Mountain Mishaps

So even though I am off the PCT and have returned to almost normal person living, I will still tell people about my adventures this summer. Hopefully people find this remotely interesting. I will exclude the most exciting aspects of my life, like answering phone calls from people who want a gyserside hotel room with two queen beds at the Old Faithful Inn, and just stick with the regular old adventures.

This was a weekend of mountain climbing. Tuesday morning we climbed Electric Peak, and on Friday, we climbed Emmigrant Peak.

Electric Peak seems as though its name may have been inspired by Pikachu, but it was actually named by the first man on the summit, who "experienced electrical discharges from their hands and hair after a lightning event on the summit." You see, the mountain is a giant lightening. This is because of high iron oxide content in the rhyolite lava that formed it.

But alas, this did not discourage our intrepid heroes.

 

 The hike was steep up to the final approach which involved some solid class 3 scrambling (something between hiking and rock climbing, where hands must be used in the ascent). 

This was a pretty dicey catwalk that we managed to avoid with some quality route finding, but much of the final approach to the summit looked like this. It was enough to discourage Abby, Caleb, and Jerimiah from summiting. It was only I, mustering some ripe mixture of bravery and stupidity, who reached the top. The challenge was fantastic and exhilarating, and the view was marvelous. 

 Looking down into Paradise Valley and Gardiner.

 Looking at the Gallatin Range from Electric Peak, the high point of the range.

Obligatory summit selfie.

In retrospect, the way up was not scary. But in the mindset of the time, being a little spooked by my co-adventurers' caution, I decided to take a different way down. From my perspective, it looked better. Safer even. From far away it looked like this.

This is bad. What you are looking at is called scree or talus. Football sized rocks created by frost-thaw cycles that precariously rest at what is called the "angle of repose," or the steepest possible angle at which the forces of gravity and friction combined = 0. A little force in any direction will change the angle at which it settles. This may sound gentle but it actually could easily mean a rockslide. The summit is the irregular, rocky part of this ridge in the middle right. I decided to go down the steep scree fields, and once I found myself stuck, was force to traverse the rock protruding from the scree for about half an hour, down about 1000 vertical feet and across maybe a half mile. This process was terrifying and exhausting, but I didn't die. Woo! 

This is what a proud person looks like after a near death experience. After drinking much Gatorade and saying my prayers, we resumed our joyful romp down the mountain.

We sport climbing in Bear Canyon in Bozeman the next day with my homeboy Danny Kaiser. It was great to hook up and the climbing was awesome. Abby climbed her first outdoor route and it was a 140 foot 5.8. She has a special knack for radically introducing herself to things. Sorry we don't have any pictures! It was beautiful.

The climb up Emmigrant was uneventful. And by uneventful I mean a ludicrously steep hiking trail. It had this special way of being exhausting and boring. 

The last few moves up to the summit were really cool though, and up there we enjoyed spectacular views of the Beartooths, and tasty sandwiches from the employee dining room.

 Last few hundred feet of the climb

Abby gracefully crushing some class 2 scrambling

a shot for r/earthporn

Summit!

Our siesta on the summit was abruptly ended when we turned around and noticed storm clouds rolling in. Despite a forecast with a 2% chance of rain, Montana mountains never fail to produce. I should have known. This created a very dangerous and urgent situation though, as we literally ran down the side of the mountain on exposed ridges to the sound of thunder and pelting rain. My foot blew off a rock and I scraped up the side of my leg and pretty seriously bruised my IT Band, but instinct kind of dictates that you ignore things like this when you are worried your body might become a lightening rod. The sweet, tasty mixture of pain, exhaustion, and fear made me delightfully puke-y as we neared the bottom of the descent. Abby and I covered 5.5 miles and 5000 vertical feet in 1.5 hours. This is stupidly fast. Yay us! We have no pictures of the descent because we were too busy shitting ourselves. Next time I will ensure to stop and take a picture of whatever impending doom faces me, all for your viewing pleasure.

Though for now, all we have is this picture of my leg. Enjoy!

Have a good day and live the good life.

Thanks for reading,

Daniel