Mountain Misadventure—Live and Learn

As you spend time in the mountains they begin to shrink. The awe remains, but you know they can be conquered for you have conquered them— or at least you think you have. You've traversed their ranges. You've climbed them at night. You've stood on their summits in the middle of winter. When you live in the mountains, work in the mountains and begin to call the mountains home, they shrink even more. Instead of hiking in them, you go for walks on them. Strolls. Escapes.

Working and living in Madison Col can become confining. Your entire world, while at the freedom of 4800', has a 500' radius encompassing your kitchen, bathroom, bedroom, work place, commute and social life. You can get stir crazy. Thursday night Everett and I decided to head out for a walk after dinner. The weather was deteriorating, fog had rolled in, it was raining lightly at times. The wind was picking up too, but we needed an adventure.

We layered up. I wore wool long johns with shorts over them, a wool base layer on top, along with a wool hooded sweater and hooded rain jacket. I grabbed my head lamp and stuffed my pockets with candy bars. Everett did the same.

We headed up the Star Lake trail for a surreal ascent of Mount Adams. A cool blue light (moon? last remains of the sun?) made the fog glow. Madison Gulf to our left dropped into a blue hazy abyss of darkness and the summit cone of Adams was a black silhouette above. We scrambled over boulders above tree line, losing the trail, but not caring as we plowed on to the summit above us. We even enjoyed a beer toast part way up, proud of our adventurous little escape. We were damp from the mist in the air, but completely within in comfort zones.

The Summit of Mt. Adams on a clear night (KBW Photo)

As we topped the ridge a few hundred feet from the summit the wind picked up. It threw us a bit off balance, but we reached the summit signs with relative ease.

We decided to follow the Airline Trail down, a more gradual decent that still required boulder scrambling and the finding of cairns (stacks of rocks) to follow the above-tree-line trail. Going down Airline we began having more and more trouble finding the cairns. The rain and wind picked up and more fog settled in. We lost the glow we had from the sky and were now in total darkness other than our headlamps. Soon we couldn't find the trail at all.

Now the Airline is a pretty straight forward 8/10's of a mile to the Gulf Side trail which leaves another 3/10s descent to the hut. I had navigated the stretch with relative ease after sunset Monday in clear weather without a headlamp. The mountain had become bigger though. Huge actually.

Looking up the Airline Trail on a Previous ascent of Adams (KBW Photo)

We forged ahead in the general direction we knew the hut to be, but soon become disoriented. Repeatedly hitting dead ends of krumholtz (thick gnarly shrubs) and boulders to large for scrambling, we had no choice but to head back up hill, eventually hitting the summit to reorient ourselves. The weather had deteriorated a few more notches. The winds were over 50 mph and the rain fell in huge, driving, horizontal downpours. Even when yelling we could hardly hear one another from feet away. Our visibility was confined to a 10 foot area lit by our headlamps from under our hoods. The scene seemed more underwater than above. Later we'd find out that the wind chill was below freezing— around 28 degrees.

We decided to follow Lowes Path to the Gulf Side trail. Lowe's took us away from the hut, but we knew it to have better, more consistent cairns, and was only 3/10s from GulfSide, which is part of the Appalachian Trail and would be much easier to follow to the hut given the conditions. We began hunting cairns on Lowes Path. With one person staying at the previous cairn while the other hunts for the next pile of rocks that mark the way. The leader would stumble and scramble until he found the next cairn, at which point he'd SHOUT back to the other who would join him. The process repeated itself over and over until the leader could no longer find the next cairn, at which he'd return to the previous point and the roles would switch. It turned into a game that kept us focused, but it left the trailing person standing in the wind and rain, cold and exposed, but marking all we had, the last known sign of the trail.

Lowes Path and the Summit of Adams on a previous hike (KBW Photo)

Eventually, it become too slow. We weren't getting down fast enough and we couldn't find the next cairn even though most were less than 20' apart. Things were quickly going from tense to scary and teetered on the edge of worse. We were tired, cold and soaked to the bone. The situation was deteriorating in exponential clicks that were getting faster. We were still working as a team though, and made the decision to forget the cairns and Lowes path. We set a corse in a direction we knew would intersect the Gulf Side trail and crossed our fingers that we'd know it when we crossed it (or else we'd stumble into the abyss of King Ravine).

As we went down more quickly the conditions improved (a relative statement). We spotted a cairn as we crossed a foot path and hoped to hell it was the Gulf Side trail. It was. We turned right (towards the hut) and picked up the pace, spotting its well made cairns at a higher rate than we head been on Lowes and the Airline. With each cairn or trail maker the leader would yell "GOT ONE!" as the follower rejoiced with praise and we forged ahead. It was another mile of fog, rain and high winds before we ran into the sign marking the Airline Junction, or safety shoot to the hut. We headed down and 100' from the door, finally saw the glow of the hut lights through the fog.

The hut was quiet with two crew members still stirring about glad to see we were back safe. "A bit wet out there" they said as we walked in the door, not fully realizing the extent of our 3-hour ordeal. Everett and I humbly began to share our story, admitting our multiple mistakes and acknowledging our good fortune. We threw some wood into the stove and began to strip wet layer after wet layer, wringing them out and hanging them dripping in front of the wood stove. Everyone else went to bed, but we stayed up for awhile contemplating what had just happened.

We were dumb. We had been cocky. We paid no attention to the weather and the hostility of the area we were heading into. The mountains can always throw more at you.

Eventually we crawled into our sleeping bags, as the wind and rain picked up even more, blasting so hard that it pushed the smoke from out stove down the chimney, filling the hut with a grayish haze.