When things really start to go sour on an adventure, I tend to sink into some ocd behaviors. For instance, counting the milage up canyons by looking at mailboxes, tallying switchbacks up flagstaff, or counting how many trees you pass when hiking. When things really get rough though, I will count my steps. I think it started as a way to prevent my self from taking an excessive number of breaks while climbing fourteeners with my parents, where I would walk for 200 or 100 or 50 steps, then stop and breath five or ten breaths, then keep going. Its a bit ridiculous, but it can really help to keep your mind off of suffering, which is not good to focus on when distance needs to be covered. This past weekend I must have counted over 50,000 steps.
My dad has been wanting to take a trip to the Wind Rivers up in Wyoming for a long time, I can remember a least a few years back. Gannett Peak is the most remote high point of any state in the union (including Denali) and the terrain is truly spectacular. So, we got to talking more and more this winter, and things started shaping up a little bit more and more, and when I got back from Montana on the first weekend of May, we were looking at a week to prepare for the trip. A big storm cycle moved across northern Wyoming as we mixed gorp, fitted boots, sorted gear, and packed freeze dried dinners, delaying our departure from Tuesday, to Wednesday, and finally to Thursday morning.
The low pressure was breaking up and moving south as we cruised along the great barren motorway of I-80, but even still, driving from Rock Springs to Pinedale, there were showers all across the plains, with some puffier, blacker clouds floating over the mountains. We weren't sure how far up the road past White Pines Ski Area we could get, but with a little bit of 4Low-ing, we were pleasantly surprised to get to the overlook a quarter mile or so from the Elkhart Park by a little after 2pm.
Map of day one, Elkhart park (lower left) to Hobbes lake (upper right)
The weather gods had left a heavy bank of clouds hanging around the High peaks, so there wasn't much to be had in the view department, but we shouldered out packs and set off following the trail of somebody who was towing a sled along the trail that became progressively more and more difficult to recognize with the rising levels of new snow. The travel was pretty quick and easy, and we crossed the first 7 miles in about 3 hours. The next hour was used to navigate the final mile of the day (our Garmin GPS was super helpful to have) as daylight faded and snow started to fall harder. We ended up camping on the North West shore of Hobbs lake, a little more than 8 miles from the car, and cooked water for some freeze-dried pad thai.
Breakfast the next day was granola and we packed up the tent and broke camp around 9, heading up towards Seneca Lakes. It doesn't really matter where you are, or where you are heading, but maps really can't prepare you for the scale of anything. Rolling over the inlet onto South Seneca Lake, we finally got a good look at the Winds, and our destination along the skyline, Bonney Pass.
After a good hour, we had traversed the nearly 2 miles of Seneca, and started the climb/descent/climb/descent (going in a straight line anywhere in the Winds involves a lot of up and down) to Island Lake, where we stopped to eat lunch and melt more snow. While you are basically around treeline when looking down on Island lake, its still a long ways up the Titcomb Basin to the bottom of Bonney Pass, where we wanted to camp. In fact it was close to four miles of mostly flat and rolling travel to our camp. It actually reminded me quite a bit of the glacier travel I did last summer up in the Waddington.
We rolled into camp around 6, pretty beat, but glad to enjoy an hour of sunshine to dry boots before climbing into the tent for some lasagna with meat sauce followed up by some hot drink. The plan for day three was an early alpine start, then climbing to from our camp at 11,100 to the top of Bonney Pass at 12,800, then ski down to the Dinwoody Glacier at 11,600, traverse over to the Gooseneck Glacier, and climb to the Summit of Wyoming's Highest at 13,804. From there we were hoping to return to camp by noon to avoid rapidly warming weather, then break camp and get a couple of miles back down the valley before dark.
Alarms went off at 3:00 am sharp, the warm granola was slow to wake me from the groggy hold of sleep, and the cold freeze from the clear night was all the more reason to claw deeper back into the warmth of my sleeping bag, but we were skinning up the pass by 4:30. Warm weather from the day before, combined with heavy new snow made for a lot of loose snow slides and sluffs from the day before, as well as cementing a 3" sun crust on top of the feet of new. So when it became too steep to skin up the pass, travel suddenly became very slow, working up through post holing crust and avalanche debris, then post holing through debris to gain a rock rib that we could take to the top. The effort took about twice as long as we had hoped, and we arrived at the saddle to see gannett fully bathed in morning light. Skis were re-applied, and we made some turns down the north face of the pass, grappling towards the bottom with the sun crust mentioned before.
By the time we reached the moat at the base of the dinwoody, the sun had fully risen, and as we stepped out of our skis to begin the climb up to the gooseneck, well... you could say that shit hit the fan. The sun crust was too steep and icy to skin up, but had zero ability to hold the weight of a person bootpacking, and the unconsolidated powder snow underneath offered the support of an inflated balloon on a bed of nails. It took 45 minutes to gain maybe 75 vertical feet, and the effort of climbing out of thigh to knee deep holes in crusty snow had left both of us exhausted.
With too little time, and still deteriorating conditions, we made the call to turn tail and head out. What we had hoped would be solid alpine climbing conditions ended up being the mud season equivalent for the snowpack, and this was not the right day to try and summit. From there it was skins on and counting steps for the death march all the way back up Bonney Pass. We picked our way back down the debris, and enjoyed a couple of handfuls of nice spring skiing back to the tent where we had a nice lunch of bagels and cream cheese.
As wet-snow slides began to pour out of the peaks under the midday sun, the tent was folded up, and we made our way out of Titcomb Basin. We left skins off for the first 3 miles, kicking and double poling and shuffling our way along the lakes, and reapplied skins in the rolling terrain right before Island lake. I had entered slog mode quite a ways back, but it hit hard coming across the flats. Sweaty sunscreen was dripping into eyes, water was low, and still had two pretty major climbs before we could drop into the Seneca lake valley, where we would set up camp. But, as is often the case, theres nothing you can do but put one foot in front of the other, and remind yourself that you are doing this for fun. Adventuring is fun right. Right.
Luckily we were able to find a suitable camp site on the edge of Little Seneca Lake as the sun dropped behind evening clouds down country. Its funny how, it doesn't matter how far you go really, when you drop your pack, it will make you feel better by at least a factor of ten. Having to work harden your tent spot lessens that effect, but when your body weight suddenly drops by 50 to 60 pounds, energy levels are bound to rise. Also there is definitely something joyous about knowing that you wont have to put that pack back on for at least 10 hours or so. Cooked a hearty freeze dried shepherds pie, and settled in for another short night of sleeping.
I don't think waking up at 3 in the morning is ever 'fun' in the traditional sense, but once you're up, you can get an awful lot done before the sun rises. In this case, we got breakfast and hot drinks made, filled water bottles, packed up camp, and crossed 3 miles down to Hobbes lake before we saw any sun. Travel was pretty smooth and easy with firm snow, and the skin from Hobbes lake up to Photographer's Point didn't take too much time at all. For a little while, we watched as the prints of a small/medium black bear joined our skin track, but apparently our scent failed to capture his interest, and he wandered off after a half mile or so.
After Photographer's Point, we shed skins for the 5 or so miles of rolling descending back to Elkhart Park, and with only a couple of short-ish skates up hill, we were flying down the bobsled track of the trail towards the car. Moving at 8-10 miles per hour with skis on is, in my opinion, much more fun than moving at 1-2 miles per hour, and before long, we were signing out of the trail register, and enjoying cokes and chips back at the car.
Its a little bit of a bummer not to make it to the top, especially after making the long trip, but, any day above treeline is still a wonderful day, and exploring in new mountains is never a bad thing. We took a gamble on snow conditions and we got shot down, but that happens. A couple of days earlier, and the snow would have been nice and soft, but the weather would have been significant, and a couple of days later, the snowpack at higher elevations could have become isothermal, especially in the flats, and made travel next to impossible. A couple of weeks later, and the lakes would start opening up, making route finding longer and more difficult. We gave it a good shot though, and the summit of Gannett will, for me, remain an adventure for another day.
Just about all the photo cred goes out to my Dad, thanks for carrying the big camera.
