Sparkling Trad Scrambles
Thermopolis, Wyoming
July 2nd
(Part II of Andrew’s summer 2025 adventures; there’s lots of rock-climbing-inside-baseball here, as with the trail-running-inside-baseball in Part I (“Summer Snowstorm in the Sierra”), but if you can get past that, this is a very good, completely batshit letter. Also it’s long!)
“Remember [so-and-so]?,” H. said, as we were sitting on a ledge a thousand feet up, talus and a turquoise lake below us, the Palisade Crest behind us, the Owens Valley and the White Mountains and Deep Springs and the whole grandeur of the Eastern Sierra before us.
“We were climbing in Red Rocks a few months ago. He said, ‘You can only call it “Alpine climbing” if you’re doing it in Switzerland.
“‘Otherwise, it’s just a sparkling trad scramble.’”
Whatever you want to call it, after the freak first-day-of-summer snowstorm that left me stranded in a ski patrol cabin for two hours in Tahoe wearing running shorts, I’ve spent the last week doing it. Big buttresses in the Eastern Sierra and bedazzled granite on Grand Teton. Truly the champagne of climbing. Plus hot springs and cats, Philip Roth and Mr. Rogers, porcupines dead and alive, trout dead and alive, functioning industrial facilities open to the public as “museums,” and the delight of having lived out of my car the last two weeks.
S. and I climbed the Grand Teton via Exum Ridge—a famous mountain and a famous route. I returned alive after 23 hours. H. and I, meanwhile, climbed a lesser-known but equally-gorgeous peak in the Sierra, playing with ice axes and cams on granite and glaciers.
(S., too, returned alive from the Grand Teton. But… along the spectrum of vitality he returned much closer to the denatured-pile-of-proteins end than me.)
H. and I climbed Temple Crag. What a joy. The full adventure was 5,000 vertical feet. Maybe 1500’ of that was roped climbing. It included everything! Hiking, scrambling, talus, scree, snow; ice axes and cams and trail runners and TC Pros; the whole deal.
Where’d I leave off? After defrosting in Reno post-snowstorm, I drove down 395 and met H. outside Bishop at the Big Pine Lakes trailhead. Hiking in, we caught up on the last six years. In the pre-covid times we climbed together regularly in the Gunks, but had barely seen each other since.
H. was laid off from Intel a year ago. One of her climbing partners was selling his van at the same time, so she moved out of Phoenix and into the van. She hit a deer a few months later. But she wasn’t ready to go back to work, so she used the insurance payout to buy another van. ($20K for 100K on a used Amazon delivery van.) She spent the winter building it out in her parents’ driveway in Maryland. There’s a bed, a stove, a fridge, a sink, solar panels, tons of storage, and murals of mountain scenes she painted with remainder paint from Home Depot. There are also large panel gaps and visible screw heads everywhere. As a materials science major she focused on semiconductors, not wood.
Temple Crag isn’t a crag. “Crag” in climbing parlance means a small cliff. Easy to get to; some chill single pitches you can do after the farmer’s market on Saturday. Temple Crag is not that. It’s a mountain. It’s one of the Palisades—a system of rugged, tall, cold peaks in the Eastern Sierra, halfway between Mammoth and Whitney, hosting the southernmost glaciers in North America.
Temple Crag is a mountain. It’s a 2000’ broken-down granite intrusion, looming over a turquoise-teal troutful glacial lake. (Maybe it was a beautiful granite dome a million years ago???) From far away its full three-dimensionality isn’t apparent. Actually, there was no perspective from which the shape of the mountain was ever clear. Human depth perception isn’t good enough to resolve its fractal system of ribs and buttresses and gullies and towers. A fractal of broken granite. How wide would your eyes have to be to understand it? Would you need eyes on rails, sliding in and out as needed, to better resolve at different scales its shape? (What about a third eye? What have the self-driving car engineers learned about resolving 3D shapes by using pure image data??)
But, anyway, Temple Crag’s actual shape is a series of convex buttresses/ribs/aretes. Or are they conCAVE? I never know which is which. They’re steepest at the bottom and flatten out towards the top. Like a sheet draped over a sphere—the unoriginal ghost costume for Halloween—bunching up into pleats on the side. Like RIBS. (You all know I still have my whale ribs in my room, right?!?) The mountain is half-a-dozen of these ribs, separated by gullies/couloirs. Protrusions poke up from the ribs at various points. (Bone spurs!)
On our hike, H. told me about all the success she’s had the last year finding climbing partners on Mountain Project. When she can’t find partners, she just solos. Her mom’s not allowed to know that. Her mom’s also not allowed to know that, in order to make logistics easier on thru-hikes, she hitchhikes.
She was hiking with two mismatched hiking poles. She said she snapped one, bought a new pair, and decided she preferred to hike with one of each. She gym-climbs in mismatched shoes—not because her feet are different sizes, but because she likes the aesthetics. One shoe is a tan leather Mythos; the other is also a Mythos, but the purple 30th anniversary edition.
So. Temple Crag. How to summit?
You start at the trailhead and hike up through sagebrush and bitterbrush, which eventually turns to ponderosa and aspen, and you camp out at one of the glacial lakes. The next morning you wake up at 5 and tap-dance up talus, no trail, passing a stream that’s iced over from how cold it was overnight.
You scramble up snow and rock. Eventually you rope up. You head up the rib. Some of the bone-spur-towers you climb up and then back down; others, you bypass. You’re on the leftmost rib—“Venusian Blind Arete.” There’s slab and crack and easy scrambling. Laybacks and flakes. Not as many loose blocks as you feared… but maybe double-check before you put all your weight on something. There’s lots of places to place pro, but you’re not exactly sewing it up. You brought your black Totem! And your lucky hex! The wind is frigid and you’re climbing most of the pitches in your puffy.
H.’s topo says that you should skip the last little bit of the rib (route-finding challenge not worth the mediocre climbing), do a single rap down into the gully, and then scramble back up the gully to the summit plateau. The summit plateau is just a giant tilted plane of talus. Like Mt. Whitney. God’s Legos, giant blocks of granite, spilled across the floor. You scramble for an hour across endless talus towards the true summit. (”Summits MATTER,” Peter Croft’s route description says.) Many towers stick up the side of the summit plateau; several times, you accidentally scramble halfway up the wrong ones. The final push is a photo finish. It’s an exposed lower-fifth-class scramble up some blocks, then along a knife-edge ridge with a definitely-don’t-look-down vertical drop, and up some more blocks to the summit. You’re just a dozen feet below 13K! There’s the summit register—it’s an ammo can—but, wait, it’s plastic? A plastic ammo can? What??? Sign the register, take some pictures. See the glacier below you, see the storms to the west, see the Owens Valley and Big Pine and the White Mountains to the east.
Reverse the scramble. Tap-dance down the talus. Avoid an obvious gully (it leads into the wrong drainage) and instead head towards what looks like a cliff. But it’s convex (concave??), and although it gets steeper and steeper—eventually you’re doing some exposed easy-fifth-class downclimbing—it doesn’t truly cliff out, not until you’re exactly a single rope length directly above Contact Pass. Perfect. Rap down. Revel in the geometric strangeness of passes—they’re a summit in one dimension, and a basin in the other! Ski down on scree until the snow takes over. Glissade, even though you left your ice axes at the base. Get yelled at by H. because her cams were still on your harness and now they’re packed with snow and will be squeaky. Ski down more scree, tap-dance across more talus, finally find the climber trail (where was this in the morning?), and get back to your campsite at 8:30. There’s exactly the same amount of light as when you left at 6:30. A full day’s work. No overtime. Alpenglow to alpenglow.
The next morning we slept in and didn’t get up until 8. H. read a fantasy novel on her Kindle and I went off to catch us lunch. Trout, fresh, fried in ghee, caught on a caddis, served over couscous. We jumped into the lake before hiking out. Back at the trailhead we split up. H. drove off towards either Yosemite or the Bay; she wasn’t sure yet. I went to Bishop. In a public bathroom in the park I washed my dishes and chatted with an affable geologist. Then I drove into Nevada. There was only one station on the entire FM spectrum, playing psychedelic jam rock nonstop. No words, no commercials. An hour beyond Tonopah I stopped for the night at an abandoned hot springs complex. The Milky Way was downright creamy. Crushed-up Oreos overhead.
Nevada. I’ve wanted to drive through it forever. Not on I-80—on the little two-lane roads. I spent the 2010s obsessed with driving through the Great Plains on two-lane roads. No civilization. Total flatness. So: Nevada. Same aesthetic. Settlements every 200 miles and nothing in between. Laser-straight roads with no cars for dozens of miles. No other landscape takes better advantage of low-angle light. Basin and range. Sagebrush and tumbleweed.
The cat in the machine shop. A beautiful orange tabby, wandering around between hydraulic presses and steam locomotives and showers of sparks spraying off grinders.
No, seriously. I stopped in Ely, Nevada, for coffee, and since I had the time and there were signs pointing to the Northern Nevada Railway Museum, I figured I’d check it out. Trains! Love trains.
… do THESE people love trains.
I’ve been to plenty of railroad museums, but… this was not a museum; this was AN ENTIRE FUNCTIONING RAILROAD, run by volunteers, whose entire railyard you’re allowed to just walk around and explore. Active railways, active machine shop, do whatever you want as long as you don’t get close to moving cars, just give us $10 admission. The provenance seemed to be that the “Northern Nevada Railroard” went bankrupt in the early 80s, abruptly, and its entirety—all its trains, all its track, its entire railyard, machine shop, EVERYTHING—just became this 501(c)3 run by volunteers. Also then the museum started buying up more old locomotives and railcars and bringing them to Ely to be restored and added to the active collection. “Mecca” is cliched as religious imagery, but… Jerusalem? Zion? One of those, but for railfans.
A model railroad… at 1:1 scale.
Other railroad museums I’ve been to have been, like, one railcar restored by a retired dude filled with placards and exhibits that have been gathering dust for 30 years. This was not that. “Here’s a map of all the buildings; feel free to go in any of them and explore; have fun!”
People used to call rural towns like Ely “the land that time forgot;” this place was “the land that tort law forgot.” Or maybe rural folk know what’s reasonable and prudent in an active railyard in a way that city slickers like myself don’t.
The highlight was the machine shop. It was the ralway’s original machine shop, still functioning, with volunteers using it to restore the old railcars. They just let you… go in and wander around this functioning, operational, vintage machine shop. There was a sign listing some of the big pieces of equipment and their origins. Most of the big tools were from the early or mid 20th century. The oldest was from the 1890s. Everything oversized. Fifteen-foot-tall hydraulic presses. Wrenches four feet long. Tap and die sets the size of manhole covers. A lathe thirty feet long. The building covered at least an acre of floor space, divided into several galleries. In one of the galleries were half a dozen locomotives in various stages of restoration. I texted photos to my colleagues who run the machine shop at Nueva. Light streaming through sawtooth skylights and rays of dust, the smell of oil, the sound of machines whirring—a live-action movie about pre-war industrial America. This should be a musical—Newsies, but with oily-faced scamps apprenticing on the railroad.
Only two rules: be careful not to fall into any of the open pits in the floor, and don’t touch anything—other than the cats. There are shop cats. A cat wandered into the shop in 2008, was adopted by the volunteers, and was so beloved by his death in 2023 that there are TWO bronze statues in his memory—one inside the shop, and one outside, atop a granite base, with an inscription, and flowers—a full grave and memorial. The cat’s name was Dirt. I didn’t catch the name of the current shop cat, but he was beautiful, too.
I kept my admission receipt so that I can expense it, in my capacity as the longtime public transit club advisor. Boy, the public transit club kids are going to be so excited to see these photos!
Idaho!!! My 45th state. Gas is three bucks; so is coffee. In the Bay Area they’re both $5. I got shit from many of you three years ago for buying an SUV—but out here my Subaru is the dinky liberal’s car. The Forester could fit in the bed of these F150s. It’s all trucks and no Teslas. Better cover up your California plates. When people ask where I’m from, I’m quick to add, “I teach high school!” Implicitly: I’m not one of those rich asshole San Francisco techbros! (Nice try. They see your Arc’teryx and your retinol.)
I ended the day at a mom-and-pop hot springs resort on the banks of the Snake River. $13, or $18 if you want to use the water slide. The hot pool was milky-white and you could smell the sulfur a hundred feet away.
I’m now at three museums for this trip: railroads, art, and fish.
I budgeted two days to drive from Bishop to Jackson, but it only took one, so I spent a day puttering around, and went to the National Museum of Wildlife Art. There was a lot of extremely representational bronze sculpture, of the sort that I imagine a centimillionaire+ finance type would buy for their home in Jackson, but also some good stuff. There was a bunch of Hudson River School stuff! Thomas Moran, George Church, etc.; everyone’s faves. There was a really gorgeous Ai Weiwei portrait of a tiger, pixellated, done in Legos of four shades (black, yellow, blue, red, and a little bit of orange). And outside (among the extremely representational sculptures of noble mountain lions, etc.) were two statues that I can only describe as steel origami: abstract representations of a wolf and a rabbit, human-sized, made from folded sheets of half-inch powder-coated steel. I thought of those two amazing sculptures in downtown Chicago: Alexander Calder’s huge red flamingo (this is one of my favorite sculptures, anywhere, partly from the siting), and Picasso’s abstract steel sculpture of a dog (horse?). (The artist behind these origami creatures calls himself “Hacer.”)
Also in Jackson: “fish museum” isn’t the right word, but there’s a federal fish hatchery just outside of town that’s open to visitors. Like the railroad museum in Ely, it’s a working facility that they let you wander around, unsupervised. Here’s a self-guided tour pamphlet! Go see some trout! The staff are very happy to stop doing their actual jobs to talk to you and show you around. Dozens of concrete raceways in rows—a hundred feet long, three feet wide, four feet deep—with trout in various developmental stages. We saw trout so tiny they were still eating their egg sacs (motionless, sitting on the bottom of the tank, because they need no outside nutrition), as well as a tank full of big huge 5-10 year-old trout (which they keep just to show off for visitors). The trout spend 11 months in the hatchery, from fry to fingerling, and then they get trucked off to be dumped into various parts of the Snake River watershed! (Snake River cutthroat trout is the particular subspecies they raise.) Half a million a year. They even had the fish truck parked out back—a huge tanker, with a a tap at the back, parked underneath a gantry with a funnel, etc., ready to be filled with fish!
I’ve been reading three books: the Mr. Rogers biography (mediocre from a literary perspective, but biography is so hard that I can’t blame the author; it’s a worthwhile portrait of an American saint), The Human Stain (it’s easy to reduce this to a political narrative of Philip Roth anticipating certain craziness two decades in advance, but that ruins the beauty of his sentences and his characters), and Rising from the Plains (I love John McPhee but haven’t really read any of his geology books; this one is about the geology and geologists of Wyoming, so it seemed apt).
My climbing partner S. teaches math at the middle school. Here are some word problems we wrote together:
A. and S. are climbing the Grand Teton. They plan to start hiking at 4:30 am and return at 9 pm. If at 10 am they’re where they thought they’d be by 7:30 am, and they keep moving at the same rate, what time will they get back to their car? What if the speed at which S. hikes uphill decreases proportionate to the amount of time he’s been hiking? What if S. decides to take an hour-long nap at the lower saddle at 11,000 feet, while insisting he’s not having any altitude problems?
If A. and S. decide to save time by simul’ing the whole thing, how much sooner will they get back to their car? What if they just don’t bother with gear or ropes on some of the pitches?
An optimization problem: If A. and S. have lots of snacks, they’ll hike faster, relative to the amount of weight they’re carrying. But the more Stingers and salami and Swedish Fish they carry, the heavier they’ll be, and the more slowly they’ll hike. What’s the optimal amount of snacks for them to carry so that they move the fastest?
Decision theory: If A. and S. don’t bring ice axes, they’ll need to be below the glacier by 9 pm so that the snow won’t have frozen up and they won’t slip-and-slide to their deaths. (Frozen slip-and-slide to hell is going to be an image in my retelling of the Inferno.) If they do bring ice axes, they’ll be safer if they slide, but the extra weight will slow them down and make it more likely that the glacier is frozen and slippery. Do they need to bring ice axes?
A. and S. summit at 7:15 PM. What time will they be back in their beds?
More optimization: If they take the emergency Adderall from A.’s first aid kit at 11 PM, they’ll be able to descend faster, go to bed sooner, and get more sleep. But if they take the Adderall, it’ll make it harder for them to go to sleep, and worsen their sleep quality. How much Adderall should they take?
If, at 2:30 AM, A. hears S. talking to himself, 100 feet behind him on the trail, does that mean that S. is hallucinating? Or is A. the one who’s hallucinating? Or is S. just listening to an audiobook?
Is that a real porcupine in the middle of the trail? Why doesn’t it care that A. is three feet away?
Final exam: Had A. and S. not lugged 30 pounds of trad gear 7,000 feet vertical and instead scrambled the entire route, how much more sleep would they have been able to get?
ANSWER: A. and S. both win!!! They summit the Grand Teton, via Exum Ridge, AND both set car-to-car PRs—bigger is better, right?—23 hours, to the minute!
Oh, I need to show my work? Fine.
I burst out laughing when I got to the summit. I never do that. The final push was a scramble; I was way ahead of S., and I thought I still had a few hundred feet to go. Then all of a sudden I came over a block. “[S.]!!! WE HAVE A HUGE PROBLEM!!!,” I radio’d on the Rocky Talkie. “THERE’S NOWHERE LEFT TO GO UP!!!” I doubled over, cackling maniacally, all by myself, for the next few minutes until he showed up. Thirteen hours. All for this.
S. was not laughing. He was not having a great day.
S. is my strongest climbing partner. He climbs Yosemite 5.12; he bigwalls and sleeps in portaledges; he obsessively toprope-solos routes until he’s perfected them. Baryshnikov on the boulders. Usually when we climb, it’s him dragging me up routes I have no business being on.
That was not the case with the Grand Teton.
I am a very talented uphill athlete. But I am not a strong climber. That’s true even when I’m climbing regularly, and I’ve barely climbed since December. My calves, on the other hand, are still some of the Finger Lakes’ finest exports. In December I did a one-day, 22-hour hike with 10,000 feet of vertical gain (and descent). I spent the spring running laps up and down the Stanford Dish and the Santa Cruz Mountains training for the Broken Arrow.
S., by contrast—when it comes to uphill performance, he has a lot of room for growth. (That’s how we’d phrase it to a student’s parents.)
The climbing approaches that S. usually takes to his 5.11 finger cracks involve ten minutes of walking from the parking lot at the Ahwahnee. The approach to this climb was a ten-mile hike rising 6,000 vertical feet.
The hike started with two miles of flat walking across sagebrush meadow. S. was ahead of me, shining his headlamp in the predawn dark. Then it pitched up. I immediately overtook him. And… he never caught up. S.—again, way stronger climber than me; very talented athlete—was wheezing and lagging.
We took break after break.
The day before, I had estimated we’d be at the lower saddle—the col between Grand and Middle Teton, the nominal end of the hiking portion of the approach, 5,000 feet up from the valley—by 9. Instead, at 10 am we found ourselves still far below the saddle, chatting with some rando guide on his off day, who was giving us beta with an air of generosity mixed with concern. “Yeah, you’re pretty late if you want to do the full Exum Ridge,” he said. When his friends did the full Exum the previous week car-to-car, having climbed it many times before, it took them 21 hours. Maybe we should just do the Upper Exum Ridge, he suggested? (The Upper and Lower Exum Ridge segments are dramatically different in difficulty, and can be climbed independently.)
We continued. S. said he felt fine, physically and mentally, especially when he stopped moving. It’s just that whenever he moved, he said, he immediately felt winded and out-of-breath. He’d been at elevation in Jackson for… a week? Shouldn’t that have been enough to acclimatize? He was there for a math teacher professional development thing—connected to the startup Math in the Mountains summer camp whose experimental winter skiing-and-calculus camp I taught at in February. A few months ago he had messaged me asking if I wanted to climb in the Tetons for a few days afterwards. (Thus precipitating all my summer plans.)
Eventually we made it to the Lower Saddle. 11 am. I had figured we’d be well into the climb by that point. Instead S. said he wanted to lie down and take a nap. Okay. Maybe have some food, too? Are you drinking water? He insisted he was fine; he was just tired.
I wandered around. Two permanent tents/shelters for the guiding operations to use as a high camp. Amazing views of glaciers to the west and of the plains of Jackson Hole to the east. The Wind River Range, further to the east. A few marmots running around. They were BLACK. What??? Black marmots? A pika, too, with… black spots. Huh. I watched a marmot run back to its den with a huge mouthful of grass.
I chatted with some people who were trail-running up and solo’ing the summit. There were at least half a dozen of them, because of how amazing the weather was. Zero percent chance of precipitation! No clouds in the sky! Barely any wind! “The weather is never this good,” they said.
I felt great! I was having a blast!
After ninety minutes, S. got up from his nap. (Was he even still alive?) He said we should go for it. Really? “People say if you do just the Upper Exum Ridge it’s five hours to the summit from here,” he said, “plus three hours back down, which puts us back here at 8:30 pm. I think as long as we’re back at the saddle by sunset, we’ll be OK.”
I wasn’t trying to force him to go, but I also wasn’t trying to force us to turn around. Had the conditions been anything other than completely perfect I would have made us bail. Who summits 14,000 feet at 6 PM? But the weather was giving us a huge margin; more than enough, I figured, to make up for S.’s lethargy.
(Was he actually OK? He insisted he was. Unclear.)
Let’s go!!!
The easiest part of climbing the Grand Teton was the actual rock climbing.
It was a ton of fun and totally worth everything else. And it’s not like we were expecting a challenge from something marketed as 5.5. But even by alpine standards, it was, uh, extremely non-sustained. The rhythm was: a 5.5 move, several hundred feet of scrambling, another 5.5 move, some easy fifth-class, two more 5.5 moves, several more hundred feet of scrambling… and so forth, for 1,000 vertical feet. It made Royal Arches look like the Dawn Wall.
“When does the climb start?,” S. said, three guidebook pitches in. He thought we had just roped up for the dicier sections of the approach. (OK, probably that was a reflection also of S.’s hypoxia. We had definitely discussed the fact that the climb had started.)
“Oh, did you want me to place gear on that pitch?,” I joked, at another moment. The most either of us placed was three pieces (the most, note). I led almost everything; S. was feeling better enough by the end that I gave him the antepenultimate and penultimate pitches. (S. is ailing—I’m in charge! A fun role reversal from our usual partnership dynamics.)
We never bothered to simul, but we did coil the rope and scramble for long stretches. (“Walk” is the more accurate word.)
Did we even need gear? Half the “placements” I made were just blocks I slung. Thank you, broken granite that’s still solid enough to trust! People talk about all-passive ascents (no cams, only nuts); I joked about an “all-sling” ascent: no pro whatsoever; just slings! It’s not a joke: we could have led the climb with only slings and protected it just as well (… and lost 20 pounds off our rack). By the end we weren’t even using slings (let alone gear) for our anchors: we were just using the rope itself, tied off around boulders. Economy! Efficiency!
The gear we did have wasn’t even comprehensive. As we were building our rack the night before, S. kept editing things down. We don’t need ice axes! We don’t need double cams! We don’t need these big cams! We don’t need these small cam! We don’t need all the nuts—let’s only take the odd-sized nuts! No, let’s not take any nuts! At the time I thought S. was being too parsimonious. But on the actual climb we agreed that even our minimalist rack was too much, and how it’d be totally viable as a scramble. Lose 30 pounds of gear and do the whole thing way faster—and faster is safer three miles up.
(The one piece of gear S. insisted on taking that I thought was unnecessary was bear spray. Safety first! Early on our approach a bear wandered across the trail 20 ft ahead of S., and he chided himself for not having the bear spray accessible. “It was a brown bear!” “… it was a black bear that happened to be brown.” “Wait, what’s the difference?”)
Granite at almost 14,000 feet! What delight! There were a couple of sections of long runout exposed slab! There was one pitch full of fun jams! A couple of the isolated-between-scrambles 5.5 moves were above 2,000 feet of air—that’s fun!!! Because of how slow we were, we only did the Upper Exum Ridge—bummer, because the Lower Ridge is supposed to be much harder, steeper, and more sustained. Next time!
Also a snowfield right before the summit. Turns out the great traction TC Pros have on granite doesn’t translate to soft snow. Lots of other wet parts of the climb—I found myself constantly rubbing my soles on my calves, trying to dry them off.
S. finally made it to the summit. I was still laughing. To the west, the sun was a few degrees away from immolating Idaho. To the east, the shadows of all three Tetons were in sharp focus on the sagebrush plains of Jackson Hole. Sunset from the top of Grand Teton: maybe the most romantic moment of my life.
“I can’t believe I left the ring in the car!,” I said. “We shouldn’t have taken such a light rack!”
The shadows of the Tetons were each was in a different shade of gray. How does that happen when there’s only one source of illumination???
Descending, we saw the sunset and the alpenglow lighting up the west face of the Grand. No one else gets to see that! Everyone down in Jackson Hole and the National Park gets to see a beautiful morning sunrise alpenglow on the mountains—but the west side is rugged and undeveloped, and so almost no one gets to see the sunset on the west face of the mountains! What fortune.
“I’ve been nauseous since the Lower Saddle,” S. said, setting up one of the rappels. Oh, great. Thanks for telling me.
The next day: “Dude, there were like five points where I was almost about to bail,” he said. “I felt so awful. In every way.”
We made it to the lower saddle at 10 pm. The sun’s final photons had just arrived. S. lay down for another nap and I checked the doors of the quonset huts at the saddle. Locked. “If you lie down, I’m not sure you’ll be able to get up again,” I said. “We have the emergency bivies, but the descent’s going to be just as bad in the morning.”
Another five and a half hours to drop 5,000 vertical feet. Pretty good, considering. Back at the climber’s ranch, I forced myself to eat half a cup of the previous day’s instant-ramen-and-canned-salmon, lukewarm in the cooler. Then I collapsed. 23 hours car to car. Definitely overtime. Too bad S. and I are both exempt.
The granite of the Grand. It’s BEAUTIFUL. Oh my gosh. S., at 1 am, hopping across a talus field: “When you see boulder fields in Yosemite, the rocks are all the same. But here, the rocks are all different.” It’s true! We crossed boulder and talus fields that were family reunions from different veins. The granite wasn’t just white-and-black-flecked (that’s Sierra granite), but pink and orange and gray and black and green; every rock a unique shade, like RAINBOW GRANITE.
There was a ton of quartz! Mostly in the form of crystals in the granite, but occasional big chunks!
And the mica!!! I’ve never seen so much mica. There were sheets the size of quarters we could pick up and look through. It was even more visible at night through our headlamps: everything was sparkling! The granite was covered in glitter. The ground as well. I kept thinking there was trash on the trail—someone’s dropped foil wrapper, reflected in my headlamp—but no, it was mica. BEDAZZLED TETONS. We were in a deep canyon, so at night the sky was mostly pitch black—the sidewalls of the canyon—and the stars, sparkly and milky as they might be, were just a narrow strip overhead. Instead we had sparkles on the ground. Stars above and below. The world asparkle at night.
The diaspora: one of the seasonal workers at the AAC-sponsored Climber’s Ranch we stayed at was an ITHACAN!!! Michelle, IHS class of ‘91, still a climber at age 52, currently living in her truck post-divorce climbing and vaguely applying to physician assistant school. Her dad was a chemistry professor; her mom was a librarian in the engineering library; she grew up in Ellis Hollow. Hah. She worked for Cornell Outdoor Education for a while at the outfitting desk—she remembers the pre-Lindseth days, when the climbing wall was a makeshift board in the corner of one of the polo barns. We talked about some of the legendary COE lifers we know in common. Her Ithaca hippie energy was clear: she was talkative and scattered.
But that’s not all: she spent the last couple years living in Tahoe, worked for Alpenglow (the small organization that puts on the Broken Arrow), and volunteered at one of the aid stations at the Broken Arrow last year! She was describing how she had gotten everyone else at the aid station to scoop up snow and give it to the runners as snow cones, to help alleviate the stifling heat of last year’s race. The snow cones! At the High Camp aid station! I remember those! Small world. Ithaca is gorges.
Porcupines. There was a slideshow at the climber’s ranch on Monday night about “Wildlife of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem.” When we told the presenter whom we had met on the trail at 2 am that morning, he was impressed. “You could live here for a decade and never see a porcupine!”
It was 2:30, we were coming close to the end of our 23-hour day, and in my headlight I caught… a skunk? a raccoon? No, that’s… a porcupine! He was in the middle of the trail, licking or chewing on something, and didn’t notice, or care about, my presence. S. caught up. After a few minutes we had to continue and walk around him—he wasn’t going anywhere. When we got about two feet away he moved and flared his quilly butt at us. Gorgeous.
The only time I’ve ever seen a porcupine in the wild—and we saw them there all the time—was climbing in the Gunks. So seeing one of them coming down off climbing the Grand felt—there’s some meaning, or climbing-associated symbolism here; I’m just not sure what it is.
And then! The next day, driving away from the Tetons, a quarter-mile below the Continental Divide: A SECOND PORCUPINE!!! This one was dead in the middle of Highway 26. I pulled over, grabbed the avy shovel I keep in my car in case of emergencies, and moved him to the side of the road. Poor buddy. Beautiful beast. I plucked a whole ziploc bag full of his quills to use in some future/TBD art project. Suggestions welcome! I have no particular ideas. Someone had already come along and plucked all the really long quills from his butt—see, I’m not the only crazy person. If only Grandpa knew all the things I’ve used the Leatherman he bought me in 2008 for!
Also, guys, porcupine HAIR. Or fur. Whatever it’s called. The interaction of the FUR and the QUILLS. There are the quills, which are exactly what you think they are, but porcupines also have hair. Their hairs are long, thin, and wispy; they form what I can only describe as a cloud layer above the quills. You can see the hairs, but they’re thin and few enough that you can see the quills through them. The hair forms an atmosphere. There’s a translucence, like from a fluid (a cloud, a liquid, smoke, etc.), but formed not by a continual mass, but by lines. Wow.
It was such a cool visual phenomenon that I tried to feel it, and in doing so poked my finger with one of the quills. Now it’s swollen and throbbing. Oops. Hope I don’t die of sepsis on the Wind River High Route.
(Can you de-barb the quills? What if I become a porcupine-quill stick-and-poke tattoo artist? I KNOW I could sell that in Oakland.)
The day after our climb my hands were torn up and puffy. S.’s hands were fine. His legs, he said, were non-functional. My legs were tired but basically fine. The alpine climber and the bigwaller!
I dropped S. off at the airport and drove east.
Fields of bison and freestone streams. After the Continental Divide, the mountains abruptly ended. Instead: sandy buttes striated with alternating layers of soft and hard rock. Then: bright orange sandstone cliffs, teleported from Utah. Finally: the Great Plains!!! Long endless vistas of rolling manifold; sometimes green and yellow grasses; other times, sagebrush and bitterbrush teal and green. Oregon Trail! Eastward expansion.
I am now at hot springs #4 of this trip. There’s a resident cat. The air is 100° and the water just a few degrees more. Am I going to hike the Wind River High Route? I guess so! We’ll see how it goes. Maybe I’ll need to bail early. I hope not. 100 miles of alpine scrambling, mostly off-trail, early in the season, is ambitious.
Back into the springs for now. Time to dream of granite and porcupines and beautiful sentences.