At the start of December, a warm spell had meted much of the big snows from earlier in the year off the southern slopes above Port Angeles. The Obstruction Point Road was a lumpy mess of drifts and boot tracks. It was a fun time to throw a pack on, get onto my skinny nordic skis from Minnesota and test my balance. This was just above the return point of my botched bike/ski doorstep adventure in November. This time, I got a ride up to elevation.
If the sky looks hazy in pictures, it is due to an atmospheric inversion that kept local air pollution trapped in place. It was a nice demonstration of what happens when the gasses that come out from our tailpipes stick around the neighborhood. I felt my chest tightening up at times.
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.
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.
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.
Snow tsunami
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.
Fuel for fireAnd for the skier
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.
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.
Setting the burner on high
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.
View from inside the shelter
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.
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.
Zirkels in the wind
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.
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.
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.
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.
On the road to Slavonia
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.
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.
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.
Burned trees near Mica Lake
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
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.
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
View down the snowfield I climbed. My tracks are between the clumps of stones on the bottom right.
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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.
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.
Two more peaks on Big Agnes
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.
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.
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.
