26 FEB 2001
By Greg Seitz
The sun had already set when I fell through the ice. My haul sled, slung
over my shoulders by its duffel-type carrying straps, combined with the full
weight of skis and equipment, shoved me onto my hands. I couldn't rid
myself of the load. I was stuck in freezing brown water to my waist,
wallowing helplessly. Five minutes earlier I had been busy crashing through
the choked slide debris and alders that made Slide Canyon nearly impossible
to navigate. Now my situation was considerably worse.
I lunged onto my back
and freed myself from my sled, freeing my feet and cursing. Deciding on this
route a few hours before, we were all too optimistic to consider what's in a
name. "Slide Canyon," the map read. Anyway, I had been in the bottom of the
drainage walking over an ice crust covering the quagmire that formed when
avalanche debris rerouted the creek. Never did I consider that this snowy
surface had three feet of muck and water underneath. I was busy directing my
skisstrapped along the sides of my sled hullunderneath the downfall and
brush. After that fateful step, I was wet to my waist. Neither my partner,
Harry, nor Slide Lake, our destination, was anywhere in sight.
With darkness all but upon me, I reached Slide Lake soggy and tired. Where
the creek flowed into the lake there was scarcely enough open ground to lie
down, let alone pitch a tent. I found half of Harry's gear (he resorted
to a double carry and went back to retrieve the rest) and sat down in the
dying light. We barely had any food left, and all I could think about were
the meals I'd devour if I ever made it out of there. For the first time in
three weeks, firewood was nearby, so I decided to try to build a fire.
Before I gathered any kindling, it started to rain.
When I finally got the fire going, I ate my last candy bar and reflected
upon the events leading up to this moment.
I was 20 years old, and my
longest wilderness trip to this day was overnight. I had camped in the snow
but always with my creature comforts so near something I had wanted to
change. So it seemed only logical when a former ski partner recruited me to
traverse the Wind River Range on skis. I'd set lofty goals the
previous fall, and this one trip could potentially meet all of them. Harry had
been living in Boston that winter, plotting to return to the Rockies once
again. Working a computer job (nobody seemed to expect much work from him)
allowed him plenty of time to read maps and plot a spring ski
extravaganza. I knew when Harry set his mind to a project, it
generally happened with grace and efficiency or at least efficiency.
Regardless, the middle of May 1997 found us plodding towards the Big Sandy
entrance of the Winds with skis on our feet, climbing gear in our packs and
sleds in tow. We'd even cached supplies at Seneca Lake, roughly halfway
to the Green River Lakes trailhead.
The first week or so was really spotty. We skied some imposing couloirs in
the Cirque of the Towers. We also spent some time stormbound in the tent.
After about day nine, the weather really cleared, and we began to cover
ground. We picked up our cache on schedule and proceeded
to the Titcomb Basin area with a new vigor. Despite my partner being nine years older than me, we
operated well together. While he was definitely more qualified on the
organization and route-finding end of things, I pushed him to climb and ski
some terrain that he wouldn't ordinarily have done.
We decided at Titcomb Basin that we had time to stick around and
explore some wilderness climbing and skiing. Miraculously, the weather
stayed perfect and we knocked off the south couloir of Fremont Peak, the
Tower I gully of Mt. Helen, and a circuitous route on Gannett Peak that
climbed an impossibly steep, southeast-facing ice runnel and descended the Gooseneck
route. While hauling our loaded sleds over 12,800-foot Dinwoody Pass was an
absolute slugfest, we beat the misery threefold. Basking in the glory of
extended wilderness solitude, we accomplished what we thought was out of our
bounds and enjoyed a simple and purposeful existence.
All we had to focus on was skiing and getting down
safely. We only saw people we planned to meet, and our biggest
concern was harassment from pikas. We knew early on that our food
rations weren't sufficient, but we tolerated the hunger and spent hours
each day talking about "when we get back, I'm going to eat..."
Harry arrived with the rest of his gear just as the rain began to get
downright heavy. We hadn't seen much but cliffs alongside Slide Lake, but
starting at the other end, a forest service trail eventually led to
the trailhead. But even these logistics were too much to think about in our
exhausted state. We cooked our last supper in silence.
That morning we started from Dinwoody Basin, at the base of Gannett
Peak. We knew that our food was running out. The weather held up and it
was time to get back to civilization. With light hearts and smiling faces, we
headed north toward Sourdough Glacier. Within an hour of leaving, Harry
noticed his skis were delaminating from tip to tailour timing was perfect,
we decided, and carried on. The Sourdough Glacier proved to be a pleasant
alpine exit. We didn't make turns, but descended at about 10-15 miles
an hour for what seemed like an eternity. Side by side, we slid along
hooting, chatting, and watching the Green River meander slowly toward the
Colorado.
At the glacier's terminus, we had to decide on an exit route, and for some
reason that I can't explain, we chose Slide Canyon. Big mistake. But that
was our choice, and within 15 minutes we were committed, heading down
a flat, snowy ridgeline searching for a continuous line into the canyon.
Finally we found it, and upon reaching the bottom we discovered how this
drainage got its name. Massive piles of slide debris littered the floor with
great heaps of a snow-rock matrix that slowed progress to a crawl. When we
finally got below the snow line, the canyon floor was solid debris: deadwood, great boulders, and live slide alder. And it was somewhere around the
end of the snow when I fell into the bog.
It rained nearly all night as we huddled underneath a tarp, soaking wet. At
that point I would have done just about anything to get out of there. We
decided in the morning to carry our gear around the lake in two trips, then
walk the remaining miles with one load. Early afternoon and we were at the
head of the lake, eating all the food we had left, and drying our gear in
the warm sunlight. For the first time in weeks took off our shirts off and
couldn't believe how much weight we had lost. My partner's decadent urban
puffiness completely disappeared. I only wondered where my stomach
had gone. We ate, packed up, and got ready for the final press home.
I don't know how long the walk was. I'd say somewhere between seven and 10
miles, but all the pain I'd experienced in my life, combined, did not eclipse
what I felt the final three hours of that walk. I am not particularly tall,
so the bottom lip of my sled extended well below my butt. The only way I could walk was hunched over or by not extending my legs backward fully. Harry did not
seem to have this problem, and I soon found myself walking alone. That was
not the only discomfort either. All my gear was stuffed into my sled, skis
strapped to it, attached with only duffel bag-type straps. The result
was like hauling cinder blocks with a barbed-wire backpack. Even worse, the
trail downhill was unpleasantly steep. Suffice to say, I was in a bad
way. My patience was at the end of its rope and all I wanted to do was stop,
vomit, throw a temper tantrum, incinerate all my belongings, lie down and
die. But I was too tired to do even that, so I pressed on.
The trail leveled out to the headwaters of the Green River, a meandering
flood plain of fast-flowing, melt-swelled tributaries. I rejoined my partner
and, by the looks of the map, we had to cross to the other side. Every time
we tried to cross, the water was running too fast. We waded for a
couple hours trying to find an area suitable to cross, to no avail. All we found were bones, and a great amount of them. They appeared to
be deer, elk, and moose bones, and we encountered them in all stages of
decomposition. We passed them frequently. Remembering this area was
where a few grizzly bears had been trapped, I began to take this as a sign.
The icing on the cake was when we encountered a small fawn that had curled
up to die. No other deer were around, and this thing wouldn't even lift its
head when we approached it. It just breathed shallow, silent forced breaths.
I wanted to panic.
Luckily, we ran into a group of hikers who told us there was a bridge just
downstream that crossed the river at the head of Green River Lake, the final
obstacle separating us from our goal. Harry exclaimed, "Perfect,
Seitz. Only two more miles to the trailhead! Are you ready to get funky?"
Fortunately, I didn't have the energy to wring his neck.
The final two miles were more of the same mind-bending agony until I reached
the end of the lake. The last few hundred yards I simply could not go on
any further, so I sat down. It was just a little bit further, but I needed to rest.
I sat with my head in my hands, utterly dejected, and then something curious
happened, or at least I'm pretty sure it did. Looking back on it, it seems
as though it might have happened in a dream that I've had sometime since
then. It's so vivid that I've just always accepted it as true and still do.
I was sitting on a log alongside the trail when a young girl, maybe 10 or
11 years old walked by with tears in her eyes. She was looking at me very
strangely. All I could think of was to ask how she was doing. She replied
that she was okay, but she was lost. I couldn't imagine what she
was talking about, this close to her campsite. You could see campfires
through the trees.
"My family was right here and we were fishing and now they're gone," she
explained.
"Well, maybe if you follow this trail further, that'll take you to your
campsite." It was a dirt highway, for God's sake.
"Oh I don't think so, I don't remember coming this way."
"Well, give it a try, and I'll be along soon enough. If they aren't there,
we'll do something about it."
She agreed and continued out of sight. The last three weeks
had really been something, and if I could accomplish that, I could do damn
near anything. With renewed vigor, I humped my sled onto my back and hobbled
my way to the trailhead.
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