Winter Rec
It was winter, the beginning 2001. My second semester at Brigham Young University was underway. One Saturday evening I came home from a long day at the library, followed by an even longer night at the testing center. That whole week had been stressful. I had studied a lot and taken several tests. As the week drew to an end, my friend Bryan felt the same way I did. As we sat in our dorm room cerebrating on our despondently miserable study-holic lifestyle, we decided to do something outrageous…
We realized that we had to go to church the next day, yet, we reasoned, our little overnight excursion would not infringe on our ability to keep the Sabbath day holy. It would be over in the morning. We hastily outlined our late night plans. We hopped in my car, drove to the store and bought some firewood. We then began the several hour drive to the High Uinta mountains of Northern Utah. There we had a secret bounty awaiting us. There we would fire up our two beautiful all terrain vehicles (ATV’s) which roared in that wilderness with such power as to make the weak at heart shrivel before our terrible thunder.
We would make the all too familiar five mile ascent to the summit and camp for the night. In the morning we would watch that stunning sun rise over the lofty grandeur of those snowy peaks. As they always are at this time of year, the mountains and valleys were covered in feet of snow. Yet we were not deterred. Our transports were no ordinary vehicles. We strapped our sleeping bags, wood, tent, and other supplies to our quads and took off. Flying over mounds of snow illuminated only by the high beams on our ATV’s was exhilarating.
The last two hundred feet to the summit were the steepest. They were so slippery, that even our four wheel drive behemoths were no match. We strapped the gear to the stronger of the two vehicles. Then, digging our boots laterally into the snow, and standing on either side of the vehicle, we pushed up on the handle bars while revving the engine. It worked! The next 200 feet were exhausting, but we made it to the summit. Now to heat up this forsaken climate. With wind-chill factors reaching down into the negative 40’s a cozy camp side fire would keep us warm throughout the night.
Wait! Where’s the wood. I can’t believe it; we left the wood at the base. Ok, five miles on an ATV really isn’t that far. But we didn’t want to push another ATV up that hill, so we descended to the other ATV which we had left at the bottom of that abruptly vertical ascent, and began to drive that one to the base. Chug…chug…chug dead! You’ve got to be joking! Out of gas? That’s ok, we have gas at the base. We’ll just take the other ATV. And again we climbed that precipitous place! What a night! At least we’ll sleep well when we get a chance!
And aboard that deafening dragon we went again. While we were driving, we realized that the car was veering to the right severely. What is going on? What is the problem? We inspected it thoroughly. Alas! A flat tire. Unbelievable! Is someone playing a dirty trick on us? What are we to do? It seemed our trip was doomed. We got a hold of ourselves and tried to think.
No need to panic. We are only a few miles from the base. I had a solution. I have an electric pump that we can pump this tire with if we can get it back to the base. There we can load up with wood and gasoline. So we got off and pushed the wounded wildcat, again with one of us on either side, revving the engine and jogging along side.
Back to the base I plugged the pump into the lighter in my car and attempted to fill the tire. No air! I tested the lighter. “Bryan, we’ve got a problem. We are in the middle of no where, and the lighter in my car doesn’t work.” We rested for a few minutes, bemoaning our fate. Woe… woe… woe! Its Sunday morning and we are five miles from our supplies. It seems as if we are doomed to destruction. Is this cruel punishment not in consequence of our poor choice of how to spend a Sunday morning!
Again we pulled ourselves together. We will not be able to carry this wood. We’ll hike the 5 mile ascent carrying this gas can. We’ll switch off. And the journey began. For hours we pulled our heavy boots out of that deep powdery snow. Each time we switched with the gas can, was either an enormous relief or an ominous burden. It seemed to get heavier and heavier every time. The chilling winds crept through my cloth coverings and burnt the skin on my face. Since we were not going to be hiking (so we thought) I wore my NEW sub-artic insulated boots. My feet may have been warm, but the blisters I would later find were so deep, as to leave my socks stained with blood.
The hours finally passed in what seemed like days. We had arrived! We put the fuel in the ATV, and drove to the final ascent. We hiked the 200 feet for the last time. Exhausted, we collapsed at the summit, only to realize that the sun was rising. The daylight was peaking through the cracks and crevices, pervading that pristine wilderness, and revealing immaculate rolling hills of white— untouched.
The scene reminded me of flying in an airplane looking down on the thick white clouds- ah if I could only jump out and land in those clouds. Yet as solid as they look I would sink right through. And so it was with these hills of snow. With the exception of our well worn tracks, the splendor of these sumptuous peaks was unaffected by our presence, and all the rumble of our man-made combustion engines was no match for the crisp resonance of the ubiquitous wind, or the august silence that accompanied its absence.
The night was over. We sat there, reflecting on the grandeur of this scene, and upon the choices we had made. What does it mean to keep the Sabbath day Holy? We had been on the trail literally for eleven hours (9pm- 8am). The entire experience seemed like a bad dream, in a beautiful palace. We climbed aboard our fueled vehicle and drove back to base, this time a little slower. By the time we had put everything away and got in the car, it was around 9 or 9:30 am. I began the drive home, but I was so exhausted, I pulled over about half way back to Provo to sleep. As one last blow— which we accepted without complaint, I had left my headlights on when I fell asleep. An hour later I arose, without power. After a while a generous police officer came to the rescue and jump started us. Another hour on the road… We were home. It was almost 1pm. Fortunately, our ward met from 2-5pm. I took a shower, got dressed and went to church. The peace I felt there was akin to the peace I felt on that summit, above the clouds of snowy life, after a long night of darkness and distress.
And so it is in life. On Sunday we step out of the world, and place ourselves in a higher spiritual vantage point. From our Sunday summit we can see more clearly. We can make better decisions. And the love of Christ can fill us with peace and lead us on the path to happiness. But remember that keeping the Sabbath day holy means more than just going to church on Sunday!
By Gordon Lemmon
April 5th, 2006
My senior year of high school, during February break, my Dad and I decided to cross-country ski the thirty-mile length of popular Lake George, near my house in the Adirondack Mountains of upstate NY. A somewhat spontaneous trip, we arrived at the lake early in the morning, parked near the shore, and headed out.
Lake George is very popular for ice fisherman, and so as we began our ski trip, we asked a few near the shore how thick the ice was. They informed us that it was many feet thick, and we took notice of the trucks parked out on the ice as far as the eye could see.
It was cold and windy, about ten degrees, and after skiing for about twenty minutes, we approached a large “mountain range” of ice, that appeared to stretch across the ice. We later found out that when the ice freezes, it expands and pushes up, forming large piles of ice several feet high that stretch across the width of the entire lake, about a half mile.
My Dad approached this ice crack of ice chunks and noticed that there was water on top of the ice. Unsure what to do, we skied along the length of the crack until we reached the tracks of a snowmobile that had crossed the crack at that spot. My Dad turned to me for my opinion, and we both agreed that if a snowmobile could do it, surely a skier could, right?
So my Dad began to ski in the snowmobiler’s tracks, as I followed close behind, and suddenly I looked up and saw my Dad fall through the ice and go under.
I didn’t even know what to do. My initial, completely subconscious reaction was to start shrieking (I am a girl). So I did–shriek, gasp, shriek, gasp…. My Dad’s head popped up. His face was covered in blood from the sharp edges of the ice, and wherever he reached the ice kept breaking away. I couldn’t move, not knowing what to do. I began to form my ear-splitting shrieks into the word “help!”
An ice-fisherman near the shore heard me. Unable to see my dad, he began to saunter in our direction. As I kept screaming, he began to jog a little more quickly. By the time he had reached us, my Dad had somehow managed to get a ski-pole up on top of the ice. The fisherman crouched down, inching towards the water, and grabbed the ski pole, pulling my dad out onto the ice, all the way out of the water.
I somehow managed to gain control of my spastic diaphragm and was able to echo my dad’s simple “thank you” as the fisherman turned to go. My Dad, soaking wet, was later treated for hypothermia. After getting situated, we skied back across the lake in our tracks the our car.
When we got to the parking lot, there were a bunch of emergency vehicles heading out on the ice. Apparently one of the fisherman heard me screaming (probably the best thing I could have done, in retrospect) and had called 911 on his cellphone. My Dad was taken into an ambulance where he was taken care of and I was interrogated by well-meaning policeman. The EMTs were volunteers and my mother later made a sizable contribution to their fund.
After my Dad was treated, he put on my spare sweats (just a little too tight/short on him, but I’d brought them just in case), and then we went to a nearby laundromat and dried his wet ones. Thankfully we’d also packed our snowshoes, so we then drove to a nearby mountain and did some snowshoeing. Both of us swore we would never again go out on a frozen lake.
When we arrived home late that night, my mother took one look at my dad and asked what the hell happened to him. She wasn’t happy. But we were grateful to be alive, dry, and warm, and had enjoyed the snowshoeing at least!
One last note–if you ask my Dad his version of this story, he’ll tell you as he was struggling in the freezing water, trying not to drown, he could feel all these cool ice formations on the underside surface of the ice with his gloves. At least until his hands went numb.
April 4th, 2006
Winter Mountaineering Epic somewhere near (or far from?) Camp Muir
This trip my friend (the same one that was with me on Success Cleaver) and I decided to head up as far as we could on Rainier during the winter. Originally we planned on trying a summit bid, but realized the weather probably wouldn’t cooperate, so we settled on just making a trip up half way and do some winter mountaineering practice. We set out from Paradise up towards camp Muir as a somewhat iffy day, but most of the mountain was still visible so we had high hopes. As we began our trek up the Muir Snowfield, the weather began to deteriorate rapidly.
The clouds went from hovering around 12,000-13,000 feet to less than 8000 in the time span of just a few minutes. Soon the wind started picking up and snow started falling. We were in a textbook Winter Whiteout somewhat high on Rainier. Navigation in a whiteout is nigh impossible. We got out our map and compass and navigated by trying to follow a bearing to camp Muir so we could seek shelter in the hut. But we realized we were lost and weren’t going to make it and it was going to be dark soon, so we decided we better started digging in and hunkering down for the night before something bad would happen.
As we were fighting to set up our tent, there was a brief “clearing” when visibility went from several feet to maybe 100 feet when I noticed a person coming towards us. At first I thought it was a ranger who was going to check our permit and tell us that we can’t camp here because this isn’t Muir, but it turns out that it was a skier who was going to go up to Muir and then ski down that day. He had an earlier start and less gear, so he got caught much higher on the mountain during the storm. He quickly informed us that he needed our help, as he had no more food, water, shelter, or clothing.
The first rule of whiteouts is don’t be in one, but if you are stay put and wait it out. He had gotten lost and tried to find his way down and ended up on the Nisqually Glacier and almost fell into a crevasse. It was then he realized the peril he was in. After several hours of wandering around, he saw our bright yellow tent during the “clearing”. It was a very long night trying to fit 3 people into our small 2 person mountaineering tent. We imparted of our supplies to him and hunkered down for the night, which was a miserable experience on so many levels. The winds were so strong that we had to have one person try to stabilize the tent. If he hadn’t run into us that night, there is no way he would have survived the night. Looking back we probably should have turned around earlier that day at the first sign of bad weather, but being two invincible seniors that we were, we kept pushing on and ended up saving some guys life. Funny how that works, huh?
April 1st, 2006
Alright, I have 2 worst trip ever stories and they are in my opinion equally as bad, and being that they occurred on the same mountain I chose to do both of them.
Success Cleaver, Mount Rainier
Success Cleaver is the long ridge coming down in the middle
My boss, two of my friends and myself chose to try to climb Rainier via Success Cleaver the summer before my Senior Year of high school. We were enticed by the “alpineness” of this route since it involves no glacier travel, is really long, and nobody is on it. We planned on taking 4 days to do the route; one for the approach, one for some more approach and the lower half of the route, a day to summit and carry over down Disappointment Cleaver, and then a day to sit around and descend back to paradise.
As we were high on the route, my boss became rather ill, in fact he became violently sick. The altitude was causing him to have a nasty case of Acute Mountain Sickness, which induced an what we think might have been an asthma attack. We stopped for to rest hoping that he would be able to pull through it, but to no avail. When it came to the point when he began coughing up a pick fluid (I don’t know if it was blood or what) it became apparent that he couldn’t go any higher and needed to descend immediately. He was having trouble breathing and because of that, he had no equilibrium or balance and was basically unable to walk without assistance. The 3 of us decided that we needed to take his pack and somehow distribute it between the 3 of us, rope up and begin assisting him down to a lower elevation. This was a major ordeal since success cleaver is steep enough that if a roped team fell, it is unlikely that you could team arrest to stop a fall. It was an arduous task of at times having to plant feet and constantly having to place pickets for protection during the descent. After descending several thousand feet, we eventually camped towards the bottom of the cleaver and waited to see if his condition would improve, which it did, but it was out of the question for him to go any higher. Our summit hopes were gone by then because he couldn’t go up anymore, and if the 3 of us continued to the summit, we would be unable to carry over as planned and I wasn’t about to descend the cleaver again.
The upper mountain from around 10,000 on Success Cleaver
March 31st, 2006
A bit late in coming, but I thought my first post on here would be about a dismal failure on my part. On Saturday, March 25, the Wasatch Mountain Club (specifically Steve and Larry Swanson) hosted the 33rd Annual King’s Peak Ski Run. This is a trip held in late March to attempt to ski to the summit of King’s Peak in a day. The trip is long (~32 miles) and gains around 5,000 feet of elevation. Steve and Larry are older guys and they’ve been doing this for a long time.
Out of 30 people that started the trip at 5 am or before, 7 made the summit of King’s Peak. Round trip took around 16 hours for most of the successful individuals. I became violently ill and turned around with most of the other skiers at Gunsight Pass. When I finally got back to my car, I nursed my swollen feet, drank hot chocolate in the Swanson’s van and tried to sleep while waiting for a friend who had made a summit push. The drive home was perhaps the most exciting part, as we were caught in a storm near Park City and through Parley’s Canyon coming from Evanston. Driving 5-10 mph on I-80 is never fun.
For anyone interested in backcountry skiing, peakbagging and essentially a long slog for bragging rights, I highly recommend trying to make this trip next year.
March 31st, 2006
Q.I use an Arc’Teryx Sindwinder SV for touring and resort riding. It is significantly thinner than my previous outer layer (The North Face Mountain Guide) so I am having trouble finding a layering system that will work for me. I tend to get warm quickly. If you could give me some options for warmer and cooler days I’d appreciate it.
A. I can appreciate your predicament as I, too, tend to get warm very quickly. I also use a thin Gore-Tex shell similar to your Sidewinder for riding. What I have found works well for me is different layering for different temps and uses.
For touring, when I’m on the move most of the time, I wear a lightweight base layer with a Marmot DriClime Windshirt over that. I keep my shell in my pack until I’m ready to rip.
If it’s really cold or stormy, I layer my shell over the top; the windshirt adds just enough warmth, but also breathes very well so I don’t overheat. I cannot overstate the versatility of this one amazing piece of gear. I use it year round, but for winter backcountry travel it rules. Its outer nylon shell takes the bite out of a cold wind, while it’s thin microfleece liner regulates your temperature evenly and effectively. You can hike all day in it.
For colder days or resort days, it gets a little trickier because even temperature regulation is so much harder to achieve. The key is having your layers work together, moving moisture towards the outer shell and away from your body.
I use a thin base layer with either a power stretch top or lightweight fleece (100 weight) over it. Patagonia’s R system (R .5 and R 1) is excellent. If it’s really, really cold I’ll put my DriClime Windshirt over the fleece under my shell or use a 200 weight fleece.
I would stay away from layering with WindStopper type fleeces as they inhibit moisture transport, making you feel clammy. Sometimes you just have to vent on the way down (with core vents or pit zips) or up (riding the chair). The newer soft shell outerwear has definitely caught my attention as it seems to be a good solution for hot folks like us. Good luck, and thanks for your question!
credit www.backcountry.com
March 13th, 2006
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