Doorstep Adventure – Tom's On The Move

November 6, 2017November 6, 2017

Shivering in the shithouse — and other tests at Sol Duc

Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”

— Mike Tyson.

Cold was in the air already, an omnipotent all penetrating wet. It was in the slick on the road, the low gray sky, the close ranks of firs and hemlocks — a billion silver droplets on the needles, droplets in the bracken, on the grass. Spotted yellow maple leaves fell heavy with little ceremony, plopping to the pavement, plastered on.

A whisper of diesel lingered from the bus that had just dropped me on the empty stretch of Highway 101 beneath the Sol Duc Valley. I hustled across the yellow lines, pushing my road bike. The full pack was a nightmare on my spine. I regretted this trip before it stared. Yet, there was no choice.

OK, there was a choice. There was a choice between the 15-mile bike, 9-mile hike — and staying home for another “get things done weekend.”

The last “get things done weekend” had began with good intentions of housecleaning, writing canning fruit for the winter (new hobby) but my attention span got sucked out through my internet connection and run over by the news cycle. My hours of productive labor became joyless hours of content consumption and self-loathing. The idea of repeating the experience for another weekend was a nauseating one.

No. I needed a kick in the ass. I needed some adventure. If that adventure required cold hands, shivering and soggy spirits, hopefully I’d at least learn something along the way.

Most of those lessons would come painfully, of course, but the kayak pogies were an exception. Putting pogies on the bike handlebars actually works pretty well, I learned. Fingers were firmly connected with the gear shifts and brakes, yet they remained encased within their warming shells of neoprene. I didn’t need to worry about wetting my gloves or mitts before I hit the trail.

My decision to wear a trash bag as a kind of skirt while cycling kept a great deal of the moisture off my pants. I was, however, developing a wet zone above the knees. I pedaled slowly.

Salmon cascades

My trash skirt and bike helmet certainly made me among the more fashionable visitors at the Sol Duc River salmon cascades. Several vehicles were pulled along the roadside near the prominent overlook. A small crowd had gathered by the river to watch the huge fish leaping up at the series of surging falls.

These were coho salmon returning to their spawning sites from the sea. Though I had seen salmon in the rivers before, I had never seen such perseverance. Fish after fish flew above the surging water to try and clear the four foot ledge into a side pool partway up the falls. Almost all of them fell backward into the foam that they had leaped from.

An instant before they hit the water, the fish would whip their bodies, thrumming with the tight, directed power of a vibrating string. For a couple fish that landed just below the top of the falls, this Hail Mary, was enough to overpower the current for an instant and push them into the pool on top. Others flailed, pathetically to their sides, flopping back down into the maelstrom.

The largest salmon seemed to have the best luck. They took the greatest leaps. Even in shallow water, they could grapple their bodies to the stone and dyno like rock climbers against gravity.

The tumult of the cascades annihilated all noise from these struggles. It was as though the standing wave at the base of the falls was the flywheel on an enormous pitching machine. Instead of baseballs flying up, there were silver 20-pound fish, arching noiselessly from the river.

Satisfying as it was to watch the salmon make it to the first pool, I didn’t see a single one make it past the even higher leap that came next.

They had eaten their last meals long ago, were running down their gauges toward empty. The top of the falls was their Hillary Step, a final test that their years of struggle in sea and river had built up to. Each failure brought them closer to the possibility that they would die without spawning, that this season would be the last chapter in their ancient genetic story.

It was painful to watch the fish jump off from the redoubt they had fought so hard for. I held my breath every time, only to watch the fish tumble out into the main current and — fighting, still fighting — fall all the way back to the bottom of the cascade

It has never been easy to be a salmon, though this moment in history may be their greatest challenge yet. Years of dams, development, over harvest and global warming have devastated the old runs, shrank the size of the fish themselves. Perhaps the fish at the cascades would have been bigger and stronger if the Pacific Ocean, wasn’t still reeling from the enormous “blob” pattern of unnaturally warm water that began in 2015. The phenomenon killed off much of the krill that salmon feed on.* If not for the failures of our species to respect life on this planet, there might have been a different scene at Sol Duc.

Maybe then, I would have seen some of them complete that last leap.

The river thundered on.

The cold and the beautiful

I got back on my bike and continued up the wet road to its end.

15 miles from where I’d started on Highway 101, I locked my bike and shouldered my pack. I began walking toward Sol Duc Falls. Plenty of people were walking with massive cameras, talking in several languages. There was a family with brown paper bags out looking for chanterelle mushrooms growing under logs.

I went off my route briefly to admire the place where the river falls sideways into a deep chasm (no salmon would ever make it this far.) It occurred to me that if I were really smart, I would just turn around here and then catch an afternoon bus back to Port Angeles. The falls and the salmon cascades were enough fodder to make up a small, successful, low carbon trip with moderate suffering.

Haha. Moderate suffering. Suffering would be abundant. It occurred to me that if suffering were some valuable commodity like goat cheese or maple syrup, I could start a nice artisanal business for myself.

Try Wandering Tom’s latest, Homemade Suffering! This 2017, limited release small-batch edition has strong notes of cold and wet — a bold contrast to its themes of back pain and numb extremities. It goes great on pancakes.

In order to gather the proper amount of suffering on this trip, it wasn’t good enough for me to just muck around below tree line; I needed to get to the alpine zone where the good stuff was. My Parks Service overnight permit was for the Heart Lake camp area, which happens to be at 4,700 feet, nine miles up the trail. It was raining at the trailhead. I was told to expect snow by the time I got to camp.

So the hike began.

It is worth noting, amidst my morbid contemplations, that there were actually a couple of beautiful things that I noticed going up the trail. One of these was the deep gully that crossed my path, plunging down the slope toward the river. Plaited bands of aerated water splashed over the mossy rocks. Overhead, a canopy of warm yellow leaves on the vine maples. These small trees followed the gully in a perfect line. They flashed out against the dark boughs of the spruces and firs.

The generous amounts of rain at Sol Duc creates a habitat for verdant swaths of moss, goatsbeard lichen hanging off the branches, beads of water clinging to the hairs. Monumental firs stand dark against the light in their shining filigree of epiphytes.

I could look down from the edge of Sol Duc Canyon and see a river that thundered like a fire-hose, bulling against the walls, throwing itself off ledges, swirling through logjams and leaping up into the air in sheets of mist.

Where was all the water coming from? Everywhere. Every inch of the valley was saturated.

Half of the trail was a stream course. My tall boots deflected most of the moisture, but I sensed that it was beginning to make inroads. Some vapor-barrier socks would have been a smart move. The kayak pogies were a surprise success however. I attached them to my poles much as I would a paddle, creating comfy neoprene nests for my bare hands. This was literally handy, because I could take my hands out in an instant and work ungloved on some minor adjustment. It was far less time consuming than me having to take a glove or mitt off to work on something.

I took few breaks while climbing the trail. To stop was to lose temperature. If I put another layer on to warm up, I knew I would get it soaked and have one less piece of dry clothing for the cold night ahead.

When the weight of my fully-loaded pack became too much, I stopped with my pack on my shoulders, crouched into a ball to distribute the weight onto my hips and retain heat.

The rain rolled off my jacket onto the small of my back.

Making myself small for this 30 second interval, I shut out the hostile outside environment and breathed the dirt smell of the rotten log I was leaning against. This short break from struggle was an important way to ground myself, tending to my spirits in the same way I was trying to keep an even body-temperature. The micro-world below gave me a measure of reassurance that I didn’t feel when I contemplated the long miles ahead of me, or the sure to be hellish night ahead.

Hints at what that night would be like included the patches of white I began to see along the trail. There was just a faint frosting on the mosses, or in the shadows of the trees. It was still raining. The clouds hid the highest slopes of the mountains above me, but I’d get a glimpse of ghost white slopes above veiled in rain clouds.

The snow grew thicker as I climbed. It was still raining. I hiked through a goulash of wet snow. I thought of the several empty camps I had passed below tree line. Surely, these would have been more pleasant places to spend the night than what was in store for me in the high country.

Ah, but I still had lessons to learn up there; I still had a suffering quota to meet.

The trail crossed the Sol Duc again, but this time there was no log bridge. I tried to toss a couple branches into the river, but the current laughed and whisked them downstream. I ended up slogging through shin deep water to reach the other side.

After another half mile of goulash hiking I had another river crossing. I had to will myself to go slow, even as the cold water soaked into my boots. A fall would be a survival crisis, likely hypothermia. I reached the side and climbed on. Finally, the trail popped up at the bottom of a snow filled basin where the wind was howling. Chunks of slush and broken ice lolled in the gray, heart-shaped lake. I’d arrived at camp.

Outhouse Camp

The rain was one thing, but when the droplets were thrown by a thundering wind, it became something much worse. The outhouse, naturally, was the place to find relief.

I shut the door and threw on a fleece layer beneath my raincoat. It would be soaked within short order. I felt my jaw clenching up from the cold. If there was going to be a shelter tonight, I needed to get it set up fast.

The shelter was my tarp, which had served me well throughout the summer. Initially, I’d planned to use the rainfly from my tent as the upper level, but realized that this was a no-go because it wouldn’t stand up without the under-tent. A dumb mistake, but still salvageable, because I could use it as my shelter’s footprint with the tarp overhead.

Another problem: Even as I cleared away the snow from the shelter site, the rainwater would start to gather up below. I used my fire pan to dig a drainage trench, which helped somewhat, but only to the extent that I’d be sleeping in shallower water.

I set up the tarp as a flat rectangle that was a couple inches above where I would sleep. This was workable, unless the rain turned to snow, in which case the weight of the snow would collapse it on top of me while I slept. OK, I could try to rejigger the ropes so that the central guy-line was higher up.

BUT, my hands were freezing cold now. Untying and retying knots would be slow work. Light and temperature were falling. The longer I stood exposed in the face of the wind, the colder I became, the more difficult it would be for me to, warm up or to do simple tasks necessary for survival. The zipper on my rainjacket had blown open and rain was getting into my puffy layer.

The shelter was shit. I was going to be sleeping in a pond with the wind blowing through the whole night.

Should I take it down then? Well, at that point, even disassembling the thing would cost precious energy. The two river crossings would leave me in an even worse way before I got below tree line to set up shelter again. After I’d been through all of that, who knows how stupid and useless I’d be. It was going to be an outhouse night.

I lurched back to the narrow building and shut the door. I shed my wet layers and arranged my sleeping bag. The last time that I’d spent a night in an outhouse was in Colorado, where I’d used a roomy handicap-accessible building that gave me room to set up a sleeping pad and stove.

This building gave me five feet to stretch out if I slept on top of the toilet with the lid down. Gusts of wind send droplets of icy water in through the cracks in the walls.

Miserable as this sounds, I had piled on enough layers to maintain a damp warmth. I set my fire pan down on the edge of the toilet and used a flint striker to light a cotton ball, transferring the flames to a hexamine tablet, which gave me a small but very hot smokeless fire. The fire gave me boiling water for hot pea soup and contributed some toxic fumes to help deaden my awareness. I fed additional tabs to the flames as I ate, warming my little shelter as the wind outside thundered into the boards.

When the fire died, I got out my sleeping bag. I bolstered my sleep system with two reflective mylar bivvy sacks. One protected my insulation from the wet on the outside; the other bivvy went inside the sleeping bag to protect it from my own sweat and damp, marinating my body inside plastic.

I contorted myself so that I could lie down with my head resting on my pack, knees bent. This was more or less how I would spend the next 10 hours. Though supremely uncomfortable, I was warm. I listened to the wind, heard the droplets spattering onto the bivvy sack. I thought of the wretched tarp that I’d pitched outside, and how hellish it would have been to spend the night under it.

I was in the outhouse because I’d screwed up. My preparations were inadequate. Plans that seemed solid to me when I was beneath a roof in Port Angeles, were torn up by the mountain wind.

“Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth,” Mike Tyson said.

He may have been talking about boxing, but the windswept campground was a place where punches came fast and survival required action to move at the speed of muscle memory and instinct.

I’d been able to afford the time it took to noodle and tweaking with my tarp during the months of summer hiking. The October weather was less forgiving. Now noodling with gear was the equivalent of lacing up boxing gloves while the opponent was already taking swings at me.

Cold and disorientation had landed like blows on my unprepared frame. Next time, I vowed to have a stronger system ready for the elements. Another option: I could have kept my lightweight system and camped below tree line. If I’d really wanted to explore Heart Lake and beyond, I could have marched up from a lower camp with a lighter pack.

Now I spent many hours in the half waking, half dreaming state, pausing to sit up now and then to stretch my cramping legs. I thought of the refugees of the world, what it was like to be insecure against the elements, utterly vulnerable. How outraged I would be, I thought, if someone turned me away from shelter on a night like this. Yet, our government routinely turns people out who face not only rain but bullets, not only cold but famine, whose struggles are not over when they get home — because there is no home. It is easy it is to be heartless to those in need when you have no understanding of what their suffering is like.

“I am grateful for this outhouse,” I murmured.

Rough trails, dark roads

The tarp shelter stayed up. It had rained all night, with just a little bit of new snow that alighted during the coldest hours. Perhaps I could have slept under there after all, but if I could have gone back in time, I still would have chose the outhouse.

The wind continued throughout my morning routine, blasting little hail pellets over the mountainside. I gathered some slush water in my pot and boiled it for oatmeal.

I wrung out my hiking pants, put them back on. It was a slog back to the bike, but I was in control of my body heat.

Throughout the hike down, I had fantasized about an imaginary clothes dryer that would be waiting for me at the campground/resort next to the Sol Duc Hot Springs. I would dry all my clothes and then buy a pass to the hot springs and rewarm my core, telling the story of my adventures to any bather who would listen.

Unfortunately, there were no clothes dryers at the resort. There was no Sunday bus service out to Port Angeles either. My plan had been to spend the night camped near Highway 101 and then catch a Monday morning bus back to town. As I contemplated another night of damp sleep, this option became less and less appealing.

Another option was to bike the 32 remaining miles to Port Angeles — a trip I was certain to finish in the dark. I stood for awhile thinking, even put my thumb out for a couple pickup trucks going down 101. Finally, I decided to stop waffling and start pedaling.

The section of 101 that goes along Lake Crescent is incredibly risky for bikes, as there are tight turns and almost no margin. I decided not to try it with a fully loaded pack in fading light.

Instead, I opted to take the Spruce Railroad Trail, which goes on the other side of the lake. The compromise here was that I would face long sections of loose rock and roots that were for mountain bikes, not the skinny tires I was riding that day. I would have to walk long sections of trail.

Even pedaling the pavement proved challenging, as recent winds had knocked several trees down over the path. Branches and leaves were scattered everywhere.

One saving grace: The rain had stopped.

As the paved trail gave way to dirt, I risked biking on some of the smoother sections. I had to stop frequently to clear out pine needles which got stuck between the wheel and bike frame. Finally, I crossed through the railroad tunnel at the east end of the lake, and got back onto paved road. The light was getting low.

I stopped in the village of Joyce to flick on my headlamp and taillight. This was the highway section that I’d been dreading most. There would be plenty of traffic, a narrow margin and dark pavement.

To clinch it all, my headlamp beam was dying I hadn’t packed extra batteries (stupid.) This forced me to take it slow along the bumpy pavement, fearing potholes and outstretched branches hiding at the limits of vision.

Another worry: Every once in a while I would look back and see that the taillight had flicked off for some reason. Unnerving, considering that this signaled my existence to oncoming trucks with the potential to blot said existence out on their front grilles. I’d stop and hit the on button again and start pedaling until I noticed it was out again. I haven’t had the problem since the trip, so I don’t think it was battery-related. Whatever it was, it wasn’t helping my relaxation.

I’d hoped that some of the fears and hardships would diminish once I reconnected with the bike path, away from traffic. Not so. The trail was covered in leaves, which made it difficult to distinguish the pavement from the edge of the forest. The dim headlamp forced me to bike slowly. Twice, I got disoriented and biked right into the woods.

My most epic fall came when I biked past a roadside construction site. I saw no warning sign, just a sudden drop off right in front of me. I hit the brakes but it was too late. The bike went over an 18-inch drop and landed hard on the rocky substrate. I fell over and the bike went on top of me. I issued a stream of oaths, got up and dusted off.

I had to readjust the bike wheel before I started pedaling. I was ready to be done.

Finally, a couple miles later, the trail ended at the suburbs west of Port Angeles. There was street lighting, the happy glow of televisions in the windows of warm houses. I could hear waves pounding on the beach below the bluffs nearby. A hilltop vantage point gave me a view of miles of lights, stretching out along the dark waters of the Strait.

Blobs of brightness by the water eroded to disparate sparks of illumination as civilization climbed the hills. And then there were the mountains where darkness reigned again. My time up there was over for now, until my next journey when I hoped to return wiser and better equipped. I was happy to follow the orange road, street lamp by street lamp, the rest of the way to a warm bed.

Sources

* Information on salmon stock decline can be found here: http://www.oceanfutures.org/news/blog/salmon-stocks-trouble-pacific-northwest

http://www.idahostatesman.com/news/local/news-columns-blogs/letters-from-the-west/article73268602.html

June 28, 2017

Bike Climbing and Snow Sliding: A Doorstep Mount Angeles Expedition

There was the world of the pavement and there was everything else.

Pavement was the Hurricane Ridge Road, an asphalt tendril climbing out from Port Angeles, and penetrating into the Olympic Mountains. was is the accommodation that allowed the river of internal combustion to flow uphill — the shuddering swarms of Harley’s, Subarus, Tahoes and other vehicles to convey their day-trip passengers toward the snow realm up above.

They looked out of windows, and saw the other world: the treacherous stands of stinging nettles and shoots of devil’s club armed with vicious barbs, diaphanous leaves of the big leaf maple shifting iridescent in the sun mist. They were just starting the climb, these visitors. So was I.

I too, grunted and shuddered my up the pavement, and I did it in the lowest gear on my bike. The plan was to notch another entry in the doorstep chronicles with a doorstep ascent of Klahhane Ridge.

The ridge is 6,000 feet above Port Angeles Harbor. It forms what I think of as the most impressive feature you can see from town. Torturous layers of jagged stone jut up out of the ridge’s west side to create the 6,400 foot summit of Mount Angeles. Snow clings to the shadowed north slope, even in July and August.

I knew I was going to pedal long and hard to get there. I knew my back was going to ache and that I would loathe the traffic going past my bike. The bike ride was the part I wanted to get over with before I traipsed merrily up the trail toward Mount Angeles. I thought of all the cars going by as I kept the bike tires on the narrow margin.

But sometimes you sweat the climb a thousand times before the wheels start turning. As I started up the hill, I found myself in a pleasant frame of mind, enjoying the sun on my face. I let my eyes wander off the road and up the narrow gullies where pearly-white freshets cascaded over moss. Fat orange salmonberries grew in the roadside thickets, though they were not quite ripe enough to eat.

An occasional vehicle did perturb my reverie, but the traffic was far lighter than what I had feared. It had been dumb to spend so much energy climbing the mountain in my mind earlier.

After over an hour of climbing, I had knocked out about five miles, which brought me to the entrance station to Olympic National Park. I found a place in a rumbling line of vehicles, then kicked my bike along with the rest of the traffic inching its way toward the kiosk.

Eighty dollars later, I had a crisp new National Parks Pass in my wallet and was pedaling past thick-trunked Douglas Firs. The investment felt good, especially knowing the threat national parks throughout America face from the current president and others who follow his brand of thug-ignorance.

A vehicle stopped ahead of me so that passengers could click at a doe and her two fawns — the size of puppies with delicate white spots along their flanks. These park deer registered minimal concern about my bicycle or the other traffic along the road. I hoped no one had been feeding them, but the world is rich in well-meaning fools.

The lush understory from the lower elevations dropped away to thinner pine forest, with long views across the valley to Blue Mountain and the snow covered face of the Obstruction Point ridge. Day-trippers wandered from their cars to get in front of the views.

“You must be a glutton for punishment,” one woman called after me as I chugged by with my heavy pack.

“I’m loving it out here,” I called back.

Fifteen miles and 4,000 feet after I left my doorstep, I pulled my bicycle up to the trailhead for the Switchback Trail. I immediately peeled out of my soaked shirt and replaced it. A couple of peanut butter banana wraps were the calories I needed before the hike. Water gushed down the mountain valley, melting off the thick patches of snow higher up the way. A guy plodded down the trail with a pair of skis on his back. A minute later, his daughters caught up with him, also with skis.

“How was it out there?” I asked.

It was skiing for the sake of novelty at this point, the man admitted. They had found mushy snow that tended to cave in near rock outcrops. The biggest worry was the fog, which was still wrapped around the mountains higher up. There were no regrets about getting up there though.

The beginning of the Switchback Trail was a muddy line zigging up between stands of Alaska yellow cedar and mountain meadow. Tiny alpine flowers were coming into bloom. Groups of black-tailed deer meandered lazily through their forage, with velvet on their antlers.

I encountered snow gradually, then all at once. A few patches over the trail, became large swaths where other hikers had kicked steps in for traction. No need for me to get the crampons out yet. I did use an ice axe to cut up a couple of switchbacks on the snow.

Typically, cutting switchbacks is a hiking sin, because it tramps out vegetation and can cause erosion. In this case, the snow absorbed the impact of my waffle stomping feet and I could proceed guiltless.

Still, the axe and crampons proved to be overkill for the expedition, where the majority of the climb was snow free.

By the time I reached the crest of Klahhane Ridge, the clouds had closed in thoroughly. This was my turnaround goal, Climbing to 6,000 feet from my home at 300 feet above sea level wasn’t such a bad day. Yet, I knew I could go further. Last year, I had taken a little used side trail up to one of the peaks of Mount Angeles. The tallest peak (which I’d also climbed last year) would be out of reach from this approach, but I would still be at almost the same height of 6,400.

The ridge divided the mostly snow-free area where I hiked, from an entirely different world on the north face. Here, in the shadows, I could peer over a 45 degree slope, where a chest-deep slab of winter snow held onto the rock. Peering down, the white snow blended seamless into the nothingness of the cloud layers. It was impossible to tell where one ended and the other began. The depthless white concealed danger as well as or better than darkness would. I understood why the skiers had been freaked out.

Still…what a ride it would be. All I had to do is hop over the edge, and start sliding on my butt. I’d gather speed — tremendous speed — as I flew into that great white unknown with the ice axe as my only brake. It was a thought that was as terrifying as it was appealing. I thought of Herman Melville who wrote a whole chapter in Moby Dick regarding the terror of white:

“…there yet lurks an elusive something in the innermost idea of this hue, which strikes more of panic to the soul than that redness which affrights in blood.”

The rock scree on the south side of the mountain was enough excitement for the blood right then. The slope looked like a cake turned on its side, with various shales, sandstones and basalts that were bastard children of volcanism and ocean floor upheaval. The rock was pulverized into bits and pieces. I kicked my boots in for purchase in pencil shards of shale.

The basalt was more solid, but still dicey. I test wiggled every hand hold before I put weight on it. Often I would find a toaster-sized rock, just waiting to tumble down slope. When I had the chance, I used my axe to “dry tool” out holds in the rock above me. There were even a couple of snow slopes, that I used the axe for, though I didn’t bother putting the crampons on. Carrying them up 6,000 feet of mountain was just my way of making sure I got the proper dose of exercise that day.

Eventually, the rock got more technical — as in technically, it was class IV climbing if that sounds impressive. I ditched the backpack, and scrambled my way up the last section to a lookout slab.

The clouds hid plenty, but I also saw a good amount of the June snow slopes to my north. The concealing nature of the fog made the jagged landscape more mysterious and menacing. I grinned in the wind for a couple minutes, then started down.

Descending the scree was predictably unpleasant. I placed little trust in any one footfall. Still, I got a little fun out of glissading down a couple snow slopes. I got a little too ebullient on one of these jaunts, and missed my chance to sink my axe in before the snow went out. The result was a bit like coming to the end of a waterslide to find that someone had replaced the pool with a gravel pit.

I emerged slightly battered and slightly humbled, to hike the rest of the way down the Switchback Trail (and glissade a few more snow slopes.) Though I had hauled heavy snow pants up this far, I didn’t bother putting them on. Instead, I worked on a new glissade technique, sliding backwards on my hands and feet with the axe twisted sideways. When it was time to hit the brakes, I turned the axe into the snow. The method worked OK, for the short sections that I had to deal with, though my hands were thoroughly chilled in their thin gloves.

Near the bottom of the trail, I took a moment to sit on a boulder, while clouds parted and mountains strobed in and out of the early evening light. I let myself breathe in satisfaction. These are moments that reaffirm that adventures, even day trips, have unfathomable worth to me. More and more, I have begun to believe in the Doorstep Adventure and I want to take more of them. If I cannot be in the places I love most, without putting money in the pockets of the people that destroy them, perhaps I don’t deserve to be there.

And it is important to find an equal measure of joy to the hardship that comes with getting into wild places without an automobile. Otherwise, why the hell did you bother coming out?

If you drive up to Hurricane Ridge and have a crappy time, you wasted a couple hours and a few dollars’ worth of gas. No biggie. Hey, let’s catch a movie sequel at the theater.

If you bike, hike or run from sea level, you better enjoy yourself out there, or else you just squandered a day’s worth of time and effort. So you have a good time.

The bike ride up had been fun for sure. The ride down was a complete blast: 14 miles of (almost) unadulterated descent. I leaned my way past curves and through mountain tunnels, white knuckling it with fingers on the brakes. I used the brakes as little as possible.

April 11, 2017April 11, 2017

A Doorstep Adventure for Bike and Snowshoes

Bicycle

As I wheeled my road bike out onto the street to start my doorstep adventure, I could still see margins of frost on the north face of the neighbor’s roof. Soon the frost would retreat as the sun continued its climb. Higher up, fields of bright white snow filled the bowls and couloirs of Klahanne Ridge. It would stay white up there a while longer.

Yet, the expanse of frozen waste and toothy crags could be mistaken for mere background decoration to the fresh green day that was unfolding in Port Angeles — a glory of spring warmth complete with chirping birds, blossoming cherry trees fresh cut lawns, and the earthy smell of living organisms crawling out of winter sleep.

The disparate scenes were separated by several miles and a couple thousand feet of elevation. Today’s adventure was about closing that gap.

By biking, then hiking and finally snowshoeing up the ridge, I would feel the challenge of the mountains while taking the chance to connect with their snowy realm.

There was a mighty pack on my shoulders, flanked by powder snowshoes and a trekking pole/ice axe. It didn’t take long for that weight to feel uncomfortable on my spine. In the best case scenario, I imagined that I would be able to traipse across 6,000-foot Klahhane Ridge itself. I had ran up there from Port Angeles while training for my ultra marathon last summer. With deep snow in the equation however, the task wouldn’t be so simple. Avalanche forecasts called for elevated risk of slides, especially above tree line. I remembered encountering harsh slopes on my summer runs, which could be hazard zones. If nothing else, I knew I could travel to 5,000 feet or so and get amazing views.

I biked out of the neighborhood past the National Park Headquarters and onto Hurricane Ridge Road. There would be five miles of uphill biking to the Heather Park Trailhead at 1,800 feet.

I ground through the miles, weeping for my aching back. Cars swept up and down easily past me. Why do I have to make everything so hard?

Sometimes I brought my head up to appreciate the endless pavement view in front of me. Mostly I watched the little twigs and bits of gravel creep by my tires. There was progress, at least in the small scale.

Shoes

I made it to the trailhead parking lot by 10:20 a.m., and locked my bike against a sapling.

Other hikers were loading and unloading themselves into vehicles. Most of them, I guessed, were going up the more popular Lake Angeles Trail.

Still, I was in no mood to get caught up in another group of walkers. I was loaded too heavily to run, but managed an aggressive walk up the smooth grade of dead pine needles. At this elevation, the evergreen salal and Oregon grape shrubs grew in abundance. Big leaf maples with mossy limbs still found niches between western red cedar and the Douglass fir. After a few switchbacks, the maples would fall behind and the scrub would disappear.

An hour of climbing switchbacks brought me to the first dabs of icy snow up in the trees. They fell in a barrage of hard little pellets as the sun loosened their grasp upon the branches. Within a hundred yards, a hard-crusted, slippery snow firmed over the trail, dusted with a fine layer of powder. Hikers who had gone before had already worn some indents into the crust which were useful to prevent sliding. I thought of my snowshoes, but decided to wait until I encountered snow that I might sink into.

The more I climbed, the trickier travel on the crust became. The trail traversed the mountainside, but not enough people had been through to notch it out. The result: My feet constantly slid out to the left. Snowy branches above the trail waited for me to brush against them so they could dump their payload down my neck.

I could have protected myself by putting my rain jacket on. Some gaiters for my legs would have been nice too. I also wanted to eat lunch. Still, I knew the transition would take time and I didn’t want to stop for all of that, only to have to stop again and take my snowshoes out — or peel a layer off because I was sweating. I wanted to be in the place where I could do all those things, and I wanted it to be in the warm sun.

There had been one lookout that I had been saving up for. Yet, when I passed it, I saw that it was shaded, and that clouds had moved in below to rob me of the view I’d wanted. I kept going until I found a random patch of sun in the trail where I threw my pack off.

Sun or no sun, the cold found me immediately. The rain jacket and parka I threw on were little help to my cooling metabolic furnace. My hands immediately became dumb blocks of frozen meat. Still, I took my mini show shovel out to dig a small indentation in the slope where I could put a sitting pad.

Lunch included some bread heels and hummus, along with a not-too-bad vegan banana brownie I’d made for myself the other day.

Having tossed fuel back into the furnace, it was time to winterize myself. I had decided to go light on my feet, and was only wearing running shoes — not designed to withstand cold, wet snow. But I would make them honorary winter boots. I put plastic bags around my socks to keep water out, then strapped my gaiters on for reinforcement at the ankles. I brought out my ice axe/pole for additional support on the tricky terrain. Finally, I got my snowshoes on and hefted up my pack.

These relatively straightforward tasks were made far more onerous by numb hands that I had to rewarm with body heat several times in the course of my work. I cursed and struggled several minutes trying to get them into warm mittens, pulling with my teeth.

Forty-five minutes had passed between when I stopped for my break and when I started back up the trail.

Snowshoes

Putting snowshoes on was no magic bullet for making the slippery crust terrain more navigable.

I still would slide violently to the left sometimes on the thin powder layer. The spikes on the snowshoes worked best if I were going straight up or down, but the rounded edges afforded little help on the tilt-a-trail. A pair of smaller mountaineering shoes may have been a better ticket.

Having the pole/axe in my hand, did help here and there for certain maneuvers.

I saw the last section of footprints end in a series of postholes. Then I was the one making tracks. Several times I walked sideways because the snowshoes engaged pretty well that way. The constant sliding was jarring though, and I was getting frustrated.

Now and then I would walk straight up the hill off the trail and then cut back over along the edge of a tree well, where the snow was slightly easier to navigate.

During one of these maneuvers, I realized that I’d lost sight of the trail. I half-heartedly searched for it and realized that I didn’t particularly care. I had my tracks to follow and it wasn’t going to snow anytime soon. My slow progress meant that there was no way I was going to make Klahhane Ridge. There was an adjacent, shorter ridge below First Top, a 5,500 foot peak that I could reach by hiking straight up. Seeing that the snowshoes actually did well climbing straight uphill, I decided that this was a course worth pursuing.

There were several helpful cuts in the trees that I could take. As the going got steeper, I found myself swing kicking my snowshoes into the slope for traction, and sometimes climbing over crust ledges. These would take a while because my feet would routinely slide out under the substrate and I might have to kick in several times to get a real foothold. A lot of the sunny areas included crumbly corn snow that gave out easily. The axe would slide right through it without grabbing anything, so I would slam my hands in and pull myself up. I grabbed tree branches when available.

Just when I was beginning to feel like a grubbing animal, a break in the clouds revealed the Dungeness Spit, which jabs five miles out into the Strait. Meanwhile, Klahanne Ridge loomed big as ever behind me. Enormous snow bowls rose up between blades of rock. White wisps of cloud curled off the ridge, while much darker clouds lurked behind — malevolent and full of power.

So much snow everywhere, I thought. If I flew for 50 miles south above the Olympics, no doubt I would see more snow than bare ground. It made me think of my home where I had started and how springtime with its flowers and cut lawns only really existed on a thin strip above the water. These mountains felt more like the true character of the peninsula.

A recent slide had left a run of broken cheddar snow to my left. The slide was shallow, but ran for about a 75 feet down the snowfield, a reminder to stay alert. I chose to avoid a obvious climb up a steep, clear slope by staying in the protection of a downed tree, and then doing a weird, rock climbing/snowshoeing move to get to the top of another ledge.

The slope became more gradual, then I got to where I could see down the other side.

Mount Fitzhenry rose up beyond the Elwha River Valley. The tallest peaks I could see on Vancouver Island were below me, but were still high enough to hold snow. The top of First Top was maybe a quarter mile away, but only by going through a gnarly looking traverse. I decided that I was happy with the view.

Looking back down, I could see Freshwater Bay and Bachelor Rock where I had some fun times kayak surfing earlier this year. Bachelor Rock appeared disconnected to the mainland, so I ascertained it was high tide. And perhaps it was high time that I started heading back to Port Angeles. It was 3 p.m. and there was plenty of sun left, but I didn’t want to get cocky.

Ducking into the shelter of some rocks, I put my parka back on, and worked my snowpants on over my shoes (couldn’t have pulled this move if I’d been in boots.) I was glad for the extra layers, because I was sure to be colder on the way down. After one more look at my surroundings, I began the descent.

Glissade, Run, Ride

Having struggled to find footing on the way up, I had dreaded what the descent had in store for me. Sure enough, my snowshoes soon went out from under me.

As I sat with my butt on the snow, I realized that I was going to be just fine. I could slide down the mountain on my butt quickly and easily in a glissade. The snow pants, which I had thrown into my pack as an afterthought, were now going to be a saving grace. No way would I sit on the snow in thin wind pants up here.

My pole/axe, like the snow pants, was finally proving its worth. The pitches I was sliding down were quite steep. Yet, by holding the pole across my chest and digging the axe head into the crust I could moderate my speed.

Well, mostly.

I lost control a couple times and got swallowed in tree wells beneath Alaska yellow cedars. I kicked off the branches with my snowshoes, crawled away and got in place for another run.

Slide after slide, I ripped down the mountain. A big grin stretched across my face. I realized I was finally having some fun.

When I got back to the trail, I alternated between awkward snowshoe steps and crawling over the crust. If I fell, I just went with the momentum. I felt like a lurching bear, allowing myself to be not-quite in control. Further down, the snow became flatter and I started running.

In a couple places, I glissaded over some switchbacks, but the snow was getting dirtier and sharper as I went down. Melting snow felt like rain off the needles overhead. I snowshoed over crud snow and ice until I got to bare ground and took the shoes off.

I started running again. The pack was lighter now, and the downhill momentum made for a good push. I kept my knees slightly bent to protect them from trauma and put it all on my quadriceps.

The salal and Oregon grape reappeared. By the time I reached my bike, it had only been two hours since I had left the ridge.

There was a short flat section before the downhill descent. I swung into a highway pull out above Port Angeles, and looked northeast. The air was extraordinarily clear, affording me a view of the San Juan Islands and 10,000-foot Mount Baker. Even further north, I could see the white peaks of the mountains near Whistler, Canada.

It is worth mentioning that I tested my brakes before the final descent on Hurricane Ridge Road. It turned out the back back brake was loose. Resetting it was a simple matter. I just flicked a lever back into place. The lessons of last month’s wipeout are still with me, even if the cuts have faded.

I spun the pedals around so that my feet were on the rough sides, kicked off, and started down the road.

Twenty -five minutes later, I was back to my doorstep. The late day light played across the valleys of Klahanne Ridge where the snow still held rein. Those were mountains — not some pretty background decoration from the kitchen window.

As winter retreats up the slopes, I know I will have to spend more time up there.

March 15, 2017March 15, 2017

The Doorstep Deer Park Adventure: Mountain Biking and Skiing into The Olympic Mountains

Midnight.

A chirping chorus of Pacific tree frogs rose up out of the soggy canyon creek near my apartment. A fine rain misted down out of the dark sky as I went to wrangle my new mountain bike out from behind the building and start spinning down the dismal streets on the first part of a journey that would take me to the snow line and then continue on skies to over a mile above sea level.

Yes it was a fun business, this doorstep adventuring.

Throw out that easy luxury of driving the first 15 miles and 2,000 feet of elevation. Swap out the gasoline you would have burned for some blood sweat and tears. Work starts at 1:30 p.m. that afternoon. Make sure to be back with enough time to gulp down lunch and rinse off your grimy self into an approximation of presentability.

These are some of the challenges and compromises you’ll face when you get sick of oil companies profiting off of your desire to experience mountains and have adventure. Such challenges only increase when you are responsible enough to have a job.

If you are willing to accept the terms of an adventure under the above constraints, you too might find yourself doing very strange things that other people might have a hard time understanding. I’ve gotten better at ignoring weird looks while pedaling through town with skis on my back.

I had already taken one day off to do the journey, but when the day rolled around, I found myself sick as a dog and stayed home instead. I was unwilling to spend another vacation day, and decided it made sense to pull a night shift to reach my ultimate goal: a doorstep adventure from sea level to the top of 6,000-foot Blue Mountain in Olympic National Park, about 24 miles away.

My apartment is a couple hundred feet above the water. I flew down the empty streets at top speed, tire treads whirring on the slick pavement. The road lit up in pools of green from traffic lights and the deep halogen orange of the street lamps. The lights from Victoria, British Columbia lit up an angry blotch of clouds across the Strait to the north.

I left the roads for the Olympic Discovery Trail, a former railroad, now paved over on a route that follows the coast. Wind on my face peeled away some of the cobwebs of sleep deprivation. I turned the pedals over faster. There was the smell of seaweed and the gentle lap of waves from Port Angeles Harbor.

A couple miles went by and my mind went into the rhythm of the pedaling. I barely paid attention to the pale form lying across the path. Wait, something wasn’t right.

I squinted ahead and saw that the whole path was blocked. I hit the brakes. A giant birch tree had toppled down the mud cliff above the trail in a minor landslide. Several trunks lay in a shattered tangle, towering well over my head, and creating several yards’ worth of obstacles. Between the cliff on one side and the sea on the other, there was no way past except through. Finding a new route would have meant backtracking a couple of miles, which had no appeal. I got out and worked my bike over and under the trunks and through the branches.

The obstacles meant lost time, but I felt strong when I hit the pedals again. I wheeled over an old railroad trestle above Morse Creek, which ran strong from the rains and from the melting snows in the high peaks.

This was where the climb would begin. Though my temperature was comfortable, I peeled off all my layers and put my wind shell on over my bare skin. I gasped at the freezing, clammy sensation. The sudden cold was an incentive to bike hard.

I pumped my legs as the bike path climbed up a steep incline beside Highway 101 where an occasional car would whirr by. Then I turned beneath an overpass and pedaled past a movie theater parking lot onto Deer Park Road.

A Park Service sign flashed in my headlamp beam. It was 17 miles to the summit of Blue Mountain. The first section of that journey involved nine miles of road and 2,000 feet of climbing to get to the Olympic National Park entrance. I’d biked out a week earlier and stashed my skis and boots in the woods there. Hopefully, they’d still be in their place.

I climbed past suburban houses and farmland in the dark. One or two cars went past, briefly blinding me with their headlights, before proceeding on their lonely journeys. A shaggy pair of dogs howled at me and chased me along their fence.

Within a couple of miles, my headlamp picked up the ghost reflection of snow on the ground. My calves were starting to feel the burn from the climb, and I was saddle sore from the bike seat.

At four miles, the road narrowed and steepened. Houses gave way to massive-trunked Douglas fir and cedar trees. Large sections of pavement were snow-covered, making me grateful for the mountain bike’s tough tire treads and low gears.

Pedaling past a clear cut, I could look down to the distant lights of Port Angeles and across the Strait to Victoria. I was climbing out of the coastlands, into the mountain kingdom where there were no lights, where the road before me was one of the only indications that humans had travelled here at all.

Wooded slopes rose up on either side, with snowy mountain peaks laying to the south, their forbidding edifices barely discernible from the cloud cover.

It was just after 3 a.m. when I came to the metal gate delineating the National Park boundary. No cars could go beyond this point until the snow melt.

Back in the 1930s, there had been a ski area at the top of the road. Intrepid drivers could brave the switchbacks to get to the small ski area at the top, which used rope tows.

The resort closed a long time ago. Now the only ski area in the Olympic Mountains with groomed slopes is the Hurricane Ridge area, which is just across the valley.

The road was no longer a way to get to skiing. The road itself was for skiing.

The snow here was a couple inches deep. I tried pathetically to keep pedaling through it, but eventually, even the thick mountain bike tires faltered. I set the bike down in a gully and jogged another quarter mile to the bend in the road where I’d stashed my skis and boots.

I kicked around in the crusty snow behind a tree stump before I found the gear. I threw it out onto the road.

Next, I put on a fleece and parka. I had just climbed 2,000 feet, and knew that my core temperature would likely take a nose dive as soon as I stopped. I unscrewed my thermos for a few swigs of lukewarm coffee and gobbled horse-choking quantities of granola for energy. Thanks to Mom for sending your son the best homemade trail food anyone could ask for.

I stuck some climbing skins on the bottom of my skis, put on several pairs of socks so I would fit into my oversized telemark boots. Then, I had to mess with my bindings, which had a nasty habit of popping off the skis before I got the boots in. All the dressing, eating, and gear fussing cost me about 40 minutes. It was frustrating losing all this time, but I still felt like I had at least a 50-50 chance of getting to the top of Blue Mountain before I needed to turn around.

The lower elevation snow was icy, and the skis moved quickly over it. Some previous skiers had left tracks, which made progress even faster.

When I switched off my headlamp, I could still make out the vague imprints in the snow. The gathering green light in the sky hinted at the coming dawn.

Switchback after switchback, the birches and the salal shrubbery faded away and scraggly spruces began to take their place.

After an hour or so of climbing, I could see the whole of Blue Mountain in front of me. Evergreens darkened most of its slopes, but there was a crown of white along the top. A thin diagonal line below the summit marked the road before me and the miles yet to ski.

I focused on moving quickly by lifting my skis high and getting as much glide as possible along the skins.

Still, lifting the heavy-duty telemark boards with their plastic boots made me wistful for my lighter pair of backcountry nordic skis, which would have given me better slide and glide, and still had tough enough bindings to take on the moderate grade on the descent. Too bad I had toasted those bindings on a not-so-moderate descent once upon a time.

Eventually, the slope began to steepen. Dull morning light revealed the mountain kingdom all around, with the tall white fin of Klahhane Ridge rising up to the west, falling down to path of the Hurricane Ridge Road. Obstruction Peak and Gray Wolf Ridge rose out of the South. What a slog it had been to get to this point! Yet, that feeling of awe amidst the grand mountains felt all the more meaningful because of it.

Just as the snow began to deepen and become more powdery, the ski tracks I’d been using disappeared. The uphill climb had just gotten harder.

Despite the setback, I was proud to be the trailblazer and to have come the furthest. Who knew when the last person to come through here might have been?

It was getting close to my eight o’clock turn around time, but I decided I could afford another half hour. I came upon the Obstruction Point trailhead, along with a sign pointing to the Deer Park campground. When I skied into the campground, I saw the summit of Blue Mountain about a mile away and just over 500 feet overhead. I knew I had the energy to get there, but I didn’t have the time. Reaching the campground had put me at 5,400 feet starting from sea level, and that didn’t feel too bad.

I took a quick stop to peel the skins off and eat a couple vegan magic bars (also from Mom.) I layered up, and started down the slope.

The skis moved slowly at first, but there were a couple steeper sections that made me hoot and holler. I dropped into telemark stance once or twice so I could whip around a corner.

Though the slope got more gradual as I lost elevation, the snow became icier too, and I was able to start skate skiing with my boards, maintaining high speed and getting a good workout also.

I swung by my staging area from earlier to pick up the boots that I’d pedaled up in, then skied the rest of the way down to the mountain bike.

Here is where I got kind of stupid, and decided to ski the rest of the way down to the road with the boots and mountain bike in my arms. Mistake.

I didn’t realize that the pavement was less then an inch beneath the snow until I came to a very sudden stop. Of course I fell on my bike. Of course it landed gear-side down, just like toast always falls down on the jelly side.

My hands were now skinned nicely from my stupidity attack, but worse was the fact that the bike derailleur was rubbing into the spokes of the rear wheel. I gently attempted to bend it away, but it just flopped right back into place.

Now how the hell would I get to work on time?

A man in a truck went by to ask if I needed help. Quite possibly, I thought.

In fact, the truck might have been my last chance to get a lift out of there. Back home safe; doorstep adventure over.

I waved off the driver. I spent some time with the bike flipped over, figuring out what to do. I realized that I could get the derailleur off the spokes by staying in low gear. That was no problem, considering that the next nine miles would be downhill. The brakes were still working fine, and that was most important.

I loaded the skis on my pack along with my hiking boots. I kept the heavy telemark boots on my feet.

The ride down the hill went without incident, though I had to go slower than I’d wanted.

When I got back on the bike path, I messed with the gears some more and found a setting that allowed me to bike in a higher gear without ruining the spokes. All of the morning walkers on the bike path avoided my gaze, figuring that it was probably better not to make eye-contact with the bicycle lunatic with a massive backpack, plastic boots and skis. My watch told me there would be enough time to get home, shower off and get to work — barely.

The fallen tree was still waiting for me on the path.

This time, I looked for a path up the hillside on the other side, and kicked and crawled over the slippery mud, contorting myself to avoid catching the skis on obstacles. I slid through a patch of briars down to the pavement, and went back to take my bike through the same torturous obstacle course.

The whole process was impractical, dirty, and not what most people would define as fun. In short, it was the perfect way to end a doorstep adventure.

January 6, 2017January 6, 2017

A Doorstep Adventure From Port Angeles to the Hills

This is my first doorstep adventure post of the new year.

Starting in Port Angeles, I ran up to get some skis that I’d stashed up in the hills and climbed to the top of the foothills below the Olympic Mountains for a beautiful view and then a wild and wooly ride back down.

Since this was a doorstep adventure, I used no motors on my journey there and back again. Bringing the skis and boots up the day before was arguably the most harrowing part of the plan, wherein I pedaled an awkwardly weighted road bike over snow and ice.

This is also the first time I’ve tried adding video to my blog. The final product ain’t Herzog, but I already learned some stuff that I hope to try on the next go around. Setting up the camera and running back for it was actually kind of fun and added a new dimension to my time out.

I hope to add more video and definitely more doorstep adventure to the blog in the new year.

March 29, 2016

The Right Exposure: A tentless ski adventure in Bear Canyon

_MG_8769 — The author takes a break from the wind before skiing to the top of an 11,000-foot ridge.

South Fork

Somewhere at the entrance of the canyon, an unseen coyote was howling, barking, howling, barking.

I skied toward it slowly, picking my way between stands of willow and alder shrub that grew in the gray flatland of the South Fork drainage. It was just after noontime. Fast moving clouds flew across the sky, allowing the sun to warm the land one instant — before they snatched the light away again. The sharp peaks in the Zirkel range to my east alternately gleamed glorious bright in full illumination or brooded in shadow like a vision out of Transylvania.

I tried not to let the weather psych me out, but it struck a harmony with my own brooding malaise.

Bear Canyon, where the coyote continued howling outrage, lay to the south in a somewhat rounder stand of mountains. It was a U-shaped gap between two ridge lines, maybe a quarter-mile across at the mouth. I couldn’t see too far up the way, but I knew that I would camp somewhere inside those walls — without a tent.

I’d sleep in a snow-shelter and rise the next morning to climb onto the ridge below The Dome. This 11,900-foot mountain, with its sheer walls, was probably out of my league, but there was an un-named sister peak, just above 11,000 feet, that had mellower topo lines on the map. I could climb it on skis, maybe.

_MG_8732 — Skis and coyote tracks above the South Fork

If the absent tent left an uneasy weight in my mind, I hoped the lessened weight on my back would make up for it. The pack was heavy enough with its winter sleeping bag, extra clothes, food, fuel, tarp and other miscellaneous and sundry camping items.

The abandoned tent gave me room to move a bit quicker and with less back strain (though plenty of that would come later.) There was also more responsibility when it came to setting up camp. I’m always relieved when I know I can snap a shelter together out of poles and nylon fabric in minutes. Building from nature required me to channel whatever MacGyver skills I might have. I knew that the shelter would take time, and I might make mistakes along the way. I’d have to pay attention to the elements, to work with and not in spite of them.

Not that the elements had any trouble finding challenges for me.

There was the river, for one.

I had been able to cross a couple of streams earlier in the trip by skiing over snow bridges. The South Fork offered no such convenience, just a channel of open water between me and Bear Canyon that I would have to get across somehow.

The only solution, I could see (other than taking off skis and boots and wading through barefoot) was a tree that had fallen across the current and had a layer of snow on top.

Fresh canine tracks had crossed here. The coyote was still howling outrage from somewhere in the trees, but I never saw it.

If I went too far off center, my skis would likely break the snow and drop me in the water. I set the skis at a slight angle against the log and slowly began to cross where the coyote had gone, obliterating its tracks with my own.

I reached the other side unscathed and continued toward the base of the canyon. This was north-facing territory, and thus, dominated by pines, spruce and fir. The canyon walls were scarcely visible through the thick boughs.

I stopped to eat some vegan pizza, then put the skins back on and started climbing through the forest.

The winding climb

The clouds hid the sun again, and I found myself looking at the sameness of the trees, feeling less than inspired.

I knew that this trip had me checking off a box before the end of the season. My head wasn’t entirely in the game; it was worrying about things like career path, the descent into adulthood, my need to put down roots and build more long-term relationships with places and people. There would be laundry to do when I got back, and I would be that much further behind in filling out paperwork, making plans.

Now, I incriminated myself. How unworthy it was to be in a wild place and stand there, uninspired. Hell, real suffering hadn’t even started yet.

I’d managed to ditch five pounds of tent, but still carried several tons worth of worldly bullshit into the mountains with me. But what was I supposed to do, just cut it all loose? Pretend that the real responsibilities and questions of the world had no right to exist because, “Oooh, the mountains are so beautiful!”?

I admit that escapism is one reason why I choose to go on adventures — it’s nice to stop worrying about things because the mountains are beautiful. But nature isn’t there just to be eye candy or to plaster us with child-like wonder. It is not separate from the world we live in every day, but permeates every inch of it, from the air we breathe to the bacteria in our guts and the primal hardware that governs our wants and needs. Human nature.

The real challenge is to see sameness between that moose browsing the willows and you, online shopping; between the chittering birds and the guys shouting at each other outside a bar on Friday night.

Natural instinct is one of the reasons why many of us find hiking and camping unappealing. We are designed not to enjoy cold, exposure, vulnerability. This is in conflict with the fact that we are also designed to crave the feeling of accomplishment that comes with summiting a mountain or traveling miles of backcountry.

Walls limit the scope of our experience, whether we put them between ourselves and nature or between ourselves and other people. Taking them down also means greater risks.

Lacking a tent gave me the opportunity to have a beautiful walls-free communion with the natural world outside that night, though this came with the slight downside that the wind was picking up and it was probably going to snow. Too much exposure would get me a nice case of hypothermia.

I’d limit the exposure with a sleeping bag, tarp, and whatever I could build out of the resources I’d have in the canyon.

The more I climbed, the more dead trees I saw, a legacy of the Rocky Mountains’ pine beetle scourge. Worse, many of the trees had toppled in a recent windstorm. I found myself weaving around, doubling or tripping any straight-line distance between two points. The trees made hill climbing a special pain in the ass, because they got in the way of diagonal traverses.

My priorities were to get shelter, water and a cook fire set up before darkness fell. Experience has taught me that it usually takes longer to do these things than I think. At around 3:15, I started the real-estate hunt.

I stopped at a couple of pines to strip away some dead red boughs (which seem to be more difficult to find at higher elevations) as fire starter. I strapped the lot of them to my pack as a home-warming present to myself.

But were there any places I wanted to settle down in this neighborhood?

Certainly, much of the west side was a no-go. I saw two places where small avalanches had left swaths of snow rubble on the bare slope. Falling snow was easy enough to avoid, but falling trees were another matter.

Almost all the trees in this part of the canyon were dead. I saw the burn marks around the trunks. I recalled that the mountains to the west of me were part of “Burn Ridge.” Yeah, there had been a burn here all right. Black skeletons of immolated pines creaked in the breeze.

The forecast called for high winds that night, leaving me none too comfortable with the idea of what thousands of pounds of falling tree trunk could do to a potential campsite. The thing was, I couldn’t find a single place outside the radius of one nasty widowmaker or another.

The sun was only a couple of degrees above the western wall. When it dropped, so would the temperature in the canyon, making camp construction that much more uncomfortable.

A time to build

The place where I threw my pack down was far from perfect as far as campsites go. There were still a couple of worrisome trees closer than what I liked. I positioned myself behind a massive burned trunk for protection.

The creek where I planned to get water was well buried in snow, requiring me to dig a five-foot hole before I could fill my cook pan with murky liquid.

_MG_8749 — Completed snow trench shelter with snow piled on the roof

O.K., there was one life-need taken care of. Now I needed a structure to protect me from the elements.

The several feet of snow beneath my feet made for a cheap and readily available construction material. Using a snow shovel, I was able to work my way though snow crust into the compact snow, piling the rubble up onto walls on either side of the pit. I ended up with a trench that was long enough to lie down in, and about four-feet deep. Looking up was like peering out of a fresh-dug grave.

Ideally, I’d be able to use the snow to build a roof above the trench, but this was not to be. Though the snow was compact and chunky, I found that it wasn’t quite consolidated enough to dig out decent-sized snow blocks (or the more frequent, irregular snow boogers.) I did have a reflective tarp that I could use instead.

I wanted support beams for this, so it was time to do some woodwork. Fortunately, I’d packed a miniature “chainsaw” — non-motorized, unless you count the operator. There’s a toothed chain with two nylon handles that I can work around a trunk or branch like a garrote, running it back and forth to make a cut. Almost as fast as a bow saw, it made quick work of a blackened tree post, that I cut into sections. The effort helped get me warm too.

I set two long logs in an X above my snow trench, then added reinforcing girders from lighter branches. I plunged two heavy log posts into the snow at either end of the trench so that I’d have a sturdy place to hitch the tarp.*

At first, I set the tarp lengthwise, but it didn’t look long enough. I realized that I wanted to set the tarp on a diagonal with the trench so that I could have the most coverage from head to toe. I also used pine boughs and snow boogers to expand my roof slightly.

A few remaining holes kept me busy trying to secure things. Then, I remembered a trick from a book on backcountry ski camping, and dug a mini snow-cave at the end of the trench. It was just enough room for my feet and knees, but it meant that I now had plenty of room for my head to fit beneath the tarp. If I’d thought of that earlier, it would have saved time and hassle.

I set my pad and sleeping bag inside, laying them over some fresh fir boughs. The wind didn’t blow inside my trench. It was plenty comfortable, even cozy, down there.

I’d just used the elements to MacGyver myself a shelter. It gave me more pride than any tent I’d pitched.

But now it was getting dim and I had to gather more firewood, because I’d used most of the sticks I’d gathered to build the roof above the snow trench.

I dug out a kitchen area near the entrance, set three stout logs down in the snow so I had a platform to build a fire. Though the wind was blowing above me, the pit protected me from most of it.

I arranged strips of dead pine bough above a cotton ball coated in Vaseline, used a flint and steel striker to start the fire.

The warmth was welcome; the choking smoke was not.

Soon, I had a hearty blaze that I used to cook a meal of pasta and red lentils. I dried my socks on sticks near the flames. I had to shift the pot several times so it wouldn’t collapse into the fire (note that it is much easier to do these things with a pot you can hang) and got rewarded with choking draughts of smoke into my lungs. By the time I slurped down the last of the lentils, my eyes were watering, my throat was raw and I had a dull headache.

According to my watch, it had taken about four hours from when I settled on my campsite to the time that I spooned the last dinner morsel into my mouth. Time to go to bed. I felt cold dots land on my forehead. The first snowflakes were whirling down from the dark sky.

Reluctant awakenings

The sleep was good, warm and dry. I woke up late to the sound of a mean wind roaring through the canyon. It was a world I was uninterested in joining. Too bad my bladder had other plans. I struggled out of my sleeping bag and trudged a couple feet outside my shelter in whirling snowflakes to take my morning pee.

Back within the shelter, I weighed my options. Though I had thought about climbing the mountain, the wind and flakes would make for unpleasant going, not to mention the fact that a whiteout could throw off navigation. Having spent one night in the canyon, I felt that I could call the trip a semi-success before heading home.

I made my breakfast on my camp stove inside. This was a wonderful luxury, considering I wouldn’t have risked using a stove inside a flammable nylon tent and that would have meant I’d have had to cook in the blowing snow.

The shelter had kept most of the heavy snowfall out, but I was glad that I had put my sleeping bag into a lightweight bivy sack to keep it dry. The outside of the bag was damp, but I’d had that on tenting trips too. and it was probably moisture from my own body.

Packing up was slow trying to corral various loose items within the cramped space. Pulling away the roof was the hardest part, because after that, I had no shelter to crawl back inside.

Must go up

Backpack fully loaded, I was ready to start the return journey. Of course, the snow chose that exact moment to relent so that I could feel like a total wimp. Because of this, I started skiing up-canyon instead of back. What the hell? Maybe I could go for an hour or so before turning back, just to look around.

Within five minutes, I came to the place where I should have camped. Live pine trees made a good wind break; a gap in the snow above the creek revealed clear running water.

There was no easy way down to the current without the risk of falling in, so I tied a bottle on a string and lowered it into the current off the end of a ski pole as if fishing for water.

_MG_8760 — Easier than fishing catfish I suppose

I put skins on the skis and started again. Soon the storm was back at full bore. The howling wind made me nervous about falling trees. I kept glancing over my shoulder, half-expecting to see a tree trunk flying down at me like a death angel.

Moving was slow and harder work then it had been skimming above the crust a day earlier. But the fresh snow was good news too, because it meant that there would be ample powder to carve on the decent.

The climb steepened, forcing me to make several switchbacks. Looking into the wind was coldest, but I preferred it to having the wind at my back, where I wouldn’t be able to see which way a falling tree was coming.

The western sky was a dark mass of snow and menace. I watched the darkness grow, felt the wind rise. Soon sharp flakes whipped all around and the world went over to fading grades of white. Maybe the top of that ridge was the place to turn around, I thought. By the time I got there, the snow had let up somewhat, though I could see another blast bearing down from the west.

Well exposed

There was another ridge higher up, and I decided that since I had come this far, I might as well go to the next one.

I skied toward an overlook above a 1,000-foot bowl. A lonely pillar of burnt pine gave me a place to put my back to the wind and chew a chocolate bar in relative shelter. Wind and flakes flew past me and over the gulf. The sharp columns and rock flutings of Big Agnes and the Zirkels stood jagged, half-visible on the other side. Snow streamers blew off the ridges like chimney smoke, leaving white imprints against the dark sky.

The storm showed a side of the mountains’ nature that’s harder to grasp on those perfect sunny days. The high peaks defied the winds ravaging their slopes, but also fed them, glorying in the chaos. It was a violent ritual, but nonetheless, necessary to affirm what the mountains were.

My stubborn ascent, the night in the snow trench, were another kind of affirmation ritual. I needed to prove that I was tough for evidence against the times when I was not tough. I needed to show that there was a place for me in these mountains, even when my instincts sought the routine and comforts of home life. Now, I saw that the blasted mountain range across the gulf, with its tough, unfeeling rock columns, was far more confident in its position than I could be.

I had sought exposure in nature as a means to enlighten myself. Now, the mountain ridge looked very exposed indeed. The light was treacherous.

More than once, I wandered into a snowbank, because I couldn’t distinguish it from the rest of the white snow. The mountains, practically lost in the white of whirling flakes, looked just like what happens when I set my camera’s shutter speed too slow. It was getting harder to tell things apart and set a course.

This overexposed world required a smaller aperture. I needed to close up, narrow my focus to the foreground elements and put one ski in front of the other.

I skied out from behind the tree trunk, intending to turn around. Instead, I found myself skiing along the ridge, then continuing up toward the unseen summit. Switchback after switchback, I climbed furiously.

2 p.m. was my hard turn around time. Get to the top of this damn thing, I thought. It would remain to be seen if there would be time to ski back home before evening. It was possible I might just hole up in a forest service outhouse for the night.

Finally, I topped out on a broad ridge, where I would have to go down before I went back up again. The dark bulk of The Dome rose out of the veils of snow. Forbidding rock faces frowned down at the land below. Even if there were time, it didn’t look like anything I wanted to try without technical equipment and more experience.

I had, however, climbed the topo lines to the unnamed black dot on the map that I had set out for. The whole trip had built up toward a couple of brief blasted visions of distant peaks. I could weigh whether I’d learned anything later. It was time to go back.

I peeled the skins off the ski bottoms and pointed the boards downhill.

The fresh snow was great for skiing. I weaved through the burned trees with a series of juicy telemark turns, covering distances that had taken me 20 minutes worth of climbing in two minutes. The wind had mostly obliterated my old tracks, so I navigated by going downhill and to the northwest, checking my compass periodically. The snow kicked up and washed out my view of mountains or any other landmarks I could have used to navigate.

At one ridge, I found myself looking down a gulf to my right and to my left, unsure which was the one I’d come up from because I didn’t know where I was standing.

By dumb luck, I saw a ghost imprint of my old tracks going toward the western valley and went that way.

I switched from bold telemark turns to slower, zigging kick turns as the terrain steepened. Wind had shaped the powder into unpredictable formations. One moment I’d be crawling through shin-deep snow, the next, I could be rocketing over bare crust. It was impossible to know what the snow ahead was like until I was already skiing over it.

As I went deeper into the canyon, the wind started to relent.

I noticed a familiar clearing, then saw the place where I had refilled my water bottles in the stream when I’d set out that morning.

I filled them once more. There were hours of skiing left before I got back home over tricky terrain and uneven snowmobile trails. It was a relief to know where I stood.

_MG_8774 — A near whiteout on the high ridge

*(Footnote regarding shelter construction)
I probably reinforced the tarp more than I needed to. Because I left it flat, that meant that I needed to bring more lumber than if I had built a pitched roof, which could have shed snow weight via gravity. One downside to the alternative method was that it would require me to settle for a smaller roof. The fact that I weighted the tarp made it less susceptible to the vagaries of wind.

March 7, 2016

My Farwell Mountain Ski

On crust and on slush

“To hell with it,” I announced, clicking out of my ski bindings so that I could kick up the icy slope in boots.

I had just started the trip, but was already fed up with the skis chittering every which way and the strain of setting the edges into snow crust so that they didn’t slip. The time and energy it took to fight the crust was taking away from the effort I’d need to spend in the miles ahead. So why not try to turn that crust to my advantage by just walking up it?

As soon as I put my boots on the snow, I found that I could get uphill easily. The crust held me above the snow as I beat a straight line up the ridge, skis cradled in my arms.

It’s a good thing I’m not a purist about staying in the bindings. Taking on the hill this way was much faster — even faster than when I was skiing with climbing skins.

The changing nature of the snow beneath my feet was a key player in deciding whether my all-day trip from doorstep (7,800 feet) to the top of Farwell Mountain (10,800 feet and about five miles of skiing distant) would be success or failure. Now that we were getting warm weather, the south slopes of the mountains were getting mushy beneath the afternoon sun, only to become tilted ice rinks at night when the cold temperatures refroze the snow. With the new day, the sun would work its magic again, and much like a tub of ice cream left outside the freezer, the crust would soften up, sometimes to the point of gloppification, whereupon it would stick to the ski bottoms.

Within this cycle was a theoretical sweet spot, a time when the snow would have perfect softness for skiing down, not too hard, not sticky mush. I hoped the time would be right when I started back down the mountain and that the snow would yield to the ski edges like ice cream to a spoon. If the window opened for a few hours in the afternoon, I’d have one chance to carve through softened snow without accelerating to terrifying speeds. The window would start to close even before the sun set. Once the sun was low enough in the sky, it would lose the power to hold back the cold below, and the cold would turn the surface back to ice.

Ski boots can walk too

_MG_8518 — The icy snow was very hard to carve in the morning

I gave myself a hard turn-around time: 2 p.m. If I didn’t start heading back by then, I figured, I would likely end up skiing on ice slopes.

I chastised myself for taking a 7:30 breakfast and not hitting the trail until 8. Probably, I wasn’t going to make it. The last time I’d tried a day trip to Farwell, I had started half an hour earlier and had been somewhere on the summit ridge when 2 p.m. rolled around, but it wasn’t the top.

Of course, white-out conditions had complicated navigation on that trip. The falling powder also made me slower going uphill, but it had also given me fairly good control going back down.

Now I puffed to the top of the ridge where I promptly fell through the crust to my knees.

I tried jogging a couple more steps and fell through a couple more times.

OK, time to put skis back on.

I skimmed up a more mild incline, along the rim of the col where I had my igloo, still standing nearly two months after I finished building it. The summit of Big Agnes glimmered in the far distance. Until we meet again, my friend.

_MG_8313 — Picture on summit ridge from my previous trip to Farwell

A heavy windstorm earlier in the month had knocked down several of the beetle-killed lodgepole pines, creating new obstacles for me to navigate. Detouring past one of these deadfalls took me down a wimpy slope that was still so icy that I almost fell face first. At a second ridge, I decided to try climbing in my boots again. Sure enough, the slope was rock-solid and easy to climb without post-holing. The extra-tilt had probably made the difference, since it meant that the winter sun would hit the snow at a right angle, creating more melt followed by more ice.

When I got to the top of this ridge, I put the skis back on and started going hard, following the ghost of my old tracks for a while, then cutting further west to try a new (I hoped) more gradual climb up the mountain.

I left my climbing skins on as I followed the ridge, to a third uphill section. This time, I climbed the hill in my skis. I could already feel the snow softening. It was getting warm out. When I got to a flat section, I went ahead and peeled off the skins along with a light jacket I’d been wearing.

Nordic rhythm

The backcountry Nordic skis on my feet were light and narrow enough so that I could maintain a decent stride and glide to eat up distance quickly. While not as light and delicate as track skis meant exclusively for groomed trail. These are not the skis most people would use on a mountain like Farwell. I knew good and well that if I would be hard-pressed to make them turn if I took them down an aggressive pitch.

Moreover, their free-heel bindings, connecting them to the boot via a single metal bar, are far more fragile than the clunky Tranformer-esque downhill ski boots and bindings designed to carve the gnar. The soft boots would not withstand the kind of torsion forces that a recreational downhill skier would put in on a lift-operated hill. There was higher risk of broken ski or broken skier.

With that in mind, a typical backcountry skier going out in short, heavy boards and monstro boots would have eaten my snow dust trying to catch me on the flats.

Daring downhill descents may get more GoPro coverage, but there is an equally worthy, if more subtle challenge for those who want to cover ground in cross country skis with efficiency and body awareness.

I concentrated on kicking hard off the back ski, letting it float into the air behind me, then bringing it back down to the snow tip to tail.The goal was to balance on one moving ski at a time— maximum thrust, minimum friction, minimum superfluous body movement. If I did well, my reward was a steady whooosh-click with poles and skis. I changed the rhythm to match the terrain, but there was always rhythm. If I got off kilter for a moment, or lost concentration, I felt my speed suffer and the rhythm disappear. It was jarring, like playing music off a scratched disk.

_MG_8539 — Aspens and sky on Farwell’s south slope

I hit pause as I came out of the trees to look at the mountain in my path. Farwell rose to the north, a 2,000-foot wall of snow, trees and rock. A massive bowl, ripe with avalanche potential lay dead center. On my earlier trip, I’d skinned up the trees on the east side of the bowl until the going had gotten steep enough for me to switch to snowshoes for the final push to the summit ridge. Here, I’d met fierce winds and whipping snow. Half an hour of snow globe climbing brought me to a rock outcrop, where I couldn’t see anything higher than I was (though I couldn’t really see more than 200 yards at this point.) I decided that though this probably wasn’t the summit, it was a great place to turn around.

Now, looking at the mountain again, I was convinced that my original plan, to go to the west of the bowl was the best way. This route would take me up through a steep aspen forest and to a ridge where I could (hopefully) skin up to the summit and then ski back down the same way. It was longer than my failed route, but I figured that I could make better time if I stayed in my skis. I didn’t even bring snowshoes this time.

Before I started climbing, I had to ski downhill into a basin. The slope here was north-facing, so it had powder instead of crust, but it was still fast snow.

I carved out a couple of telemark turns through a grove of pine saplings, and then realized that I was heading for a sunken log at high speed. I sailed over, picking up air, before landing in a lunge in a small drainage gully.

I pumped my fist in the air.

“Whooo! That’s what I’m talking about!” I shouted to the trees and squirrels.

Who knew if I would make the top today? I was glad I’d come out.

Skinning Farwell

_MG_8532 — Author taking a quick break to record what he looks like in new shades

Back on crusty snow in the drainage, I resumed skiing up a slight incline, following some fox tracks. The sky was deep blue, cut with pearl-white aspen boughs. A deep ravine loomed up in my path. Instead of losing elevation by going down it, I stayed patient and followed it uphill to the east until it receded into the mountain. I took a break to eat and drink, then put skins on my skis. I’d brought two pairs for the occasion so that I could cover almost the entire ski bottoms with the strips of synthetic hair. The hairs lie at an angle so that the ski slides going uphill, but resist sliding backward. This friction, would allow me to power up steep pitches that would have been impossible otherwise.

Even with skins, the climb would take a lot from me. I began making switchbacks that required wobbly kick turns with the skis. Soon my heart was pounding and a sweat zone was spreading between my pack and spine.

How easy to forget — even when there is a direct way up, even when there are no boulders to scale or avalanche zones to bisect — climbing the side of a mountain is hard.

Switchback after switchback, I watched the land drop away, revealing the Pearl Lake Reservoir, Hole In The Wall Canyon and the Colton Creek drainage. The tooth of Hahns Peak rose to the west. It had been too long since I’d climbed a real mountain. It is a fine way to take a new view of the world. Part of climbing’s thrill, is that it gives you the opportunity to imagine that you have transcended the paltry concerns of the world below. This isn’t true, but the perspective is refreshing and leaves the door open for other subversive thoughts. When I look out from high, it reminds me what a vast space we live in, and how much life and possibility exist to fill it.

_MG_8556 — Alpine scenery like this will keep me climbing mountains

The view up the mountain was less encouraging. The ridge I was aiming for seemed to get further back the more I climbed. I bargained with myself that it might be easier to take a more middle path up the mountain, closer to the bowl, even though this might mean steeper terrain, possibly greater avalanche risk (though unlikely in the old, compacted snow.)

The aspens thinned as I climbed, then gave way to dispersed evergreen groves. I noticed long stretches running down the slope, where nothing grew. That was where the avalanches had been, I thought, where they could happen again. A slip there on the hard-pan snow could mean a long, ugly fall. I did my best to avoid these places.

As in my earlier hike up Big Agnes, I stayed in trees as much as possible, or lined myself up beneath boulders as I climbed. Still, there were moments where I would ski out above one of these big empty corridors, anxiety welling in my gut, before I got back into the cover of some pines.

I found one area of disturbed snow, that I thought for sure had been the site of a slide. I looked closer and realized that I was looking at snowmobile tracks. The fact that noisy engines had barreled straight up the treeless pitch without triggering anything reassured me that the snow was stable, though I also wondered if the drivers had even considered the risk.

I got back into the cover of some pines, tackling trickier and tricker switchbacks with the skis. The snow up here had hardly softened a whit in the full sun, ski edges could barely scratch them.

Nearing the top of the ridge, I took the skis off again and started kicking up the slope.

_MG_8566 — A nice picnic spot that I found

Within a quarter mile, I was on the ridge, which was a quick ski away from the summit.

The exposure and the altitude gave the top of Farwell the grizzled alpine quality I love about mountain tops: gnarled trees, jagged boulders stripped bare by the elements. Hard winds had carved the snow into scale-like sastrugi, beautiful repeating shapes that were the music between the mountain and the wind — improvisational, yet rhythmic patterns riffing within some divine free jazz masterpiece.

Amidst this, stood an improbable wall of solar panels, antennae and a corrugated metal transmitter station, surrounded by snowmobile tracks. The panels, like the mountain face I had just climbed, were tilted at an extreme angle to maximize the sun’s input. Cell phone conversations and high definition television were no doubt passing through my body from the dish nearby. I wondered if there would be a place where I could eat lunch inside, or even grab a beer, but the lonely outpost offered no such accommodations.

_MG_8553 — View of mountains and snowmobile tracks on Farwell summit

Just as well. I skied over to a high ledge looking out over the valley I’d just climbed out of. The view was worth suffering a little wind. The stark plains of Wyoming lay to the north. I scanned east over the Zirkel Range, recognizing the snowfield that I’d taken (almost) to the top of Big Agnes. Was there any other way I could have climbed that mountain? None of the other routes I could see looked possible or free from serious avalanche risk and this made me feel a little better for not standing on the exact top of that mountain.

Going down slow, going down fast

_MG_8577 — This was the most badass line I carved on the trip. I was sliding down on my ass.

A more immediate concern was how I would get down off the mountain I was standing on now. It was about 12:45, well before my mandatory turnaround time. The hardpan snow that I had just climbed made me a little iffy about the ski down. If I went that way, I would take skis off and glissade (slide on my butt) over the steepest sections, then keep my skins on the skis so that I wouldn’t build up more momentum than I wanted.

If I took another tack, I could follow the summit ridge line east, and come down the way I’d gone on my last trip. If I could stay north of the ridge for a while, I would have a bit of powder to ski instead of hardpan. I scanned my surroundings for a while and double-checked my map, then decided that this was the way to go.

Leaving the skins on the skis for the descent felt awkward and jerky at times, but it did allow me to take on slopes that I wouldn’t have dared to try otherwise. Skiing in slo-mo, I cut bold lines down a small bowl, made a quick glissade down the steepest section, got back into my skis for a pretty fast set of turns through some trees.

The powder on the shadowed north face of the ridge was more enjoyable to ski than the ice snow and I felt good control in the skins. Unfortunately, the way back meant going south, and that meant I needed to take on the ice slopes at some point.

I followed the ridge through thick pine forest, then climbed back onto the south side where the aspens grew. Here, the snow had finally begun to soften. The pitch was still way too steep for me to ditch the skins in the skis that I had, so I contented myself with long traverses. In any case, I was making better time than I would if I were in snowshoes.

I swooped down to the top of a drainage and saw ghost tracks in the snow. A familiar-looking pine tree reminded me that this had been the exact spot where I had put my skis on when I’d been going down the mountain on my previous trip. This, I figured, was as good a place as any to ditch the skins and ski all out.

The crust was mostly melted now, which meant that I could carve, but I would still be moving above an icy layer, and moving fast — much faster than I had gone through the powder on the earlier trip.

I pointed the skis along the old tracks and started flying. Though I barely turned down the hill, it felt like I had rockets at the ends of my skis. I used the telemark position to absorb the shock of bumps, and to desperately turn into the hill to cut speed. I would come to a stop, adrenaline pumping, kick turn and fly down in the opposite direction.

I dropped into the drainage where the pitch began to get milder. I could see a couple of crisp turns in my old tracks and decided try and match them. Bad idea. I went ass over teakettle, landing hard. I felt a sharp pain in my hip and got up immediately before it could decide to be a serious injury. I was still miles from any help and it was a bad place to fuck up.

I started skiing again, more cautiously. I did get in a few turns I was proud of as the pitch mellowed. I also lost my balance a couple times. Finally, I spilled out at the base of a willow drainage at the base of the mountain.

There was a pine tree plantation to ski through, that afforded an impressive view of what I’d just climbed, the snow faces reflecting mid-afternoon sun.

I knew I hadn’t done anything too incredible in terms of skiing prowess, but the skis were a means to getting to the summit and getting back down. I was proud that I hadn’t felt the need to leave them on at all times. Nor was I ashamed that I had left the skins on the skis for the descent, because that had allowed me to use the light, narrow skis that minimized my approach time.

Now that I was heading back, I shed the downhill mentality and got back to thinking like a Nordic skier, searching for the rhythm that I needed to power over the flats. There would be the final set of ridges to come down before I got home and I wanted to get to them before the sun got low in the sky. I could feel the snow consolidate as the cold began to freeze the surface back to ice.

The window was closing. It looked like I’d make it through just in time.

February 1, 2016

The Snow Booger Hotel

_MG_8134 — Author at the entrance to his new home.

Going beyond the tent

Building shelter is one of those challenges that isn’t necessarily easy in the backcountry, but like starting a fire, gathering food or navigating off trail, it offers its own satisfaction.

We seek empty spaces as a way to commune with nature; what better communion than to sleep in a dwelling made from the elements of nature?

In the Routt Mountains in northern Colorado, the element I notice above all others is the several feet of snow on the ground, snow that an enterprising adventurer could stack, sculpt, or burrow into for warmth. The air trapped within creates insulating properties that my three-season tent doesn’t have. Plus, the snow is already there. I don’t have to haul it in on my back to make a home out of it — though a snow-shovel can be helpful.

So why have I bothered lugging my tent along when I go on a multi-day trip when I could build a better product out of snow? The fact that I can set the tent up in minutes rather than hours has something to do it. Then there is that fear that I could screw up at shelter building with no recourse except a night in the cold fury of the elements.

Therefore, when I decided to try my hand at igloo building, I chose to erect my first shelter up on a ridge, maybe a quarter mile away from the very solid, timber-built, central-heated structure where I actually sleep most nights. If I screwed up here, a warm bed would be just down the hill.

Champagne powder into snow boogers

_MG_8074 — Canoe paddle being used to quarry snow

I should make a note about what I’m talking about when I’m talking about igloo building.

When I tell locals that I’ve built an igloo in the woods, they will often ask if I have actually built a quinzee. In order to build this kind of structure, you build up a big mound of snow and dig it out. My dad and I built quinzees during some of Connecticut’s epic snow years.

To build an igloo, I planned to take blocks of snow and raise them up into a dome. Blocks of snow? This seemed impossible for this part of the Rockies where the snow has the consistency of baby powder.

Snow is a malleable medium, however.

I stumbled upon a eureka moment on my trip to Big Agnes in early January. While digging a pit for my tent, I could shovel snow out in large chunks if I went over it in snowshoes first and left some time for it to set up. The chunks weren’t blocks per say; they were more like irregular snow boogers. Still, I started thinking that these boogers might make a viable building material.

If I could build a shelter with this stuff, it would be a cheap alternative to an Icebox, which is an igloo making device that a Colorado company makes. I had pondered buying one of these so that I could leave my tent behind on trips. That said, many reviews I read online reported that it still took four hours or so for them to put the igloo together. Craig Connally, author of “The Mountaineering Handbook,” says it only took him two hours to build a decent structure. Connally, advises mountaineers to eschew four-season tents when there’s snow on the ground, and get an Icebox instead. He argues that there will not only be a weight savings, but also a time savings.

“Remember,” Connally writes. “…the people who spent the night in their tent will have the pleasure of digging out the frozen anchors, attempting to dry the frost and condensation in the tent, and packing the frosty tent away with a little extra weight to carry.”

This endorsement had me close to buying an Icebox, but then I started thinking that I might be able to build an Igloo without one if I compressed the powder with my snowshoes.

A week after I got down from Big Agnes, I went on a shorter trip up the ridge behind my living quarters. I scouted out a horseshoe-shaped ledge in the hillside where the snow was deep and the firs grew tall. This place would be in the shade most of the time, meaning colder nights, but also a longer lifespan for any structure that I built.

I started tromping circles in the fresh powder, pressing it down toward the earth. After I had compressed it to the max, I took my snowshoes off and started packing the snow in boots alone. I left to grab lunch, then came up a few hours later.

Working with the snow shovel, I dug out beachball-sized snow boogers and arranged them into a horseshoe about six feet in diameter. I kept building until the walls were about belly high. Then it was time to go in for dinner. I stomped out more powder so that there would be more building material for the time I came back.

Putting it together

_MG_8088 — View of ceiling under construction

I came back about a week later with my canoe paddle.

I’d just hauled the kayak to the top of the ridge and planned a to go for a fun-filled descent later on. In the meantime, I tried using the paddle to stab out snow blocks.

It turns out that the flat blade was able to extract a much better product than the curved head of the snow shovel. Most of the blocks were still irregular; a snow saw, the kind used by actual arctic natives, no doubt would have been the best tool for the job.

I compensated for my goofy building blocks by mortaring gaps with broken chunks of snow and loose powder. Snow is awesome to build with when you consider that you can squash different pieces together and make it one whole. It forgives plenty of mistakes.

The part that made me nervous was leaning the walls together. I had visions of myself cursing over the collapsed walls. Due to my reluctance to lean the blocks, the igloo was becoming more cone-shaped than dome. My early plan had been to leave one gap in the walls so that I could walk inside in order to lean the top blocks together to create the ceiling — but this wasn’t working. The gap made the whole structure unstable. I had to close the ring, and dig my way in later so I could put the top pieces on.

When the walls got above shoulder height, I started scooping snow around the base, creating a step ladder from the powder so I could put the top blocks in. This fresh snow (I hoped) would also reinforce the walls for the big hole I was about to cut in the side.

I planned to dig under the walls as much as possible to avoid compromising the structure. There was maybe three feet of snow between the bottom block and the dirt. I started my burrow a couple feet away in the already-packed snow, making a mini-quinzee for the igloo foyer.

It took me about half an hour to stab my way through and excavate the rubble. I crawled through the tunnel to the cold blue sanctuary within. There was a manhole-sized gap in the ceiling — the last part of the job. I dug some boogers out of the hardpack beneath my feet and then I was closed in.

There was just enough room to stand, and I could lay flat with my feet jutting out into the entrance tunnel with room for a guest (but let’s not get ahead of ourselves here.)

The insulated walls created a stillness. It was calming to sit in the soft blue light coming in through the cracks between the slabs. It is that same calmness that follows a face-plant skiing. For one cold moment, you look down into that cold, still world beneath the snow, a place which is devoid of the noise and motion outside.

“I could stay here, a while” you think.

I spent some time filling in cracks with snow mortar. Then I went outside and broke a mess of branches off from a nearby fir tree. The flat needles made a perfect floor for my new dwelling.

I decided to leave the structure up one night to make sure it wouldn’t fall down for no good reason. Assuming this wouldn’t happen, I planned to spend the next night in my very own snow booger hotel.

Sleepover

Pale moonlight filtered through the snow clouds as I tromped my way along the pathway up the ridge. Cold flakes melted on my brow as I climbed. A hush on the land. No wind.

From the top, the far flung points of orange light from different houses in the valley looked like ships on a dark sea. A leather slap beat of cowboy boots on hardwood echoed from a barn dance below, but I was in no mood to fumble through a botched set of promenades and dos-i-dos.

The noise faded as I retreated through the pines — the dark deep realm that seduced Robert Frost one snowy evening.

My igloo entrance beckoned out of the from gray snow. I got on hands and knees to crawl through to the womb I’d built for myself.

The scent of the fir boughs lent their crisp scent to the still air. Within minutes, my body warmth boosted the temperature inside my dwelling. I blocked the entrance with my backpack, zipped into the sleeping bag.

I kept the snow shovel close to my head just in case I needed to dig myself out of a collapse.

As my eyes adjusted in the dark, I could see the gray outlines of the blocks I’d built for myself. The ghostly, non-uniform shapes made good dream food.

I slept deep.

The next morning, I checked the water bottle I’d left next to the sleeping bag. No ice whatsoever, though the weather service had predicted the temperature would be 17 degrees that night. An inch of powder had fallen outside. I took a sled ride down the ridge and got to work on time.

Some notes on snow building

_MG_8143 — Snow boogers stuck together, as seen from within the shelter

I call it a snow booger hotel. Others might call it a rubble hut. I call it an igloo sometimes, but I know that I didn’t build it with the same craft as a true igloo. I guestimate that I spent about eight hours building the thing but I wasted time with a few mistakes that I wouldn’t repeat on a second go round.

Could I use something like this on a real trip and leave a tent behind? I’d be willing to try as long as I had a backup tarp, no bad weather was moving in and I got to camp by noonish.

One mistake I made in this project was that I spent way more time packing snow more than I needed to at first. I’ve found that tromping over the snow with snowshoes a few times with the snowshoes and waiting 10 minutes is a viable way to get snow chunks. I’ve also been able to dig up juicy chunks out of the half-melted snow near fire pits. Areas of wind-blown snow could also work (similar to what the arctic people would use to build) because wind will shatter snowflakes and create a denser medium. Snow that’s also been in the sun would also work. When I was camping at 10,000 feet the snow was deep enough that some of the bottom layers were naturally chunking up, but the base isn’t quite deep enough to get those benefits at my current elevation.

I dug some OK chunks out of a groomed snowmobile trail as an experiment. Building a snow shelter this way will make some snowmobilers unhappy, but in a survival situation…

I also built this snow shelter much larger than I needed to for strict survival purposes. If I did build something out on the trail, I would build a lower ceiling to save time and allow more room for warmth to accumulate. The shelter did sag a bit after a couple days, probably because my dome was sloppy, but I reinforced it with more snow and it seems OK so far.

Digging under the wall as opposed to leaving a gap in it throughout the building process worked well for my purposes.

I’d like to try using my stove or a candle inside to see just how well that works to warm the whole structure. Another challenge would be to see how well I could compress the snow for block making if I were using skis instead of snowshoes.

As for whether I will buy an Icebox, there is no question, that the product makes a better looking product, and I could probably build an igloo faster if I had one. I’m going to save my money though.

Considering how much snow is lying around northern Colorado, it might be fastest just to build a snow cave or a quinzee in order to make a shelter in a pinch. I’d like to try both before the winter is out. I’ll let you know how it goes.

_MG_8142 — My view looking out the front entrance

January 25, 2016

Experiments in Snow Kayaking

Wipeout in a whiteout

The kayak barely moved at first. I had to wriggle back and forth to inch it forward on the snow ledge I’d created. I saw the chunks of crust break away as gravity grabbed hold of the bow. Then the boat tilted over and we started tearing down the gully.

White powder sprayed up into my face. I could barely see what was happening, only that I was moving very fast. My efforts to steer with the paddle hardly mattered; down was the only direction my boat was interested in going — and it was going that way faster and faster. I squinted ahead to the fast approaching tree stand, wondering how the hell I was going to thread my way through.

Something bumped beneath my hull. The world instantly flipped upside-down and went white. My head was buried in the snow.

The ride was over.

I flipped myself right-side up, observed that my boat was almost completely buried in powder and that my paddle had flung out several yards down slope from me. To retrieve it, I had to take my sprayskirt off and wade through waist-deep snow. I’d need that paddle to get the rest of the way down the hill.

In the traditional model, I would wait to go kayaking until the snowmelt.

The powder on the mountains here in Routt County will begin feeding the rivers in a couple of months. Rivulets beneath the crust will merge, feed into drainage gullies, streams and willow fens, down to the Elk River in the Colorado River system. From the Yampa, to the Green River and eventually the Grand Canyon, the melting white stuff will build standing waves and hydraulics for whitewater kayaks and rafts to play in.

But just because the snow hasn’t melted, doesn’t mean that I can’t kayak over it. All it takes is a steep enough hill and a lot of powder.

Climbing with a paddle

Getting a kayak to that steep hill is the first challenge. My system involves snowshoes, a backpack, carabiner, rope, and a canoe paddle. I set the ascender bars on the snowshoes and start wallowing up the deep powder with the rope tied to the bow, clipped to the carabiner on my backpack. The first run is always the hardest because I’m breaking trail and pulling my kayak uphill through powder. I lean forward like some hobbled supplicant, praying that the kayak won’t yank me off my feet.

In some ways, the canoe paddle in my hands works even better than the hiking poles I typically use with snowshoes. Paddling the powder on flat sections gives me a decent momentum boost from my upper body. The paddle also balances me. I can brace the flat of the blade against the snow, much as I would use a high brace to prevent a kayak from capsizing in waves. When the going gets steeper, I use the paddle more like an ice axe, sinking it deep into the snow above me and using it to pull myself up.

I often fall when the snow gives out from under me or my snowshoes lose their grip. Here, I can get back on my feet, pushing off the flat of the snow, like I’m doing an Eskimo roll.

The paddle can even dig out steps for me when I get to the steepest sections of the slope.

Going up the hill this way is one of the most physically grueling workouts I’ve ever done — a full body punishment system. My heart pounds like an express train when I finally get to the top of the ridge, maybe 150 feet above my start point. It’s a lot quicker on the way down.

Set up

The climb was over. Finally.

I wiped sweat out of my eyes and surveyed the run. It was a south slope and the sun had just come out. Hence, a delicate crust was already forming on the powder.

I pulled my sprayskirt out from my jacket where I had stashed it in an attempt to keep it warm and stretchy.

There is something reassuring about this sprayskirt, a solid piece of neoprene that has stood up against the fury of waves and rivers. This pricey, “serious” piece of gear, helped me feel that, yes, I did know what I was doing up here, looking down a 35-degree snow slope through an aspen glen.

I used the paddle to dig out a notch in the slope where I could set the kayak down.

Getting the sprayskirt attached around the cockpit was a chore in the cold, even after I’d stashed it in my jacket to keep warm. The skirt wasn’t strictly necessary to go down the hill, but I did like how it kept the powder out of my lap. And I had that psychic comfort of knowing I was using a piece of gear that had served me well on past trips.

It did feel a little weird being in a kayak without a life vest however.

The backpack on my shoulders was another thing that was a little different from my standard kayak trip. I’d already given up trying to tie my snowshoes to the kayak for the way down. It was easier to put them into the nylon loops at the sides of my pack and fasten them together with a cam strap.

I put a ski helmet on and sunglasses. I wrapped a mesh t-shirt around my head like a burka to deflect all the powder that was about to come flying up at my face.

I looked at the canoe paddle, a cheap wood thing I’d bought in Minnesota. Having already busted up a couple kayak paddles last year, I decided that I wasn’t ready to invest in quality piece of equipment only to smash it in while jackassing in the snow.

Making it work

The mantra for this run was “Lean that mother!”

Just as I had leaned kayaks on edge to turn them in whitewater or waves, I planned to use the same principles to make the boat work on the snow. Adrenaline had helped me forget this principle on my earlier runs and I had tried turning by using the paddle alone. It wasn’t enough.

With that in mind, I planned to lean far enough to put my whole body against the snow if need be.

I pushed off and the kayak began grinding downhill at a slow crawl. I leaned the boat way to the left and dug the paddle in on that side. Sure enough, the boat began to turn that way. The sound of crust breaking beneath the bow accelerated at a slow grind to a faster swoosh. Snow began flying up into my face. Now, I was moving at a skier’s speed. I leaned right toward a gap in the scrub oak and the boat responded in a neat arc.

I was carving!

The boat responded to the powder exactly the way it was designed to turn on the river, the same way a skier would cut graceful curves into the alpine slope. I’d stumbled into a unified theory between snow and water.

I shot through the gap in the shrub and the powder started flying up in my face. The view throuh my sunglasses became dim, then obscure. Then I could see only see white. My hands clutched the paddle, unwilling to let go. The best I could do, while flying blind was to lean hard and hope to avoid hitting anything.

After a couple seconds the kayak stopped. I took the sunglasses off and saw that the lean had dug the kayak deep into the snow and basically thrown on the braking power that I’d needed — that along with the fact that I’d steered into some shrubs.

I put the sunglasses in a pocket and analyzed the route down the hill. I pushed off again and carved the rest of the way to where I’d started.

_MG_8157 — Buried kayak after a flip in snow

Can snow kayaking be the next hot sport?

Some witnesses have seen me going up and down the hill with my kayak and asked where I got the crazy idea.

No, I wasn’t the first person to think of it. There are some very entertaining online videos of others who have gone before me.

Nonetheless, this is hardly a popular sport yet. I’m enjoying something out which doesn’t necessarily have a large body of knowledge surrounding it and gives me the challenge of finding some things out on my own. Nor does snow kayaking (yet) have specialty products designed specifically for the job.

Note: If I were designing a kayak specifically for going down snow slopes, I would probably build metal edges into the sides for better carving. But that would subtract from the fun of doing something goofy in inadequate gear.

Snow kayaking is also a learning opportunity for boat technique

Many similarities between boating and snow sports became apparent after I started launching my down the hill.

Leaning for instance. I plan to steer with same aggressive edge that I used to carve the snow the next time I kayak in whitewater.

On the flip side, now that I have tried using a canoe paddle with snowshoes, I’m considering ditching poles on my next snowshoe trip with steep hills. Being able to brace against the powder without plunging deep into it (as with poles) is a huge advantage while climbing. So is being able to carve steps quickly.

The paddle also proved instrumental an igloo building project that I will describe in a future post.

Kayak vs. Skis

When the fresh snow falls on the hills and I have to decide whether I’d rather strap boards to my feet or go rambling in my yak, there are considerations to weigh:

Kayaks are slower to move uphill

When it comes to kayaking down a hill vs skiing, the former is obviously far more laborious to haul up to the top, at least if ski lifts aren’t a part of the equation. This is however, a killer workout that I’d would recommend to anyone who wants to get in shape for mountain climbing or trail running.

Kayak gear is tougher to work with in winter

Other changes that I had to make to kayak the snow vs. on water included moving the foot pedals way back so that I could fit inside the boat it wearing winter boots. A sprayskirt is nice for keeping the snow out, but getting it on and off in the cold is a bear.

Because snow kayaking only puts my head a couple feet above the slope, even more powder flies up in my face than what I’d encounter skiing. I’d probably do well to invest in some ski goggles before snow kayaking full time.

Kayaks are more forgiving when they hit stuff, but will hit more stuff

One advantage of the low body position is that I can’t get knocked off my feet like I can skiing, though a flip is definitely possible.

If I hit a tree in a kayak, it will go better than if I hit a tree on skis because I’ll have a bunch of plastic protecting me. The fact that the kayak doesn’t steer as well as skis means that collisions are harder to avoid.

Kayaks excel when terrain is deep and steep

The kayak’s extra volume means that it floats very well on snow. I got some decent runs on a powder day when some of my friends snowboarding friends could barely move. They ended up using the kayak tracks to pick up speed.

On groomed trails, snowboards or skis are definitely faster and more exciting than a kayak run. If I put glide wax on the bottom of my boat, it may change the equation.

Without deep powder, steering is possible, but sketchier. I took a run down a south slope that had crusted over and found myself going down the hill backwards with next to no control.

So far, deep powder and steep slopes have equaled the most fun for me, including one run where I went down slope in a chest-deep mass of churning snow.

While deep and steep snow has made for the best kayak runs for me, that stuff is also the hardest to drag a kayak through.

What I’d like to try next:

At some point I’d like to graduate to a double-bladed kayak paddle, though I doubt I’ll find anything cheap enough that I’d be willing to sacrifice anytime soon.

I’d also like to try setting a luge track in the hill and build banked turns with a shovel. It’d be fun to get up some speed without having to worry about steering so much.

I’m both excited and terrified to see what happens when I finally melt some glide wax onto the bottom of the kayak. I have a feeling that it will be a wild ride.

January 11, 2016January 11, 2016

The Doorstep Big Agnes Expedition

_MG_7966 — Summit ridge on Big Agnes, looking northeast toward Mt. Zirkel and Wyoming

What was amazing about my homemade pulk sled was that it worked.

I’d dripped ski wax onto the bottom of the kid’s sled for maximize glide. From there, I loaded on jumbo snowshoes, a monster backpack, sleeping bag and separate dry bag full of food. I lashed ‘em all together with cam straps, affixed cam straps to ski poles, affixed other end of poles to a carabiner on a belt around my midsection.

When I moved on skis, the sled followed. Nothing fell off or skidded into the snow.

I skied east on the snowmobile trails toward Slavonia, a trailhead in the Zirkel Wilderness, which was on the way toward Big Agnes. This 12,000-foot mountain had become an obsession of mine for a couple of weeks. There were the usual symptoms: staring at the topo map, figuring routes, squinting at the distant mountain from the groomed ski trails.

Now, I was skipping out on a fun three day weekend with coworkers so I could be on this snowmobile trail in the fading light and dropping temperatures.

_MG_7838 — Homemade pulk sled, at the start of the adventure

It was a six mile ski to Slavonia, started at 3 p.m

Occasionally, I moved myself and the whole rig out of the trail to make way for the snowmobiles, so I could breathe their exhaust fumes for the next couple minutes. The demented yowling of their engines bounced off distant ridges. To be fair, this trail wouldn’t have been here if not for the snowmobiles, but I was proud that I was planning this trip motorless from doorstep to mountaintop.

The pulk skittered over the broken snow crust behind me. Going uphill with this thing definitely upped my calorie consumption; going downhill with it boosted my adrenaline. I poled frantically to keep the fast-descending object from swinging in front of me and knocking me off balance.

The fact that I’d attached the sled to me with stiff ski-poles instead of rope meant that at least I didn’t have to worry about it taking me out at the legs.

Fears about whether I could really make the homemade pulk work had been among my doubts about whether I could pull off this motorless expedition. I was thrilled to see that I could move everything smoothly enough

Tomorrow, I’d get to have all the weight on my back, and hopefully be able to haul it all uphill through deep powder to Mica Lake. The third day, I planned to go on with only bare essentials in my backpack. If I could steer clear of avalanche zones and fatal rock precipices, I could reward all these efforts with a smiling moment on a mountaintop.

It was dark by the time I pulled into Slavonia. The small wooden structure at the edge of the parking lot looked far more inviting than the tent I had yet to pitch.

Yes, that small building happened to be the trailhead bathroom, but so what? The shit was frozen anyway.

I wasn’t out to get the glamorous camping award, and if this saved time from taking the tent down in the morning, I was all for it.

Another perk: I could set my stove up inside to cook dinner. I locked the door to offset the slim possibility of someone making a late-night visit to the facility. I later noticed a sign forbidding camping in the area. Well, lest I paint myself as a scofflaw, let’s just say that I was taking a very long dump, a dump that happened to last until the morning.

When people wake up on a bathroom floor, it is usually the product of hazy decision-making half-remembered, if at all. In this case the bathroom floor was a key part of my plan to make up the most distance possible the following morning.

_MG_7858 — Dinner at the best seat in the house

The morning still sucked, as mornings winter camping will suck.

Sure there’s the beauty of the silent world, the promise of the untrammeled snow. Also there’s the numb fingers, numb feet, the intrusion of dampness where you don’t want it, the burden of leaving the marginal comfort of the sleeping bag for the thousand little camp tasks and packing.

There were no tracks on the trail, leaving me to break the powder. I’d left the sled behind — it’d have been useless in this stuff.

Leaving the skis behind had been the difficult decision. Even if I’d put climbing skins on the bottoms, I knew that I wouldn’t be able to make the same time that I would make in snowshoes. Strapping them to the pack would have added bulk to an already mighty load, and probably would have gotten tangled in trees on the climb up. It would have been hard to get a slick ride down with all the weight on my back anyhow.

My goal was the mountaintop, not a flashy descent. With skiing out of the picture, I could focus on tasks like route finding.

Locating the trail under the feet of snow in a willow drainage was no easy task. I meandered through the aspens in the valley, staying on an eastward course. I used my topo map to find the drainage between two mountain ridges that was my golden ladder to Mica Lake.

_MG_7881 — Snow slough with debris tracks in Mica Creek Basin

Finding the route and climbing it are not one and the same however.

My snowshoes, which are great for floating on loose powder, are less awesome on steep pitches. I found myself doing elaborate traverses, pulling myself up on tree trunks. This was a dangerous game because said trees were loaded with beachball-sized snow bombs, quick to drop when shaken. Sometimes the trees would drop their payloads for no good reason and white powder would explode over my head and shoulders.

The other kind of falling snow that I worried about was avalanches. Sources had told me that the east side of the valley was dangerous (windblown snow would accumulate on the west faces with the prevailing wind) so I tried my damnedest to stay on the opposite side of the drainage.

The task was not so easy because of Mica Creek, which sometimes cut up to 30 feet down into the bedrock. The topography in the basin forced me to cross the creek several times — walking oh-so-delicately over the snow bridges.

The water might have only been a couple feet deep, but if I soaked a boot, I would most likely have to turn the trip around.

There was also no easy way to get down to the water without falling into it. I refilled my water supplies by dangling a bottle off a cord from one of the snow bridges.

A narrows lay ahead, which included a steep climb between two steep snow-covered walls.

Here, the safe west wall had the most evidence of falling snow. However, the drop wasn’t so long and I didn’t worry about a light snow sloughing going over my boots. Nothing that I could see had fallen off the other side of the canyon, but if something did fall, it could have made for a minor avalanche. I stayed west.

At the top of the narrows, the drainage opened up into a valley. It was maybe half a mile wide, flanked by razor-like mountain tops.

The drainage forked and I chose to go right, climbing up a steep ridge between Big and Middle Agnes. Few trees grew on the high snow fields. Eventually there were none, just blank white snow and jagged rock. I scanned for a route that would keep me out of avalanche danger, but also keep me away from impossible rock spines and other hazards.

Two ominous tracks of busted snow streaked several hundred yards down the south face of Middle Agnes. Avalanches had fallen here.

The more I climbed, the more I expected to run into Mica Lake. Eventually, I realized that I had gone way too far to the east, and turned back downhill.

Water, food and warmth were the three priorities on my mind as I came into camp.

Light was already fading by the time I reached the lakes’s edge, meaning I had to hustle to do my chores.

I used my ice axe to bash a hole in the lake ice and get water (difficult because there was only a couple inch margin between the ice and the lake bottom). I climbed a slight hillock nearby where I dug a large pit in the snow where I pitched tent. I got another pit started for my fire.

The axe came out again for fuel gathering. I swung away at the spruce branches nearby by the light of my headlamp.

I took one mighty swing at a branch only to have the axe fly out of my hand. I heard the familiar, musical dong! as the axe bounced into something nearby. But where the hell did it land? I swept the snow and the tree branches nearby and found nothing. I tried recreating the trajectory of the lost axe by throwing sticks and seeing where they landed. Eventually, I dug around through the powder with a stick and still came up empty. I called off the search after a half hour and got to fire-making.

Say what you will about the romance of woodsmoke rising up in cold winter air, I’d have probably just used my cookstove if I’d known what a royal pain the campfire was going to give me.

I had some Vaseline-soaked cotton balls with me, excellent fire-starters, but my supply was low, and I decided to save them for an emergency.

Another challenge was that the lodgepole pine didn’t grow up here. This meant that I no longer had the ubiquitous, highly flammable, red needles that I’d used to start fires easily at lower elevations.

I tried lighting notebook paper and drier lint that I’d brought with me. The licks of flame rose like a promise — and sputtered out as I hacked smoke. Finally, I broke off a piece of candle and added it to the lint. When the lint ignited, the burning wax kept the whole shebang going long enough for me to ignite some dead spruce twigs.

Cooking on the wood fire was like getting teargassed. Every time I reached in to shift the pot over the flames, I got a throat-wracking, eye-burning draught of smoke. By the time I’d softened the lentils enough to be palatable, I had a dull headache and a sore throat.

I ate as quickly as possible, as the fire wound down. I put another pot of water on to pour into my metal bottle to heat the foot of my sleeping bag.

I had put spruce boughs under the tent for extra insulation against the cold. I propped my backpack under my sleep pad, and put the sleep bag into an emergency bivvy. I felt confident that I would be warm enough this evening. What I was having a hard time imagining was getting up at 4 a.m. to fetch water and prepare my gear with numb fingers and toes. I knew it would be best to get up early if I wanted to do anything before the snow softened, became harder to walk on, and more likely to avalanche

_MG_7900 — My route, as seen in daylight, went behind the trees, into the valley and to the left behind the rocky ridge line to a snowfield that went to the summit ridge..

I dreamed that I woke up in a blizzard, with snowmobiles wheeling around camp. I hated that the whining machines had made it to the lake I had worked so hard to get to on my own, but the falling snow meant that I probably wasn’t going to try the mountain. This thought felt like a relief.

I woke up at 3:49 a.m. thoroughly confused, unzipped my tent to look up into a clear, cold sky. Stars glittered like ice shards on black water. A crescent moon cast its pale light upon the snow world.

Body and mind might not have been motivated, but my bladder had a strong motivation of its own. Once it had motivated me out of my sleeping bag, the hardest part was over.

I decided to pretend that I really was stoked that I was getting up this early. The fake motivation helped me to wrangle gear together, strap snowshoes on my boots and trudge down to the ice hole on the lake to fill water bottles.

Fortunately, I’d put snow back on top of the hole after I’d filled up the last time. This insulation had prevented the ice from completely reforming. I was able to bash the hole back open with the tip of my ski pole and a liberal dose of profanity. The water was slushed with ice shards. It would refreeze quickly in the cold air. I put one bottle in my pocket and stuffed the other two into my jacket. In this way, I kept my water supply close to my body heat.

Unmotivated to start any fires, I opted to skip the hot breakfast for a Clif Bar.

As soon as all the camp duties were over, it was almost 6 a.m.

I retraced my snowshoe tracks to the basin above the lake and then chose a route going up a valley on the south side of the mountain.

The world was painted in deep dark blues and the pale hues from the moonlight. In a world that seemed half-real, the cold felt real enough. I had the iciness of the water bottles near my skin, frigid air moving through my nostrils. Movement was the way to stay warm now that I was out of the sleeping bag. As I toed up the first snowfield, the sense of purpose that I had been faking earlier began to gel into the genuine object. Movement was what fought back against the vulnerable feeling walking alone in cold darkness.

I knew my confidence would grow when the sun came out, and that I would be glad that I decided to begin this early hike when I had the chance. I knew that I had already invested a lot in this hike, and that if I backed down, it would be hard to rally the courage or the fortitude needed for future adventures, and that I would be giving up on some of the qualities that I value most in myself.

_MG_7976 — My path up along a snowy ridge as seen on the return trip. Little Agnes is in the background.

One shooting star raced across the sky. Another flicked by a couple minutes later. Then there was another, and another.

A set of lights from the distant town of Clark twinkled far below. I raised the climbing bars on my snowshoes for extra support as the route steepened.

Paranoia about avalanches kept bubbling into my consciousness.

I kept inside the trees as much as possible — there was less likely to be snowfall there. I inspected the tree trunks for broken branches or snow accumulated on the uphill side.

I topped out on a sinuous ridge of snow, walked the edge down into a treeless basin. A dim green glow gathered above the ridge-line to the east.

Avalanche-wise, two factors were in my favor: there had been no new snowfalls in the past couple weeks, which meant that the snow that was on the slopes had had time to stabilize. Also, it was still very early in the morning, which meant that the snow was far more stable than it would be in the afternoon.

Looking up at the face I planned to climb, I could see no avalanche tracks. Still, I planned to weave around as I climbed to avoid the steepest pitches and to move in the shelter of some boulder-fields. If things began to look truly sketchy, I’d turn around, I promised myself.

Climbing the steeper pitch in my over-sized snowshoes did turn out to be a challenge. I found myself sliding back at least half as much as I could step forward.

Finally, I swapped out the snowshoes for crampons. The crampons gripped exquisitely, but didn’t do jack to keep me from falling through knee-deep snow.

I leaned forward into the slope so I could put more weight on the ski-poles — even flopping them flat onto the snow in front of me like some bizarre climbing flipper. I approached the top in this awkward crawl, suitable behavior for a supplicant. Now and then I looked out or down. A radiance swelled above the eastern ridge. The sky went from dark to gray. I watched as first sunlight burned on the high peaks, marching like fire down the slopes to ignite the darkened world below.

The pitch got steeper and steeper. My heart beat like crazy as I fumbled along. I got to a second set of boulders and jabbed the crampon points into the rocks to haul myself up. The thought of avalanches reverberated through my brain. Was this snow too steep? Should I head back. The snow was getting crustier here. I watched tiny snow chunks dance out from beneath my crampons and roll, roll, roll, roll, down the hill, leaving particle accelerator tracks in their wake. One chunk of crust wheeled down the mountain like a runaway buzzsaw

_MG_7970 — View down the snowfield I climbed. My tracks are between the clumps of stones on the bottom right.

When I tried to kick out some larger slabs, however, they only went for a couple feet before they stopped. The slope seemed too gradual and the snow too cold to really rumble. I still felt unease in the pit of my gut. My awareness also went to my right foot, which had gone numb with cold despite the climbing workout.

For the last forty minutes, I’d had my eyes set on a leaning boulder, that was higher than anything I could see on the mountain. It had seemed like only a quick jaunt to get there, but my approach was painfully slow. I struggled to lift the crampons above the crust so I could fall back into it. I worked my fingers into tiny holds in the rocks in order to flop myself over. I stumbled, drunken to that ridge, looked out and gasped.

I’d gone from looking ahead inches past my nose, to looking out over unfathomable miles. Boulder projections stabbed the sky off knife edge ridges. They glinted in the orange illumination. The Zirkel range rose up in a defiant bulwark on the other east of the valley. Further south, mountains followed mountains like shark teeth. There was a gap at North Park, on the other side of the Continental Divide, and then the mountains rose again. Miles of empty table land lay to the north in Wyoming.

_MG_7956 — View of peaks along summit ridge looking northwest

I instinctively recoiled from the edge. Indeed, I could see places where cornices of overhanging snow dangled over the the cliffs like trapdoors to the abyss. I could also see, unhappily, that there were two other peaks on the ridgeline before I truly reached the top, and these peaks were separated by a narrow, dangerous-looking ridge with a thousand-foot drop on either side.

“Well screw that,” I thought.

I turned around and began tramping down the crusted snow.

At one point, I heard a rumble overhead and my heart lurched.

I whirled around to realize that it was only an airplane.

Another glance at the snow face, made me reconsider the avalanche danger. I took a slope measurement using a trekking pole and a compass as a protractor. I estimated that the slope was only about 30 degrees, if that, which was about the least steep angle that an avalanche would happen.*

I also saw that there was a way to cut to the west side of the summit ridge, which might take me to the highest peak while avoiding a walk on the knife edge.

I had already committed 20 minutes to walking down the ridge and it would take a lot longer than that to get high again. After standing in place for a minute, I started trudging back up the way I’d come. It was far easier going up the already broken snow. Finally, at a boulder-field just above the summit, I made a dogleg to the west. Again, I stuck crampon points against hard stone. I maneuvered around the first peak and over to the second. I topped out with another view into the vast gulf stretched out to the north of the peak. The third and final peak was maybe two football fields away.

But the knife edge was even sharper between these two peaks, and if that wasn’t sketchy enough there was a tall vertical rock outcrop standing right in the middle. Climbing over wasn’t even a possibility.

If I wanted to get beneath the outcrop, I would have to crawl out onto one of the absurdly tilted snowfields on either side. If my crampons could grip into the champagne powder snow and my hands could grasp some tiny chink in the slippery rock, I could see a minute chance that I could crawl out to this final peak. But when I tried to visualize this possibility, what I saw was a tumbling, thousand-foot death ride that got faster and faster until that sudden stop at the end.

I realized that I had to turn around again, just a couple snowball throws away from the summit. Knowing that I had exhausted all my options, made it easier to turn around without pesky second guesses to haunt my descent.

It is likely that if I had gone the standard summer route, approaching the peak from the east side, that I might have found a way to this final peak. Then again, going this far to the east would have added many miles of unbroken powder to my trip, and for all I knew, there may have been avalanche risk that would have fudged my chances there.

Half an hour into my descent, I was close to the shadow of the ridge line, where the sun still hadn’t risen. I crouched in the shelter of a boulder so I could swap out my crampons back into snowshoes where there was solar warmth. This was where I discovered that the water bottle in my right pocket was empty. Where had the water gone? Mostly into my right boot. No wonder why that foot had been so cold.

_MG_7974 — Rock, ice and lichen near the top of Big Agnes

It was my fault. When I’d filled the bottle in the slushy water, there had been ice crust on the screw threads and I had failed to twist the cap all the way shut.

I squeezed out of the sock and set it in the sun, warming the foot as best as I could with my hands.

It took another hour and a half or so to get back to camp.

I’d knocked out the fulfillment part for this trip’s hierarchy of needs (OK, almost fulfilled them. I didn’t quite reach the summit did I?) now it was back to basics: water, warmth and food.

It was a beautiful sunny day on the snow and I felt no need to hurry back down to Slavonia for another night in the bathroom. It was nice to take care of camp chores at a leisurely pace.

I walked out on the lake ice to where I found a mushy patch near where a stream came in. I was able to use my snow shovel to dig out a generous hole to fill my bottles. I took the rainfly off my tent so that the sun could burn away the humidity, and threw my damp sleeping bag over a spruce sapling.

I had snagged some dead red needles on the way back to camp, which I used to set a new fire on my cook-pot lid. My boots hung out on sticks jabbed into the snow, so that the most amount of warmth could get into the toes. After a while, I started some pasta mixed with coconut butter. I was out of patience for the slow-cooking lentils. I watched the steam rise from my boots and socks. I put my metal water bottle near the fire so I would have something hot to put in the toe of my sleeping bag.

It would be a good night’s sleep.

_MG_7993 — Taking care of the basics at camp

* https://utahavalanchecenter.org/blog-steepness. Here is one source, amongst others that explains the relationship between slope angle and avalanche risk. Though this blog describes me doing my best to use what I’ve read and picked up from others to stay out of avalanche danger, I haven’t taken any classes, and don’t want to give the impression that I am an expert on the subject.