Gannett, the Wyoming state highpoint. It had been on my mind since 2019 – after Greg and I skied King’s Peak in the Uintas in a single push. That was a wild and inspiring day: hard but not scary, decently big but by no means unreasonable. As with any good adventure the question started to form in my mind: “what’s next?” Whitney was intriguing, the volcanoes up north, of course pieces of Alaska beckoned. Greg talked about having tried to ski Gannett years before, a real crusher. It started to burrow into my brain.
Since King’s, I’ve skied a lot more, climbed a lot more, and spent more time moving fast in the mountains. I skied Washington’s Mount Adams in a day. I took an unguided hut trip to British Columbia. I ran a trail marathon in the Swiss Alps. All in the back of my mind it was training for another hard ski adventure. It was time for something big again.
Winter 2022 dragged out. We had late storms that rebuilt a weird and unusual snowpack. Here in my adopted home of the Wasatch, the alpine held snow deep into the summer. In June, I went and skied a summer Baldy alone, and wondered if it would be my last day skiing. As I made too-fast-for-the-sloppy-conditions turns through potato snow and rock fall debris, I hoped not. I knew I wanted to do something more exciting with this lingering snowpack in the West. I had been talking to James about Rainier. I had been talking to Greg and Brett about Gannett. Rainier seemed like a higher chance of success, if we had a weather window. But the Winds were so much closer, and to me in many ways more interesting – less information, less of a place people skied. It was a place you went to backpack, flyfish, go “mountaineering.” Remote. Hard to carry skis all the way back there. You had to want it.
On a gorgeous late June climbing day we mapped out the timing on Gannett. We had a hilarious cackle of an ambitious plan to ski a bunch of lines up there in a long weekend. It was kind of a joke. We’d break our bodies trying it. But skiing off the summit of a tall mountain intrigued us. So, we started watching the Winds: snowlines and weather.
A couple weeks later, loose reports of clear trails came in. Greg and I looked at the calendar. Weddings. Work. Vacations. Trips to the East. He had just come off a 80 mile fastpack and I had been in the desert working for three months. Brett was injured. But clear skies were in the forecast and when the weather says go, we go. How many more springs will I have to do something hard? Something that pushes me to the absolute limit mentally and physically? How much longer will Gannett have a glacier? So we committed.
We knew we could not do it in a single push from car to car but we didn’t want to drag it out either. We wanted to move fast. Fast meant less stuff, less food. This is bad because I love food. Greg is definitely a minimalist when it comes to food. On Teton adventures he’ll opt out of the fine cuisine in town. A Dominos pizza will suffice. Breakfast? Choke down a cold bagel at 1am, chase it with a Coke. But he’s usually right so I tried to follow his lead, counting grams versus calories, sadly leaving candy at my house. The night before our departure from Salt Lake City, I organized all my nuts, jerky, salami sticks, and backpacker meals into my pack. I brick and mortared a light summer ski kit with camping gear, electronics, a toothbrush, and some party favors – a half liter of tequila. Party Shirt. Greg and I can go light, but we still make it sick.
We left the sprawling Mormon stronghold early on July 8th and headed to Wyoming. I gazed out the car window and thought about my adopted home of West. I think a lot of people move West expecting Denver, San Francisco, The Grand Canyon, Yosemite. Some idolized vision of wilderness and cities. In reality, there’s a lot of grassland – endless beige plains stretching beyond the horizon. Vast open space with a lot of “nothing.” Patch-worked among the nothing, there is industry. Huge cattle farms: dusty, hot cows fattening before slaughter or pumped dry of their milk. Energy: coal mines and natural gas wells. Pump stations, pipes, and refineries that break up the nothing. They are surreal skeleton dwellings. The bones of massive metallic creatures, legs of steel and spines of corrugated tube. In their wakes, huge black dunes unearthed and ready for processing. The mineral imported and exported on perfectly straight rail and road that split the land into grids.
And there are great American rivers. Unlike the our built paths, the rivers meander. They twist with the contours of the place. We paralleled the Green River, and I was happy to see a familiar waterway. I knew too that if we did make it up to Gannett, we’d be near its headwaters, which excited me — to know a place like the Green from source to confluence was to put together my mental map of the West. I have sat on its beaches and bathed in its water – swam through its riffles and wondered about its millennia of snaking downstream through the canyons of the Colorado Plateau, in the heart of which it meets the Colorado River at the Confluence. The powerful place where the two mighty desert rivers quietly mix, blending their sediment rich colors. Together, they pass a wide sandy beach and tower of crumbling red rock before the canyon constricts and sends the calm sluicing river into the torrid infamous whitewater of Cataract Canyon. And onward to Glen Canyon, drowned beneath Lake Powell and the focus of my career at the Glen Canyon Institute.
Greg steered the Subaru onto the shoulder of the highway, pulling me out of my daydream. We both step out on the crunchy gravel and piss on the side of the road. “DOWNWIND!” I laugh. Greg and I both have tiny bladders. Same stops to pee on the drive and on the skin track, sign of a good partner. “Your turn to drive,” he says. He’s got to call the DA’s office. He’s a lawyer… who’s able to take off on a weekday to go ski the highest mountain in Wyoming. “Cool,” I respond, and let him ride shotgun to work on trial prep.
We pulled into Pinedale, Wyoming a bit after 10am and hungry. Subway fit the bill – big, cheap, caloric. Classic utilitarian eating. We wolfed down sandwiches and did some last minute Instagram prowling for any more beta on the region – where the snowline was primarily, but what shape the mountain was in: what potential skiing we’d be able to do. I scrolled some more maps, refreshed my Fatmap, Caltopo, and Trailforks. So many trails, crisscrossed and miles upon miles before we’d get to our skiing. Our phones had us lingering. We had made good time but we did not want to squander it. Plus now we were out of the plains – we could see the Winds. A big, snaggletooth of granite towers 20 miles east of town. Enough with the technology. It was go time.
At the Pole Creek Trailhead we repacked gear – I took some cook stuff, Greg took the tent. We poured the tequila into a small water bottle. I lashed my skis to the outside of my pack, the black buckles stretching under the overstuffed sack. And, onto my back it went. It was heavy, but felt familiar on my shoulders. I had my skis and boots on my pack, some pizza, some booze, and a mostly unknown adventure to come. All of my favorite things in life – the simplest and most important necessities. We took one last look at the car, nodded, and started along the trail to Titcomb Basin.
—
The subalpine approach to the Winds is a spectacular jaunt. The trail is easy and rolling, a well kept single track through the wilderness. Pine and spruce dominate the ecosystem, but aspen, alder, grasses, and flowers thrive as well. Much of the first four or five miles took us through this forest, which reminded me of other big days getting to tall mountains. A couple meadows gave way to little ponds, and small views of the bigger mountains to the north – our eventual destination. A couple of the first guys we passed were coming down with helmets and rope. They had climbed Gannett and gave us really good news about the snow line – it was at the far end of Titcomb Basin, with snow all the way up Bonney Pass. The bergschund was closed. Ideal. We passed a Forest Service trail crew working on a section of our walk. “You guys have your bear canister?” Ummm… Sort of? We were going to use a rope and hang. The ranger was adamant that we must. “We have a problem bear, and it will find your food,” he said, side eyeing our skis. Noted. Thanks. Onward.
Another mile or two we got to “Photographers Point” and our first real look at the alpine region we were approaching. The mountains were massive and staggering. We could not even see Gannett yet, but we could *sort of* see where Titcomb Basin was. It was like Frodo and Sam looking out over all of Middle Earth trying to find Mordor. There was endless undulating forest, lake, creek, and granite crag between us and just where we were going to camp that night. Ten or more miles of it. Noted. Thanks. Onward.
Greg and I have been friends for a long time and we often revisit stories of hilarious parties, drunken raucous debauchery of our recent youth. We chat about work and projects. Greg moved back for law school a few years prior and he often regales me with briefs or complex issues that occasionally go over my head, but he’s passionate about them and I can tell it’s important stuff. He was a vocal advocate for me to stay in environmental work when I was thinking about going down a different path a few years back. And of course we talk about mountains.
He’s done more in the big mountains than most people I know, and in a style all his own. He’ll lead up some pitches, ski some obscure line, then toss a front handspring off a cornice above exposure. But he’s not crazy. He just loves to have a good time. On our long walk he started to tell me about the first time he came to Gannett, ten years prior. Another buddy and he had come out during college and hiked big heavy setups all the way into Titcomb. It took them days longer than expected, and they ran out of food. When they finally got to the top of Bonney Pass and got their first look at the peak, he knew they could not do it. They epic’ed home with their tails tucked. He says this experience was one of the biggest catalysts for his aspirations in the mountains. He wanted to learn how to be better, do better, execute epic ski missions to remote peaks. So he taught himself how.
And, in turn he has taught me how. He often talks me through a crux, or offers advice when I’m struggling. He and our friend Brett have both taught me how to read mountains. How to look at snow and terrain and understand less hazardous passage. How to establish when we can move up, stay put, or need to turn around. And they have taught me how to communicate – what I need, what role I want to take, or what my goals are. These are absolutely necessary. If you don’t pay attention to the mountain conditions and your partners, you die. And all three of us have been close to death of friends in the wild.
We ran into a guy with a gun over his shoulder and it snapped us out of our conversations. He was a game warden and he said he had to kill the problem bear. He told us that we would probably be fine in Titcomb, but to keep our heads up. Always.
After a couple hours, the forest was thinning out and we started hitting lakes. Seneca was the first of two large ones – long and the color of onyx. Bald alpine domes stuck out against the forest on the far side. We hiked along it on a trail cut into the cliff, right above the water, and as we rounded the corner I saw an impeccable campsite on a spit of land jutting into the lake. But we were only halfway to our destination, so we took some photos, had a snack, filled water, and kept moving.
The trail took us over a couple passes and with each one, we got a little closer. We could see the jagged edge of Titcomb more clearly now, a serrated edge against the northern horizon. We snacked and chatted, filling water when we needed it, and happily acknowledged that we both were feeling really good and that our pace should put us in Titcomb with daylight to spare.
We descended a col and hit some sloppy snow, slipping down the dirty lingering patch. We caught some more backpackers and like many we had passed, they were heading to Island Lake, which we could now see at the bottom of the slope. We were over 12 miles into the day and at a major landmark. There had been talk of even camping near here depending on snow line and how long it took us to get there. It was an amazing lake, and another I felt myself drawn to linger at. So we took a longer rest.
We sat on a small sandy beach opposite a small bubbling runoff creek we had just passed. The creek had giant trout literally jumping over our feet as we navigated the torrent. Now on the beach we watched mosquitos buzz lazily in the late afternoon light. It was starting to turn that warm light, sleepy and peaceful. I lay back against a rock and smiled. After a few quiet moments we slugged down some water, saddled our bags back on our shoulders and kept walking up the trail.
—
Into Titcomb.
The last couple miles of trail before the long twin lakes in Titcomb Basin was less traveled, snowier, and rambled a bit more. And we finally gained some elevation. It felt good to know we were getting close to camp and to the staging for our summit push. We both felt excellent and our big day had set us up well to make a solid effort on Gannett. As we popped out of the last climb we entered the toe of a the first long lake, and got a full view of Titcomb and Bonney Pass on the far side of the lakes.
The valley was huge, thousands of feet of granite swept overhead, creating a vast wall to either side. The jagged ridge that we had first seen at Photographers Point was now directly above us on our right and loomed tall against the twilight sky. Oranges and golds illuminated the rocks on either side of us as the sun set, casting its last rays into our home for the night. I would not have called Bonney a pass from this vantage. It still just looked like part of the cliff wall. It was steeper and taller than I expected. It’s imposing face roused that twist in the gut, big mountain apprehension. It was also far away. We still had a few miles of approach to go in the morning. But Bonney was similar to so many other faces I had climbed with my skis on my back, and I reminded myself of that. Plus, it was fat with snow. So, we would be able to boot up it and ski down it in a good style. It was perfect.
As we set up camp and made dinner, a lone hiker visited our camp. He excitedly greeted us and asked about our skis, about Gannett. We asked him what his goal was. “Banff” he said casually. What? Trail name “Half Mile” was midway through the Continental Divide Trail, a monster 3100 mile through-hike from Mexico to Canada. But he was intrigued by the big mountains along or just out of the way, and Gannett checked that box. He told us he didn’t have much in the way of sharps, and like me looked up at Bonney ominously. He said he’d see how he felt in the morning. “What time are you starting?” he asked. Greg and I looked at each other and shrugged. “Probably like… 2am?” He laughed. He’d be sleeping longer than that. I didn’t blame him. We bid him well and off the trail he went, toward Bonney and I did not expect to see him again.
We posed for some sunset pictures and hung out with the five fat marmots that were curious about our camp. In the dim light we decided we should try and rest. We crammed into my small stinky tent and said goodnight. I hoped I’d be able to get a little sleep, knowing that only few hours of tossing around and farting lay between us and our alarms, buzzing sometime in the pitch black of night.
Summit Day
The sun rose as we were halfway up Bonney Pass. The nerves of the night before were long gone and we were excited: in the zone, and climbing up the snow. It was a heroic position on the wall there – cliff spires rose to either side of the wide valley and we gained elevation quickly to the blunt rollover that comprised the top of the pass. I kicked steps into the snow, my back now light from leaving so much gear in camp, trail shoes forgotten in the moraine at the bottom of the snow. In my winter clothes and ski boots, I felt at home in the glow of dawn on snow with a trusted partner in big mountains.
At the top of Bonney, the snow ended and we groveled up gravel and talus across the long blunt roll that comprised the pass. We stood atop the saddle and finally, after leaving the car some 20 hours prior, got a first look at the highest peak in Wyoming. My stomach again dropped. It was huge, and more complicated than I had anticipated. A long rambling climb to a seemingly steep hanging snowfield over exposure guarded the summit. I lamented this to Greg. He laughed, knowing it was how he had felt 10 years prior when he bailed. “We’ll be fine,” he said. “Nothing you haven’t done before!” I knew he was right. And, we now got to click into our skis and ride down the glacier. What it was all about.
Our first descent of the day was everything I hope and expect out of a remote summer ski. Firm fast turns led us down to the long valley. Towering and crumbling alpine cliffwalls hemmed in the wide slope and we took wide turns, arcing in the firm snow as spots of blue glacier ice flashed by. We took turns leading the fast pitches down to the toe of the Goosenecks Route on an eastern ridge of Gannett Peak.
We stopped there for some time, snacking and warming in the sun, now high in the sky. Strangely, a light haze set in. Smoke from a forest fire somewhere far in the distance, another reminder that while our adventure felt remote and isolated, it was not. We were still in our adopted home of the West, full of interconnected complexity.
With our skis again on our back, we navigated a south facing ramp of dirt, dust, and loose rock up to the Gooseneck Ridge proper. We passed some other travelers, the first we had seen all morning. They had turned around, thinking they had gotten too late of a start and that the snow was too warm. It looked and felt okay to us, a simple summer snowpack and no mountain hazards to speak of. My primary concern was rockfall, and while rockfall is unpredictable, it seemed like we could mostly stay out of the way of that at least for the time being. One of my favorite mountain quotes is Jimmy Chin’s “we’ll go until it doesn’t make sense to go.” For Greg and me, there was no reason not to keep going.
We kept our skis on our backs as we navigated a variety of terrain on Gannett proper. From loose dirt to moderate snow in couloirs and broad aprons, the route finding and mixture of climbing kept it interesting. There were a couple sections of easy rock chimney where we scrambled up, our skis scraping against the blocks, pulling us in weird directions. Our crampons grabbed all of it – the snow, ice, and brown rock and earth that we needed to climb.
As we finally popped out of the wandering Gooseneck route to the last summit pitch, fatigue and altitude had begun to take its toll. I was tired and getting weary of the wandering pitches. My mind drifted back to camp and to the impossibly long walk back to the car. My legs started to feel weak. I looked up at the summit pitch – a quick vertical bootpack that led to a long ridge. From where we stood, the ridge looked thin, a serrated edge cutting the sky, and just off the ridge was our first pitch of skiing, a hanging snowfield that once again appeared steep and unsupported. Baking summer snow was sitting on top of a massive cliff. An uncontrolled fall from there would be fatal. And, I had read that it had been for some. That lurked in my mind as we looked up. Worse still, there were two other climbers just getting on the ridge. They looked unsteady, relying on axes, almost crawling across the ridge. I could hear their metal tools jangling and banging against the rock. They made soft groans to one another as they slowly traversed the line to the summit.
“Greg, I don’t know if I got this… You go bag the top and I’ll wait here for you,” I said in a small voice.
“What!” he responded. “No way, you’re fine. This is something you 100% can do. Have some gummies. You’re absolutely going to the top,” he bellowed back at me. And in a quieter voice he said, “those guys are gumbies. You got this.”
He was right, as he usually is when I start bellyaching. So, I had some sugar and took some breaths. Once the candy was down, and a couple swigs of water had washed it away, my legs and mind did feel better. The sun was out, the weather was calm and the mountainous landscape we had walked all the way in to see was objectively beautiful. Long glacial valleys, some with the blue ice still present, stretched on for miles and miles. Where we stood, at the head of these valleys, pointed peaks lorded over the basins. Couloirs and gullies fed down into the canyons where snow melted and fed the forest and onward down into the Green or Missouri River, depending on what side of the Divide we were on. I felt the power of those rivers, one familiar and one new. I felt both large and in control as well as a tiny insignificant part of the ecosystem, all at one. Pushing off from my snack repose, I planted one cramponed foot into a step above, then the other above that, and I kept climbing up the snow and followed my friend Greg to the summit ridge.
—
The top of the mountain isn’t anything crazy, really just a jumbled cone of granite. We took turns posing on top, and had a quick snack. On the last pitch of the climb, the spookiest part was not the snowy face, but the precipitous drop to the West. It seemed to fall away thousands of feet into space, all the way down to the Green River Lakes, and beyond, flat Wyoming plains until it crashed unceremoniously into the Teton Range, which we could just make out in the haze some 90 miles away to the north.
We had the summit to ourselves but we didn’t linger – it was early still, just midday, but we knew how quickly wind and weather could materialize. Because we also knew our day was not over. We had to ski down Gannett, navigate the skiing and downclimbing back to the Dinwoody Glacier, then climb the glacier and talus back up and over Bonney Pass, and backtrack to our camp and the marmots. Lots more to go.
We clipped into our skis with a satisfying snap. I led the first pitch and skied in tight turns across the snowfield. It was a little grabby right at the top, breakable sun-mank, but quickly the angle changed, or perhaps the aspect tilted off and I was able to stay on top, edging smooth turns down a precarious piece of snow on Wyoming’s tallest peak.
Greg had watched my turns and knew now that the snow was okay. He dropped in much lower than I dared, making fast sweeping squiggles in the middle of the face. We had made a bold run and when he joined me he looked back up at our twin turns and smiled, “think of all the people that will hike up here this summer and see that!” I laughed. We had left a small mark on the mountain, but it was our signature and those turns would likely be there for a while.
We skied another short section of steep snow before we had to climb down some steep rock and dirt. We passed the two older guys we had seen on the ridge and then, to our surprise saw someone coming up the Gooseneck. They were not running, but they were moving fast, racing some invisible clock. We slid down to them and realized it was our friend from the night before, the through hiker, Half Mile! We stopped and chatted with him for a second. All three of us were all grins, we had just skied our summit pitches and he was less than an hour from the top. High fives and a round of “hell yeahs!” were give and we sent him on his way to the summit.
Around the time we saw Half Mile, we realized another old friend had poked his nose into the party. Uncle Gusty. The aptly named “Winds” weren’t going to let us get away with it that easily. But, we couldn’t think about that now, and there on the windward side of the mountain where we pieced together couloirs and snowfields, we were mostly just warm in the sun.
The skiing was good. We arced fun, long turns down a variety of terrain, mostly not having to take our skis off. As always, it sure beat walking down a mountain. And as always, with the skis on I felt the most in control over my body in the alpine. We took turns going first or snapping photos of one another hop turning and swerving with the alpine cirques in the background. I was glad that after the summit pitch, none of the skiing had much in the way of objective hazard. We could let loose and enjoy the weightless freedom that we feel when cruising down on our skis.
Eventually the snow did run out and we walked gravel and dirt back to the toe of the Dinwoody Glacier. As we snacked we discussed our options: take a wider route up the glacier, or the way we had come down. I liked the glacier route more because it gave us a wide berth from the cliff face that had been shedding rock. Greg didn’t trust the glacier. Having spent less time than he in glaciated terrain, I agreed.
On our return to Bonney Pass, the wind finally did catch up to us. It was blowing straight into our faces and the long skin up to the talus that would lead us to the saddle took forever. It was a long, cooking slog. Tired legs plodded up the glaring glacier, inching along. The only exciting part of that return was when, no surprise, some rock let loose from the cliffs above and sent us skittering out of the way like spooked spiders. Once we cleared the cliff, we were in the talus and the slog only got sloggier.
From deep, cooked snow to gravel to balanced towers of rock we went back and forth between different surfaces, trying to figure out what was easiest to climb. It was all terrible. For an hour we made slow uphill progress: fatigue and hunger started to turn into delirium. The hammering of the headwind made thought and conversation impossible. We just had to keep moving. It was a tricky balance for me, I wanted to totally dissociate to try and numb myself, but I also needed to pay attention to footing and handholds. I went into autopilot and climbed, just looking at what was right in front of me.
When it felt like it would never end, I crawled over my last granite stack and the terrain finally leveled out. We were back atop Bonney Pass, overlooking the Titcomb Basin, the lakes, and our camp way at the far end. It was, mostly, downhill from here.
We skied our last run of the day, and, beside the wind, it was probably the best skiing. Bonney was continuous and steep. We took turns leading down the 1800 foot wall of snow, the lower we got the less the wind howled, and we could really start to relax. Finally the good skiing ran out and we pieced together the last stretches of snow through boulders, punching through until we threw in the towel and walked across rocky lakeshore to a giant granite slab where we had left our shoes.
Our shoes, drying in the sun, were a welcomed sight and we unloaded there. All our sweaty ski clothes came off, food came out, and our bare feet soaked in the high summer sun. We lay there for a while, quietly sipping tequila we had carried all day and letting our bodies chill. It was early to be celebrating, we still had many miles to walk. But, I felt good that we had skied the mountain in a great style, and I was happy for Greg to have closed his Gannett chapter, a 10 year long project, the culmination of years in the mountains.
Later, we would share a bag of freeze dried mac n cheese at our basecamp, and gulp down the rest of the booze, finishing the bottle. Laughing and refreshed, we would walk many more miles than expected that afternoon, the sun high and warm, giving us energy. We would walk well into the night, until we finally found a flat spot among the trees, where we would sleep among the deep forest, with only a handful of miles to go. And in the morning we would run right into the “problem bear.” On hind legs, he’d growl at us and we’d screech and make ourselves big, readying the spray — but he’d run away and we, wide eyed, marched quicker than ever back to our cars and to a well earned burger and beer back in Pinedale.
But for now, I rested on the warm, sunny, gray slab.
I breathed in that rich mountain air, comfortable on the rock. The wind, now a gentle breeze, and melting snow dribbling from Bonney and the cliffs around us, chimed through the canyon, letting me drift off into a semiconscious place.
My mind left my body and floated down through the alpine and forest, and washed into the gathering creeks, rushing into wide rivers, carving the plains past farm and forest and oil rigs and highways, and then cutting down into the Colorado Plateau, the red rock sandstone, and lonely laccoliths that stretched throughout the southwest — quiet, deep, windswept places where forgotten voices still whispered stories from before my ancestors even knew this land existed. Grottoes and alcoves dusty and golden, desolate and beautiful. Cottonwood trees shaking leaves, preparing for another fall, another winter, until they can begin again. And finally that gushing mighty Colorado with all of its anger and memory, dammed and drained and dwindling to a trickle miles before the ocean. I drifted there, to places both known and loved by me and many as well as completely foreign, adventures waiting to happen, or perhaps in another life. I drifted and drifted.
Finally, Greg stood, declaring he was going to start the hike back to camp, to more food, and to whatever came next in our day and lives. He departed, leaving me there at the top of Titcomb Lakes. Soon I pushed myself up off the rock, gathered my stuff and one foot after the other, started the long walk out of the mountains.
