Super Gully

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.