Thursday, July 1, 2004

Once again, we arose at 4:00 a.m. and headed up to the trailhead. We were on the trail by first light at 5:30 and quickly found out why Borah Peak is rated "strenuous" by both the Wingers and Holmes.

Looking over even the lower parts of the trail, the grade is ridiculously steep, something approaching 40% for long stretches. Once you get above timberline and onto the ridge, it's a little less brutal but still definitely goes "up" quickly. The image to the right was actually shot on our way back down, but gives a good sense of the trail as it skirts the ridge. To the left, the drop is precipitous down into the valley, and most of the remnant snowfields are corniced and definitely not safe to walk out on.

We thought we were doing fairly well until we got to this spot just below Chicken-Out Ridge. We had expected the main snow bridge after Chicken-Out Ridge, but this one was a surprise. The patch of snow was only 50' or 60' long, but its top sloped up at a 20-degree angle and looked pretty icy. To the left was a very steep (60°) snow chute that dropped far off into the valley. To the right, there was a patch of gravel at first, but then the snow continued 20 or 30 feet down to a cliff. There was an area perhaps 10 or 15 feet long that was exposed to both hazards simultaneously.

I set up a belay spot for Nathan and went up with ice axe and crampons, finding a fairly stable spot from which to belay him as he climbed up. Fortunately, the surface turned out to be firm but not as icy as the reflections had led me to believe and neither of us had any problems getting up the snow, although we both were relieved to get past the most-exposed parts.

Once above the snow, the use trail became jumbled and ran out, leaving us faced with some steep third-class climbing to get up to Chicken-Out Ridge. I scrambled up high enough to look over the ridge to the summit and was greeted by a huge pile of cumulus clouds building just behind Borah Peak. At that point, it was clear that we would not have time to safely reach the summit, especially considering we had another patch of very exposed snow to cross.

At that point, we took a couple of photos to show how high we had managed to get and began our retreat back to the car.

The salient features are identified in the photo above. The snow bridge and its exposure are visible on the right. Chicken-Out Ridge is between there and the main (expected) snow bridge, which obviously has its own "interesting" exposure. From there, the summit is up and along the remaining ridgeline. I figured it would have taken us at least an hour-and-a-half up to the summit from the beginning of Chicken-Out Ridge, and at least an hour back to where we were. Given the rapidly-building clouds, there was no way we would be back off the ridge and below timberline before the storms started, so the only prudent thing to do was to back down and leave Borah Peak for another day.

Back across the snow bridge, we could see just how rapidly the weather was building over the peak. Definitely not the time to be up there on an exposed ridge or the summit!

As we retreated, we continued to watch the clouds build and drift over Borah as we looked across the valley between the approach and summit ridges. (Basically, you walk in a large 'U' to get to the summit. The trail circles around skirting the ridge most of the way, although Chicken-Out Ridge is literally along the top of the knife-edge ridge.)

We hadn't yet made it down off the ridge when we were pelted by snow pellets. Fortunately, the clouds that dropped the snow on us weren't building into thunderheads (yet), but we wasted little time on this relatively easy stretch of the trail.

Just before you drop off the ridgeline and back into the really steep part of the trail, you get a view back into the Lost River valley. The car is tantalizingly visible, a small white dot in the center of this shot at the wide area at the end of the road. You're probably only a mile, line-of-sight, from the car at this point but have the hardest hiking yet to do, even though it's all downhill from there. Nathan was prompted to wish for a hang glider...not a bad idea if you had a friendly pack animal to haul it up for you!!

Stormed off our second planned highpoint, we wandered a bit farther up highway 93, to a site where the fault scarp from the 1983 magnitude 7 earthquate is particularly visible on the surface. The fault shifted Borah Peak up a foot or so, and the neighboring valley down several feet. At this point, the scarp appears as a square ditch with a larger bank on the mountain side of the ditch. The Borah Peak access road crosses the scarp in a large switchback, although the original route of the road is still visible where it dead-ends in the scarp.

After marveling at Mother Nature's handiwork, we returned to MacKay for the night, eating dinner at the Bear Bottom Inn (no, I'm not kidding!). Decent Mexican food, kitschy atmosphere, and good beer! We repacked for a possible second try at Borah the next day, but also packed the rest of our gear, planning on departing the area either way.