake and wondered if Dad placed much the same footsteps circa 1954-1962. For reading material in camp, I brought with me Randy Pausch’s “The Last Lecture”. The theme of a father passing his wisdom to his children seemed fitting, as did the terminal cancer subtext.  Dad’s lessons to me were subtle.  He didn’t leave me with a mental archive of aphorisms that I can apply to life’s various situations.  Dad’s lessons were of the “follow my lead” variety– do as I do with just enough words to reinforce what he was demonstrating.

One of Dad’s supreme lessons is the triumph of function over form.  Don’t worry about how something looks or how others might judge you or your things.  If it does the job appropriately and with a certain economy, then it is just right.  Take Dad’s Austin Healey 3000.  Dad doted on that car– that is the engine, trany, brakes, etc. probably while wearing his trademark K-Mart sweatshirt.  The body, on the other hand, was subjected to a uniform overcoat of blue metallic spray paint.  It’s said that modern auto makers have engineering departments devoted to tuning the sound of a car to evoke the right visceral response.  There’s no doubt in my mind that an audio engineer would have struck gold with that Austin Healey.  But, please, no pictures.

Dad was the Renaissance Man of Repair, the Journeyman of Jury-Rigged, the original DIY guy before the term was chic.  I use these terms with only the utmost in respect and admiration for Dad’s skills.  He could keep an Olds running for hundreds of thousands of miles, shingle a roof and finish a basement.  Needing a means to haul bushels of leaves around our New Jersey property, Dad built a 2×4, plywood and chicken-wire contraption on tires that would have looked at home on a Monty Python set.   Too much stuff to fit in the Vista Cruiser during family vacations?  No problem.  Dad’s solution was a trapazoid-shaped plywood box, painted fire-engine red, bolted to a Sunfish trailer frame.  One weekend while home from college, I was embarrassed to tell Debbie (then my girlfriend) that I didn’t know how to start the family car.  “Excuse me,” I said, and went to confer with Dad.  I hopped back in the car and reached under the steering column.  The car started right up when I pressed the doorbell-cum-ignition switch.

Yes, he could fix things but his true passion was invention. Dad was too modest to ever bring it up but Mom always liked to brag that Dad “helped put man on the moon.” I inquired one day and Dad informed me that his contribution to the Space Race was gyroscope suspension fluid. He used his patent award bonus from NASA to buy a 10-speed Schwinn.  Naturally, he painted it battleship gray. When an ownership change cut jobs where Dad was director of R&D, he took the opportunity to strike out on his own.  His process for replacing silver with nickel in many industrial processes paved the way for a comfortable retirement.  A business lesson that Dad taught me was “minimize your overhead”.  True to form, he taught this by example.  For years, he manufactured his own product and drove the big drums up to Rhode Island in a van every week to service his accounts.  He was Product Development, Sales, Logistics, Accounting, Collections, Customer Support and Management– all in one.

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The first bands of freezing drizzle blew through in the afternoon and didn’t last long.  I had suspended a 12′ x 8′ plastic sheet for shelter and passed the time reading in my Crazy Creek.  Dinner was left-over Beef Stroganoff.  My trick is to fully cook dinner at home then freeze it.  The entree mostly thaws while on the trail then I simply reheat it for dinner.  Easy and tasty.  Had it been Dad here 50 years ago, he would have been pan-frying trout.  Ask Seth– I’m simply not that good a fisherman.  Did I mention that Dad tied his own flies?

For a while after dinner, the stars shone brightly and Jupiter hung prominently in the Southern sky.  I sipped the last of my decaf and prepared to settle in for a pleasant evening.  I fully expected the typical summer Rocky Mountain pattern to prevail.  Afternoon thunderstorms, clearing, sunny morning, afternoon thunderstorms… lather, rinse, repeat.  Wind and thunder telegraphed that the operative word for my trip was going to be “rinse”.  Make that sleet.  It came down hard around 9pm and then again from 2am to 3am.  My brand new GoLite tent starting leaking.  Nothing catastrophic– just little annoying drips here and there.  The GoLite “team member” told me that the tent didn’t need seam-sealing.  The hydrophilic thread in the seams would swell and become self-sealing.  So there I was at 2am at 11,200 feet waiting for the thread on my tent to swell and keep me dry.  I’m guessing that Dad back in the day would have been in a 15lb army surplus tent, dry, and not worrying about the weather.  REI certainly makes us look good out there.  But has all this gear really enhanced the experience of the outdoors for us?

One year Gwen took Dad rock climbing in the Gunks.  She wore the colorful lycra clothing popular among modern climbers.  Dad felt like a fish out of water.  In his day, a “belay device” was an extra piece of fabric sewn into the back of his deer skin jacket.

One of the worst feelings I have while camping is awakening to the sound of rain (still sleet) on a tent, knowing that there’s no refuge.  I was going to have breakfast and tear down my tent in this stuff.  I skipped the pancakes and coffee that I was so looking forward to and dug deep into my pack for a Powerbar.  I quickly and efficiently broke camp and packed, then hit the trail.  I hiked back up the icy traverse, and scrambled to the top of the pass.

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Now I will share an important aspect of my trip.  It was part pilgrimage to fulfill a last wish of Dad’s.  With me I had a portion of his cremated remains.  He wanted to be reunited with the Indian Peaks Wilderness he first came to know and love in 1954.  My desire was to grant him that wish from the top of the Continental Divide.  I found the perfect spot for my private remembrance– a semi-circular monument of rocks that apparently was erected years ago to provide a modest wind break.  It was still drizzling slightly as I took off my gloves and pulled a letter from my pack.  It was written to the family by a good friend of Dad’s from Tuesday Hikers.  Among the words she hand wrote were:

On our Tuesday hikes, Sandy was invariably full of good humor and good ideas about where to hike.  He was relaxed, interested in everything, often amused by conversations around him.  He was fully engaged in life, always learning.  And he was wonderfully supportive of his fellow Tuesday Hikers.

As Sara also said in her letter, “Cancer shows no mercy and no respect.”  It is a great irony for Dad that he was a student of longevity and the aging process.  He studied it from the perspective of many disciplines– philosophy, religion, physiology and molecular biology to name a few.  He undoubtedly had the genes to live to 100.  It was his lament in the last few months that years of regular exercise, an extensive vitamin regimen and a positive outlook were likely compromised by a corn cob pipe first smoked at age 14 (and ensuing decades of pipe and cigar smoking).  Or, perhaps it was years of working with hazmats– a hazard of his profession.

I thought about Sara’s words and the well wishes to our family from dozens of Mom and Dad’s friends.  I thought about my family, my son who lost both grandfathers much too young, and Gwen’s new twins who will never know their maternal grandfather. For a just a moment I dwelled on the manner in which Dad ultimately decided to find peace.  For all the advances in the fight against cancer, many treatments are almost worse than the disease. They can be barbaric and rob one of dignity, energy and the will to go on.  In our culture we reward the heroes who fight the odds.  With cancer, I now believe it can be just as heroic to make the decision not to fight.  When the outcome is clear, I think healers should offer better counsel on the tradeoffs between quality of life and longevity.

The wind picked up as I sprinkled Dad’s ashes on the Divide.  Substance and Spirit rejoined.  To the East, the sky was beginning to brighten.  If I hurried back, I could probably make Seth’s afternoon baseball game.

Andy Jacobs, Sept. 2008

Epilogue: The date of an outdoor memorial service with the family is now looking more favorable for the Spring. In the interim, please feel free to post a comment with a favorite anecdote from the trail or other memory. We are grateful to the Boulder community for your outpouring of warmth and support.

1 Comments so far ↓

1. Oct
   8

   11:57
   AM
   Aunt Nancy

   Andy,
   Thank you so much for sharing this wonderful rememberance to your father. My thoughts are with you, Debbie, Seth, Murial, and Gwen during this sad time. I wish to embrace you all with my love.
   Nancy

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