Summit Place Attorney has made her way to top of Colorado’s 14ers By Tom Kirvan
B
efitting an avid mountain climber, Denver attorney Erica Payne has experienced her share of highs and lows since embarking on her “14er journey” nearly 20 years ago. Her first quest to reach the summit of one of Colorado’s 58 peaks topping 14,000 feet nearly ended in disaster. At the time of the 2004 climb, Payne was a
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law student at the University of Colorado (CU) in Boulder. The Labor Day weekend trip began unceremoniously enough when Payne and her law school friend, Katie Stone, borrowed a Jeep Grand Cherokee to traverse a rugged 6-mile-long road to the South Colony Lakes trailhead where they would launch their planned climb to the top of the Humboldt Peak, a spectacular 14,068-foot mountain in south central Colorado.
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“Humboldt is in Sangre de Cristo Range of the Rockies and is generally considered one of the ‘easiest’ of the 14ers in that area to climb,” said Payne, who grew up in a suburb of Boston. But “easiest” is a relative term, which Payne would eventually discover while attempting to make her way to the summit, a nearly 4,200-foot imposing climb from the trailhead. “I probably should have figured that it was going to be a tough day based on