Adrift In The Alpine

Enchaining The Peaks of Wyoming's Bighorn Range

We had been in the range a few times. In fact, Mike Lilygren and I had probably put in more time rock climbing on the alpine granite there than we had anywhere, which was somewhat unheard of in that era. We had climbed the East Face of Cloud Peak in 1990, Tried to establish Superfortress on The Merlon in 1992, 1993, 1994, and finally sent in 1996. We had both been on other trips separately. In the summer of 1999, we decided to try and link up an enchainment of the summits from Black Tooth on the north end to Cloud Peak on the south.

Traverses like this are logistically tough and require a good deal of sacrifice when it comes to what you’re going to bring. Sleeping bags and a tent would be nice, but carrying them on your back while leading pitches would not. Extra shoes, a large rack of gear, and a second rope all fell into that same category. In the end, our gear ended up fitting into two small daypacks, didn’t include rock shoes, a full meal, or even good storm gear.

The traverse starts on the tough-to-access north side of the range. Fifty years before, you could have driven a Jeep to Kearny Lake, but the road had been destroyed by traffic and was now an ATV trail. We talked our friends Jeff and Rick Leafgreen into shuttling us there. We drove up from Lander, dropped my truck at West Ten Sleep Lake trailhead, and then all piled into the Leafgreen’s rig to drive up to Story.

Just west of Story, the ATV trail climbs up narrow switchbacks through amazing bands of limestone. Then there are miles of narrow forested road, through some of the wilder country left in this wild corner of the state. Mike and I each sat behind one of the Leafgreens as we cruised up the trails quickly in the morning air. The trail climbs and dips through the trees and finally crests near tree line at the east end of Kearny Lake Reservoir.

There, we threw on our too-light feeling packs, and started along the fisherman’s trail along the north side of the lake as the hum of the Leafgreen’s ATVs faded away. At the west end of the lake the trail pretty much disappeared, but we were able to follow faint and discontinuous paths up the drainage to Spear Lake, above.

As we skirted Spear Lake, the sun dipped below the ridges to the west. We moved west and south up out of the last of the vegetated drainages and up to the small Bard Lake and then past a couple of smaller lakes above. We paused at the highest one of these, where we filled our Camelbaks, and committed to the bare north ridge of Black Tooth, not quite sure where to stop for the night.

Dark closed in, the clouds gathered, and we marched higher still. Somewhere around 11,500’ we found not so much an overhang, but a huge boulder split diagonally by a big chimney. The upper side overhung at about 45 degrees, the bottom, a slab of almost the same angle, and a floor of small boulders and ice. We were windwhipped and soaked from rain when we crawled inside, and were glad to have the little shelter it provided.

We pulled the foam backpads out of our packs and spread them across the ice. Mike pulled out his small stove and brewed up one of the two tea bags we’d brought. We pulled on our down jackets, which would be our only insulation. We ate bars and jerky and squatted side by side with our backs to the open sky, hoping the Gore-Tex knockoff laminate in our Sierra Designs prototype rain jackets would hold up and keep our down jackets dry.

The rain kept up all night. We “slept” a while, but mostly just moved around to try and keep from aching too bad when the sun came up. I kept wondering what we’d do if it continued to rain. The Leafgreens were back in Lander, and for all intents and purposes, we’d “burned the ships.” The only way out was across the ridge.

Sometime in the night, it stopped raining and the wind came up. It was cold for July, but I knew the wind would dry the peaks fast and we needed that more than warmth. We would have tossed and turned all night if there had been room. Instead we squirmed.

In the morning, Mike rebrewed the tea and we each ate a bar. Mike had bought a bag of red hots candy in Buffalo on the way up, and we each had a handful to start the day. We restuffed our small packs. We put harnesses on and I tied the coiled rope on top of my pack, not knowing when the roped climbing would begin. Apparently, the north ridge of Blacktooth was 5.5. Mike hiked first, moving quickly up talus, then up exposed slabs, and finally into ledgy terrain where falling was not a good idea. He scrambled left and then right, retreating here, committing to a more direct path there.

I followed behind. At times it seemed like it would have been nice to rope up, but Mike was already on past that section...and I was carrying the rope. After maybe 30 minutes of scrambling, the angle eased and we walked up a gentle ridge. We hit the summit of Black Tooth (4th class) about 6 in the morning. The register on the summit showed the last people to sign had been there in 1986, thirteen years before. It was not a hard peak to climb, but the approach-to-coolness ratio was quite high. We drank water, enjoyed the sun, and looked, finally, south along our intended ridge traverse. Cloud Peak, the last of the summits, seemed a very long way away.

We scrambled south on granite blocks and slabs. Eventually, the angle steepened, and we looked for a good place to set up a rappel. Mike moved around the east side of a small block and hollered, “Hey, come check this out.” Wedged in a crack on top of the block was a piece of climbing protection, a chock, but it was made of plastic. Neither of us had ever seen one, but it was not budging, so we clipped into it, backed it up with an aluminum one, and rappelled down into the gully below.

Mount Woolsey, the next peak in line lay across a short narrow gap. It sat slightly east and south of the Black Tooth, and it looked like it would be easy to skirt on the west side. Our goal, though, was not to just get down the ridge, but to hit each summit. Beyond the gap, we found a nice stance, and Mike flaked out the rope. I tied in for the day’s first lead.

The north side of Woosey was near vertical, but was broken up by ledges and cracks. The climbing was a bit wet, but it was easy to protect, and ended up being quite good. I traversed up and left, and left again, and even further left, reaching a large ledge after about 150 feet of easy fifth class climbing. Mike followed quickly, then climbed right past me and up easier terrain to a point at which the angle eased. He set a belay and when I joined him, we scrambled a short distance to the top. A quick photo, handful of Red Hots, and we moved on.

The descent was slow, and with a lot of third class downclimbing and a rappel, we found ourselves at the base of a small pinnacle called The Gargoyle.

Hardly a mountain, we scrambled up easy terrain to near its top, and then roped up to scramble up the spike of a summit, a fifty foot dagger sticking up and leaning slightly over the chasm to the west. It is so slender that it would be difficult to put two people on top. Since it was a named peak, we had planned to climb it, and since we planned it, we did it.

Mike climbed up first, rope trailing behind him. He found no place for putting in gear, so he carefully grabbed to top, rolled up onto his feet on the tiny summit, then reversed the climb back to me. I did the same, and then we coiled the rope and hiked on along the narrow ridge to the three-summit Innominate beyond.

The Innominate is everything ideal about an alpine summit. Hard to reach, technical, jagged. It is a multi-summited fin of a mountain that seems torn from the ranges of Patagonia than where it sits. Like a man’s hand held upright, the mountain is spire after spire with deep and narrow gullies between. Its position in the range makes it a rarely climbed, but often dreamed of, objective.

The first of its three summits was relatively easy, a few short ropelengths that barely ticked into the fifth class category. We hit the top, and quickly rappelled into the col between the first and second summits.

From this narrow stance, the climbing presented more of a challenge than one would hope. We traversed left and then back right looking for an easy way. Not finding it, we committed to a long vertical crack that was, truthfully, harder than we’d expected to run into on a ridge traverse.

I pulled the insoles out of my sticky rubber approach shoes and laced them as tight as I could get them. I gave Mike the Camelbak reservoir to carry—now less than half full—and started up the crack. The rock was cold and damp in places, but the jams were good and there was plenty of opportunity to place gear. Because our rack consisted of no more than ten pieces, I climbed to maybe twenty feet before placing anything. The crack varied between hand jams and fists, but I was grateful for the ease of stuffing my thick shoes into the crack.

At about 80 feet up, I found the crack stacked with loose flakes, and had to toss the dinner plate-sized pieces out one by one from below. Mike crouched close to the wall to avoid any danger, and occasionally yelled up encouragement. We both knew that I’d drawn the short straw of the trip and he was grateful.

Mike followed quickly, and acknowledged the difficulty with a quick raise of the eyebrows upon reaching the belay. We were in it now. We climbed to the flat-ish summit on a couple more easy leads, bouldered to the top of the 20 foot spike that formed the true summit, and then roped up for a careful downclimb into the col before the third summit.

Tame by comparison, the third summit was probably the best overall climbing, with two good ropelengths of solid and fun climbing. We hit the top near noon, and descended south toward Mount Kramer and the end of the technical climbing. Once in the Innominate-Kramer col, we stripped off our harnesses, coiled the rope, and grabbed a quick bite to eat before shouldering our packs for the scramble to top the last two summits.

The remaining work was boulder hopping on wide alpine slopes, and we hit Kramer quickly without even a rest at the top. As the sun set behind the Absaroka Range to the west, we topped Cloud Peak, a summit we’d visited together a few times. We were now in familiar terrain, and it was mostly downhill to the truck, although 11 miles away.

We drank the last of the tea, and ate the last of our food (save some Red Hots) at the summit. As we worked down the long south slopes of Cloud Peak, we knew we had hours of hiking ahead, but the work was all but done.

It is slow going and not “casual,” yet each step was one closer to the end of the day. Each step also took us down in altitude, and my pounding headache was slowly subsiding.

We dropped off the ridge and down along the headwaters of Paint Rock Creek, then into the first green meadows we’d touched all day. A quick jaunt up one small final hill took us to the Solitude Trail, which we found just as the darkness overtook us completely. We walked up around a hill above Mistymoon Lake, past a group of tents lit by headlamps and on down toward lake Helen.

Then it started to rain. It came it heavy and it wasn’t long before we were totally soaked. We moved past Helen and finally into the trees, following the wide and muddy trail a final couple of miles to the trailhead. We got to my truck around midnight, quickly tossed our packs into the back, and drove out to Deerhaven, then down the winding road through Ten Sleep Canyon.

In town at the bottom, we stopped at a roadside Pepsi vending machine for drinks and found the tailgate had been left open the full hour’s drive from the trailhead. By some miracle, both packs still rested on the tailgate of the truck. We made sure to secure the load, then drove on to Worland. It was raining, windy and we were dead tired.

In Worland, we found an open store, and went in for burritos, ice cream, and anything else that seemed like it would fill our stomachs and help keep us awake. This wouldn’t be the first nor last time we drove across the state in the darkest part of the night, either on the front end or back of some huge day.

As I write this some 25+ years later, I value my time in the wild with Mike as one of the great gifts of my life. The days were magnificent, the objectives big, and we both did a good job of keeping our mouths shut when we had doubts. There are turning points in each trip when we are not so sure that what we are doing is a good idea. Neither of us was brash, so we knew it was OK to trust the other when our own motivation slipped.

Mike and I have both gone on to greater ranges and bigger adventures. The Bighorn years, as they now seem to have become, were some of the best.