The time that glacier blew my mind
So when I find my self with no job and have worked for 7 months strait, what does one do with their self. I find that I get board really quickly when I am not working, wicked stir crazy in fact. So what did I do, I got a buddy of mine and we headed west. First stop montana, Bozeman in fact, where matt and I’s friend, Beau, lives. We hiked with him for a day and he was kind enough to let us use his house a base launching site. We packed gear food and anything else one might ever want in the backcountry in the winter and headed to within spitting distance of the canadian boarder.
This part of the trip was Matt’s choice so all our destinations were picked by him. The start of the trip was on the western side of the park. We arrived at the park at like eight o’clock at night, we ended emptying the back of the truck and sleeping in the bed of it. Once morning came around, we headed off for the ranger station. One would think with more then half the roads closed in the park and there only being four roads to begin with it would be easy to find the ranger station. However, being groggy and not familiar with the area, we ended up having to drive around for like a half an hour before we found our way. This of course gave us high hopes for being able to fid our way in the woods. Our original plan was to ski tour the “Going to the Sun Road†but with recent freezing rain and snow the avalanche danger was extremely high. The road it self apparently crosses 70 plus avalanche slopes. We were talked out of that plan. We decided to change our plan to camping at the base of mount brown and trying to climb that instead. It is a relatively sheltered mountain with lots of potential for good views and very low avalanche danger.
By the time we got all our various things together, permit, gear and wits it was late morning. Matt had never been out past ohio, so when hitting the trail he was anticipating a steep trail that takes you right where one would want to go. However, trails out west were all built with thought and design, unlike anything out east. Switch backs where the trail is steep and trails that fallow the easiest path possible appose to the hardest. We were packing most of our gear on sleds the trail design made the pack in really easy except for when we had a blow down in our way, then it was a pain. There were not to many of the blow downs so it was easy enough to manage.
Our first camp site was almost 3 miles in from the trail head, matt was on snow shoes and I was on some tele skis. It took us about 2 hours to reach our site. We got there just after lunch and started to set up camp. We had to dig a flat spot in the 14 inches of snow for our tent and kitchen area. We also had to hang a rope for our food, animals would otherwise try to take it from us. By the time we managed to do all these things dark had almost come upon us. Time for DINNER!@$@
Our food supply for this mostly was provided by the AMC. At the end of the year they have foodthat they cannot sell back to the public, so they give it to their employes. Matt and I managed to score a ton of food for this trip, from pasta to beans to rice to all other kinds of staples.
We cooked some good old pasta an veggies, and ran around in the dark. It was much warmer they we had originally anticipated so when we actually headed for the tent at full darkness witch was at like 6 I think, we were hotter then hell.
The next day we planed to attacked mount brown. All 8200 feet or something around there, about 6000 feet of vertical gain and this is one of the small mountains in the park. We set out for the summit around 9:30.
Being from the east when we climb mountains in the winter there is most often a nice hard pack to walk on, not so much floundering through deep deep snow. However that is not the case out here. As we started our hike up, the snow pack got deeper and deeper. I was on Tele Skis witch made it easier for me push through some of the deep stuff, but matt with his snow shoes had some times he was just step and sink, step and sink. We hiked for over three hours and got what we thought was a far distance but soon realized that we were making very bad time and needed to turn back if we wanted to make it down before darkness struck. We realized in about the time that it would take usto hike Mt Washington in the summer we got almost half way up Brown. But with more snow made my ski down ever that much more epic!
With all the time it took us to get up it took all of 35 minuets to get down. What silly business. When we got back down made a bunch a food, explored around the camp site and fallowed some cool animal tracks.
The next day we hiked out/ skied out since it was all down hill. I was skiing with my sled of gear fallowing me and Matt was riding his sled like a sled. Let me tell you once you get going pretty quick a heavy sled is rather hard to stop. There were a couple of instances were I would be flying down the trial, try to stop, and the sled would come up behind be and take me down! Ouch! We got the car eventually and headed back to the ranger station in search of anther permit.
At the ranger station we met a man by the name of Ranger Dug who was in his 70s and had been working at the park for the last 50 year! Epic long time. We ended up chatting with him for a while and got a permit for the Eastern side. Dug kept on telling us that that was the arctic side of the park and we need to be extra prepared for super super cold conditions! We listened, but both matt and I were well aware of what the cold can do and we had lots of confidence that we could battle any weather that the park would throw at us. We left there with the snow dumping on our heads and made our way east. We had to drive in-between the park and a large chunk of national forest, so it was quite the scenic route. A little dicey at time with all the snow, but my truck did just great with it!
We ended up getting to the other side around the time that dark began to fall, night seems to fall really really quickly around these parts. Neither of us wanted to deal with packing our stuff in the morning so we used the nice toilet house as our pack house. One in the mens side one in the women’s side and packed all our sleds and ate a bunch of food, slept in the back of the truck again and waited for morning to arrive.
When morning came we packed all out stuff, chatted with a ranger who stopped by and headed
out into the great east glacier. We headed down the Red Eagle trail, our goal was the Red Eagle lake self. At the lake there was a privy and a tent site. But yet again we over estimated how far we can really travel in the winter. When we talked to the ranger he informed us that we were going to have to do a little cross country or bushwhack if we wanted to avoid two river crossings. We managed to make it just past the bushwhack section before we had to stop and make camp. We set up our tent, made our kitchen area and set up the bear bag and of course it was dark. Ranger Dug had told us that this was the arctic, and it was raining….great.
We woke the fallowing day with a plan of going to lakes that we originally set out for, but it was still raining and hiking in the snow while its raining is really not all that fun. Matt and I ended up hanging out in the tent for a good while before we were too sire crazy to stay put. So we gathered our gear and set out for a short day hike to the lake. Still raining and cool we ventured around for about an hour or so. Got cold and headed back to the site. This day kinda ended up being dedicated to hiding from the weather.
The next day since we were well rested we got up early and ate a bunch a food and started in the direction of Curly bear mountain. We could see it way off in the distance, all it looked like was a giant mass or rock towering a couple thousand feet above our heads. We knew that we would in no way or form be able to get up to the summit of the mountain, but we had some points that we were going to head for so we could at least go up and kiss the mountain. Bushwhacking out here is so much less of a hassle then in the whites. When you are in the whites you have to fallow a compass bearing and keep looking for it time and time agin. Out here you can see where you want to go for miles, so you just walk it. We ended up hiking up and up for about 4 hours I think, and got to the point where there was more snow fields then tress. We kept on climbing, our goal was to get on top of this little bump that was next to the mountain. We climbed and climbed, up and up, till we got to this slop that would have required ice axes and crampons, witch we conveniently had left in the truck. We ended up having to turn back but we ended up being at the base of the mountain, and looking up at this awesome mass of rock made ones stomach churn.
We ended up heading back down the mountain fallowing our tracks for a while till the snow fields were the wind had blown all the tracks away. We could see the general area where are site was and just started to head that way, every now and again we would adjust our direction. And after a while being the experts that we are, we found our tracks agin and fallowed them all the way back to our site. Epic wind, Epic Snow, Epic times.
We came back to the site ate some more food and fell asleep for a good long while. After we woke up it was close to dark and we decided to do the smartest thing we have done all trip, decided to walk back to the truck in the middle of the night.
Are plan was to pack up camp and do a short bushwhack and fallow the trail all the way back to the truck. As we packed up the camp we noticed a new fresh set of tracks that were no more then a couple minutes old. We soon realized that it was a mountain lion that had been checking out out cooking area and gave a look down at us in the tent. We started to shine the light into the woods and Matt saw the glow of his eyes right before he darted into the woods. That spooked us nice and good. So we hastily packed up the rest of camp and started on our midnight trek back the the truck. We did the short bushwhack to the trail and started in on the 5 mile trek back. We fallowed the trail till we hit a field. At this point we lost the trail and in stead of looking at the map to figure out where the trail could be, we ended up bushwhacking the rest of the way to the truck, about 4 miles or so. With the last mile plus being this awesome lake side shore walk where we could see all the mountains lit up with the light of the moon. We got back the the truck at 2 30 in the morning wicked tired and very hungry. Ate little and crashed very hard.
We both had a blast and now its time to move on to colorado.
The one downer of the trip, I had over 45 minutes of video of the trip and when we got back to Beau’s, me being the tech-no geek that I am, managed to delete all the footage before I could successfully copy them to my computer……..oh well. Honk!
More pictures to come, once i get back to cape code and get some of matt’s photos.
