The Angel of Shavano

In late 1976 I was living in Denver and took part in a winter ascent of one of Colorado’s many “fourteeners,” the 14,229-foot-high Mount Shavano in the Sawatch Range, near the Continental Divide.

That winter there hadn’t been much snow, so our climb was planned as a walk-up without the usual winter mountaineering equipment. At four in the morning the day of the climb, a coworker named Gary and I met at a rendezvous point in Denver several miles from where I lived, and I rode with him to central Colorado where we were to meet up with two other climbers.

A friend of mine named Jeannie and her climbing partner Matt were driving down from Boulder. We met at the start of a dirt road in a remote area near the mountain, and drove a few miles up toward the mountain’s base. Our starting point was at 9500 feet, so we had just under five thousand vertical feet to climb. It looked like it could be a bit of a challenge because there was more snow than we’d expected.

Climbing up to timberline

The weather was clear and cold. It took several hours of bushwhacking to reach timberline (around 11 thousand feet) and from there we could see a clear line working along the south side of the crest of a ridge, which skirted above steeper slopes and some vertical ledges. Above timberline the ridge was more exposed to the wind, and had been swept more clear of snow. We’d have to pay attention, but it wasn’t dramatic.

Bighorn sheep for company

Continuing up Shavano

The ridge was unrelentingly steep, and two of us, Jeannie and I, were not as strong as Gary and Matt. It wasn’t until 2 pm that we reached an intermediate peak at just over 13,600 feet. Both Jeannie and I were now suffering from altitude sickness—extreme dizziness, nausea, fatigue. We decided to wait on the false peak—to lie there actually—while Gary and Matt went across a shoulder and up the last 600 vertical feet to Shavano’s summit. An hour and a half later they were back.

So, it’s now it’s three-thirty, there are 60 minutes of light left, and we’re at 13,600 feet. We started down the way we came, but of course there was no actual trail, and the patches of snow were trickier to descend than to come up across. We were tired, a bit clumsy, moving slowly. When night fell we were still fifteen hundred feet above timberline.

We hadn’t planned on being on the mountain after dark, but there was a full moon, and we were able to pick our way along the ridge in moonlight, saving our flashlights for when we reached timberline. Not wanting to overcommit to the southern side of the ridge where we knew there were cliffs, we wandered a little too far down the north side where, after we descended a bit, we encountered a huge snowfield that stretched downward into darkness perhaps a thousand vertical feet, ending at timberline. We saw that on either side of us the snowfield extended well back up the slope. None of us had the energy to withdraw back up the mountain to find a way around the snowfield. We didn’t have ice axes to arrest a fall if the snowfield turned out to be slick. We cautiously stepped down onto it; the snow became deep very quickly. We soon realized it was a heavy powder that allowed our feet to sink in deeply but supported us well. Our early steps were tentative, but exhausted as we were, we began to let gravity take over, walking faster and faster; and then we were running, laughing, tumbling down the dim snowfield. The word avalanche never crossed my mind. Had there been a 100-foot cliff in the middle of the snowfield we might never have seen it coming. The deep powder gave us the sense of running down the side of a cloud, feet never touching the ground. We dropped a thousand feet in a matter of minutes and entered the forest below.

Once under the pines we were plunged into darkness. We still had about fifteen hundred slippery feet to descend and unknown miles of walking to find our parked cars. Back then the valley was remote with no lights at all. The possibility we’d end up spending the night on the lower part of mountain didn’t alarm us as we were well-prepared, and if needed we’d be able to find our cars the next morning. But our collective sense of direction, or luck, turned out to be very good and we found the cars around ten that night.

Which is when things got a little strange: we were slowly driving back down the dirt road—Gary and I were in the lead car, too tired to talk. Other than the swaying tunnel of headlight in front of us everything was black, as the moon had set behind Shavano during our descent below timberline.

And then in an instant it was bright as day. I happened to be looking southeast and suddenly saw the Sangre de Cristo Mountains shining in broad daylight 15 miles away. Before I could react, it instantly went black once again. Hallucination? We wordlessly rolled to a stop and got out of the car—Gary had seen it too, Matt and Jeannie as well. We decided it must have been one hell of a meteor coming in right over our heads, because none of us saw anything but the flash of daylight.

Somewhere around 2 am Gary dropped me off where I’d parked in southeast Denver, which is when I discovered, as he drove away, that I’d lost my car keys somewhere up on the mountain, probably tumbling down that snow field. Having been up now for 24 hours I was exhausted—I went to a phone booth and called my girlfriend to ask for a lift (she not only cheerfully rescued me, but eventually agreed to marry me).

A couple days after our climb a brief article appeared in the Rocky Mountain News about a huge meteor that had come down over Colorado’s Collegiate Peaks (part of the Sawatch Range) that was so brilliant it could be seen over a hundred miles away. I still wish it had taken us an extra 15 minutes to find our cars—would have been miraculous (and maybe a little terrifying) to have seen the meteor coming down at us.

Postscript: a few days later I drove up to Boulder (had a spare car key) to have lunch with Jeannie to talk about our adventure. I met her in the cafeteria where she worked, which was situated on Table Mesa on the edge of the Front Range of the Rockies. After lunch as we were leaving the cafeteria I saw, hanging on the bulletin board, my car keys. If I’d seen a small flying saucer sailing into the cafeteria I would not have been more stunned.

“My keys! What?”

Jeannie said, “Those are your keys? I found them in the back of my car yesterday. I put them on the bulletin board because I always pick up coworkers hitchhiking on the way up the Mesa—I figured one of them lost the keys.”

At first we didn’t know how my keys got into her car, then remembered that I’d briefly sat on the edge of her back seat to change out of my hiking boots. How my keys fell out of my parka then, and not while I was lying on the ground some 13,000 feet up on Shavano or tumbling down the snowfield on our descent, is unfathomable.

There’s a legend (probably invented in the 1940’s by non-Native Americans) based on the fact that each spring a melting snowfield on Mount Shavano assumes the shape of what to some looks like an angel, known as the Angel of Shavano. In a nutshell, the fictional legend of the Angel of Shavano is that an “Indian princess” wept on the mountain during a drought, praying for rain for her people. Her prayers were answered on the condition that she could never leave the mountain. Each spring the waters from melting snow that leave the figure of the angel on the mountainside are the tears of the princess.

The snowfield we descended in moonlight is possibly the very same one that in spring forms the Angel of Shavano. So, my personal theory is that the Angel of Shavano actually returns lost car keys—and—why not, maybe she repairs bent struts, patches sidewall punctures and such. Further, I think she lit up the night to help us locate our cars, but was a little late flipping the switch. And finally, when she saw me leaning against Jeannie’s car she tossed the keys onto the floor next to me.

And my theory of the Angel of Shavano is no less likely than what actually happened that night.