Wilderness Challenge

As I stepped off the van into the snow, I looked around at the surrounding mountains shining with the sunlight punching through the clouds. My breath was coming out in wisps, and the wind seemed to knife right through the layers of clothing I had so carefully thought out. My red long underwear shirt, my gray wool sweater, and my heavy blue outer shell seemed to be no match for the January cold.

All around me, the other students were unloading their gear. The crunching of boots, the squeaking of web gear and the swish of skis through the snow did little to disturb the tranquility of our surroundings. Every now and then, a shout of frustration echoed through the hills as someone dropped their pack, or their ski boot refused to strap properly into their telemark skis.

These skis were new to all of us. They had metal edges like downhill skis, but the boot was a lot like a cross-country ski. Attached only at the toe, it was more like a hiking boot than a ski boot, allowing a lot more freedom of movement. But it also took more getting used to because one could bend all the way forward, making it easier to fall. The whole setup was further complicated by the fact that we were carrying seventy pound packs on our backs; and were expected to ski uphill using the ridges on the bottoms of the skis.

Eventually, everyone had all of their gear sorted out, and the driver of the van waved as he pulled away from us and down the abandoned logging road.

These roads could be found all through the mountains of northern Idaho and southern British Columbia, a relic of the early-twentieth century timber industry. Covered with eight feet of snow, they made for excellent ski trails. Our leader, Alan, was eager to get started.

“Come on everybody!” he shouted, his cheeks already tinged red from the cold, “Only a couple of miles!”

“Oh jeez, here we go” said my best friend, Duncan.

“Yeah, this is gonna be fun” I said. I tried to keep myself from complaining. After all, we didn’t have a choice in the matter… this was a required school trip at Rocky Mountain Academy, designed to introduce us to the wonders of nature, while teaching us to work together to get through it. Besides, we were already here. We started slowly up the road.

“How far are we going again?” asked Duncan.

“I don’t have the map handy, but I think only a mile or so”, I replied.

“It can’t be much more than that, it’s already 3:00”, Duncan pointed out.

“Hope not.”

A light snow started to fall and I kept having to wipe it off of my face as we went seemingly forever onward. I tried to keep my mind off of the journey and take in the surroundings, but it was rapidly all starting to look the same. The others started to complain.

“How much longer?” asked Dave, another member of our group.

“Just another mile,” was Alan’s reply from up front.

Alan was an ex-Outward Bound instructor, for their trips where you would spend two weeks hiking, two weeks canoeing, and then two weeks mountain climbing. That’s what finally got him in the end; a two hundred foot fall off of Mount Shasta. He stopped his rather rapid descent with his ankle, which now no longer bent all the way forward. He claimed it bothered him from time to time, but I personally had never seen any evidence of this.

He was a great guy, really… just a bit gung-ho about this whole trip, at least more so than I was. After all, who really wants to spend eleven days and ten nights in Canada on a wilderness expedition, especially in January?

Finally, we heard him call for a rest, and we took our packs off and greedily gulped the water from our bottles. I was trying to conserve, because I had no clue how or when we were going to get more. Duncan, on the other hand, seemed not to care, and he stuffed his empty bottle back into his pack.

“Good one, Swifty!” I said. “Hope you aren’t thirsty later”.

He smiled as he rummaged around in his pack and brought out another full bottle.

“Ok, Ok, good to see you thinking”, I said.

“We’ll see how flip you are when we stop again”, he said.

I decided not to argue, as it looked like he might have a point.

We started back off, but it seemed only a short time later that we stopped for the last time that evening.

Alan had selected a relatively flat clearing off to the side of the old road that was surrounded by small hills on three sides, which he explained would cut down on the wind. We started to unpack our gear.

Although there were more than twenty people out with us, including Alan and another staff member, Dan, we had been divided up into smaller sub-groups of either three or four. This way, one person in the smaller group could carry the tent and the ground sheet, another could carry the stove, the fuel, and the pots and pans, and the third could carry the food.

I had the food, which, as far as I was concerned, was a good thing because even though it was heaviest at first, it would get lighter day by day while the tent would still be ten pounds when this was all over.

Duncan took the stove from his pack and filled it with fuel. He set it on a piece of foil, and started to prime the pump. I looked through the food bag and got out some hot chocolate, some freeze-dried soups and some Power Bars.

Dave, meanwhile, was struggling to get the tent set up.

“You OK over there?” I asked.

“Yeah, yeah, I got it.”

Leaving him to it, I went back over to Duncan.

“I’m all set,” he said. “The only thing we need now is water.”

I looked around, and saw Alan and Dan setting up their stuff. Walking over to them, I called over to Alan.

“Alan, we need water. Any ideas?”

“Sure, all we need to do is dig!” He said with a smile. “There’s a stream right over here, unless you want to melt snow. The only thing is, melted snow tastes horrible because there’s no oxygen in it. Plus it wastes fuel.”

“Ok…” I said.

Alan called out to everyone and told them to stop what they were doing and come over to the spot he had pointed out to me. We all had small, bright-orange plastic shovels, and Alan directed us in digging out a stair case approximately eight feet down below the surface of the snow until we struck water. From the top, I could see down to the bottom, and was surprised to see the stream bubbling along underneath all the snow above. We took turns bringing our water bottles down and filling them. I made sure to fill both of mine up this time.

Back at our spot, Duncan, and I helped Dave with the tent, and then we set about getting the water boiling. We were all pretty cold by this time, and hot chocolate was all we could think about.

The stove, however, had other ideas. Try as he might, Duncan could not get the damn thing to light. These were Colman stoves, and they were supposed to be relatively reliable, if a bit heavy; and once they were primed, which was achieved by pumping this little knob sticking out of the side up and down with your thumb over the hole at the end and then screwing down, easy to light by just opening the valve to “light” and then holding a lighter to the burner. But the thing just kept sputtering out. Finally, Duncan squeezed a thin layer of fire paste around the burner, and tried again. It sputtered a few more times, but finally a thin blue ring of flame made its way around the rim. We all breathed a collective sigh of relief, and put a pot of water on to boil.

While we were waiting, we unpacked the rest of our stuff. We traded our ski boots for the felt-lined pack boots that we all carried, and then laid out our sleeping pads in the tent. As we unrolled our bags over the pads, the water began to boil. We sat huddled around the stove and drank our hot chocolate, then boiled another pot of water for the soup as we ate our Power Bars.

“How cold do you think it will get tonight?” I wondered out loud, looking up at the star-filled sky.

“Supposedly -40 degrees, according to Dan,” Duncan replied.

“Great.”

When we were finished, Duncan put away the stove and fuel bottles while I washed the pot out with snow.

We slipped into our sleeping bags and tried to go to sleep. I lay awake for over an hour, thinking about the distance we had to go, and the things that might happen in the days ahead. By the time I finally drifted off to sleep, the other guys were snoring.

I awakened to the gray light filtering through the walls and open door flap of the tent, and the bitter cold that was seeping down around my face and into the bag. I slowly crawled out of my warm bag into the frigid air, and got dressed as quickly as I possibly could.

“Damn, it’s fucking freezing” said Duncan. “The stove is all set up, and I was just about to make coffee. Want some?”

“Are you kidding? Of course I do. What time is it?” I asked, wiping the sleep from my eyes.

“7:30”, said Dave, who was crawling out of his bag.

I made my way outside and saw that everyone else was in various states of readiness, and they all looked as cold as I did.

We ate a breakfast of GORP, or “Good ol’ Raisins and Peanuts”, and prepared to start the day. After we packed up all of our stuff, we helped Dave take down the tent, and we changed into our stiff ski boots.

“Everyone ready?” Alan’s voice cut through all of the early morning conversations around us. “Let’s go!”

We started through the ankle-deep snow, bent over under the weight of our packs.

Conversation had been slow, mainly I think because no one wanted to be the one to complain about the exertion, or the cold, or the light snow that was again falling on us. Finally we stopped for lunch. This time, I had the map ready.

“Ok, we’ve gone 7 miles,” I said.

“And only 7 more to go,” Duncan replied.

“That’s the spirit!” said Alan from behind us. “Just think, it’ll be over before you know it.”

“Sure, sure. I’ve heard that before,” laughed Dave.

“Are your packs heavy?” he asked. “Mine is killing me.”

I had been worried that it was just me struggling.

“My shoulders are numb,” I said.

“Mine too,” Duncan agreed.

We all rolled our eyes, slightly embarrassed at admitting that this wasn’t easy for any of us, and then got up and put the offending packs back on.

I leaned way forward to try to get the waist strap as comfortable as I could possibly make it, and pitched face-first into the snow. Hearing laughter from all around, I wanted to jump right up and act as though this had been intentional, or at least no big deal, but I couldn’t; the damn pack was too heavy! So I rolled over on my back, looking a lot like a turtle I was sure, until, by sucking in my stomach, I was able to release the waist and sternum straps and stand back up. Of course, I was almost completely covered with powdery snow by this point, and well past being able to look at all cool, so I joined in the laughter. Finally, I dusted myself off and carefully put the pack back on and stepped into my skis.

We started back on the trail, and the snow finally stopped. After what seemed like hours, Alan called a halt. We turned off to the right, to what looked like an unbroken path into the wilderness but turned out after a short time to lead to another clearing like the one that we had spent the last night at but without the sheltering hills.

We were starting to get a sort of routine down, and we got the stove, tent, and food ready a lot more quickly than we had the night before.

Dan told us that there was no stream this time though, so we had to melt snow in order to make dinner and hot chocolate. Alan had definitely been right about the taste, but we found that by pouring the melted snow back and forth between two water bottles we were able to re-oxygenate the water and lessen the foul, flat, and almost burnt taste.

The next morning, getting up and out of the warm bag into the freezing air was no easier than it had been the night before, but we were at least able to get moving quickly.

After about two miles, we stopped, and Alan told us that we were going to stop there for the night and to get everything all set up for later. This was a bit strange, as it was only about 10:30 in the morning, but the reason for stopping was made clear shortly when we were told that we were going to be going on a day trip up an eight-thousand foot peak.

We had smaller day packs tucked away in our larger backpacks, so we filled those with a lunch of rice cakes and peanut butter along with the obligatory GORP and set off through the trees. The going was slow and arduous, skiing uphill through snow that was knee-deep in places. After about 4 hours of progress, Duncan, Dave, and I made it over the last hill and found ourselves at the summit of the unnamed peak.

Although the weather was apparently cloudy at this altitude most of the time, today it was crystal clear, and we could see for fifty miles in all directions.

“Three states and two countries,” as Alan put it, which were Idaho, Montana, Washington, The U.S, and Canada.

The trees on the summit were only about 5 feet tall above the snow, as most of their height was covered, and the parts that we could see had snow blown in one direction so that they looked like they had been in a wind tunnel or something.

Sheila, one of the girls in our group, had a camera. She struggled to get the snow-filled zipper of her backpack open, finally having to take off her gloves to grasp the thin brass tab.

“Oh my god it’s freezing!” she said. “I hope this thing still works after I fell on it yesterday.”

After taking a bunch of pictures of the views and of each other, Sheila being kind enough to take a picture of Duncan, Dave, and I together framed against the incredible view, we had a quick lunch. It was only rice cakes with peanut butter, a power bar and some more GORP, but it tasted great after the long climb up. Then came the best part; we got to ski back down. It was almost 8,000 feet of uninterrupted downhill skiing.

By the time we got back it was almost six, so it was definitely a good thing that we were all set up for the night. We made dinner and hot drinks, and got ready for bed. I decided to try a suggestion I had heard from someone in the group, which was to heat a quart of water and then fill a water bottle with it to put in my bag for the night.

That made all the difference… with the clear night it was definitely going to be cold, but I hardly cared.

We were awakened to a crash in the woods nearby, which turned out to be a tree branch falling under the weight of the snow that had started falling during the night. Alan and Dan had the worst luck out of all of us… their tent had collapsed.

We went through the morning routine, and got going. After a few miles, we came upon a cabin in the middle of nowhere. It was apparently some sort of rest-area maintained by volunteers. We took off all of our gear and made a fire in the stove, drying our boots and socks out while we sat around and told stories. The cabin had, in addition to a primitive kitchen, a bunch of simple bunk beds consisting of a few sheets of plywood between two-by-fours. We had to set up our sleeping pads and bags two to a bed, but it certainly beat sleeping outside. There was a trail register as well, filled with entries from as long as 50 years before. Sheila read a few aloud, and one stood out in particular, from 1968:

“It’s so cold out here… but it’s nice and quiet. No killing, no bombs, just the snow and the trees. Just me.”

I read them all, and when I was finished just signed my name and the date at the end, not wanting to say any more. We lit the entire cabin with the many candles that were scattered throughout, and stayed up really late just hanging out and listening to the storm that had come upon us as it beat against the cabin’s sides, the wind whistling at the corners of the roof.

The following morning, we set out into the driving snow once again. Our destination was a stream from which to get water something like 10 miles ahead, but over quite a few hills. At least there were downhill sides.

Duncan and I were struggling to catch up to the rest of the group as we had stopped briefly to rest. As we crested the next hill, we saw that the rest of the group had stopped and was looking down at Alan who was skiing quickly down a particularly steep hill.

“What’s going on?” Duncan asked.

“Got me.”

I called to Dave, “See anything?”

“Yeah, Sheila’s lying down and crying”, he called back.

Sheila was another member of our group, a girl I didn’t know very well.

Moving closer, I could see Alan and Dan bending over her.

“Ok, it looks like Sheila broke her ankle,” Alan called up to us. “We’ll all need to work together on this.”

“Damn, the closest road is like 25 miles from here,” said Duncan.

“I know, I’m not sure what we’re supposed to do,” I said.

Alan and Dan took Sheila’s skis off and then placed her poles alongside her leg. Then, they took her sleeping pad and wrapped it around them to make a sort of splint. Alan took his pad and folded it over her skis, which he laid side-by-side to form a sort of makeshift sled for her to sit on. Then he put her pack down in front of the pad. It was really quite far from ideal, but it served its purpose. I took Alan’s pack and put it on my chest over my own. Duncan took Alan’s skis, and Alan put on the snowshoes that he had been carrying, so that he could walk and push Sheila along. It had stopped snowing, at least, which made things a bit easier, as we were no longer in the white-out that we had been before.

It was really slow going, and starting to get dark, so Duncan, Dave, and I went on ahead with some others in order to set up some things at the campsite we were to stay at. This way, when Alan, Dan, and Sheila got back along with the others who stayed behind, they would have hot chocolate and food ready for them. Struggling under the weight of two packs, I continued on.

We entered a small valley, and on our right, it was almost completely dark, with stars shining through. On the left, though, the sun was still shining in the blue sky. Maybe it was because of the latitude that we were at, but it was one of the most amazing things I have ever seen. Christina, one of the girls with us and a good friend of Sheila’s, who was carrying her food, named it “The valley of light and shadow.” Cheesy, but appropriate.

Eventually we reached camp, and set everything up.

We got everything ready for the others, who joined us eventually, looking as tired as we were.

Alan called on his walkie-talkie and reached a ranger station somewhere that offered to send someone with a snowmobile the following morning. We were bone tired, so we quickly finished eating and got into our bags.

I was asleep before I knew it.