Part Ballerina, Part Musk Ox

Darton Peak is out of view as I begin the climb from Willow Lake. The adventure begins!

Snow on the ground makes almost everything more difficult hiking.

 From the increased challenge of tramping through powder, to having said powder creep into boots where it melts to ice water, to the challenges of clearing space for camping, a deep snowfall can make it a bitch of a time to do what you would take for granted in warm wather.

Before I left on a November trip to Darton Peak in the Big Horn Mountains, I knew there would be no exception to the rule about snow. At the same time, I figured that such an expedition would be a valuable opportunity to test out some new outdoor stuff I had bought and also try to learn from the things that I had done wrong the time I tried to climb the same mountain a few weeks before.

As a result of this determination, I started up the trail from Circle Park looking slightly more like the backwoods badass I’m always trying to become.

There were new Gore-Tex gaiters over my boots that I had bought for $60 at the Sports Lure an hour before ($60! Did I seriously just drop $60 on these little things I have over my lower legs!). I had new fuel bottles as well, ready to melt snow for water if need be. I had a new headlamp too, in order to help me get through the darkness. Then there was the $300 sleeping bag that I had strapped to the back of my pack. After that last sleepless night shivering with ice-block feet in the old bag, there was no question that this was an investment that I wanted for this trip and for any future expeditions into cold places. If it was warm enough for Denali, I figured it would work swimmingly in the Big Horns.

The last piece of gear to test was myself.

So it was a bit of an anti-climax when I drove into Circle Park to find that almost all the snow was melted off the ground and it was well above freezing outside. Did I feel a little ridiculous setting out with oodles of expensive stuff? Maybe.

But as I hiked the miles in, the snow became more prevalent and eventually I was trudging through a couple of inches of the stuff. The campsite I chose was at the shore of Willow Lake at around 9,000 feet. It was completely frozen over by the time I got there and my hands were already cold.

Though I had come prepared to melt snow, it would still be easier to have liquid water to begin with. The fact that the lake was iced over was a little discouraging. A more positive sign was a patch of bare ground underneath the shelter of some pines — the perfect place to pitch tent. I put on my warm clothes and began the diligent work of setting up the camp. The small warmth of the day disappeared with the sun going behind the mountains, just like an invisible hand were turning down the thermostat.

The view from my campsite at Willow Lake

The ice turned out not to be a big deal; all I needed to do was throw a nearby boulder through the ice. I filled up my cooking pot and fixed satisfying meal of re-hydrated mashed potatoes. It was better than that godawful meal dinner I'd made from bog water the last time I was in the Big Horns. I poured the leftover hot water into a steel bottle so I would be able to warm my feet on it in the sleeping bag.

Now it was dark and I used my headlamp to go about the rest of the camp chores. At one point, a set of tiny golden eyes glittered in the beam, then disappeared into the night.

By 7 p.m., I crawled into the super-warm sleeping bag for the night, sharing the space with the water bottles and boots. I bunched my parka around my feet for extra warmth.

No sooner had I nestled up, than a hard wind came down out of the mountains, punching the walls of the tent in at me. But I was warm! Safe within the womb of synthetic fiber, I may as well have been lounging on a tropical beach.

I stayed awake for a couple hours, listening to the howling wind and strange sounds from the lake as the ice contracted and expanded. Eventually, I drifted into n uneasy sleep.

Something was crashing around outside my tent. Eyes shot open. It was 1:30 a.m..

Shit! I thought the goddamn bears were supposed to hibernating now.

I realized that I was not at all sure of this, as much as I wanted it to be true.

“Hey!” More crashing.

“Beat it!”

No, I hadn’t brought the bear spray. Yes, I had left food inside my tent.  

Shit, shit, shit.

Someone had told me there were only a couple of black bears in the Big Horns and they were pretty timid — not that I felt too reassured by that now.

It was definitely something large out there. Stumbling around, whacking up against branches.

I unzipped my bag and my tent, sprang out without shoes and swung my headlamp beam through the darkness. Nothing appeared beyond the branches of the pines.

Cursing, I moved away from the tent, and sprang on top of a log, taking care not to put my socked feet through any snow. The blue lamp from the headlamp played over the trees and along the snowdrifts. Then I saw the tracks, maybe elk, or moose. Little kicks of powder rested on the crust, indicating that they were recent.

I let the pent up breath hiss past my lips, heard my heart careening in my ears. I went back to the tent and cocooned myself into the bag, praying that nothing else would wake me before morning.

When my alarm went off at 5:30 a.m., it was still dark outside. I wrested my boots from the sleeping bag, put on my parka, and crawled back from the tent.

I re-bashed a hole through the lake ice and took in a hearty breakfast of oatmeal.

So far so good though, I had enjoyed a warm night, and felt far more energized than I had on my last summit attempt. The fact that I had brought enough gas for two warm meals was another advantage, as was the fact that I had a reliable source of water instead of the frozen swamp I had camped next to last time. I was also getting an earlier start.

By the time I had finished breakfast it was almost 7 a.m.. A rumor of sunlight glinted through the drab clouds. To the west, the 12,275-foot summit of Darton Peak was hidden behind a steep ridge. An arctic canyon wound its way between the peaks, defined by thousand-foot walls of craggy stone. The path I had plotted on the map started on the south side of the rift, gaining elevation sooner, before I became trapped between the steep sides of the canyon.

As soon as I started up the pitch, I knew it was going to be hard, slow progress. The mountain slopes were defined by an exquisite chaos of boulders, made all the more challenging by the snow, which hid deep crevices between the rocks until I unwittingly discovered them by stepping through.

It was good to have the bright red gaiters protecting the tops of my boots from snow.

To make walking easier, I stayed in the trees, where there tended to be fewer boulders and shallower snowdrifts. In other places, I hopped from rock to rock, avoiding the guesswork about which snow would hold my weight or wouldn’t.

Inevitably, this led to a series of strange movements as I worked to maintain both forward momentum and balance on the rocks. Though I am far from graceful in many things, I will brag that after years of practice, I can handily weave a path over a forbidding landscape of jumbled rock.

It is a ballet of boot on stone and for the first hour or so, it’s fun solving the puzzle of where to put feet down, while keeping momentum. It seems like my feet know where to go before I do. After a couple hours however, the ballet becomes one of those hellish dance marathons with plenty of opportunities to fall or twist an ankle. You want it to end, but the  dance floor is stretched out for miles yet in front of you.

As I climbed merrily up the ridge, congratulating myself on how well I was handling the boulders, the pine trees fell away. An icy wind rose up to greet my progress, blowing snow off the drifts and into my face. There was no view of the summit. It was lost in a gray cloud of whirling flakes.

Some of that weather would be coming my way, I realized. Or else it was one of those stationary storms held in place by the mountain.

In any case, if I kept going, my visibility was going to get very poor. This made me think about whether it would be best to turn around and avoid the risk of getting disoriented on a high peak.

This was not the most appealing option considering that I had already aborted that earlier attempt on Darton, I had come back to seal the deal, so I could put it behind me and start obsessing about other mountains.

On the other hand, if things were really about to going to go to hell up on the ridge, it was unlikely I would make the summit anyway, and it would behoove me to get my ass off the mountain sooner rather than later.

I took out my compass, and checked the bearing of where the summit should be. The potential that things could get ugly when I got higher was real, I thought. But I also had a pretty large margin of error heading down. There was a trail below me that ran miles north and south. I could mess up big time, but as long as I could follow my compass roughly east and walk the distance, I was virtually assured that I would find the trail on the way down.

 Just as helpful, the landscape set some pretty clear parameters: go too far to the left and you take a long fall, too far to the right, there were tall boulder piles and another drop beyond them — both would be indications that I had gone off course. The worst thing that could happen is that I could trip or fall in a bad way and not be able to get down. That is why, as excited as I was about hopping rocks and making fast progress on the peak, I also had to be very, very careful.

Now there were fewer rocks to step on and more snow to plunge through. I was grateful for those fancy-pants gaiters, which were doing a fine job keeping the snow out of my boots, even when I fell into waist-deep traps between boulders.

Tiny particles of ice flew out my face out of the wind, making it almost impossible to look straight ahead. The small amount of exposed flesh on my face felt like it was getting sandblasted.

Christ, maybe I should turn around after all.

But, sometimes mountains have a way of revealing their most incredible beauty at the height of their cruelty.

This time it was a rainbow.

The clouds had opened to the east, allowing the warm gold light to spread over the stony walls below me, for the beams to shine through the icy droplets in the air and paint an arc of brilliant color from the tops of the mountains down into the canyon.

I’m not particularly superstitious, but it was hard not to take that as a good omen.

Reinvigorated, I marched on beneath the brilliant bow of color. I weaved further south to get to the other side of the ridge, where I hoped to get some shelter from the wind.

The rocks were now crusted with a sheen of ice. I found myself slipping helplessly even on slightly tilted surfaces. No more ballet, back to the snow.

I was plunging in knee-deep with each step, leaning into the slope. I began to think of one of those Discovery Channel documentaries about the arctic and all those musk oxen, plunging through the deep snow, their coats clumped into icy dreadlocks.

That was how I was going to get to the top of this mountain. Nothing fancy, just leaning into the slope, plunging through the snow like a stupid machine. I would fall a lot and get back up again.

The times I did find a patch of snow strong enough to hold my weight were mitigated by other times when I fell through to my waist and had to wrench my boot out between stones. The wind was still terrible.

At last I spotted a peak in front of me, a deranged pile of rock and snow standing proud amidst the flying ice.

“I’m gonna get you, you sonofabitch!” I shouted into the wind, then fell through the crust again, bashing my knee into a sharp rock.

More profanity. I picked myself up and began climbing anew.

My heart hammered in my chest as the sweat trickled down beneath the windbreaker I was wearing. My hands were still cold and numb.

White was all around; on the ground, whirling in the wind. It messed with my sense of balance as I clutched at boulders for stability, buffeted by hard gusts of wind. My muscles were slow and confused, probably weakened by the altitude. I crawled my way over another pile of icy boulders and looked around.

It had to be the top; it had to be. I looked skeptically at the topography on either side of me, unable to see very far in any direction.

It was 10:30 a.m., meaning I was still well ahead of the 11:30 turnaround time I had given myself. But I wasn’t sure if I'd actually summited.

As I pondered, I grabbed a sandwich out of my bag and threw on my heavy parka for extra warmth. Another savage gust of wind ripped out of the west and then I saw the real summit, still far above where I sat. First there was disappointment, then the inner argument about whether I should head back, or try and struggle the rest of the way up.  There wasn’t much time to sit and think. I decided to go for it and see how far I could get.

With that, I clambered down the stone pile and walked across a field to the next peak. Thankfully, the strong wind had blown most of the snow off and it was easy going compared to before. If I had managed to tough it out through the wind earlier, I probably would have saved a bunch of time by walking here, instead of steering into the boulder field.

The top of the peak was still lost in the snow. But it couldn’t be much further. Could it? In order to stay off the treacherous boulders, I picked a steep snowy slope. The average depth was less than a foot here, otherwise, I would have worried about avalanches. I was learning that the steep snow tended to have a thicker crust and was less likely to collapse under my weight.

Sure enough, I found it easy to kick my feet into the slope and work my way up, just like I was climbing an enormous ladder. Well, it was relatively easy. My heart was pounding wildly and I found myself wanting to just lie against the snow, a comforting white blanket where I could rest.

After a couple hundred feet, the snow ladder was gone, and it was back to stumbling through boulders and powder.

It took me about another half hour to make it up the treacherous crown of the mountain, and that’s where I found the the biggest boulders yet. The fact that they were still covered in ice made them no easier to grapple with.

The final boulder, the tippity-top of the damn mountain, was so icy that I didn’t dare try to stand there and risk getting knocked over in the  wind. I flopped on top of it and quickly cowered back into the shelter of the other boulders.

Victory!

Self-portrait atop false summit. If I'd taken a picture on the real summit, you'd see the same damn thing.

It was noon, and I knew I was pushing daylight. I clutched at the headlamp in my pocket. It was likely that I would need it before I got back to the car, hopefully not before I reached the tent.

Looking back down over the slopes, I could barely see more a hundred yards through the whorls of flakes. I was the house in the snow globe. I began working my way down the boulders, tracing my footsteps when I could, using the compass when they disappeared.

One thing that was going right was that I had the wind at my back. Now that I was going down, I was able to move a little faster, and could even glissade in a few places where it was possible.

When I reached the bottom of the summit pyramid, the weather had abated some, and I had much better visibility. I followed a new route where the wind had blown a lot of the snow off, and for about half a mile, I didn’t have to deal with falling into booby traps under the snow crust.

Soon enough, the going got tough again when I stumbled into another snowy boulder field. I tried to get off the ridge early, and ended up kicking holes on a very steep snow pitch in order to get down. Toward the bottom, the crust began getting harder, requiring several kicks in order to get a foothold. I wondered if I would have to clamber back up the way I came. Fortunately, I found a route over some rocks and made it down.

Not the effort was worth it. When I got down I found the going to be just as treacherous with boulders as what I had found on the ridge. At least I was out of the wind.

The sun was low in the sky when I finally made it to the tent.

By the time I got everything packed, I knew I would be using the headlamp.

But now that I was on the trail, I was sure everything would be fine. It was about a hundred times easier to walk on. I clicked the headlamp on before I got to Sherd Lake.

Puffs of cold breath went before the beam.

I was below the snow line now, walking easily between the lodgepole pines. God, it felt good not to be stumbling over crazy rocks.

There was no question that I had corrected a lot of things that I had done wrong on the previous trip. If I felt compelled try the peak a third time, there would be other things that I would do differently to make the trip even better and more safe.

Looking back, I probably should have done a bear hang at camp (why chance it right?), gotten up earlier, saved some distance by sticking to the north side of the ridge going up, and skipped the “short-cut” going down. Even though I hadn’t done everything perfectly, enough things had gone right to give me the privilege of the summit and getting back to the car with sore legs, utterly exhausted.

It seemed like I had spent the last 12 hours pitting all my mental and physical energy against the elements.  I realized that this quiet stretch of darkened trail was the first time I could actually afford to take in a moment. Even the rainbow had been dimmed by the fact that snow was flying into my face.

 Before I got back to the trailhead, I paused to stare up through the trees. Beyond the branches, all the stars in the cosmos were out, shimmering like a spray of ice across the cold mountain night.

You can see the rainbow if you squint. Yeah, I'm kicking myself for taking the cell phone camera instead of the real deal.

Heat Redistribution is Socialism.

Author awakens refreshed and energized for another day of freezing his ass off in the mountains

Whose failed policies are to blame for this? I thought as I clutched myself for warmth inside my damp sleeping bag.

The weather forecast had predicted a nightly low of 11 degrees Fahrenheit where I was tenting at 9,000 feet in the Big Horn Mountains. The bag was rated to 25.

I was wearing my parka and my ski mask for extra warmth and had thrown a space blanket over everything. My hiking boots were snuggled up inside the bag with me so that they wouldn’t freeze up before the morning. I had also filled a stainless steel bottle with hot water and put it in the foot of the bag. It rested at the far end of the bag, where I tried feebly to warm my feet against it.

The thing was, my head and body were almost at a comfortable temperature, not great but hardly hypothermic. Even my hands were doing okay, kept warm from the heat of my chest. It was only my feet that were completely frigid. My upper body had hoarded all the warm blood for itself and left the feet drained, lifeless and cold.

No matter how many times I curled over to rub them or hold them against a warm thigh, they froze again immediately, as soon as I stretched out again.

Stupid blood circulation.

Of course, that is the genius of the body’s regulatory system, that it could rank the importance of different body parts and delegate the distribution of what warmth remained.

Through it is no fault of their own, my feet and toes, are lower-class citizens in my body and in the heat economy that keeps that body alive. No warm blood for you toes!

The hypothalamus, or whatever messes with my circulation, keeps that warmth in my torso and in my head, enough so that I can break a sweat even while my feet and hands remain like so many lifeless slabs of frozen meat.

Apparently, my brain has more worth than my big toe, even though the big gray organ immediately leaks the warmth it gets my scalp — outsourcing precious heat to the atmosphere.

Then, alive and foolish with warm blood, it gets the brilliant idea that I should go for another hike in the snow, where my hapless feet will have to freeze again.

How they suffer to appease the stupidity of the brain. The only recourse for them is protest — lighting up the nervous system with indignant howls.

“We’re fucking cold!” the feet tell the otherwise clueless cerebral cortex.

“Why did you make us walk out into this crap without gaiters? Why can’t you send some heat down our way and not be so selfish all the time?”

The brain ignores its underlings at its peril. After all, it still needs to walk out of the icy forest it journeyed into. If the feet freeze off, my brain would have to call on the hands to make its escape— and lord knows the hands are even worse complainers.

Bighorn Peak from Rainy Lake

About that snow....

I doubt much more than a month went by between the last 100 degree day in Gillette and the day the first icy flakes came whipping across the Wyoming plains in early October.

That day, I looked out from the office window at the winter weather and it dawned on me that the Big Horn Mountains would soon be covered with thigh-deep powder, and climbing peaks was going to get a lot harder.

I also knew that the road into Circle Park would close and make it that much harder for me to get to Darton Peak and Big Horn Peak, which I had been on the list of peaks that I wanted to knock off this year.

It was time to drive back down the highway to Buffalo again once again and spend another night in the thin, cold air.

I pulled into Buffalo around noon and dropped into the Sports Lure to hunt up some new gear. I was in the market for a warmer sleeping bag and thought I might see what selection they had before I bought one online.

I came close to dropping cash on a Mountain Hardware Lamina rated for -15, but I didn’t see anything warmer. If I made the investment in a high-tech sleeping bag, I wanted to be sure that it would keep me warm in any type of abuse that I would be willing to walk into it with. While a -15 rating would probably be adequate for any of the expeditions I have pulled off in the past, I didn’t want to sell myself short on any future adventures either. The decision to hold off meant I’d be spending the night in the 25-degree bag and cold times were ahead.

I did pick up hand warmers as well as a fancy inflatable air mat that had been marked down. Several outdoor websites I’ve read have told me that it’s kind of pointless to own a warm sleeping bag if you sleep with your body is only millimeters off the icy ground.

I found out that there was already about four inches of snow at the higher elevations when I paid up at the cash register. I cursed myself for bringing the snow pants, much less gaiters. I would have to try that much harder to keep the snow out of my boots when I hiked in.

But I had already spent enough time messing around in town.

I took my new loot back to the car and got back up on the road, to the mountains, navigating the switchbacks on the way to Circle Park.

The turnoff was a dirt road that was snowy, but not too daunting, even for my '93 Mazda Protege.

A month ago, I had barely been able to find a parking spot at the trailhead. Now I was the only one there. I filled out a backcountry slip so there would be a record of where I was going. Then I set off down the path, putting the first prints in the fresh powder.

The slant light of the afternoon made the trunks of the lodgepole pines glow orange. The whole thing was sickeningly Christmassy, those needles glistening with snow — booby traps actually. Brush up against the branches and they will be sure to dump the snow down your neck or into your boots.

It was a different, more hazardous world than the one I had found on my previous visit. A sheet of ice covered a swamp that had been festering with bugs and peepers only a month ago.

Sherd Lake wasn’t frozen yet, but it was on its way. Little ghost ships of mist whirled and danced up into the cold air, betraying the heat below to the entropy of the universe.

I glanced at my arm and noticed the same mist rising up from me. Shoulda been wearing a jacket. Hopefully I wasn’t about to freeze up too.  The sun was getting lower. I got moving.

On the second day, I was climbing over this stuff, trying to get up Darton Peak

I planned to put up tent at Otter Lake about a mile further on. The snow seemed to get deeper as I hiked and I had to keep shoving my pants-bottoms over the tops of my boots to keep it from getting in and melting. Some got in anyway of course, and that is a big part of why my feet would freeze in the night to come.

I waded through a meadow of tall, snow-covered grass near the lake and spied a dense stand of trees that looked like a good wind shelter for camping.

The lake was frozen, which raised the possibility that I would need to melt snow for water that night.

The cold fell over me like an icy blanket almost as soon as I stopped moving. I made my freezing hands set up the tent, threw on clothes and clutched myself for warmth. Still getting colder. 

Dammit. Dammit.

I needed fire and a hot meal.

My thoughts turned to the mashed potatoes I’d brought for dinner. If I could find liquid water instead of having to melt snow, I could move things move a lot quicker. I thought about just emptying what was left in my bottles, but decided I didn’t want to use up what I had left if I didn’t have to.

Maybe I could bash a hole in the ice and fill up that way.  I walked out to the lake and struck uselessly against the ice with my ski pole and then my metal cooking pot. I thought about putting my weight on it to make it crack, but I was sure such this would end poorly.

Then I looked at my feet and realized they had sunk through the snow into the boggy area by the lakeshore. A cold dribble of murky water had filled the boot print. It was a good thing I had waterproof footwear. Still, this was not a good place to be at all.

I thought about options, and then stepped down hard neared to the edge of the ice.

Sure enough, more brown water trickled in.

Cold. Cold. I’ve got to get out of here. I’ve got to get warmed up.

I scooped my pot down into the depression and brought it back up full of bog water. Little particles and other decomposing odds and ends drifted in the dirty suspension.

I didn’t care. I lurched back to the tent where I had set up the propane stove.  There was a lighter and then matches as a backup.

I started with the ligher, flicking uselessly at the wheel with my cold fingers. I summoned sparks but no flames.

Matches then. Again, I was greatly encumbered by my cold hands. When I struck a flame, I was too slow with the fuel knob on the stove and the flame sputtered out before I turned on the gas.

The Jack London story “To Build A Fire” came to mind. Fire can be a savior in a tough situation. It can also be a fickle bastard — hardest to light when it’s needed most.

Compounding it all, I had made the asinine decision to bring a small LED flashlight with me in lieu of a headlamp. This meant that I had effectively limited myself to using one freezing hand for the task. It was the kind of cheap light that requires you to keep your finger on the switch in order to stay lit.

If I could make fire I would probably just light some flames and then go to bed. After about seven matches, I finally got the stove going. The purr of the propane combusting was music to my ears. I put the pot of dirty water over it to boil any germs to death.

It was already looking like a bleak evening, but then the burner went off. I went off too, with a stream of profanity that only warmed me up oh-so-slightly.

Looking south from a ridge on Darton Peak 

I fumbled for the flashlight and realized that I had forgotten where I had put it. This was no good because was about as dark out as the inside of a polar bear’s rectum in the darkest night of the arctic winter. It’s the little things, I thought. The little mistakes that kill your ass when you’re too full of yourself to think about what you’re doing.

The best I could find in the way of light now was the little sensor and the LED screen of my camera, which cast a pallid illumination over the snow.

I had a suspicion that the propane might run out, so I had brought a second cylinder. With numb hands, I screwed out the empty canister and put in its replacement.

 Now to light the stove. It took a few misfires, but eventually, I got it up and running.

Within several minutes, I had a big pot of bog-flavored mashed potatoes. I put the steel can of water over the flames to heat up. Unfortunately it was only slightly warmed by the flames, before the other canister ran out too. Next time, I’ll know better than to have brought two canisters that I have used before, and think that I can get away with it.

With nothing else to do, I finished the potatoes and went to my bag to sleep. Even with the new pad underneath the bag, the set-up was still as cold as hell. I did crunches every now and then to try to get warmth, hoping my body would be generous enough to share some with my feet.

I realized I needed to pee. Not wanting to leave my sleeping bag, I unzipped the tent and have the sleeping bag, and let the stream go out into the snow.

When at last I hit the illumination button on my watch, it told me that it was 2 a.m.. I had been in the bag awake and freezing for at least five hours.

Finally, after kicking around for who knows how long, I finally drifted into fitful slumber.

Sunrise over Otter Lake

When I awoke, the eastern horizon was aglow as the morning light crept across the cold sky. I watched the fiery orange ball of sunlight climb out from behind the pines, its hesitant beams filtering through the branches and lighting up the frost crystals atop the frozen pond.

The icy landscape glowed, but seemed no warmer for it.

My feet were still cold. I wanted to go home.

I went over to the pond for water and found that the bog trick that I had pulled the night before wasn’t working. The lake edge was frozen with everything else. I had forgotten to put my fuel canister under my pillow, and the propane fairy hadn’t visited my camp at night to refill my stove. I still had some water left in the bottles and drank some with the dry handfuls of oatmeal and peanut butter tortilla that constituted my breakfast.

No water meant I was definitely hiking out and not trying to climb any mountains.

On the way back I thought about some smaller hikes I could do. I took a quick detail off the trail to look at Rainy Lake, which has a nice view of Mather and Big Horn Peaks. Frowning escarpments of stone towered above the frozen water.

I was getting ready to hoof it back to the car, when I noticed some weak areas in the pond ice around the rocks and stabbed at them with my pole. Remarkably, I was able to bust an opening. I threw off my mittens and went for the water bottles.

The water was dirty sludge with the corpses of various insects floating in it. No prob. That’s why I brought iodine tablets. I looked back at the mountains, then to my watch. It was almost 10 a.m., which was probably too late to get any summits.

I was amazed to discover the half hour of hiking that I had put in had already warmed my feet and had me peeling layers.

Well, I could give myself a turnaround time, say noon and make my way down then.

I set off without feeling very committed to the summit. This was good, because the going was a lot harder than I thought it could be.

I was going off trail, which meant that there were more cobbly rocks like the ones I had bitched about in my earlier entry on Mather Peak. Only this time, they were covered with snow which made it about twice as hard to go anywhere without falling down. Snow covered up ankle-twisting crevices between boulders, snow made my feet slide off the rocks in weird directions.

It was a helpless feeling, knowing that no matter how careful I was, I would still end up falling down.

Finally, I chose a low, unnamed outcropping at just over 10,000 feet and make that my turnaround point.

It was 1 p.m. now. I ate a flour tortilla filled with peanut butter and washed it down with bug-water.

2,000 feet above me,  Darton Peak stood unconquered. Not even close.

I couldn’t feel bitter though. Incredible scenery was all around, from the high-walled cirques and frowning escarpments of the mountain range, to the strange clouds drifting in and out. Looking to the east, I saw that most of the snow had already melted off the rangeland. I recognized the Pumpkin Buttes, about 80 miles away in Southwest Campbell County.

In spite of it all, the experience was a valuable one. The next time I take to the mountains, I’m not going to underestimate the cold. Misery is a good teacher.

Much of my philosophy surrounding the outdoors is that one should make do with less, as much as possible. After all, I seek the outdoors as an escape from our consumer-driven society. However, Mother Nature has forced me to rethink certain elements of that philosophy.

I didn’t do myself any favors by cutting corners on this trip. Now I have a checklist of things that I didn’t bring on this last trip and plan on bringing next time.

Behold!

Warm sleeping bag (I just went online with my hard earned journalism dollars and bought myself a -40-rated North Face Dark Star. I’ll be sleeping it the next time I go to the mountains.

Pee bottle (so I don’t have to get out of said sleeping bag when I inevitably have to take a leak at night.) They say it is important to hydrate when it is cold outside. This allows me to do that, and also to 

Bowl (so I can have water boiling for a hot water bottle

Switch-operated lighter: no more screwing around barehanded with an icy metal wheel.

Headlamp: no sense keeping one hand tied up to hold a light. I need to have as many prehensile fingers in the game as possible.

Gaitors:  (already have em’, though one needs to have a strap mended) Might find some super gaiters.

Snowshoes: (Maybe not for the first trip, but I’ll need them eventually. I tried to get away without these last winter, I’ll be damned if I get stuck trying to push through waist-deep snow again.)

More fuel: (I’ll need a lot if I want to boil snow.)

Snowpants: ( I’ve already got these, but need to get a hole mended.)

More Socks: to put water bottles in (preventing freezage). Many recommend traveling with bottles kept upside down, preventing the lid from freezing on and blocking access to water.

   It is important to remember to keep boots and bottles alike inside the sleeping bag at night to prevent it from going to ice.

Another word on gear: You can have the best there is, but it ain’t worth jack if you don’t know how to use it. One of my biggest struggles has been not only acquiring the right stuff, it’s been learning to be efficient with it. The more time spend fiddling with matches, snapping a tent together, packing and unpacking, the more time a body has to lose those two most valuable resources: warmth and time.

Looking northwest from the slope of Darton Peak toward Mather Peak. Pity about the fog on the lens.

A Colorado Marathon

 My jaw was clenched tight as I made my way down the streets of Denver. I felt the bead of sweat on my forehead.

C’mon. You’ve made it this far. Hold it...Hold it.

I surged forward. Then my foot moved over to the brake as yet another traffic light turned red.

I had made my last pit stop had been in Cheyenne and in that time, I had put away another liter of water.

Proper hydration starts before race day; at least that’s what I’ve always believed.

I’d practiced those beliefs on the drive through Wyoming and Colorado, watering religiously and stopping frequently to run inside of gas stations.

If I were still in Wyoming, it’d be easy enough to pull off the road, water the desiccated fields, and be on my way. In cities, that operation is much more difficult to pull off and will likely lead to legal repercussions.

I put more pressure on my jaw, clenched my bladder and continued driving toward the convention center — at least where I thought the convention center was supposed to be.

I shot a couple of nervous glances toward the map I printed out. I still had about an hour and a to make it there before it closed up. I needed to get my bib, chip and marathon packet by then or else I wouldn’t place. For the moment, I was more concerned with getting rid of the extra Gatorade and water that had made the passage through my kidneys.

I spied the parking garage finally, though it took a while longer to maneuver the Mazda through an interchange, over trolley tracks and through a couple more traffic lights.

No conventional garage this one. The entrance led to an enormous corkscrew that I had to drive up for several stories. The only way to go was up, and the helplessness of the situation, made me feel like Han Solo, getting sucked into the tractor beam.

Oh yeah, parking was $12. There was no way I wasn’t going to pay that now.

After surviving the weird spiral entrance, I rolled into a parking spot and jumped out toward the elevator.

Somehow standing up made me have to piss even worse. Christ. I thought this place was connected to the main building. What floor do I have to punch to escape this place? Ground level? The bridge? I tried a few buttons, each time the doors opened to a different floor of the garage, no bathroom in sight.

I thought about finding some discrete corner, but thought better. There might be security cameras. The Wells Fargo corporate overlords that owned the garage would probably find out and imprison my soul inside an ATM.

Desperate, I rode the elevator back to the car and grabbed a Gatorade bottle, emptied it out on garage floor and then filled it again in the driver’s seat.

The race expo was bumping when I found it. It had the usual assortment of vendors handing out freebies as well as the clothing and shoe sellers.

I thought about grabbing some running shorts, but balked at the $40 price tag.

I wasn’t interested in hanging around there long after I picked up the packet. It’s not a good idea to spend much time on your feet before a race so I made it a mission to get back on my ass as soon as possible and get to sleep soon after.

I count myself lucky that I have friends in Colorado and didn’t have to throw hotel fare on top of gas money and registration costs. A couple of us got our dinner at Panera where I tried some pretty nice pasta with pesto.

In my experience, it’s good to get the carbohydrates in before a race, but not wise to bust a gut. I had overeaten the night before my last marathon and had regretted it midway through that race when I felt sloshy and weighted down. By the time I had cleared the plate at Panera, I felt like I had struck the right balance.

I slept at a place belonging to a friends’ family, and nodded off with the alarm for 4:45 a.m..

I stirred together a last meal of store brand instant oatmeal and honey and started drinking some more.

I ate what I thought I needed and took off. If anyone had been awake, I’d have said goodbye.

It was still dark by the time I rolled into Denver. The streets were cluttered with racers, wearing making their way to the line with numbers safety-pinned to the fronts of jerseys. I pulled into the first parking garage I found, and got a space.

From there, it was just a matter of following the crowds.

News reports pegged somewhere on the order of 15,000 people would show up for either the half marathon or full marathon. Civic Center Park looked like a very fit outdoor festival when I got there.

I stashed the race bag that had my wallet, cell phone and clothes in the holding area that race attendants had set up in a fenced off area of the lawn.

I ducked into an outhouse one more time and got my ass over to the race line.

I had seeded myself for 2:45 and was in the first chute. I worked my way close to the front. First the hand cycles took off, then it was our turn.

I ran across the line, trying not to waste too much energy weaving past people and trying to remember that almost everyone would be going off too fast.

I made a conscious effort to be slow and easy, but it felt like every runner in front of me had a magnet on his back.

The digital display at the mile mark read 5:55 — way too fast for me to hold.

It just felt so easy to keep my legs turning over, but I made myself let the other runners go past me, to think about going easy.

At two miles, I looked at the clock again. Still under 6 minute pace.

“Damn!”

The runner next to me laughed. He was running with a 2:50 marathon goal, and like me he was going way too fast. When he asked how fast I was planning to go, I laughed and said I wasn’t really sure.

We agreed that we would both try to slow it down, at least for a mile. He was living in Boulder now, but I found out that he was from Upstate New York originally, and that he knew one of my friends from my college XC team. Small world.

The slowing down tactic worked., perhaps a little too well. We ran the next mile at 6:50 pace.

I decided to pick up speed again.

I suppose this is as good a place as any to give the Rock’n Roll Marathon people props for the job that they did putting the music together. The rock chords, combined with the cheers from the sidelines, kept me pumped up as I ran through the miles.

Several local high school cheer squads were out on the course. I’ve been a cross-country runner from middle school clear through to college, and can attest that this is the first time that I’ve had pompoms shaken for my benefit. There was a police officer posted at every intersection in order to stop traffic when I came through.

I managed to say “thanks” to several people who cheered as I went by and gave the thumbs-up to several bands.

Now, I was going past runners, most of whom had probably jackrabbitted the start of the race.

I felt good, but couldn’t stop worrying that I was going out faster than I should. Would that slight tweak I feel in my Achilles heel, become debilitating pain by Mile 20? Would the soreness I had started to feel in my thighs hobble me further down the course? It was certainly possible, but there was no way of knowing. Since most of the signs were good, I kept running like I wanted to do my best race.

The best race included a stop at some hedges to pee off the extra water I had drank before the start. Later, I took a short detour to the Porta John to take a dump.

These delays were no disaster in the scheme of things and each time I gained back the ground that I’d lost on the other runners.

I don’t know if it’s just me or if the cameras turn away when elite athletes take a leak in a back alley or need to duck in the john.

I hydrate well before races, which I don’t plan on changing, but maybe I should reevaluate the role of oatmeal in my race diet, because I’ve had to take a dump in my last marathon and a 20 mile race I did a year ago.

When I hit the half marathon mark in 1:22 I saw that I was cruising right below my 2010 PR.

I decided to hold onto my current pace, and if I still had juice for the last mile, I’d burn out what was left in a final kick.

Now it was just a matter of holding on and trying to use energy efficiently.

“Stay loose!” one on looker shouted. He might have been an XC coach. I realized, my arms were a bit too high and adjusted myself accordingly.

My body and legs knew I was working, but I still had my momentum. As long as nothing broke that, I felt that the PR was in reach.

The course took a lap around a park lake. People on bikes, walkers and casual joggers gave me the “great job!” and “keep going!”

I blew by the 18-mile mark. I felt like going faster, but decided to hold onto the energy for the very last.

As much as I wanted to get my best time, I was afraid of blowing myself out. The marathon proverb is “Once you hit the 20-mile mark you’re half way there.”

It sounds kind of off; until you run a marathon and then it sounds dead-on

This 20-mile mark, I felt the ache in my legs, but I felt strong enough to go to the end.

“Great job!” an onlooker shouted. “Push it in! Push it in!”

“That’s what she said,” I gasped as I ran past.

A couple people were shouting that I had the top 10.

Even the cops at the intersections had caught the race spirit, and told me to keep it strong.

Strong. Keep thinking about how to run the best time possible. Don't think about how nice it would feel to start walking. You can think about the beer at the finish if you like, but only if it motivates you to push harder.

The jelly feeling was getting into my legs. My running form had definitely worn down to shit at this point.

 Right after Mile 25, there was maybe a 50-foot hill and I went up it in flailing lurch. The crowds were getting bigger, and louder.

After what seemed like a lifetime, the 26-mile mark came into view. There were .2 more miles to go. I drained the fumes I had left in the tank and put down a mediocre kick to the finish while my name boomed out of the sound system. I glanced up at the red numbers on the display as I went across the line: 2:45:44 — a PR by 20 seconds. It was all I needed to know. I finished 10^th overall. Top finisher Abraham Kogo did it in 2:27:58, while Mizuho Nasukawa was the first female finisher in 2:37:05 (marathonguide.com).

I staggered through the finish chute with a dumb grin on my face.

I found a patch of grass nearby and sat down. Damn my legs hurt. I found myself laughing silently. I wondered if I was going to cry but didn’t. I didn’t exactly laugh either, just made kind of a hopeless smile and wheezed air.

All the long runs, the hours running down the streets alone had brought me here, butt on the grass with crippled legs and 10^th place. Here was the moment of validation.

It wasn’t that much, but for then, it was enough.

The Best I Can As The Runner I Am

 Ah, there’s the feeling I remember: that feeling of exhaustion and despair soaked into every aching fiber of my body.

It’s the feeling that everything I once called me has been drained away. No personality, no sense of humor, no intelligence is left. All that remains is the automaton, numbly carrying out its cruel orders to keep going and ignore the suffering.

Don’t break now. Not until the finish. Only then are you are allowed to break and break utterly. You can drink a million gallons of water; you can lie on the carpet for the rest of the day like a useless glob of jelly and not exert an iota of effort.

I squint down the miles of asphalt I still have to cover for this 17-mile training run. The paved ribbon weaves over the dried-up landscape of Campbell County, the strange buttes and grazing cattle, the big-ass hill I’ll have to get up somehow.

It feels like the damn marathon.

I have two of the 26.2-mile races under my belt now, but it’s been over a year since I went the distance.

That was the Vermont City marathon in Burlington, which I did in 2:52:57. I hadn’t trained as well as I could have. As I went home from that race, I vowed to train more and get to the shape I needed to be in to beat my 2:46:04 P.R. from my first marathon.

Unfortunately, a strained Achilles heel put the brakes on those plans.

Now that I have built up my miles again I’ve gotten reacquainted with going long. The Rock 'n' Roll Marathon in Denver is September 22.

As I pound along the hot pavement, I remember the heat of the Vermont City Marathon.

 Man, those last eight miles had been hell. I had wanted to stop running and crumble somewhere by the side of the course, just like I really want to walk up this hill now.

It reminds me that these training runs are psychology exercises as much as they are physical conditioning. If I stop now, it will make it easier for me to stop during the marathon. But if I can look back on this run and remember that I pushed through, maybe I’ll be able to grin and bear it when I’m actually on the racecourse.

My arms feel weak and floppy as I try to get up the hill.

Damn…this sucks. Maybe if I just had a minute to catch my breath….

It is enticing, this siren call of weakness.

I am ready to give in, but then I reach the crest. A wind has picked up behind my back. I lengthen my stride and let gravity pull me towards home.

I finish in just under two hours. If I had run the marathon at that pace I would have finished in about 2:57.  Of course, I would have needed to hold on like that for another nine miles.

No problem, I think as I lie on the floor of my apartment, heart still thudding in my chest, sweat crawling into my eyes. Except, I’ll have to run it faster to get the time I want.

Self-delusion can have some painful consequences, I’ve learned. Last year, I raced my best 15-mile race on Martha’s Vineyard. The problem was that the race was actually 20 miles. I had let myself think I could hold a sub-six minute pace way further than I actually could. Over the last five miles, I paid for my folly with interest.

The problem is that I need to be a little delusional to run my best.

I ran my first marathon much faster than I thought I could, in part because I didn’t listen to common sense and slack my pace for the first 10 miles.

I delude myself today by not keeping track of weekly miles and by eschewing conventional speed-work on the track. Instead, I do fartlek: “speed play” in which I will run hard for a random distance. I take a break for a random period of time and then pick up the pace again.

If I used a stopwatch on the track, it would give me a better idea of how well I can run. But I don’t really want to know how good I am. I am afraid I’ll find out that I am not as good as I think. That could mean cutting myself short on race day.

Instead, I have been training based on feel. I run as far as I think I should run, go as hard as I think I should go. Within that model, I try to get in one long run a week and to do some speed-work.

Because I haven’t been training by the clock, I can’t rely on the clock to tell me how fast I should be running the marathon. I will have listen to what my body is saying it can do, and be honest enough to run the right pace.

I hope that the watch tells me that the pace I choose is fast enough for a P.R time, but if it isn’t fast enough, I would do better to accept my limits early than run into them face-first with 10 miles left to go.

The Great Rock Hop

The Mather Peak Adventure Part II

So begins the second installment of my adventure from Circle Park to the top of Mather Peak in the Big Horn Mountains.

Boulder fields forever

  After that night scrambling amongst the boulders in the dark, and pitching tent at 10,500 feet next to Lake Angeline, I finally crawled into my sleeping bag. Here, my grip on sleep was tenuous at best.

  The icy wind swooped over the mountains, rattling the tent fabric, making the floor undulate up and down. Even in the sleeping bag, I was so cold that I ended up doing plyometric exercises for warmth. I curled into a fetus and waited for sleep to come.

  Sleep came, but it left around 1 a.m.. A particularly strong gust hit the side of the tent and woke me up with a full bladder.

 I staggered out for a windy piss in the cold, then dove back into my shelter.

  What dreams would come involved me staggering around on top of mountains and interviewing Buffalo politicians for some news assignment that I didn’t understand. I woke up again at 4 a.m. and then at 6.

  This time, I could pick up a faint glow coming through the walls of my tent. I looked outside in my imagination, picturing the spectacular first rays of morning striking the snow on the peaks above, the glacier too, descending the stairway from heaven until at last I was in the light and in the warmth.

  It wasn’t particularly warm in the world though. A scene of uncommon beauty may have been unfolding outside, but all my animal instincts told me I should stay put, curled snug within the snug cocoon of heat. Nor was the sound of the wind against my walls particularly inviting.

  Oh hell! I didn’t come out here to be comfortable. I flung myself from the tent and looked at the world around.

  Deep pink-orange light flooded the ledges on the other side of the lake and the glacier. The waters were still dark, a deep blue like the ocean. The wind had stirred up small whitecaps, even though there couldn’t have been more than half a mile’s worth of fetch.       

  Any gripes that I could have with the discomforts of the previous night, seemed petty now.

  People could wait a lifetime to see this. It was just an obscure lake on the map, another day in the Big Horns.

Tent pitched alongside Lake Angeline

  There was plenty of challenge ahead though and not much time 

for complacency. Two weeks ago, I had left for the summit of Cloud Peak at 4:45 a.m.. It was about an hour and a half later than that, and arguably I had an even harder hike in front of me.  I went to the lakeshore and gathered up some water for my oatmeal. A hot meal would fortify me against this chill.
Unfortunately, my lighter had other plans. It was completely shot.  

  Yesterday it had worked beautifully lighting the stove for pasta. Now I was eating cold oatmeal yet again. Some things never change.

  The summit of Mather Peak is 12,348 feet, leaving me about 2,000 feet of gain to cover in about three and a half miles. No biggie right?

  What I was going to find out was that those miles were going to be a lot more taxing than the average trail hike Not only would I be navigating by compass, I would also have to contend with boulders everywhere.

  Admittedly, I love rock hopping, and get a thrill out of bounding from one to another. It’s great exercise too.

  Coming from back east though, this part of the hike is usually the icing on the cake. Big boulder fields tend to lie above tree-line, so on a 5,000-foot New Hampshire mountain, that means that you will get about a half mile of pure rock scrambling.

  This hike however, I was starting at 10,500 feet, already well above tree line and in the place where winter ice breaks the exposed bedrock into crazy piles of rocks that range in size from softball to SUV. To cross this lawless realm, would require me to spend the next hours, hopping from point to point, putting my feet in weird angles and scrambling up and down boulders.

  In this kind of funky situation, a hiking pole is an indispensable resource, allowing me to pivot, catch myself from slipping and keep my forward momentum.

 

   I left camp and started up the first ridge, moving fast to get some warmth up. The lake fell away and I got up closer to the glacier.

  The fingers of ice plunged down off the edges of the cliffs and nestled in immense grooves in the rock.  Layer upon layer of snow had accumulated here over centuries, maybe millennia, and compressed down into the pack. Leaning in the grooves they had carved from the rocks, the glaciers looked like skyscrapers of ice, leaning against the mountain.

  On the other side of the ridge, a particularly terrifying glacier dropped straight down at the corner of two rocky cliffs. About 20 feet of it jutted out in an icy platform over the Seven Brothers Lakes to the east. Those with a low sense of self-preservation could walk or crawl out to the edge and look straight down perhaps 50 stories or more of drop.

  Fortunately, I could stay well clear of these icy segments. The rocks kept me plenty busy.

  I had an internal goal to reach the summit by 11, imagining that it would leave enough leeway for me to get back to my car in Circle Park by dark.

  I ended up getting to the main peak around 11:30 and then killing some more time getting over to a sister summit. As long as I navigated a more efficient route on the way back, I figured I should be okay.

  As I hopped from one boulder to another, and scrambled up and down others, it was a tricky business keeping a straight line. Nor was it really worth the effort. It was far better to give in to the topographic whimsy of the landscape, to try to find the twisted path that worked the best over the senseless jumble of broken rock.

  This is part of what makes rock-hopping fun to me. You are always in a puzzle, but there are an infinite number of correct places to put your feet down, no need to get bogged down in the boredom of knowing exactly which way to go.

  It was as much a mental exercise as a physical one. Over time, the game slowly morphed from a fun pastime into knee-jarring tedium. Scrambling at the high altitude cut my energy a bit. Compounding it all, there was the fact that many large, seemingly stable rocks had a tendency to slide, tilt dangerously or else fall away completely, dumping the hapless hiker along with them. 

  Ere I reached the summit, my ankles had suffered the abuse of many a treacherous stone.

  The top of Mather Peak was marked, appropriately enough, by a pile of rocks. Someone had left a steel strongbox next to it and I wrenched it open to find a logbook. A few hikers from previous years had left entries on the soft pages, though there was no record of any other 2012 ascent. Whether this is because nobody else has been up there this year, or the more likely answer, that no one bothered opening that box recently, I can’t tell you.  

  I added my own name and sealed it back up again.

The view was indeed spectacular: miles of mountain lakes and glaciers, sprawled out under the azure sky. To the north I saw Bomber Mountain rising in a steep-sided bulk of cliffs and ridges. Beyond that stood Cloud Peak, my second most recent ascent in this range. About 15 miles to the south, I saw the green slopes of the Meadowlark Ski Resort.

Cloud Peak in the distance, with Bomber Mountain in the foreground

 I had two liters worth of water starting out. Hiking in the dry, thin air I was going to need a refill. I scraped some snow off of one of the glaciers and put it into one of the half full bottles. It wasn’t much, and the snow, which looked so pure and white from a distance was actually quite dirty.

  The ice was melting steadily under the sun, but there was no way to get to the water, because it immediately trickled beneath the rocks. I could hear streams of it rushing beneath my boots, completely out of reach. After some work, I moved a couple of rocks and put one of my bottles under the trickle, letting it fill.

  Getting back to the tent was a tough and I took an inevitable tumble when the rocks shifted underfoot. It was getting toward 3 p.m. when I spied the tent far below from my vantage point on the ridge.

  As I began the descent, a stone went loose under my boot, dropped me, and flung me around violently into a boulder. Since I was wearing my camera on a strap, it caught the brunt of my inertia, transferring the kinetic energy to a small area of my ribcage.

When I got my wind back, I spent it out in a string of profanity.

  My camera is more resilient than I am apparently; it seemed none the worse the wear, happily clicking pictures for me for the rest of the trip. My ribs, of course, hurt like a mother. The rest of the day, I got to feel a jot of pain every time I took a deep breath.

Back at the tent, I refilled my water bottles and took the tent down. I still had miles to go to get to the car, and I preferred to cover them before nightfall.

  I steered around the tall ridge on the way to Willow Lake. All the time, I was playing the opposite of the Hot Lava game we learn as kids. At all costs, I tried to stick to places where there was dirt or shrubs. I was burnt out on the rock hopping. As the trees filled in again, there were only slightly fewer boulders, and more dead trees to hop and thickets to cut through.

  The sun was low in the sky by the time that I got to Willow Lake. 

  What a relief it was to get back on trails, free of the responsibility to choose my own path. Tired as I was, I managed to jog  the flat sections of trail and avoid the dark.

The old, trusty Mazda waited in the parking lot, ready to convey me across the miles of road back to Gillette.

  As for my rib, it still hurts, even a week later while I write these words. I sneezed the other day and it felt like taking a hammer to the chest. I don’t believe it is anything more than bruised however and I haven’t stopped running or anything crazy like that.

Back at Lake Angeline later in the day