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.