A week ago the road leading up Mt. Evans to the summit was closed due to impending winter. The road goes way up into the sky until at 14,000′ plus, it stops and you can get out of your car and wheezingly look at the animals living here that have absolutely no trouble breathing. In fact they find it amusing that many of the visitors keel over and have to be dragged by the back foot to the waiting emergency vehicles where they get oxygen and the advice to go home.

So on the 5th of September you had last call to go up and see the mountain goats and their neighbors the Bighorn sheep, pictured here. In a very short time it will be soooo cold and snowy, what with the mountain top area being completely filled with weather, that it would be really miserable to be here. Guys who regularly go to Antarctica don’t like going here.

If you look closely at the picture above you will see adolescent bighorn sheep frolicking. They’ll run and leap from rock to rock and jump for the sheer irritation factor of it knowing it bothers the older ones a lot. If you were to try even one frolic your heart would explode in your chest and your eyeball would pop out. That’s right, pop right out of your head. Eyeball popping is very possible in super high altitude places where extreme cold is involved. That’s why they shut the road down. Otherwise people would go up there and try one frolic and then there you are, exploded heart and eyeball popped out. Plus you’d have to lay there for the rest of the winter because they don’t open the road until May or June.

Well then, there it is, if you didn’t make it to the summit of Mt Evans on September 5th too bad for you, you missed it. Now you have to wait until next year. The sheep and goats will still be there. They live up there fulltime. No exploded hearts or popped eyeball for them, they’re trained and experienced on how to survive living in ridiculous places so they’ll be just fine. Meanwhile if you are hell-bent on being miserable there’s lots of stuff you can do between now and the opening of the Mt. Evans road next May.

You can watch every single one of the debates between the candidates and talk to your friends about them until one of them sticks a pencil in your ear. Or you can intern on one of those crab boats up on the Bering sea. It’s just below eyeball popping cold up there. You could attend a seniors only party and listen to all of their recent medical procedures. There’s more, that’s just a few of the things you can do to keep your misery index up to your own personal comfort level. If you lack the imagination to figure out your own miserable activity to do this winter we have a list here at The Institute that we would be happy to send you. Just send us a stamped self-addressed envelope with $80 dollars cash in it and we’ll get it right in the mail for you. If you don’t have the exact amount in cash send five twenty’s instead and we’ll try like heck to get your change back to you.

P.S. Don’t think you can outsmart the system and sneak up to the summit and hold one hand over your eyeball and get away with it. Doesn’t work, trust me on this one.