Bouldering isn’t really about bouldering. Every boulderer knows that. Bouldering—the actual behaving-like-monkeys-and-scampering-up-rocks part—is great fun, but bouldering is really an excuse to gather socially like monkeys, to discuss and ponder life, politics, work, or more often the case girls.

This trip was definitely about girls. Or, at least, a girl. E, who is a man, and I were in Redstone, Colorado, wandering around between stunning red conglomerate boulders plopped among a patchwork of Aspen trees. It was the middle of the day. Our tips were shredded, our arms burnt, and we needed a change of scenery. We were young, just out of college. E had just moved to Aspen for the summer, and was working as valet car parker guy. I was working for a small newspaper in Paonia. Both of us were having troubles with the single life. I had hitched a ride over with a coal miner, and E. had driven his old Minnesota Subaru station wagon. We met in the middle—in Redstone.

Anyway, it was noon and we were bored, so we decided to head up the road to explore the abandoned Yule Marble quarry up above the town of Marble. I’d heard a lot about the place—it was world’s largest (and purest) marble deposit, and a century before, the marble mill there had supposedly been the largest enclosed building on the planet. Marble from there had gone on to such notable places as the Lincoln Memorial, the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, and the Colorado State Capitol. The marble boom didn’t last too long, though, and Rockefeller-insvestment notwithstanding, the mine had been mostly abandoned since 1941.

E drove up the valley, took a right at the fire station, and headed up a steep dirt road towards the mine. Two miles up the road his Subaru overheated. He figured his Minnesota car didn’t like Colorado summers. We stopped, briefly considered hiking up from there, then turned around and coasted back down the hill. As we rolled into town, I suggested we park at the bottom and hitch up, since I’d been having such good hitching luck lately, and we still had half a day.

Before E had the chance to consider the option, I turned around and put my thumb up as a newer Subaru Outback drove by.

“Goin’ to the mine?” I asked
“Yeah,” the driver said.
“Could we get a ride?”
“Sure — no problem.”

We hopped in and introduced ourselves to the driver, whose name was L. She was 23, and an art student in Durango, and she was cute. She told us that she had come to the mine to snag some marble to take home and sculpt, as she had just purchased her own air compressor and drill. I was sitting shotgun, while E. was relegated to the back, and I remember the look on E’s face as we got to know L. The look was: this is the coolest girl ever. Let me reiterate: she was very cute. She was also kind of a climber (which, obviously, is an attractive thing to other climbers), though she had broken her leg three weeks earlier while climbing in Moab. We didn’t realize the implications of this injured limb until we got to the mine, and learned we had to hike in about a mile.

L was on crutches. Did I mention that she was really cute? Because the way she was prepared to tough out the hike on crutches made her even cuter, in that mountain-chick kind of way. That, and the crutches, in combination with the little straw sun hat she wore, gave her a kind of naturally deliberate grace. As we started hiking, E and I were fawning over her, chit-chatting away, running ahead and then back like impatient but obedient dogs. Once the initial excitement of actually having made it to the mine passed, we settled into a slower pace, and walked side by side (us on either side of her) up an easy trail, at L’s hobbling pace. A few people walking the other way said to her as they passed, “Whoa, you’re hardcore!” or “Nothing’s gonna stop you, huh!” This made E and me very proud, simply by association. We absorbed the compliments vicariously, as though they were intended for us, knowing, deep down, that they were not.

We followed the trail, which paralleled a roaring stream that ran through a steep, dolomite canyon. The walls to our sides were polished and rounded. All of a sudden, the trail dead-ended at the base of a massive pile of enormous, angular, pearl white boulders. Thousands of them, precariously jumbled up against one another, glistened in the sun. Stenciled on each boulder, in bright red paint, were the words, DANGER KEEP OFF. It was as surreal as real stuff gets.

L agreed to stay behind at the base of the talus slope in a little shady nook beneath an overhanging boulder while E and I scurried up the slippery pile of rocks. She wanted to bring some high quality chunks of marble back with her, and E. and I had convinced her we could get her the sweetest possible rocks farther up, where the selection would no doubt be better. We also wanted to poke around the mine. On the way up to it, of course, E and I had a little man to man.

“She’s cute, huh?”
“Yeah. Jesus.”
“Think she has a boyfriend?”
“I dunno. I don’t care.”
“Neither do I.”

We decided that the coolest possible thing we could do would be to bring back the World’s Sweetest Chunk Of Marble™, thus winning her heart. Forget gold, or diamonds, or sonnets. This girl could be won over with strong, competent, consistent, unbroken metamorphic rock. Images of Michelangelo’s David, and Rodin’s The Thinker flashed through my head (as did images of L. in an unrealistically sexy sculpting outfit) and I felt important for having the opportunity to help this artist find something from which to carve her masterpiece.

The way up the talus field went like this: E and I stopped every few feet and yelled to each other “Hey, check this one out. It’s good, right?” Then the other one of us would respond, “Yeah, it’s OK, but check THIS one out!” Eventually, two things dawned on us. First: the rocks we liked were WAY too heavy to carry down a jumbly talus field — many hundreds-of-pounds too heavy. Also, I was wearing sandals, and I didn’t want to lose any toes. This led directly to realization number two: we’d be better off finding good smaller rocks closer to the bottom of the slope. So we decided to hold off on the rock scouting, and invest in mine-exploration.

At the top of the talus slope, we found a road rutted with enormous tire tracks, and followed it until we hit a fence, which we climbed under. From there we could see the mine, but between us and it was a large pool of a substance we had never encountered before. It was made of marble dust and rain water, and looked sort of like snow and sort of like styrofoam and sort of like rock – but not any single one of those. It was, therefore, hard to determine if it was solid or liquid. As E. stepped gingerly onto the substance and then into it, he discovered that the stuff was pretty much quicksand. Unfortunately, E was also wearing sandals, and he had sunk in above his ankle. For the rest of the afternoon I called him Cement Foot.

I skirted around the quicksand stuff, and met E at the gaping entrance to the mine. Before us lay an 80-foot drop. “We HAVE to get down there,” I said. Skirting to the right, we found another road, which led to a tall gate, E squeezed between the rock and the rightmost pole, and I crawled under. Since his route looked unnecessarily more difficult, I yelled to him, “What the hell are you doing, Cement Foot?” I was trying to use his new name as much as possible.

Inside, we probed carefully around. At first we were filled with that fear that conspires to weaken you while trespassing. Soon, though, we remembered that it was Saturday; the place was deserted. We climbed up a ladder to a pillar of stone in the middle of the complex, and poked around monstrous industrial machines and cables and drilling gizmos, listening the whole time to the sounds of our exploration echo off of the walls. E and I agreed that we were 200 feet down, with billions of tons of rock in the ceiling above us.

We wanted to stay and poke around more, but we remembered L, and didn’t want her to get bored without us, or—worse yet—find someone else to fetch rocks for her. So we headed back. We scampered down the gleaming white boulders, and near the bottom, stopped to grab some high-quality rocks. We ended up taking nice 40-pound chunks of rock, carefully maneuvering with the added weight. When we got back down to L, she looked at us, bent over under the weight of the rocks, and said, “You guys didn’t get those for me, did you?” With the straw sun hat, and her polite manner, she seemed very Victorian.

Well, shucks. “It was nothing,” we said. “It was the least we could do.” We were totally glowing.

L grabbed her crutches, got up, and together the three of us walked back down to the car, our paces now evenly matched. E and I were toting our heavy marble blocks, and once we started walking, we asked her what she thought of them. Earlier, we had asked her what kind of art she planned to make, whether she had a certain design in mind, any sort of artistic inspiration, or whether it was more of a play-it-by-ear kind of thing. She said she had some abstract ideas, which, now that I think of it, was a good way to dodge the question.

E and I, though, were by this point engaged in a juvenile competition, and had to know who had chosen the best rock. E carefully displayed his chunk, gently rolling it over midair, revealing the intricacies of its shape, his biceps flexed the whole time under its weight. L said she knew exactly what she would make out of it. This totally made Cement Foot’s day.

I then asked L what she thought of my rock. I turned it over, showed her how it was less pointy, but more of a solid rectangular prism, and of very high quality consistent grain, which sparkled in the sunlight. She said she liked it, but wasn’t sure what she’d make out of it. This was a huge blow. “Not sure!” I thought. “What the hell?”

By the time we made it to the end of the trail, and put the rocks in L’s trunk, the rocks seemed very small, and our accomplishment seemed much less noteworthy. We offered to go back to the quarry and get a few more rocks, but L said she was all set. So we drove together back down to E’s car, which had cooled off by now, and then we followed her back to Redstone, where we got ice cream and sat in the shade.

Thus came the make or break moment. We asked L. where she was headed, what she was, you know, doing later. She said she was en route to Denver; from there she was flying to Michigan to see her… boyfriend. That was that.

When she left, E and I tried to rationalize the let down. The scenario, was, after all, so unusual. You don’t meet girls hitch-hiking, just like you don’t meet girls at coffee shops. It just doesn’t happen. But we also believed that we had been so close to success. Our thoughts soon strayed back to the day’s other events, and remembering the marble quarry brought us back to reality and gave us hope. By the time we finished our ice cream, we were making plans to return to the mine. Next time, we’d hitch a ride with another cute girl. She’d be single, and we’d carry bigger, better rocks.