|
by Drew Tabke
This past May, ventured into the Wind River mountains with my good friends Tyler Sterling and Davide de
Masi. We entered the Wind River Wilderness Area from the Elkhart park trailhead, which lies a few miles above Pinedale, Wyoming.
From there, we walked about 18 miles to get into the area called Titcomb basin. The going was slow and painful, with the snow
only being supportable during the first few hours of daylight, before turning into a collapsing, booby-trapped pile of mush.
It took us about two and a half days to get to our first camp, right at the bottom of Lester Peak. Lester stands at 12,342ft.
The mountain stands alone, detached from the ridge of peaks that make up the continental divide. We ascended and skied Lester
the next morning and found near-perfect spring conditions from top to bottom.
Lester Peak behind Davide:
After
a couple of days camped in this area, we moved higher into Titcomb basin proper. We established a main camp at the south end
of the Titcomb lakes, and then the following morning we left behind as much excess gear as we could, taking only our bivy
sacks and enough food and gas for two days out.
Tyler, crossing the upper of the two Titcomb Lakes. Tower One, a sub-peak
of Mt. Helen is the wall ahead and to his right:
Finally, as we neared the very end of the basin, the northeast couloir
of Mt. Helen came into view. We deposited our extra gear right at the base and started the 2,000ft stair-stepper right up
the middle:
The decent was in near-perfect condition. We were exhausted and set up our camp behind a boulder right
at the base of our couloir. The next morning we headed up to try our luck on a couloir on Mt. Woodrow Wilson that we had glimpsed
from our original campsite miles back at Lester Peak. This photo shows the very narrow couloir down the rock face we would
attempt to climb. The large mound of snow at the bottom of the couloir is the Sphinx glacier, and the large, snowcapped peak
behind Mt. Woodrow Wilson is Gannet Peak, the highest point in Wyoming:
On the way up we were afforded some beautiful
views of the line on Mt. Helen we skied the previous day. Tyler checks it out:
We reached the couloir to find some
bad news. There was more ice and rock than was visible from afar, and what snow there was had been sun-baked and abused by
water runoff and rockfall and was thus nearly unskiable. We climbed up anyway to get a closer look:
Perhaps a more experienced team could have done the line, but we decided we needed to descend. Two rappels and some
all-terrain side slipping and we were back on the tip of the Sphinx glacier. Here we found the best corn skiing of the entire
trip, and our disappointment was quickly washed away. One more view of Mt. Helen, Mt. Sacagawea, and Freemont Peak (L to R),
and it was time to go home:
We took two days to exit, spending one night at Eklund Lake before fighting rapidly
deteriorating snow for the final miles back to the car.
|
