Opportunities to find deeper powers within ourselves come when life seems most challenging.
Joseph Campbell
My first solo backpack trip at sixteen had been up to the Lake Basin in the Wallowa Mountains. Ever since then, I had wanted a Walden-like experience of that cluster of lakes (all over 7000’ elevation) in the depths of winter. The mountains in winter . . . . How quiet are they? Streams, flowing and cascading, are frozen or flow silently beneath twenty feet of snow. Most animals have left or are hibernating. What songs would I hear; what tracks would I see? Visually, the snow simplifies everything, erasing all the messy details of rotting logs, fallen branches, groundcover and rocks with sensually curved whiteness. Snow rounds almost every shape. How bright would Orion and his faithful dog stars shine within the frigid darkness above the night’s snowy mountains? I wanted to wake in the sub-zero early morning stillness, spend the day just skiing amongst the frozen lakes, circling back by evening to settle into a long winter’s sleep.
Bob, my ski companion from my Longest Night adventure, and I had skied a few times up the West Fork trail to the first lake in the basin and back, a long day trip. One day, we took two cars, parked one at the Hurricane Creek trailhead, and then skied up the West Fork trail, across the edge of the Lake Basin, and skied down the Hurricane Creek trail. The sun set. I remember gliding down through an open meadow with the west face of the Matterhorn holding the last faint light of sunset. As the evening darkened, Comet West became visible in the northwest sky. Entering the forest shadows of the last two miles, we could feel, not see, the guiding railroad-like tracks made by other skiers and let their grooves lead us down to the trailhead.
During the winter after my first season in Denali, a bold plan grew of how I could attain my Lake Basin experience. Dad did regular deliveries over into the Wallowa Valley so he could drop me off at one place and pick me up at the other. I would ski up the Lostine Valley road. The road was long but at easy road grade. The next day I could cover the six or seven miles to Mirror Lake in the heart of the Lake Basin. I was really looking forward to the last three-mile stretch of that day: an almost level sojourn through a wide-open glacial valley filled with alpine meadows in the summer; it should be a wonderful afternoon through all-encompassing quiet white. Then I could spend two days skiing about the Lake Basin, savoring the silence and stillness. On the fifth day, I would descend Hurricane Creek’s conveniently steep, short trail where Dad would pick me up.
I had seen a movie in Denali of climbers pulling their equipment behind them on the snow rather than carrying it on their backs. I bought a cheap red plastic sled and connected it with rope and bungee cords (to smooth out any jerks) to an old padded hip belt that I would put on backwards to have its padding in front. Since I had never gone this far into the deep winter mountains alone and since I wouldn’t have to be carrying the weight (the snow would), I overpacked. The sled weighed 70 pounds for the 5-day trip.
The first day I made it to the trailhead at the end of the Lostine Road. Right on schedule. My cheap plastic red sled worked fine, slithering ten feet behind me up the road.
The next morning I arose early and started up the Lostine River trail to Mirror Lake. The trail climbed longer and steeper than I remembered and twisted about. Trails become nebulous when covered with ten feet of snow and I soon was simply working my way upward through the forest as best I could.
Snow that falls on the evergreen boughs cascades outward, not down, piling up a few feet away from the trunk, leaving a sloping “tree well” around the trunk that, in deep snow, could be three or four feet deep. I wasn’t afraid of falling in, but my mindless sled loved to side-slip down into them. Whenever it did, I had to stop, work my way back down to the edge of the well without tangling up the two ropes connecting me with my sled, pull the seventy-pound sled back up onto the slope, clamber back upslope holding the ropes so that the sled would not slide back down in until I was back up to full stretch of the ropes, and continue on my way. A summer trail passes by a tree without a thought, but I had to find a way up that slope so that my sled, ten feet behind, would not slide into any well, so I was creating my own route. The terrain was too confusing and steep to go straight up, so I had to angle up across it. Instead of tracking behind me, the sled often slid sideways downslope of me, yanking on my uphill hip. Sometimes instead of sliding, the sled simply rolled over. Then it became unpullable. I’d have to sidestep down the slope, turn the sled over, and brush off the snow while holding the ropes to keep it from sliding down further. Then, letting out the rope as I went, I would side step back up to where I was when the sled rolled and try to continue.
I spent all day struggling up that steep first three miles. Dark snow clouds drew in. I had to make it up to that level stretch of valley before night and snow fell. I made it, barely. I went only ten feet beyond the crest and in the dim fading light of dusk, successfully went through my highly-evolved “pitching Ledge in the snow” routine. I had plenty of supplies, thanks to the sled, so I slept quite comfortably. I woke part way through the night to find the roof of my tent pressed down against my face. In a bit of a panic, I pushed up. The roof rose and I heard and felt many inches of snow slide off to the sides of the rain fly. The moment it slid, I could hear snowflakes falling quickly on the now-bare rain fly. I went back to sleep.
I awoke again to the same situation. No panic this time. I noticed how quiet it was beneath the layer of snow. When I pushed up the roof, the snow slid off with a sigh and the sound of falling snow could again be heard, and I went back to sleep. This happened three or four times. Then the next time I raised the roof, the snow did not slide off. The previous slides must have piled up to the height of the rain fly, holding the new snow on top of the tent. So I had to get footwear on, crawl outside, and stomp down the ridges of snow paralleling my tent to create space for more sheddings of snow off Ledge. I paused to look around. Every dark evergreen branch was highlighted with a white line of snow rising straight and tall upon it in the windless dark. This fine etched beauty was enchantingly beautiful; I delighted I was here. I crawled back into my bag and sank back into sleep. I was awakened several more times throughout that long night to push up the snow-laden roof, but each time I easily slid back into lovely sleep. I awoke the next morning excited to be able to do the next, beautiful stretch through fresh, pure snow.
But thickly-falling snow obscured any view of the slopes around me. The falling snow was like a white fog. Trees a hundred feet away were only dim outlines. I was behind schedule now but it should take only a few hours to reach Mirror Lake. I’d have base camp set up by mid-day and still have 1½ days for cruising about in this beautiful, fresh snow. I set off and immediately learned that a 70-pound plastic sled does not skim over the top of two feet of freshly fallen powder snow. It bogs down instantly. I gave pulling a good faith effort but quickly realized I would exhaust myself within a few hundred yards. I took my pack off the sled, split my load between pack and sled, left my sled, put on the pack, and skied/trudged ahead.
This was classic deep Western powder. If I were on a steep slope, a descent through it might have been spectacular. But instead, I was trudging on the level with a pack on my back. I’d lift my back ski up a foot onto the top of the snow, slide it forward, high above my other sunken foot, and then shift my and the pack’s weight up onto the new forward ski. As I stepped up onto it, the ski would crunch down through the snow until I was again a foot deep in the powder. Then I would lift my back ski up out of its hole (along with the couple of pounds of snow on top of the ski that can’t fall off to the side until it is out of the hole) and slide it forward. Again I would have to initiate the exertion of stepping up a foot only to have that exertion turn into a crunching down into the deep snow. After a hundred feet, I was tired. I would stop, drop the pack, and turn back toward my sled. But I can’t use the luxury of my new tracks because I need to beat down a wider trail for the sled. So I must deliberately break fresh tracks next to the ones I just did. At the sled, I would turn around, hook the sled on, and start back to my pack. By the time I reached my pack, an inch of fresh snow covered it. Every hundred feet of progress up the valley required three hundred feet of hard trudging back and forth. It snowed all day. As the day wore on, I realized I was not even going to make it to Mirror Lake. I worked all day and got close. I found a campsite out of avalanche danger, which was extremely high now, and fell exhaustedly to sleep with no time to sit and absorb the place.
I wake the next morning to intense blue sky! I see the spectacular glistening beauty I had longed to see. No trail stretches behind me; the night snow has covered it all. I stand here like a tree that’s been here all of its life. As the sun rises over the ridges, the trackless mountains start shedding avalanches down their steep couloirs bordering the Lostine. I soak it all exultantly in. I break camp and push on up the ridge and finally look down on Mirror Lake, an absolutely level expanse of deep snow. My original plan still gave me the rest of the day to enjoy the basin, but I must be on my way now. Although going down Hurricane Creek through two feet of powder will be easier than going up, it will still be a slow slog; the half-day descent I had planned for the fifth day is no longer realistic. So after lunch, I start down. Much of the trail is fairly steep so I don’t have to do a back-and-forth trudge like yesterday. By the late afternoon, I’ve dropped below the elevation of maximum snowfall. The fresh snow is thinning and by the next morning, on my last day, my sled is again sliding behind me and I have only five miles or so to the trailhead to meet Dad.
The trail is easy to follow and goes through open space for the most part. However, the valley drops quickly so the trail can’t follow the bottom. It’s easier to maintain a steadier gradient on the left-hand side of the valley, a few hundred feet above the stream. Again, I am experiencing my plastic sled slipping down the slope and dangling downslope of me, sliding sideways, sometimes rolling over.
The sides of the valley grow steeper. Downslope I can see the creek entering a rocky gorge. I’m not worried because I had skied this trail that magic night several years ago and did not remember any danger. So I continue on, but there is no way the sled is going to follow behind me. It will be dangling/sliding below me, exerting its force downward, the entire way.
I continue on and the slope grows steeper and I realize that if I slip here, the consequence would be bad. I’d slide down the steep slope, pulled by the weight of both the sled and myself, and possibly slide into the icy snowmelt flowing at the base of the slope. I step carefully along. Part of the challenge is that the sled does not slide smoothly below me. It comes to its inertial rest and remains in place as I move ahead a few feet. Then at some unpredictable time, it slides ahead, jerking my hip belt downslope.
The slope grows steeper and turns nasty. For some geological reason invisible beneath the snow, the slope, ten or twenty feet downslope of the trail, steepens into a rocky plunge. My sled is sliding along just a few feet upslope of this lip. If the trail draws close enough to that lip, my sled will slide over and I will have the entire weight of that sled pulling on my hips.
I pause to consider what I should do and it’s then I realize I have no options. I have to go ahead. It’s not because if I turn around, I would have probably two days of travel to go back up the Hurricane Creek and then drop into the Wallowa Valley and make it back that way, worrying Dad and Mom and probably triggering an embarrassing search. I am aware of those consequences, of course, and it influences my thoughts, but that isn’t why I can’t turn back. I am stuck because I can’t physically turn around. Each step I take must be exactly perpendicular across the fall line. If a ski is placed at an angle, it might start to slide and the weight of that sled could accelerate the slide down towards the lip of the gorge. I might lose my edge and slip. And my edge is already tenuous. These are my long, wooden cross-country skis without steel edges. Their edges are hardwood, long sanded down by many miles of skiing over rough terrain. The only way to turn around is a perfectly executed kick turn, swinging the skis around on the downslope side. Even if I had the guts to do that, I can’t because the ropes hanging from my hip belt to the sled create a vertical “fence” that my skis can’t pass through. And I can’t take that sled off either because I wear the hip belt backwards so that the padding is up front, like a yoke, for me to push against. If I undo the hip belt, it will still be around me with its ropes stretching down to that sled. I have to go forward. Earlier, I wrote that the most important skill for roaming was “being able to always take back each step.” Here was a potentially deadly example of not being able to take back my steps.
I work my way carefully along. Then I come to it.
To understand what I met requires a digression. Snow changes over time. It begins as fresh sharp individual crystals. Over a few weeks, however, the snow settles as its weight squeezes out trapped air. In the heat of the sun, the thin points of each crystal can melt and refreeze near the center of the crystal. Gradually the snow compacts into corn snow which is like small, frozen ball bearings. The snow becomes icier and icier with each passing day. Then another storm comes and drops a load of snow on top of the previous surface and the process starts over again. What often happens, however, is that the newly fallen snow can’t really bind with the icy layer it falls upon. Avalanches will usually shear along this weak contact between the two layers.
Up to this point, I had been skiing on the new snow of the last storm. It molded to the edge of my skis. But an avalanche, starting high in the rocky side-drainage above me, had swept all the new snow away, exposing the older, icy surface beneath. I had to cross fifty yards of steep, icy snow.
The whole time I could look down, down past my carefully placed skis, down past that shifty red sled dangling on my hips, down past the lip just below that sled, down to a steep-sided gorge of ice water probably a hundred feet below me. If my footing ever slipped just once, it would be over. I would slide (pulled by the sled ahead of me) over the lip. I would probably bounce at least once before sliding into the water. That bounce might not kill me but it would probably break bones. I would land in the water, broken, tangled and tied to the sled, my hands strapped to my ski poles, my feet clipped into skis. With all those attachments, my head would probably be underwater with limited maneuverability. I’d start freezing right away but, if conscious and not too broken, I would have to take off ski poles, hip belt, and skis while trying to keep my face above water. If I could manage that, I would still be stuck in a deep gorge of icy water without any place to get out. The only way out would be to remain within the icy water torrent for several bone-numbing minutes as it carried me through the gorge to some later spot where I might be able to finally pull myself out. Then I would have to drag my totally drenched, shivering, broken body back up a steep slope of snow to the trail and then hike out four miles through the snow. I would freeze at some point. In other words, if I slipped, I died. Death might be fast, but probably not. Instead, it would be a painful, frozen thrashing about without escape. The moment one of my skis slipped, the pain and death must follow inevitably, and that slip might happen at any moment. There would be, at the least, a few first seconds of slipping when the most terrified shriek of my life would explode out of me. I was very aware of that shriek. I could feel it building within me, waiting for the slipping ski to slice it free.
I had to focus on not slipping, on making it across that icy slope. So I began. My right ankle held its ski’s edge into the slope. My two arms and ski poles kept me balanced. I’d bring my uphill ski forward about a foot. I couldn’t extend farther because I had to keep my weight centered over my planted ski, so just one small step at a time.
I’d slide the ski about, feeling for any unevenness that might give it more purchase. Then I’d adjust the ski until I was sure it was pointing straight across the slope, absolutely straight across the slope so that there would be no sliding forward or back. Then I’d start stomping down and into the slope, trying to bash a groove into the icy snow. I couldn’t stomp hard for fear I would dislodge my planted ski. When I felt I had created a sufficient ski hold, I’d stomp the ski into place and then, breath held, shift weight forward via the strongest line down from my thigh muscles through my knees, calves, and ankle, into that powerful spot at the center of my left foot, down into the icy slope. If I were going to slip and die shrieking, it would happen then, as I shifted my weight from the safe footing to the untested footing. Not only did the ski have to hold my weight, it also had to hold the weight of that sled hauling down on my hips.
The new step holds. I move my poles and my right ski forward. Get completely balanced on the left, uphill ski. Use the ankle muscles to firmly plant that ski edge. Then bring the right ski ahead and start the work of bashing a groove in the ice for it. Keep the focus on that. There’s a line between the center of the ball of my foot and the base of my ankle bones. The closer my balance is over that line, the more firmly my foot presses the ski’s edge into the ice.
Two things make the situation worse. As I move toward the center of the avalanche chute, the surface grows icier. It takes longer to bash less substantial grooves. I have no way of knowing how much icier it’s going to get up ahead. Each step might just be moving me closer to that spot where I will die. And that damn red sled. It did not slide smoothly along with me. It would rest at some spot as I moved farther ahead. One small step, two small steps, it wouldn’t move and then, at some unknown point as I was transferring my weight forward, it would suddenly pendulum forward across the icy slope, yanking down on my hips, against my precarious balance on a thin, icy foothold.
My ankle muscles ached, for they were the strength that glued me to the ice. Once weight shifted onto a foot, that ankle had to hold steady as a tree until I was prepared to risk death with the next weight shift to the other foot. Once the weight shift happened, that ankle could relax, recover and then start the precise work of hammering the next edge into the ice. But the longer I took to rest that ankle, the longer the other ankle would have to plant the slope with full, tiring strength.
What drove this experience so deep was that it wasn’t the kind of danger where danger approached me. I had to step onto it, thirty, forty, eighty, who knows how many times. I’d place the ski into the new groove, many of which (because of the increasing iciness) were less substantial than the ones before and pause. I was focused on the contact between my skis and the icy slope, but always on the lower edge of my vision hung that sled and the plunge beyond. Over and over again, I had to summon the willingness to shift my weight and step onto the next edge, to step into that shriek. I was always aware of that shriek down in my belly, but I couldn’t let it break my concentration on maintaining the line of willpower that held me to that slope.
I could go on with the details but, fundamentally unlike me, you have always known that I would make it across. As footing grew firmer and then the slope grew gentler, relief turned into exaltation, gratitude, love of life. I went on with my life. I share this terror for one reason only. In situations like this, one learns how much power lies coiled within our consciousness, accessed through intense focus. John Muir learned this on Mt. Ritter. Edward Abbey experienced it at a canyon drop-off. Countless thousands, I’m sure, have learned this in a variety of horrible ways. I would never wish such an experience on anyone, nor do I ever want a similar experience again. However, from it came a certain confidence. Not a daredevilish arrogance but rather a recalibration. Having experienced a full “10” of mortal danger, I realize that most of my life I’ve been interacting with 3s and 4s. My “crises” are really only 5s and 6s. We have within us a great power that we rarely tap into. We are capable of more.
– – – – –
Afterwords
For decades, I avoided thinking about this experience. Whenever anything would lead me towards feeling that shriek within, my mind would bounce far away from it. About thirty years later, I got really sick (rare for me). After several days in bed with a fever, I woke from a nap feeling I needed to write this story down. I got my laptop and wrote out the entire first draft of what later become this chapter. The next day, I was healthy again. It definitely felt like remembering the specifics of that experience and externalizing them onto paper purged my sickness.
Next Chapter . . . . . Table of Contents
Leave a Reply