The other night at the bar, I got good and sandbagged by a local character who loves to climb and ski remote peaks. We were talking about Super Gully on Lost River Peak. It's a straightforward line and not difficult, per se, but the way he described it was a little facile: “You walk uphill on an obvious trail for a bit and then skin and then you boot pack, you can’t miss the line, and I’m sure you can ski all the way back to the car. It’s really popular, there will probably be tons of people at the campsite.”
That was a stretch. Bones,
Dapper, Cy and I set out from Driggs, drove through Mackay, and spotted Super
Gully. It was very obvious, as promised: a long wide path of snow that swept
down from tall rock buttresses into a drainage out of sight. But the ascent
looked dry, and steep, and long, and where there was snow it looked thin.
We turned onto a dirt road and
followed it until it dead-ended at a clearing with a fire ring. Not another
soul in sight. The ground was too slanted to get a good night’s sleep.
The weather the next morning
was pretty ideal for a safe ascent of the southwest face: overcast, not too
warm, and not too windy. We started out in running shoes and I was happy
clambering up the slope despite a heavy pack. When we hit the snow line we
switched to skinning and then inevitably started bootpacking at the bottom of
the gully. I kind of hate bootpacking.
Instead of booting straight up
we opted to thread up and around it from the south, which was maybe a little
slower but certainly more interesting. It was pretty easy to kick steps in the
firm snow although I was sometimes forced to wallow through unconsolidated
sugar.
The pitch steepened further and
I was glad I had borrowed both a whippet and an ice axe. If I fell, I wouldn’t
stop sliding for a couple thousand feet. The sun teased us and the wind blew
cold.
Our roundabout route did
require that we traverse a shale field and it scared the shit out of me. I
didn’t trust my foothold and fell a couple times, skittering down the slope and
clawing my way back up, pissed off and shaking. The guys waited for me to
cross. I wanted to descend from there but we decided it would be more feasible
to keep going and fortunately the final push was much easier.
We quickly topped out on the
false summit and gaped at the panorama of peaks before us. The Lost River
Range, mostly hidden from the road, was a wide spread of towering mountains
with that signature layer cake geology. To the west the Pioneers sprawled
across the horizon and the Lemhi rippled on the eastern front. I love Idaho.
We didn’t sit on the snowy
little landing for long. Both of my pairs of gloves were wet from ascending on
all fours and I was worried about getting too cold. The drop from the top was
steep, firm, and precipitously rocky to the north. The surface was chattery and
my legs quaked with 5,000 feet of climbing but the snow provided plenty of grip
for my ski edges.
Back in the sun at the apron of
the gully, we chose a return route, knowing the skiing would be questionable. We
picked our way through some north-facing trees in snow that was rotten to its
core and so touchy that it kept collapsing in broad patches, plunging us under
the isothermal layers. Not necessarily dangerous but certainly spooky.
Snow turned to runnels of mud
and I again fell repeatedly, coating myself with mud. I cursed and removed my
ski boots in a fit of pique. Once I put my running shoes on I was much happier,
billy-goating down the bushy hill, following trails dotted with elk droppings,
until, knees aching, we were back at the truck.
The chances of mishap on a ski
tour increase exponentially with every additional group member, but the four of
us made it up and down without incident. At the end I was dirty, inexplicably
sunburned, and dehydrated, but gratified.
We stopped in a bar in town for margarita pitchers and burgers. The bartender asked us what the hell we had come to Mackay for, and she looked nonplussed when we said skiing. On the drive home rain began to beat on the windshield and then turned to snow in Tetonia, thick wet snow that coated the ground and caused us to groan about the never-ending winter. My gear is still muddy in the garage and I am escaping Idaho to go mountain biking this weekend. Such is life.
