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