Posts Tagged: Backcountry

For his 60th birthday, my father, who has always loved hiking, mountaineering, and the outdoors, decided he wanted to go on an adventure with his family. He settled on rafting the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon as his expedition of choice. Unfortunately, Grand Canyon trips tend to fill up as early as two years in advance, and we weren’t able to book one. Instead, we decided to raft the Colorado through Cataract Canyon. Cataract Canyon is in Canyonlands National Park, above the Grand Canyon, and has even bigger whitewater.

The winter of 2013 started off well for skiers on the West Coast. A wet November dumped plenty of snow to get some skiing in over Thanksgiving, and an even better December made conditions around the holiday season and New Year’s excellent. Unfortunately, those first two months of the season were followed by the driest January on record and an equally uninspiring first half of February. When I went to Kirkwood over Presidents Day weekend, it hadn’t snowed much at all in almost six weeks. Still, the groomed runs were in decent shape, but the off-piste conditions were terrible.

The winter retreat for the Stanford Outdoor Education Program instructors was a back country skiing trip off of Highway 88 near Kirkwood Mountain Resort. We left campus early on a beautiful Saturday morning. Despite a flat tire in Jackson, we managed to make it to Tragedy Springs Road, of which only the first hundred feet or so had been plowed. We parked in the plowed area and distributed group gear and food. Then we strapped on our skis and went on our way.

Every quarter, the instructors of the Stanford Outdoor Education Program (OEP) go on a retreat to refine skills and plan trips and lessons. For our Spring 2008 retreat, we took advantage of a spell of hot weather to brave the cold, swift waters of Arroyo Seco, a gorgeous canyon east of Big Sur. Not only is Arroyo Seco beautiful, but it’s much closer to campus than the Sierras, so it made for a short and easy drive.

Tucked in the northwest corner of California, the Trinity Alps are a small but spectacular mountain range. The Trinities have been on my list of places to visit for a few years now, so I was excited for an opportunity to explore them. I joined a group planning to snowshoe up the Canyon Creek Trail to the Canyon Creek Lakes, an eight mile hike with 3,500 feet of elevation gain. The goal was to get as far as possible up the trail, given the storm forecast for the weekend.

After the first two weeks of my trip to Alaska in the summer of 2007 (see Wrangell Mountains Part One for stories from those two weeks), I began designing my field study for the second segment of the program. Along with a group of three other students, I decided to study the issues involved in safe bear-human coexistence, including identifying bear habitat to help backcountry travelers avoid or at least be conscious of it, and researching methods for storing bear attractants in the backcountry. We spent about a week researching these topics and designing our field study. Then we embarked on an eighteen-day journey through the Wrangell Mountains.

I spent two months in Alaska during the summer of 2007 through an environmental sciences field study program. On our day off, we decided to go ice climbing on the Root Glacier, one of the two major glaciers in the area.

We took a shuttle to Kennecott, an old mining town that sits above the glacier. Our guides were two women, Elizabeth and Betsy. They outfitted us with gear: plastic mountaineering boots, helmets, and crampons, and together we hiked a mile and a half down to the glacier. We arrived beneath an ice wall, and Betsy and Elizabeth walked around behind it to its top and set up an anchor of three ice screws.

If you follow the archipelago of southeastern Alaska north to the Gulf, the first mountain range after the coast is the Chugach. Stay on the far eastern edge of Alaska and continue north forty miles. There lie the Wrangell Mountains, a stretch of peaks forged by ice and fire, carved by glaciers, forced upward by the crashing of tectonic plates, and scorched by volcanoes. In 1980, Wrangell – St. Elias National Park and Preserve was created. At 13 million acres, it is the largest national park in the United States, larger than nine U.S. states and seventy countries. The old copper mining towns of McCarthy and Kennecott lie at the center of the park. I spent two months during the summer of 2007 in a field study program for undergraduates based out of McCarthy.

The final trip of my Advanced Wilderness Skills class this quarter was a student-led backpacking trip to the Emigrant Wilderness. I’d never visited the Emigrant Wilderness, but it was described to me as a larger, less-crowded Desolation Wilderness. I knew the Desolation Wilderness to be a gorgeous area, so I was excited to explore Emigrant.

We left campus at around 7:00 PM on the evening of Friday June 1. The drive along Highway 108 was long. We stopped in Mi-Wuk Village to pick up a wilderness permit at the ranger station there, and continued east along the highway until we reached Crabtree Road. After several miles of poor-quality, mostly unpaved roads, we reached Crabtree Campsite, our home for the night, at around 12:30. We went to bed immediately, most of us sleeping out under the bright, almost full moon.

Straddling the Montana-Idaho border, the Bitterroots are a remote but spectacularly beautiful mountain range in the Northern Rockies. It was among these rugged peaks that Lewis and Clark crossed the Continental Divide in the early nineteenth century. The summer after my sophomore year in high school, I spent a month in Wyoming, Idaho, and Montana on a wilderness leadership training program. The trip included an unforgettable nine day, sixty-five mile backpacking trip across the Bitterroots, much of which would turn out to be off the trail.