Points of Light

Looking back over Willow Lake on the way to Lake Angeline 

This is the first installment in my adventure to the summit of Mather Peak in the Big Horn Mountains of northern Wyoming

  Through the pre-evening dimness and far, far below, the city of Buffalo twinkles like a lonesome outpost amidst the miles of semi-desert plains.

  Are you having a nice Saturday night down there?

  I see your lights clustered together, drawn to one another much as the lights in the darkening sky are part of their own galactic cliques. 

  And you twinkle in those rows of orange halogen street lamps, lighting the way to bars and whatever other amusements the evening has to offer.

  Do not mistake these words for condescension. I like your town plenty. You’ve got some pretty good beer on tap and some nice bluegrass musicians that I wish we had where I live 70 miles east of you in Gillette.

  But on this stony ridge thousands of feet above you, I can see how small you really are compared to the darkness that surrounds — the dim grazing land, the strange buttes, the latticework of canyons. The darkness stretches up to these proud mountains that had exulted in the last rays of the sinking sun as they put you in their shadow.

  Now I see that you are not entirely alone down there. Amidst the empty plain, I can make out the blip of a radio tower, the odd natural gas rig or a ranch. A pair of headlights crawls out from your outskirts, climbing the Powder River Pass toward Tensleep and Worland on the western side

  For myself, I have a cheap LED flashlight that I bought earlier in the day, but I won’t turn it on until I absolutely need it. The orange glow in the west still affords me enough illumination to pick my way around the loose boulders. A glance at my compass indicates that I am still heading in more or less the same trajectory that I had set for myself when I left Willow Lake two hours ago. The way that I have been winding around the boulders, and through the trees earlier, it wouldn’t surprise me if I were off by a few degrees. As for the distance I have left to travel, your guess is as good as mine. It couldn’t have been more than three miles on the map, but I’ll be the first to admit that it’s been slow going over these boulders.

  And even though I have my flashlight, even though I’m heading for Lake Angeline, which is pretty big and should be hard to miss, the fact that it is getting dark now is starting to worry me just a bit.

  Maybe I should have stayed at Willow Lake after all. The sun was still up when I cooked dinner there, and that’s when I decided that I would rather push on then camp there for the night.

  Obviously, I reasoned, what I really wanted to do was hike up another 1,000 feet and get to Lake Angeline so that I could climb the distant Mather Peak the next day.

  The distance I would need to cover  hadn’t seemed so long when I was looking at it on the map. Now the darkness is closing in, and I find myself looking for a place to lay up for the night. My eye scans the boulders for a patch of meadow, at least a flat rock where I could pitch the tent. 

  I put these thoughts aside. First, let me get to the top of this ridge and maybe I’ll be able to see the lake. In 15 more minutes of scrambling I’m at the top.

Here's how I cooked up some tasty pasta at Willow Lake

  There it is! Way beneath my feet in the valley, maybe 500 feet down that steep, rocky slope. I can see the wind pushing waves across the dark waters.

  An almost-vertical glacier plunges down from the mountains to the western shore. Where there are glaciers, boulders invariably follow, meaning that it will be tough finding a spot to pitch tent — if there is anywhere to pitch a tent. I’ll be damned if I can tell by looking down at the dark landscape from up here.

  It will take at least another half an hour for me to reach the water and then I will have to find a tent-spot by flashlight.

   I guess I kind of fucked up with this whole navigation thing. If I had paid more attention to the topo lines, I would have known to hike the distance in a big L shape instead of a straight line. That way I could have steered around the ridge. That way I wouldn’t have needed to climb way the hell up here, and then climb way the hell back down there.

  The first stars have come out now. Like the lights of Buffalo, they are far away. Comparing those distances is just a matter of scale really.

  And for whatever small progress I’ve made, this may be about as close as I will get to those far-flung worlds above. Get too close and there will be no turning back.

Even as I think this, the city lights disappear behind the ridge and I begin the descent into the glacier-carved bowl.

  “Ow! Goddamnit!”

   I just twisted my ankle on a boulder. It must be time to turn that light on. I’ll need it to get down without killing myself.

  I unclip the light from my pack and swing the beam through the dark to scramble Gollum-like after it.   

  The illumination is only bright enough to show me one part of the jumbled chaos at a time. There’s enough light for me to guess where I should plant my foot, but to make the next step, I must swing the light away again; and so I move forward only by surrendering the path behind me back to the mystery.

The last light of the day cuts over Darton Peak. I had originally planned to climb Darton and possibly Bighorn Peak, but ultimately decided to go for Mather, which is a farther-flung summit.

  At last I have reached bottom.

  It takes a while, but eventually I find a patch of grass that is free of boulders. It’s a little tilted, but it’s good enough to sleep on. I disembowel my backpack and start to snap the tent-poles together to make my shelter. It is already cold, probably down in the forties. A chill breeze blows down off the glacier as I fumble with the different components.

  These stars…you may never have seen stars like the ones I see as I stand here 10,500 feet up in the dry Wyoming air. They overwhelm everything, filling up the bowl where I gaze gape-mouthed upward. Here is the Big Dipper for you, offered in high def tonight. Then there’s the Milky Way, which spans the heavens like a lattice of shining dust.

  Against the tapestry overhead, my limited mind is as the flashlight beam bouncing among the boulders — able to perceive small parts of it but never close to comprehending the whole. But I try anyway, vainly trying to expand my consciousness out into the infinite recesses of the universe above.

  It is like tossing a sugar cube into the ocean. One dissolves utterly; the other is utterly unchanged.

It occurs to me that for most nights in my life I will be in some kind of town or city, lucky to make out the brightest celestial bodies, while halogen bulbs and neon signs are everywhere to see. Yet just a century ago, this cosmic panoply I see now had held rein over every clear night on earth. Wouldn’t it have changed human perspective to see that kind of display nightly, when no one needed to make a special trip into remote places to see it?

  I can’t help but think of the Isaac Asimov story “Nightfall” in which a civilized planet with multiple suns never experiences darkness. But then a rare total eclipse reveals the stars and it plunges their society into chaos.

  No doubt Asimov was on to something when he wrote about the power that stars have on the human psyche.

  My take on the matter is slightly more optimistic. A starry sky like this one is a vaccination against myopia. Those of us who take the far-off stare into the heavenly spheres step outside the dull trappings of everyday existence. I would rather lose my mind to the stars then shut it up within the narrow walls of sober institutions.

  It pleases me to climb mountains and see far. So it pleases me to see these farthest, celestial realms. They are better understood today than when we first stepped out of caves to gape at them; but they remain largely unwritten – a blank page for the imagination’s possibility.

  It is ironic that science has made leaps and bounds in broadening our intellectual understanding of the cosmic realm, yet at the same time, we are cut away from that primal experience of being in it, of looking directly across the passages of space to the worlds beyond. We are more likely to see the workings of this universe as a telescope image or a computer model on the LCD screen; a brief diversion from our otherwise bland workaday lives.

  And even if these lives shrink and seem meaningless compared to the far-out reaches of the universe, I say it’s far more depressing to go through life with eyes cast down, intentionally ignorant to the fact that we are but one pixel on that vast canvas.

  Being one motif in the baffling image, we can look at the other parts and try to see where we fit into the grand puzzle, thus we learn something of our own shape.

  Alone again, above the city, nearer to the stars, my mind is forced to consider itself as one entity. I am distanced temporarily from the connections to people and other responsibilities that I use to define myself on other days; in their place I have space forever.

  At least it’s that way until I find myself standing in a patch of light.

  I blink in surprise. Everything including the tent and the boulders behind me is completely lit up.

Not angels or aliens that I can tell. It’s someone else camping out here on the other side of the lake. They must have seen me getting the tent set up.

  “Hey!” I call out.

  “Hey.”

  “How you doing tonight?”

  No reply.

  Okay, I guess I can live with that. The light goes out. It was super bright. Did they bring a set of headlights up here or what?

  I’m slightly unnerved, but at least I know I have a can of bear spray if they are planning to go all Blair Witch on me.

  Studies have shown that as few as one third of the people you’ll meet in the wilderness are psychotic axe-murderers, so I’ll probably be OK.

  Now that the other light is gone, I use my own to finish putting up the tent.

When I finish the work, I take a minute to lie on the grass nearby and gaze upon the firmament. The beauty and mystery of it moves me, but I am also getting kind of cold out here. Once I get inside the tent, that will be it for the view. It will be lost behind the rain fly that I have put over the tent to deflect night’s winds.

  Starlight is very pretty, but unless you happen to be handy with a sextant it’s not very practical. Unlike our good old Sol, it won’t even you warm.

  Warmth was gone from the sky now, but I had it in my sleeping bag. And there was my universe, slightly larger than a nutshell. Here I could cower from the infinite from behind walls of nylon and close myself off for the sake of comfort.

Looking down to Lake Angeline

Cloud Peak in 24 hours

View of Glacier Lake from Cloud Peak Summit

 Some adventures are all about going for the big one.

Sure, I’ll wander off into the wild to get to an obscure mountaintop that no one’s heard of or scramble up that random butte for no reason other than the desire to see how things looks like from there. But, like most people I can be a sucker for the big names, the celebrities if you will in the world of outdoors.

Compared to the big shot mountains in the Tetons and down in Colorado, Cloud Peak would be lucky to make the C-list. That doesn’t change the fact that at 13,167 feet it’s still the tallest thing around northeast Wyoming; big enough to have the Cloud Peak Wilderness named after it, not to mention Cloud Peak Energy, the multi-billion dollar coal company based in Gillette about 100 miles to the east.

Almost a year ago, when I decided to move out to that city, the Big Horn Mountains had a lot to do with the decision. If I left, I was going to make damn sure to climb a lot of those mountains. One of those days, I was definitely going to climb the tallest one of the lot.

With the waist-deep snow finally melted, I was looking at an achievable goal. Cloud Peak is not too far from road access and has a gradual ridge for hikers on the Southwest side that doesn’t require technical equipment. Some of the local runners I know have done the whole 22 miles and 4,000 feet of climb from the trailhead at West Ten Sleep Lake in a day: the Cloud Peak Marathon, they call it.

I decided to tone things down a notch and do a two-day trip. I’d hike six miles from the Ten Sleep Trailhead the first day and then camp at 10,000 feet at the shores of Mistymoon Lake. The next day, I’d leave the tent and take a light pack to the Cloud Peak summit, get back to the tent and hike out the way I came: 16 miles.

I lit out from Gillette early Saturday afternoon, It was another 90-degree day in Campbell County. Since there is no A/C in my car, I had the windows down, as I shot down the highway, sweating in a whirlwind of superheated air. Every mile, the mountains grew larger in my view, cool, their cool slopes patched with snow and ice, outside the reach of brutal summer.

 I turned off Interstate 90 in Buffalo, then started up the 9,000-foot Powder River Pass.

While the faithful Mazda made the climb without protest, it was less happy when I turned off the highway onto the bumpy dirt road to the trailhead and the nine rattling miles of abuse to the suspension that followed.

The trail to Mistymoon Lake begins just above 9,000 feet. I got there at 5 p.m. when there was still plenty of light to hike in. The trail was smooth and pleasant, winding through the tall stands of lodgepole pines. Occasionally, the trees would break away into a glen, and I would see the denuded granite sides of mountains up above, decked with snow, exalted in the late afternoon sun.

One of the mountain lakes that I passed on the hike in

I reached Mistymoon Lake by 8 p.m., tired from the ups and downs along the trail. A clouded sky and the fading light dressed the surrounding landscape in dull colors.

But what a landscape! The trees that I had begun my hike with had fallen away with the elevation gain. Mountains thrust upward from the far side of the water in brazen walls of rock. Cloud Peak lurked further back, separated by distance, fortified by cliffs.

Large boulders scattered lay atop the alpine meadows nearby, calling cards of the last glacier. A few other campers had already pitched their tents on some of the grassy spots near the shore. They were finishing up their meals, getting ready to crawl into their sleeping bags as the darkness fell around us.

I chose a spot for myself and heaved the pack off my shoulders, glad to shed its weight.

As I did, the clouds parted in the west. I watched a blush of salmon-colored light spread across the mountaintops, illuminating the land peaks me, even as it stayed dark down below.

A small rock outcropping, a couple hundred feet above the lake looked to be crowned in orange as it snagged the last of the light. Taking a madman’s inspiration, I began charging up the bouldery slope, trying to reach the light before it faded. Alas, I wasn’t quick enough, and before I could reach Valhalla, the stone reverted to the dun shades of before.

The gods denied. But at least I had pictures.

From my vantage point, I could see another luminous corridor that opened over the land to the south, from the forested high country, down to the rangeland thousands of feet below. I watched, Gollum-like from my crouch among the darkened boulders, then scrabbled the rest of the way up to the dim summit.

View over  Mistymoon Lake looking south 

More earthly concerns awaited where I set up camp. I realized that despite my diligence in packing a camp stove, fuel, dehydrated food and spoon, I had neglected to bring a lighter or matches. I was discouraged by my absentmindedness, but not because I was afraid I’d go hungry. I’ve learned that dehydrated mashed potatoes are perfectly edible in cold water, if slightly less enjoyable.

I dumped my canteen over the pot and set to eating. Not bad. Not bad.

After the meal, I got into the tent and crawled inside my sleeping bag. I set my cell phone alarm for 4:45 a.m.. All the better to start hiking early and get down before any thunderstorms started brewing.

I woke to the alarm in the dark and cold and began preparations in the lantern light. This consisted of pouring cold water over some instant oatmeal and spooning it down with some raisins. I put some warm socks over my hands that were thicker than the gloves I had brought, cleaned up breakfast and put everything I thought I needed into the pack.

I turned off my lantern and picked my way along the trail in the predawn light.

There is no trail to the summit marked on the map, but there is an informal footpath up Paint Rock creek designated with cairns.

I wound on and around the trail, through a maze of boulders , scrambling up steep pitches of rock. It was impossible to find all those little stone piles and I frequently wandered off trail. It was easy enough to keep going in the right direction using the canyon as a guide. Eventually, the route started climbing away from the creek. I made sure to fill up both my water bottles and treat them with iodine before I left. It might be a while until water was available again.

As I climbed, I saw the first beams of sun light up the tops of the peaks. In the reverse of the night before, the golden illumination climbed down from the mountains, bringing warmth to the rest of the world.

The tops of the canyon above me blazed with the first stroke of day and I tramped merrily beneath it all, stupefied by the beauty.

A tributary of Paint Rock Creek on the way to the Cloud Peak summit

                          

It's a little cheesy, but I couldn't resist photographing the bright canyon top in this puddle

I started across a small snowfield and sunk in knee deep before I made it the whole way across. Well, it wouldn’t be a trip to the Big Horns if I didn’t posthole at least once.

I passed beneath a few other snow fields. The snow melted steadily into streams going down the mountainside. But instead of running along the surface, they sank down into the boulders. Oftentimes as I made my way over the broken rock, I could hear the water rushing beneath me. It reminded me of the documentary Touching The Void where a wounded climber manages to crawl down the mountain, is desperately thirsty and hears water coursing through the ground beneath his feet  but has no way to reach it. I tapped the canteen in my side pouch, glad that I was stocked for now.

After I spent some time climbing the ridge, the top came into my sites, just another mile of scrambling up the Dumpster-sized rocks. Sometimes a boulder would tip under my weight and I would hop nervously to the next. I found my heart pounding in my chest and it occurred to me that I was probably working harder in the thinner air. Only once did I get a slight dizzy feeling and it passed quickly.

At 8:45 a.m. I came upon the summit. I climbed the highest boulder, and let out a whoop of exultation. To the north I could make out the sharp summits of Black Tooth and Woolsey. Then there were the stony ridges coming of Bomber Mountain to the south.

Most spectacular of all was what was right in front of me — and straight down.

Cloud Peak’s summit stands at the brink of a 2,000 foot cliff. Below lies Glacier Lake, which as the name suggests, is surrounded by an immense glacial bowl. Minerals scraped off of the mountain have colored the western segment of the lake a stunning turquoise color, which seeps into the eastern portion, which is a, darker, deeper blue.

 I could sit above it all and see the world stretch out past my boots. Here was the chain of alpine lakes pouring out of the glacier over the rock fields and watering the piney forest. Here was where the forest fell away and gave way to the dusty rangeland that grew fainter as it went east until, at last, it blended seamlessly into the hazy sky.

I stayed on the summit for about an hour, taking in the views of Woolsey and Blacktooth, daring my way out on the ledge that overlooked the glacier. A brown smudge across the sky marked smoke from wildfires burning somewhere down below. At one point I caught a whiff of burning smell.

Smoke was one thing; thunderheads would be another. In looking out over the sky, I counted myself lucky that I didn’t see any.

I thought about my plan to try climbing Bomber Mountain that day. At 12,448 Bomber is shorter than Cloud Peak, but there was a substantial dip between the two. The wreckage of a bomber plane that crashed there on a World War II training mission still remains.

Looking across the way to the other mountain, I found a ridge that looked steep, but one I thought I could climb.

Getting there from Cloud Peak would be trickier. I decided to do a little scouting on the south side of the Peak. The topo lines on my map seemed to indicate that it would be doable.

I could have butt sledded down one of the snowfields, but they looked too steep and I would risk losing probably control in a very bad way.

Here's one way to get off the mountain really fast

I was walking over an immense, slanted stone surface near the cliff when I put my foot down on a surfboard-sized boulder. Instead of staying in place like a good rock is supposed to do, it slid out. I fell backward and grabbed another boulder for support, this one the size of a VW bug. Thankfully, it stayed in place.

Meanwhile, the rock I had stepped on sped up and then plunged over the cliff. I wasn’t able to see what happened but it must have been pretty epic. One boulder struck another and then another. As I clung there, I heard what must have been hundreds of pounds of rock go clattering down the thousand-foot wall, the echoes reverberating through the canyon. I wasn’t counting, but it probably lasted a full minute, growing larger, more distant and more terrifying. I delicately pivoted my weight onto the foot that was on solid stone, trying not to put much weight on the VW boulder.

I scrambled back onto more trustworthy ground and caught my breath, just as I heard the last stones go clattering down the abyss.

“Fool of a Took!” I muttered, feeling the flutter of panic in my chest, but not a little bit of hilarity at the situation.

It just kept going! I thought to myself.

Fortunately rock has a lower co-effecient of friction than soft human flesh. Even if I hadn’t caught myself, I probably wouldn’t have gone over. The experience was still jarring enough to make me rethink my off trail plans.

I made my way back to the regular trail and started the descent. I saw a couple of hikers going up as I went along and gave them updates on what they had ahead. There were some big white puffy clouds that looked like they could mean trouble, but didn’t do anything.

By mid afternoon, I was back at the tent on Mistymoon Lake and packed the tent and everything else in the bag and headed for the car.

That last six miles left me plenty weary. It was 5:15 p.m. when I got back to the trailhead: just over 24 hours after I had started for the summit of Cloud Peak.

I had earned myself a helluva sunburn, was grubby and tired. Above the fatigue my  chapped lips twisted themselves into a smile of satisfaction. I had got the big one.

Alpine flowers near a snowfield on Cloud Peak