I was in Aspen for work recently, when it occurred to me that I might get away and hike something in the high peaks to get some cardiovascular exercise. From near town, I could see Pyramid Peak, one of Colorado’s 54 peaks over 14,000 feet, colloquially known as “fourteeners.” Collecting fourteener summits is a popular Colorado pastime, and more and more Coloradans aspire to tick the list. Most approach the game as one to be completed over a lifetime, but today’s endurance athletes try to get them done quickly, in a matter of one year, weeks, or even days. And there are still ways to differentiate yourself from the masses and achieve a fourteener “first”. There have been a select few who have made ski descents, snowboard descents, or telemark ski descents. There are those who ride bicycles between the hikes to achieve purely “human powered” ascents. Recently a book was published about the first pair to spend a night on each summit as part of the quest (slogan: “Snore the Fourteeners?”).

While I have been an avid climber for 42 years and moved to Colorado because of its mountains, my time in the local hills has focused on technical rock climbs, not fourteeners. However, Pyramid Peak gained my attention last year, when Congressman Paul Ryan ran on the Republican ticket for Vice President in the 2012 presidential election (he is considered one of the favorites for the Republican presidential nomination for the 2016 election). During the 2012 campaign, Congressman Ryan was quoted as saying that he had climbed 40 Colorado fourteeners, had done all the fourteeners in the Elks range near Aspen, and that Pyramid Peak was one of his two favorites, along with nearby Capitol Peak. This statement immediately struck me as strange. From what I had read in the fourteener guidebooks, Pyramid Peak sounded like an unpleasant, dangerous slog, with little payoff in terms of aesthetics. But after Paul Ryan claimed it as his favorite, my curiosity was piqued. The summit held a newfound allure: a chance to combine two of my favorite things, mountains and politics.

So, on a recent Sunday in August 2013, I decided to give Pyramid Peak a try. Just the week before, I had come across a column by Paul Krugman, a Nobel Prize winning economist, calling Congressman Ryan, current Chairman of the House Budget Committee, a “con man” because he proposes broad cuts to government spending without disclosing the unpopular and politically dangerous details.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/05/opinion/krugman-republicans-against-reality.html?_r=0);.

After hiking Pyramid myself, I agree with Krugman’s assessment of Ryan as a con man, at least with respect to Ryan’s story that he has climbed Pyramid Peak and 39 other Colorado fourteeners.

In my own recent experience, Pyramid Peak is a massive rubble pile, as loose and dangerous a peak as any that can be found in Colorado. One has to question the judgment, if not the sanity, of someone who claims it is his favorite. It is always at the top of lists of the hardest fourteeners, but not because its 6 mile plus round trip is as long or strenuous as other notable fourteeners. No, Pyramid’s reputation rests on its treacherous, loose rock, and in the route finding dilemmas that require one to judge the lesser of two evil paths (“Do I go up this loose, dirty gully, or that one over there?”). I could understand someone describing Pyramid as “the fourteener you were most glad to get down from” or “the one most likely to result in traumatic brain injury,” but favorite? Not so much. My hike up Pyramid tells me that if it wasn’t just over 14,000 feet, reaching the magic elevation for fourteener enthusiasts, no one would ever do it. But before I describe my recent outing on Pyramid, some background on Ryan’s fourteener claims.

Colorado was an important swing state in the 2012 election. To launch Ryan’s campaign in Colorado, a Republican operative penned a breathless Denver Post op-ed that extolled Ryan as a heroic Colorado mountain man who had climbed 40 of the state’s 14ers. This number was confirmed by the Chairman of the Colorado Republican Party, Ryan Call, who was quoted in the Denver Post saying that Ryan had personally told him that Ryan had climbed 40. Ryan had also bragged about other impressive fitness achievements, including his Olympian-level body fat percentage, and running a marathon—26.2 miles-- in under three hours.

Marathon enthusiasts soon concluded that Ryan exaggerated his marathon time. Their investigation showed that he had participated in only one marathon, and it wasn’t one of prestigious ones, such as Boston or New York. It was the Grandma’s Marathon in Duluth, Minnesota in 1990. Further, his time was not in the low 2:50s as he had claimed; it was actually a little over four hours, comparable to the time of another GOP celebrity marathoner, Sarah Palin, who had scant reputation for athletic prowess.

http://www.runnersworld.com/general-interest/paul-ryan-has-not-run-sub-300-marathon

On Supertopo, someone posted a thread about Ryan’s claim of forty peaks climbed. I joined in and concluded that Ryan probably hadn’t climbed 40 fourteeners, after his marathon story was debunked. A typical Supertopo discussion ensued—vituperative hysteria mixed in with thoughtful discussion—with Ryan’s supporters on one side and skeptics on the other. I had fun mocking the tone of the op-ed, which was a thinly disguised political advertisement masquerading as an opinion piece.

Some of my posts were directly quoted in a blog by Atlantic Monthly columnist James Fallows. This got the attention of the main stream media and the subject flared up briefly on the internet. The sequence of events was as follows.

• August 11, 2012. Ryan is named by Mitt Romney to be his choice for Vice President.
• August 11, 2012. Ryan Call, chairman of the Colorado Republican Part, says that Ryan personally told Call that he had climbed 40 fourteeners.
http://www.denverpost.com/nationalpolitics/ci_21291876/colorado-pundits-react-mitt-romneys-choice-running-mate
• August 26, 2012. Denver Post op-ed praising Ryan: http://www.denverpost.com/ci_21386184/paul-ryan-mountain-man
• September 5, 2012.Fallows published his blog post quoting me, the “skeptical climber,” from Supertopo, doubting Ryan’s fourteener claims.
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/09/paul-ryan-mountaineer/261904/
• September 5, 2012. Fallows is a journalist with clout. Within one hour of his blog post, The Romney/Ryan campaign responded to Fallows to amend the number of fourteeners claimed.


• September 5, 2012. Gawker featured the story on its front page.
http://gawker.com/5940781/is-paul-ryan-lying-about-climbing-40-mountains-too-what-is-his-deal

• On September 5, 2012, the The New York Times reported that Ryan was working to “complete a list” to confirm the number of fourteeners he actually climbed:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/07/us/politics/paul-ryan-faces-scrutiny-over-marathon-and-mountain-claims.html?_r=0


• September 5, 2012, John Andrews, the author of the Denver Post editorial, retracted his 40 fourteeners quote from Ryan:

http://www.ccu.edu/centennial/blog/post/2012/08/30/mountain-man-ryan-aims-high


• September 5, 2012. In the New York Times article, state GOP chairman Ryan Call disavowed his quote of Ryan from the August 11, Denver post article:
• September 5, 2012. A partisan group mocked Ryan’s claims and demanded evidence to support them.
http://www.progressnowcolorado.org/blog/2012/09/did-lyin-ryan-really-climb-forty-colorado-fourteeners.html

• September 6, 2012. Fallows stopped covering the story in his blog, asserting his lack of expertise where climbing is concerned:
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/09/finale-on-paul-ryan-as-mountain-climber/262054/

• September 10, 2012. The Denver post issued a correction to the online version of Andrew’s op-ed, amending the total from 40 to 28.
• September 27, 2012. A Colorado Springs reporter asks Ryan, “How many fourteeners have you climbed?” Ryan refuses to offer a number, instead telling the reporter, http://gazette.com/paul-ryan-interview-unabridged/article/145158;
• Early November, 2012. The original Supertopo thread was mysteriously deleted, making links to it by Fallows and others inoperative.
• November 3, 2012. I started a new thread on Supertopo, which recreated my posts in the disappeared thread.
http://www.supertopo.com/climbing/thread.php?topic_id=1973871&msg=1973910#msg1973910
• November 6, 2012. Barack Obama won the election, earning a second term, and making moot for the moment the question of Ryan’s veracity.

For reference, here is the complete list of public statements by Ryan, or attributed to Ryan from close sources, regarding Colorado fourteeners:

• Paul Ryan Miluakee Journal Sentinel
• Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
• Colorado GOP Chairman Ryan Call in the August 11, 2012 Denver Post.
• September 5, 2012 New York Times
• John Andrews in the August 26, 2012 Denver post.
• John Andrews’ “correction” after the number was challenged. September 6, 2012 Denver Post.
• John Andrews, Denver Post
• Romney Ryan campaign’s official statement.
• New York Times quote from Ryan
• http://gazette.com/paul-ryan-interview-unabridged/article/145158; September 27, 2012

Alright, with that background, let’s get back to Pyramid Peak.

4:30 am Sunday morning: We used to get revved up for early morning starts by blasting Hendrix on the car stereo; this time it was James Taylor’s “You’ve got a Friend” on the classic rock channel. Times have changed. And that song stuck in my head all day, since its mournful beat matched my slow, but steady, pace up the hill.
Got a headlamp start, but after a mile you have to turn off the main trail and I had to wait a while for the sun to rise a bit to find the turnoff. It was fun to walk by headlamp, since I hadn’t done an alpine start for a while. After a good trail, you get into a big cirque with the North Face of Pyramid looming above and the scree dancing begins.

My route, the east ridge, is the standard one these days and it has about 4,000 feet of elevation gain from the parking lot to the top, including a good trail, scree hopping, and mud slopes to get to the ridge itself.
On the ridge, the periodic , cairned trail wanders up a series of ugly couloirs and indistinct arêtes with the big drop of the north face on your right and lesser cliffs on your left. How to describe the quality of the rock? Imagine pinnacles consisting only of stacked rocks resembling dinner plates, platters, trays, tables, and even whole dining rooms, just waiting for some incautious hiker to send the whole mess down the mountain .
At one point I was trying to avoid the mortal danger of being under a group of scramblers ahead of me by ascending a clean little 15 foot corner out of the fall line. The corner was solid, but I hadn’t reckoned on there being piles of loose rock on every flat surface at its top. I tested a half a dozen possible holds, all unattached to the mountain itself, so the only solution was to sweep off a place to mantle with my left hand and another to place my right foot. The danger of losing balance on that mantle was that if you started to teeter backwards, you would desperately grab for something and be left looking at a handful of angular stones as your last memory. I stayed close to the circuitous, cairned path, from that point on.

If you like loose rock scrambling with fatal drops below you, then Pyramid should indeed be your favorite. Seriously, if I were to ever venture up there again, I’d be sure to do it on a Monday or Tuesday to try to minimize the number of other climbers. That way, you could better avoid the danger of someone above starting a rock fall that would take you out, or the equally distressing possibility that your own misstep could dislodge a boulder that would kill some poor soul below you. And watch out for mountain goats up above. Contrary to their reputation for being surefooted, they are surprisingly insouciant about knocking rocks down on their climbing brethren.

I suspect that Ryan mentioned Pyramid as one of his favorites because he knew its reputation as one of the hardest 14ers. Just like his marathon exchange with an admiring radio show host, where he humbly averred that his best time was in the low 2:50s, his Pyramid and 40 fourteener claims were designed to impress the listener with a false claim no one would likely ever challenge .

The Congressman didn’t take into account that the tribes of runners and climbers can sense mendacity, from long experience with frauds and mountebanks. The most famous modern climbing controversy is Caesar Maestri’s claim to have made the first ascent of Cerro Torre, a magnificent rock and ice pinnacle in Patagonia. Climbers who followed the route years later (including ST’s own Jim Donini) found pitons and other gear left by Maestri and his partner, but only up to a point very low on the mountain. The consensus is that Maestri’s claim to have achieved an extremely difficult and unprecedented first ascent is false. David Robert’s article in National Geographic is a good summary. http://www.nationalgeographic.com/adventure/0604/whats_new/cesare-maestri.html.

Cheating in marathons has been a fairly common occurrence. Marathon officials have had to develop sophisticated systems of electronic checkpoints to deter those who would steal the acclaim that is earned so painfully by legitimate competitors. A recent New Yorker article described a reputed marathon cheater who was so clever, race officials still don’t know how he apparently faked crossing numerous checkpoints to achieve impressive times. http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/08/06/120806fa_fact_singer

Ryan finally admitted under pressure that he exaggerated his best marathon time by more than an hour, and his fourteener claims are suspect for that reason alone. The burden to prove his fourteener claims should not be on the doubters who are faced with proving a negative, but on Ryan, a known fabulist when it comes to athletic feats. The available evidence indicates that Paul Ryan’s fourteener claims are just another con:

• Ryan has zero credibility regarding his athletic feats after his marathon fabrication.
• Real fourteener enthusiasts remember and cherish their total number of peaks just like marathon runners know their personal best times, so all the bizarre “clarifications”, retractions, and obfuscations are evidence that Ryan was simply caught in a lie.
• The attempt to distinguish the number of total climbs including repeats of the same peak versus the number of separate peaks is a ploy designed solely for media consumption. No fourteener enthusiast counts repeat ascents when someone asks, “How many have you done?” The carefully crafted official statement: “climbed above fourteen thousand feet 38, 39 times” is a laughable obfuscation. Two of the fourteeners have roads to the top. He could have driven to the parking lots at the top of Pikes Peak or Mount Evans 38 times and this statement would be accurate.
• In my experience, real fourteener enthusiasts are positively voluble regarding their fourteener list and will produce their spreadsheet if you betray even the slightest interest, along with volunteering photos, epic storm stories, and all other manner of detail. In other words, don’t get them started telling their experiences unless you have a good single malt and lots of time available. No list, photos, or details of climbs have been produced by Ryan, despite a claim of careful study of the matter on the campaign plane last September.
• Pyramid Peak could not reasonably be anyone’s favorite fourteener, as explained above. My favorite is Longs Peak, which has acres (both vertical and horizontal) of immaculate rock and dozens of different routes of climbing interest. Ryan said that Pyramid and Capitol were his favorites because it was a way to drop the names of two of the most difficult fourteeners.
• It is a classic indication that a person is lying about mountaineering accomplishment when he becomes angry when questioned. Jim Perrin, Britain’s finest writer about climbing, noted this in his most recent book about explorers of the Himalaya in the 1930s entitled, Shipton and Tilman. He observed that anger directed toward questioners of dubious mountaineering feats was a sure “clue to insecurity and guilt” of the false claimant. This is the most reasonable explanation for Ryan’s irate, “read the transcript” response to the Colorado Springs reporter’s simple question, “How many fourteeners have you climbed?”

Why back down from the marathon lie when caught, but stubbornly try to maintain the fourteeners fable? The marathon runners were able to come up with concrete evidence that Ryan had lied, so he had no choice but to admit the truth. Proving the negative regarding the number of his fourteeers hikes is more difficult, so Ryan tries to maintain the charade. That is remarkably brazen, but in the words of that fawning Denver Post op-ed, there is probably “no better index” of Ryan’s character.