From a vantage point high in the Williams Fork Mountains along the Blue River, the rugged Gore Range beckons, intrigues, and forewarns all at once. This granite citadel stretches a mere 25 miles as the crow flies from Eagles Nest on the north to Vail Pass on the south. But between those points, jagged rows of serrated shark's teeth pierce the sky.
Geologically the Gore rises between two major, northwest-southeast trending fault lines, and is riddled by innumerable minor faults that intersect at every angle - thus its daunting complexity. This range beckons, all right, but the austere beauty of its knife-edge ridges, breathtaking spires, and vertical faces also holds observers at arm's length. These shark's teeth can bite. To a select few, this dire portrait simply promises adventure. And therein lies a tale of one man and a mountain range he wanted to know.
In 1979, a photograph in a climbing book of one particular spire - an obscure summit named "Peak C"- caught the eye of a young mountaineer named Joe Kramarsic (pronounced kruh-mar-sik). Now 48 and a Dillon resident, Kramarsic recalls, "I had to find that peak. It's not mentioned on maps, and there was no guide book to this range."
Kramarsic missed the elusive Peak C on his first try, but a week later he reached his mark, a Class 3 climb. "After Peak C, I examined the maps and there were no names for a lot of the peaks in the Gore," Kramarsic says of his awakening interest. "There were blank spaces on the map." Blank spaces on the map - in Colorado in the 1980s, no less. Something clicked inside Kramarsic.
"Most people pass through this area and, perhaps, they climb a few of these peaks, then move on," he observes. "Somehow, I developed a compelling interest. People had approached the Gore Range from the Vail side, and from the Dillon side, but nobody had really investigated the entire range and its possibilities."
Ten years after Kramarsic moved to Colorado from his native Illinois, he began spending his free time climbing in the Gore. Having earned his bachelor's degree in history from the University of Iowa, he took it upon himself to document not only his own Gore ascents, but those of the men and women who preceded him.
Today it's quite possible that no one has ever known the Gore Range as intimately as Joe Kramarsic. Yet, as he is swift to point out, he is simply one of a number of climbers who have made their mark on this range and, in some cases, left signs of their passing.
Yet it is a measure of the Gore's ruggedness and complexity, as well as the patchwork nature of the historical record, that these mountains still retain secrets. And it is likely that certain of her mountaineering mysteries never will be solved.
First Accounts
The mountains that would come to be called the Gore Range entered the historical record in the early 1800s, after westward-moving Anglo trappers, explorers, and miners pierced the central Rockies seeking furs, gold, and silver. Neither native Americans nor Spanish explorers - Anglos' predecessors by millennia and by centuries, respectively - left any sign of ascents in the Gore.
It was the distant lure of the Oregon country that finally produced the first written record of this mountain range. In July 1839 an Oregon-bound party under Thomas J. Farnham crossed the Continental Divide, descended the Blue River, and marveled at the scene.
As Farnham recorded in his diary:
The face of the country along the morning's trail was much the same as that passed over the day before; often beautiful but oftener sublime. Vast spherical swells covered with buffalo, and wild flowering glens echoing the voices of a thousand cascades, and countless numbers of lofty peaks crowding the sky, will give perhaps a faint idea of it.
Farnham's account, published in London in 1843, may well have inspired Scottish nobleman Sir St. George Gore to hire Jim Bridger to guide an elaborate hunting tour of the central Rockies. In 1854-57, Gore and Bridger hunted big game for sport in this region; this sojourn, which impacted local wildlife for decades, finally left a name on contemporary maps (for a colorful account of this legendary trek, see story in Vail Magazine 1994 Winter issue, "Lord of Gluttony").
After gold discoveries in the Rockies sent waves of explorers and miners across Colorado, few adventures seemed to remain. But contemporary maps did exhibit blank spots, and an Illinois professor and Civil War major named John Wesley Powell responded.
First Ascents
In 1867 and 1868, Major Powell led a gaggle of naturalists and civilians through river valleys and passes on the headwaters of the Arkansas, Platte, and Grand (now the Colorado) rivers. During those years he conceived his famous journey down the Colorado River and through the Grand Canyon. But in the process, he reconnoitered the headwaters of these rivers by making a few judicious mountain ascents. In 1868 that included the earliest recorded ascents of Longs Peak and the Gore Range's highest summit.
On September 26, 1868, Powell and college student Ned Farrell reached the summit of the highest peak in the Gore and, cognizant of their primacy in that endeavor, left a tin can with a note inside recording the date and their names. As Farrell later wrote of that ascent, although the one-armed Major often encountered difficulties: "... he would not give up, and we cautiously moved on, passing many places where a single misstep ... would be certain death." Powell and Farrell reached their goal by ascending the Cataract Creek valley on the mountain's northwest flank.
Thus, the highest peak in the Gore Range - an imposing, pyramidal summit of 13,560 feet elevation - obtained a legendary reputation. Lured by this reputation, explorer Ferdinand V. Hayden and five of his survey became the second recorded party to reach the summit. Arriving in August 1873, Hayden and his men found Powell's tin can, and inside his note and "a small desiccated [sic] and discolored biscuit," with a dedication to its finder. Artist William H. Holmes sketched the inspiring summit panorama and Hayden named the peak after his predecessor.
While the turn of the century wrought fantastic change elsewhere in the West, the third known ascent of Mount Powell - a physical barometer of slow change in the precipitous Gore - didn't take place until 1913, when Percy Hagerman, Philip Stewart, and their sons reached the summit in August via Black Creek and the mountain's northern ridge. At the peak, they found the registers signed by Powell, Hayden, and their companions. Hagerman copied the registers and reported on them in the Colorado Mountain Club's journal, Trail and Timberline. So far, the Powell summit register has proved to be the earliest found in Colorado.
A U.S. Geological Survey party of four men made another ascent in July 1931 and noted the by-then corroded tin can and its deteriorating contents. Four years later the Colorado Mountain Club made the Gore Range the object of its annual summer outing, and two parties reached the summit of Mt. Powell, one retrieving Major Powell's tin can for the Colorado Historical Society. Mountaineering in the Gore in the 1930s and `40s by the late Kenneth Segerstrom and, then, Stan Midgley, embodied the perennial attraction between human and mountain that one day would grip Joe Kramarsic. And when it did, Kramarsic would have the sense to find these early mountaineers before their passing and capture their stories.
Looking back, there were auspicious signs in Kramarsic's past. Born of Slovenian stock in Oglesby, Illinois, he spent two undergraduate years at Illinois Wesleyan University, where Major Powell once served as professor. After graduating from the University of Iowa, Kramarsic moved to Colorado Springs in 1971 and then to Climax for a job that could complement and support his new-found passion for climbing. Today this soft-spoken, bespectacled man makes his home in a modest condominium in Dillon, stacked high with climbing books, magazines, and equipment. Kramarsic maintains his athleticism by working as a snowplow operator on Loveland Pass, swimming, and in spring, he admits with a chuckle, "hiking up and down ski trails with a metal detector."
Kramarsic's youthful appearance belies his 48 years; only salt-and-pepper hair hints at middle age. His natural modesty and reserve suggests a touch of shyness. He turned down an offer for commercializing his self-published, 1989 book, Mountaineering in the Gore Range: A Record of Explorations, Climbs, Routes, and Names. In these pages, readers will discover that behind the staggering peaks of the Gore Range lies a rich lore and history that Kramarsic has rescued from elusive sources, both living and written. (Author's note: To order a copy of his book, send $12.45 c/o PO Box 1342, Dillon, CO 80435; Colo. residents add .60 sales tax.)
Gore Mountaineers
In his quest to document the climbing history of this range, Kramarsic has scoured archives as close as the summit registers on the peaks looming from above his condo to as far away as the U.S. Geological Survey's library at Reston, Virginia. His pursuit of seminal mountaineers in the Gore Range enabled him to meet and interview the late Ken Segerstrom, whom Kramarsic calls "one of my best human finds."
Kramarsic even traced Stan Midgley, another early Gore mountaineer, to California. Midgley wrote Kramarsic a letter of his own experiences in the Gore, and included a photograph of the Vail Valley before anything but a dirt road ran through it. Dolores LaChapelle, of Silverton, corresponded with Kramarsic about her experiences on another historic Colorado Mountain Club outing in 1948.
"These people really have some stories to tell," Kramarsic says, cognizant of his predecessors' work. Of those stories, consider Segerstrom's ascent of 13,400-foot Eagles Nest at the north end of the range, which produced one of the Gore's enduring mysteries.
"When Segerstrom and his partner, Harold Weaver, climbed Eagles Nest in 1933, they thought they might be the first to make that ascent," relates Kramarsic. "But as they neared the summit, crawling on their hands and knees in an electrical storm, they discovered a .30-.30 cartridge stuck in a crack. That meant someone might have preceded them to the summit, though at least one authority believes that crows might have carried the shell aloft and dropped it there. We'll never know."
Not all of Kramarsic's summit tales are as dramatic. He reached the top of recondite, 13,200-foot Peak E in 1980, added his name to the register and made his way home. "I returned five years later on a second climb by another route, and tried to open the summit register," he recalls. "I was cursing to myself, `Who the hell tightened that cap like that?' Finally I got it open and it turned out it was me, five years earlier."
Kramarsic Memories
Although not recommended by most experts, Kramarsic has by habit climbed alone all these years. He cites his own reasons for this. "In the Gore Range I didn't find many people interested in climbing unnamed peaks," he explains. "And the more I climbed alone, the more I enjoyed it. You have a sense of what you're doing after all these years. It's a matter of always trying, but always knowing when to turn back. Lightning and rockfalls are the most dangerous elements."
When pressed, he allows there have been moments. "Some of the ridges on Peaks F and G were rather... (He emits a nervous chuckle.) I just remember thinking, `I'd better not fall here or they'll never find me.'" Kramarsic is uncertain whether he has made any first ascents, although he thinks he probably has been first up certain peaks by certain routes. He has made several documentable second ascents. And he allows himself an observation that sheds light on his work, and permits an outsider to grasp its stature:
"If you look at a map the Gore is not a big range. But if you try all its peaks from different routes, it takes a while. It took me about ten years to make different approaches to about 100 summits. There are very few places I haven't been."
One of Kramarsic's few accompanied climbs occurred with fellow mountain historian and geologist Russ Allen of Littleton, Colorado, whom he met through their mutual fascination with the Gore. "There seemed to be a mystique about that range," Allen says today. "There wasn't much known about it when I began my research."
Of his colleague, Allen observes: "Joe's research is amazingly thorough. And he's a very private person, an individualist who climbs alone. That to me is unique. There's an element of devotion there. His mountaineering and historical work is his contribution to history, without financial reward. He wants this knowledge on record for people who are interested and really care. "To my mind, Joe has joined the ranks of Hagerman, Segerstrom, Midgley, and the others. You now have to include Kramarsic on that list."
Allen has also contributed to the mountaineering history of the Gore Range. When apprised by Kramarsic in 1984 that the original summit register created by Major Powell resided at the Colorado Historical Society in Denver, Allen oversaw the priceless, but crumbled, register's preservation in lucite. "To me it's very important that this kind of thing not be lost," he says. "This is sacred stuff, like finding the Holy Grail."
A Climber's Creed
There is no end to this story of Joe Kramarsic and his beloved mountains. "You never really get done," Kramarsic pronounces. "I'll always go back. There are still a few things I haven't done."
Asked to recommend certain climbs to neophytes in the Gore, Kramarsic smiles a wistful smile: "It's up to you to find your own way," he says quietly. "That way you can have the same experience I had in climbing these peaks when there was no information on them.
"Everyone should climb a mountain for their own reasons. My favorites may not be other peoples' favorites. Find your own. That's where the sense of exploration comes in. Don't follow someone else."
Colorado Springs-based journalist Phil Carson writes on the natural resources, history and people of Colorado for regional and national publications.