Boulder Traverse, con't.
Matt invited good friend Ben Brock and me to join him for the traverse. We all grew up together playing in
the mountains and have struggled to combine our zeal for the hills with modest paychecks. Except for
Matt’s photography, however, and the prospect that we might collaborate for a magazine article, our
primary responsibilities were to ski the ridge and keep each other safe.
The plan was for Matt and Ben to ski the first leg of the tour, from Galena Summit, a popular touring area
about thirty miles north of Ketchum, to Galena Peak, an 11,153 talus pile at the north end of the Boulders.
I had a wedding to attend so I would meet Matt and Ben early on the morning of day two at the base of the
south side of Galena Peak. We would travel light—bivy sacks and sleeping bags but no tent. A small climbing
rack and ski rope added additional weight but also additional security.
The night before our proposed rendezvous I slept terribly. I was wedged between my wife and the wall
of a yurt on a tiny bunk the size of a twin bed. I was still groggy from the champagne (this was a backcountry
wedding!), but my wife and I managed to wake up at five and ski out to the highway. Instead of heading south
to Ketchum we drove north to Cherry Creek, which drains the south side of Galena Peak. I double checked
my gear, kissed my wife goodbye, and started up the drainage as her white Subaru sped towards home.
As I toured up Cherry Creek I wondered what it was going to be like up on the ridge. I knew Matt brought
his camera gear and I hoped it wouldn’t be intrusive. Matt doesn’t like to set up his shots—he shoots with
the natural flow of things—but it all seems a little staged. I told myself I would be patient if he wanted
Ben and I to pose for the camera. But still I wondered. Was Matt in this for the skiing, or the photos?
I knew he would later want to publish images from the trip. Maybe he would want me to write a story?
Was I in it for the skiing or for the scoop?
From the top of a warm rock outcrop with a perfect view of Matt and Ben’s descent route off Galena Peak,
I scanned the huge south bowl for a glimpse of turning skiers. We agreed to meet around eight, but now it
was nearing eleven o’clock. At last I saw a flash of light near the summit and shortly after one of them made
the first turn of the morning. Staggered by about a hundred yards, Matt and Ben carved up Galena Peak in
what they described as “near perfect” corn snow conditions. They each threaded their own slot through the
cliff band at the bottom of the bowl, crossed the upper reaches of Cherry Creek, and glided to our meeting
spot in a clump of scraggily white bark pines.
“What took you guys so long,” I joked as they skied up.
“The last two hundred feet to the summit sucked,” Matt said, “post hole nightmare!”
It turns out Matt and Ben bivied just shy of the summit and left what turned out to
be the crux of the first leg, a series of 3rd and 4th class scrambles, for the following morning. They
covered about twelve miles the first day, most of it between 9,000 and 11,000 feet.
Our route philosophy was pretty simple. We would stick to the true ridge crest as much as possible. In general
this was the divide between the Wood River Valley, which is the home to Ketchum and the Sun Valley ski resort,
and the East Fork of the Salmon River. As we progressed south we left this true divide and traveled along a
major spur, which divides the North and West Forks of the Big Wood from its main stem. If the ridge required
more climbing than skiing, we would strip skins, lose elevation as gracefully as possible, and regain the ridge
where it wasn’t as technical. Matt had pre-scoped several descent lines, which we would certainly hit.
Anything along the way that looked enticing and wouldn’t take us too far off the ridge was of course fair game.
From the base of Galena Peak we climbed back to the crest via broad open slopes on the unnamed summit at
the top of Cherry Creek. For the next eight miles we never dropped below ten thousand feet and toured almost
exclusively along the true divide. Here the ridge was wide like Park Avenue, and it undulated naturally from
the peaks at the heads of the drainages to the saddles below. We skied across the top of Spring Creek, then
King Creek, then Easley Creek. The sun shone on our faces and only a light breeze disturbed the air.
We traveled on the hard, windward side of the expansive ridge, and cruised efficiently toward our proposed
bivy underneath locally named San Lorenzo Peak. Thinking back on this stage of the tour I sometimes
imagine a plane or helicopter flying overhead, cameras rolling, shooting our position from all 360 degrees,
capturing four distinct Idaho mountain ranges in the background.
The only hindrance along this section of the tour was Matt’s camera. He was snapping photos like crazy, sometimes racing ahead to get a frontal shot, then falling back for a different perspective. He was mostly unobtrusive but I was super sensitive to any hold up. Despite my promise to not get impatient I fumed privately each time Matt said, “hey can you guys hold up for a second, I want to get this shot.”
At one point I waited on the top of a narrow, wind-sculpted arête. Looking south I saw the cut slopes of Baldy and the town grids of Ketchum and Hailey. I saw hordes of cars with ski racks heading north on Highway 75, probably to Galena pass, the touring capital of the Wood River Valley. Then I turned my head towards the other side of the ridge, the East Fork of the Salmon side. I didn’t see anything except tree and rock and snow and sun.
We bivied that night in orange light and looked down on the lights of the Wood River Valley.
Day 3 was the day. We climbed four major peaks and made four major descents, starting with San Lorenzo first thing in the morning. From our bivy at a saddle on Lorenzo’s southwest ridge we added crampons to our skis and kicked to the summit. We made quick work of the transition from up to down and scoped our line.
The entry into the shady super-couloir on Lorenzo’s east face was the descending crux of the traverse. We hopped and skidded the first hundred feet on hard, fifty-degree wind slab, softened a hint by the direct sun light. The couloir itself formed beneath a horizontal step in a southeast trending ridge and we regrouped there before the meat of the drop, a thousand foot plumb-line, tilted to forty-five degrees, with consistent, stale powder and room for three sets of tracks. We ripped it one at a time and Matt skied the run out Alaska-style, hooting and hollering as he pulled up to Ben and me in the basin between San Lorenzo and our next high point, Silver Peak.
Two hours later we stood on the top of Silver, studying the entry into another couloir, which required a rappel. We slung a horn and dropped off the summit to a notch. It was afternoon now and the heat and the sun had already transformed this couloir into a gooey mess. Most of the surface sloughed when we rappelled so we put the first skier on belay. I backed up a solid stance with a quick t-trench, wrapped the cord around my hips, and put Ben on belay. “I’ve never skied with a rope before!” Ben said as he jumped the first few turns, sending more wet, loose snow avalanching down the gully. After watching Ben a slab release seemed unlikely and now most of the surface snow was on its way to the run out. Matt and I simul-skied parallel lines and we held elevation by traversing north back to our ridge. San Lorenzo and Silver down, Boulder and Goat to go.
We opted not to climb Boulder Peak as its summit was off the main crest and also because it was now late in the afternoon. We hit a low saddle behind the spur that leads to Boulder’s summit, and skied low-angle, breakable-wind crust into Boulder Basin, the site of an old mining town. With skins on again we climbed out of Boulder Basin, back on the spine, towards Goat Peak, the last major summit of our traverse.
Pretty well knackered at this point, I led out along the ridge and was so focused on my ski tips that I failed to notice the huge cornices on this leg of the tour. Then, during a long, straight run along the crest, a chunk of cornice thirty feet long and four feet wide cracked underneath my feet. The track of my left ski, carried intact at first by the falling block of snow, smashed on a rock spine and the noise of the resulting avalanche reverberated like dull thunder in basin below. The track of my right ski lay undisturbed in the snow, immediately adjacent to the crack where the cornice broke. I fell into a scared pile onto the safe side of the ridge.
I lay there dumbfounded, waiting for Ben and Matt. Upon approaching Matt said, “watch out! The cornices are big here!” I thought “thanks,” picked myself up, and looked sheepishly over the edge where I might have fallen.
I got back up on my skis and continued along the ridge, this time giving the cornices a wider berth than really necessary. Just a minute or two after leaving the scene I was about to crest a small wind roll when I stopped suddenly. There, thirty feet in front of me and just on the other side of the wind ridge, stood a big mountain goat, staring me right in the eye.
We gaped at each other for a few long seconds. The goat, a billy, appeared calm and unconcerned with our presence. But then, as if sensing the sudden onset of danger, it moved twice, first to my right, the good way, and then to the left, the bad way. The goat chose left and bounded twice over the edge where only a moment before I had almost gone myself.
We skied away quickly to give the goat the option of hopping back up to the ridge and after a point we never looked back. I don’t know what happened to that goat. I know I couldn’t have survived on that side of the ridge. I would have been smashed to pieces. That goat and I were grim reapers for each other and that ridgeline had two sides to it—the life side and death side. Forget any silly metaphors about the valley of the sell-out and the valley of the soulful. That goat and I looked into the valley of death and everything else seems a little bit trivial.
From then on it was just a matter of getting out and we skied conditions they don’t show in the movies. By now it was hot and the snowpack was isothermic. We wallowed in snow completely saturated with water. Then the sun went down and the surface started to re-freeze resulting in the most challenging skiing any of us had encountered, ever. Finally, we ran out of snow completely. At 8,500 feet we thrashed unglamorously down the sage-studded south bowl of Durrance Mountain, normally a classic winter backcountry run. When we arrived unceremoniously at Ben’s truck we loaded our gear in the back and said our goodbyes. They left to retrieve Matt’s rig from Galena Summit, and I thumbed it to Ketchum because I was already late for my twice-weekly stint as a ski-tuner.
I guess it comes down to a chicken and egg thing. We didn’t ski the Boulder Traverse to take some photos and write a story. They were born of the experience. The other way around is doing it for the shot and for us that is the sell-out side of the ridge. But we are getting paid for this, and yes we get paid when we guide people in the backcountry. There’s always a fine line between this ethic and that ethic, and in this case, what a line we skied!
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