The Folly of the Southern Mountaineers
The folly of the southern mountaineers
In 1990 after bombing my first semester of college I decided that a road trip would be a good way to clear my head. So I took a job, saved up some money, and took off with a friend on a grand tour of the country.
We made it all the way from the deep south to Yellowstone before we ran out of money. On the advice of a friend working in the park, we decided to head down to Jackson Wyoming. I found a job and settled into some of the most exciting times of my life.
A few friends from back home and I decided one weekend to climb Teewinot mountain. This was not a completely unreasonable endeavor. We were mostly all experienced hikers and even had a little climbing experience among us. Besides that, the mountain is a walk-up with a short scramble near the top, or at least that’s how it should have been.
The plan went like this, we stopped to sign in on Friday after work then drove to the trailhead. We made our way up almost to the tree line. We set camp off the trail near a small pond. That was a bad idea. The mosquitoes were thick near water and it led to the decision the next morning to forgo returning to the trail and head straight on up, figuring we would find the trail up higher.
We took off the next morning with youthful exuberance. Climbing fast we made good time, it was at least 2 hours before we realized we had worked our way around to the wrong face of the mountain.
At this point, any reasonable person would have chosen to backtrack and get on the trail, we forged on.
This rapidly turned into the most technical climb of my life. Steep glacier crossings and hair raising climbs up some big rock faces. We were safe to some degree, we had a rope and some other climbing gear but our 2-hour climb turned into an all-day affair.
By the time we made the summit, we had absolutely no chance of making it back to our base camp before dark. Two of us did have long sleeves and we had an energy bar and two flashlights between the six of us. We made yet another mistake on the descent, trying to cut off a few miles we inadvertently walked into some cliff bands in the dark. After dropping the good flashlight we decided to hunker down till daylight and take care of the injured team member.
In our rush to get down one of our party tripped and fell headlong into an 8-foot deep gulch, flipping all the way over and landing on his feet. Only problem was the force of the fall drove him to his knees and shattered his knee cap. He soldiered on into the dark and didn’t have any real trouble walking till the next morning.
When the light of morning arrived we got down to basecamp packed and made it back to the trailhead before breakfast. At the summit, there was a canister with a pencil and paper for all the climbers to sign their names. One other had made the assent that weekend. By using the trail he made the climb up and down in one day.
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