There are few things that feel better than sitting down on your pack in the parking lot after a big day in the mountains. Taking off your boots feels like an amazing massage, cheap beer tastes better than 18 year scotch, and any food that you find in the car is the best thing you’ve ever eaten. Timpanogos delivered one of those days.
I almost bailed on Jamon and Dan when my alarm went off at 5:00. My insomnia has been running pretty full force lately, and I never fell asleep Saturday night. But, I stuck to my early morning plan of “don’t make any decisions before coffee” and got up. In the pre-dawn light of morning, the three of us skinned away from the car in Aspen Grove. Things went relatively smooth until we got high in Primrose Cirque, where the wheels started to fall off. First we found ourselves in thick soup with about 50 feet of visibility. Luckily, Dan had done this exact tour before, so he guided us using his sixth sense.
An hour later, a quick hole in the clouds gave us a quick view of Robert’s Horn and the satisfaction that we were in the correct place. As we punched out through the top of the clouds, the snow got steeper and bullet hard. I lost a ski, fell, and self arrested with my Whippet pole while trapping the dropped ski under my foot. As I recovered and switched over to boot pack mode, Dan lost a ski as well. He wasn’t quite as lucky, and his went for about 500 feet while we watched from above muttering “stop, stop, stop…” under our breath. Eventually it did stop, and Dan headed down to retrieve it and get in some bonus vert. With our crew reunited, we skinned around Emerald Lake and up to the saddle between the North and South summits before booting along the East ridge to the point where we planned to drop in and ski back to Sundance.
Between the terrible snow conditions and Dan’s side trip, it took us six hours to get there. That’s a lot of time for less than 5000 feet of climbing. In the grand scheme of things, I’m not a very good skier, but I can stay on my feet when I have to. Dan sure wasn’t bothered with the double fall line skiing above cliffs, but Jamon and I were taking our sweet time and making damn sure we didn’t end up going for the big ride. Temps were warm, and pretty much every turn triggered a small wet slide, but at least it wasn’t the tilted skating rink we had come up on the other side of the mountain. After a short section of down-climbing where we picked our way through a small couloir and took a hard left to ski out Big Provo Cirque where the snow got so hateful that even Dan went down a couple times. Then we entered the scrub-oak while swinging around Stewart Falls, and our progress slowed to a crawl.
It’s good to be with happy, motivated people when you’re getting worked. Most would put their heads down and say “damn, this sucks” while feeling sorry for themselves. Others say the same thing, but they say it while laughing and talking about how it’s going to make for a great story. As we entered the thick of it, Dan summed it up well: “It took us almost eight hours to get to Type 3 Fun. That’s pretty good.” Eventually, we made the summer trail and were moving well once again. When we got to the road, we skied down it until the snow turned to pavement, and then we started walking. The third car to pass gave Jamon a ride to go get his Subaru while Dan and I enjoyed one of my very favorite activities—sitting on the pack with a big day in the books.
