In 2016, my wife and I agreed that if I failed to make 100 miles of forward progress through the winter of 2017, I would abandon the Continental Divide winter trip altogether. That failure indeed happened. However, because of the circumstances, I was able to convince Carleen to let me have another year.
Here are those circumstances.
· The first part of December coming off a training trip, I fell and cracked some ribs, which stopped me in my tracks for the next eight weeks. Even then, I knew taking the trip would be untenable if not outright impossible.
· Near the end of January, I caught a virus that cut me down for nearly 3 weeks. More loss of physical conditioning.
· I agreed to stay put until the end of February. With two ailing dogs, one within days or weeks from the end of his life, Carleen was going to be gone for most of February. The dog did pass the middle of that month.
Snowshoes, backpack, and an expedition sled are used to travel on an eight-foot deep snowpack. Location was on a tributary of Odell Creek in the Centennial Mountains.
Now beyond the point where I could physically prepare for the trip, I nevertheless prepared to go anyway. My hope was that pulling a sled would make the trip possible. Without a training trip, something that is a necessity, I left a few days after March 1. It was a failure. I left again one week later. I exited this final trip after 12 days. I claimed that a mushy snowpack combined with the stolen resupplies stopped me. While those reasons were true, they were also not the complete story. Being ill prepared physically carried at least one third of the reason I failed.
What did come out of the winter of 2017 was the realization that with some exceptions, I would be able to use the expedition sled throughout the future trips.
Besides the sled use during most of the upcoming winter trips, another change will be the incorporation of a large summer trip, which will include my wife going with me. The trip will be in the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness of Idaho and Montana. The distance will be approximately 160 miles, which will take approximately one month to complete. More on this trip later.
In the meantime, the physical training has begun afresh. What I have to mention about that is nothing, considering all it would be is under my breath groaning and grumbling.
British Antarctic explorer, Robert Falcon Scott and the two remaining members of his five-man Terra Nova Expedition, officially the British Antarctic Expedition team perished on March 29, 1912. Low on food and fuel, and 11 miles from their next resupply, a blizzard arrived. They were so weak the last day they traveled they only covered a couple miles before they hunkered down to wait out the storm. The wind blew for a week before they finally succumbed inside their tent.
In a winter setting, to manufacture heat a person needs numerous items such as shelter, cold weather gear, and two major items, calories and movement. Because at the last moment Scott decided to bring a fifth man, the Expedition only had 4500 calories available for each man per day rather than the original 6000 calories. That eventually slowed the expedition, which simultaneously made them more susceptible to the cold and harsh conditions, which in turn slowed them further. At some point, they were unable to move fast enough to manufacture heat, making them vulnerable to frostbite, which slowed the team even more. It was the classic snowball effect . . . no pun intended.
Their experience was similar to some of my own, except I am still alive, although not because I am better than they were. Au contraire, the only group of expeditioners I have read about that might have been tougher than the Scott bunch was Lewis and Clark’s Corp of Discovery, who probably never experienced temperatures colder than brief spurts of 40 degrees below zero Fahrenheit. For the Scott Expedition below zero temperatures were the norm.
A winter sunset on the summit of Blodgett Pass in Montana and Idaho’s Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness.
On March 23, 2008, my first day in Idaho after summiting Blodgett Pass, another storm would arrive before the day’s end. This was Day-6 of the first leg in my attempt at a 106-mile double winter crossing in Montana and Idaho’s Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness. Moreover, today I was supposed to have arrived at the winter-closed Elk Summit Guard Station, where I hoped my nine-day resupply waited. After two nights of below zero temperatures, and sleeping cold in my mummy sleeping bag, I still had 13 miles to travel before arriving at my cache. Only, it had just taken 5 days to complete less than 11 miles, and by the end of this day I would be digging into my 3-day emergency food stores.
In the heavily forested region of the Big Sand Creek canyon, I stopped for a breather near the end of my freshly built trail through the snow. The last time I had eaten anything was at least six hours earlier. Out came the 2/3 empty bags of raisins, prunes and peanuts. Weak and tired, I desperately needed nourishment. Shaking, I fumbled the bag of peanuts, and then dropped it into the snow at my snowshoed feet. Some of the precious contents spilled into the partly stomped snow.
On March 23, 2008, during the descent into Big Sand Creek Canyon, in Idaho and Montana’s Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness, the storm arrived in the early evening.
Even in the pristine woods, I have a zero tolerance rule. Whatever lands on the ground stays on the ground. Not this time. By the sixth day of the trip, I finally realized that I was slowly starving to death. My backpack’s heavily padded waist belt, already cinched as tight as it could go, remained so loose that the pack was dropping off my hips and onto my shoulders. After a few moments of indecision, I stuck my fingers into the snowpack, retrieved and then ate the combination of peanuts and snow. The spilled contents totaled approximately 100 calories. However, I knew I needed everything I could eat, with nothing wasted.
For the next three nights before I arrived at Elk Summit, the temperature dropped below zero for two of them, and I was cold in my sleeping bag. After consuming approximately 3000 calories my first evening with the resupply, in spite of the raging storm that lasted until the middle of the following day, I slept warm and soundly through the night. Besides the continuing storm stopping me the next day, greatly weakened, I was in no condition to travel. I rested and kept eating for one day before continuing the trip. I also slept warm the second night at that camp, although once again the temperature was below zero.
Elk Summit Guard Station during the winter of 2008 in Idaho’s Clearwater National Forest. The second floor bedroom window is below eye level.
Like the Terra Nova Expedition, I had an underwhelming amount of calories for the task. My plan had been to travel the 25 miles to Elk Summit in six days. A few days before the trip began; a storm had dropped about one foot of powder snow on an already deep snowpack. I would endure two storms during the nine-day period, and then one at Elk Summit, and yet a fourth storm 48 hours later. As a result, there was no alternative but to build trail for 5.5 days before hefting my load of 80-95 pounds and carrying it to the end of each built segment. Through those 5 days, I averaged 1.7 miles of forward progress per day although I walked 5.1 miles. I had planned on four miles of forward progress per day. In short, during the first 9 days of the trip, I traveled an extra 18.7 miles getting only half of the calories that I needed. While I survived the mistake, would I learn from it?
On Montana and Idaho’s portion of the Continental Divide, a winter view of Eastern Centennial Mountains viewed from Two Top Mountain in Henrys Lake Mountains.
Near the beginning of this winter’s travel on the Continental Divide, 48 miles is in the Centennial Mountains, 22 miles west of Yellowstone National Park. If the route is all powder snow, which I anticipate will be the case; my supplies dictate that my daily forward progress must be at least 2.09 miles. That is a greater average then when I was building trail during the first leg in Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness in 2008. There are some vital differences though. I am carrying an additional 2625 calories for each day, coupled with a load that is 15-30 pounds lighter.
The proper daily minimum amount is 6000 calories. Based on experience, in heavy powder conditions, I can anticipate my forward progress to be .33 miles per hour. Unfortunately, in a strong ascent, and there will be eight of them in the Centennial Mountains, I can consume 1000 calories per hour. Excluding the ascents, at 600 calories consumed per hour, I have enough food available to travel 7.5 hours per day, assuming I am physically fit. In addition, there are 1500 calories for my 18-hour camps. Since no one has ever traveled this route during the winter, only my upcoming experience will reveal whether I brought enough food.
Reading this, one may question why I failed to place more food on the route. Weight. In extreme winter conditions, there is a balance between how much I can carry and ideal calorie allowances. I suspect Scott decided on an extra man at the last moment because of the weight of the gear and food. Since I am traveling alone, there is no sharing the camp gear’s weight, or getting assistance building a trail through deep powder.
If four persons were traveling this route, consuming the same amount of calories as I, using the leapfrog method, they would be able to travel between 7 and 10 miles per day, all forward progress. Moreover, they would be less tired at the end of the day. That is important since winter is far less forgiving about mistakes or shoddy work. There can be no shortcuts when building a winter camp, which takes at least double the time of any other season.
Other factors will challenge the trip, such as blizzards (days of no travel), extreme cold, busted equipment, and missing resupplies. My biggest question remains to be whether I will have enough food and fuel for each leg of the 270-343 miles of travel.
During the winter of 2016, freshly socked in by a blizzard on an unnamed peak in Eastern Centennial Mountains. The wind had taken my tent a few hours earlier. After a futile search for it, I built a snowcave nearby and nearly died that night.
Note: because a strap broke on one of my snowshoes during the winter of 2008, seeking a replacement I briefly exited the trip 20 miles north of Elk Summit. My wife picked me up and we spent the first night in a nearby motel. In our room when I removed my shirt, she gasped and said I looked like a concentration camp victim. Apparently, for a short-lived period in 2008 I was very skinny.
Note two: after the Selway-Bitterroot trip was successfully completed, I reworked out the calorie numbers. I was shocked to discover that instead of approximately 5000, I only had 3375 calories available per day.
The Scott Antarctic Polar Expedition of 1911-1913 used the teepee type, single pole, and single walled tent. I used a similar four-season tent throughout my solo 150-mile winter trips in Montana and Idaho’s Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness.
During my first subzero cold with the tent, I discovered that the heat congregated above my head just before making a too quick exit through the single wall. Whenever I sat up there was virtually no heat from the floor up to my neck. This was a critical defect, since one normally sits up to sip hot drinks and eat hot meals. The best I could do was to lower the tent, an action that partly solved the problem, but increased another problem, which I will soon describe.
The interior of a pyramid tent with the outside temperature approximately zero Fahrenheit. Note the rivulets of water on the tent wall threatening my gear on the footprint. (Click on photo to enlarge.)
In addition, the floor space 1.5 feet away from the tent’s edge was useless due to melting occurrences on the walls, which happened twice a day with the use of the stove. The built up frost on the tent walls soon became dripping, but mostly pouring rivulets of water streaming onto the tent’s footprint and into my gear. As if that was not enough, the center of the tent was useless because of the single pole occupying that area. Due to the restricted area, practical usage would have prevented it from ever being more than a cramped two-man tent rather than its four-man tent status.
Eventually I lowered the single pole to bring the built up heat in the tent down to my head and torso. Unfortunately, the lesser angle and lowered tent walls removed more of the living space, which set me up for another cardinal “do not”. No part of the bedroom should ever touch a tent wall. In a winter camp, a damp sleeping bag is a step toward freezing to death. In a double walled tent, the normal tent of today, the moisture on the outer wall also pours, but not into the survival area, umm mostly.
A pyramid four-season, single wall, single pole tent. The best tent I have experienced for shedding heavy snowfall.
I should mention that the tent of 100 years ago was not waterproof like all of the modern tents, but then Antarctica is the driest continent on Earth, where it never rains. The point I wish to make is that the porous cotton material greatly reduced much of the frost on the walls of yesterday’s tent. There are other distinct advantages to the pyramid tent. Properly setup, piles of falling snow, and there was plenty of that throughout the La Nina winter of 2007-2008, failed to collapse this tent. In another plus, the Scott Expedition, as with other expeditions of that time, demonstrated the strength of the tent against the wind. It handled 90 mph winds!
What convinced me to continue to use the tent in spite of its deficiencies was the phenomenally low weight, something I have no doubt Scott failed to experience. His tents likely weighed in at approximately 50 pounds while mine weighed less than 5 pounds.
In the end, the remaining three men of the five-man Scott Expedition, after attempting to wait out a blizzard for seven days, froze to death. While a mixture of circumstances brought about their demise, lack of food and fuel, with built up moisture in their sleeping gear, another may have been this type of tent.
Finally, I want to note that the manufacturer description of my tent said it was a four-season tent, which I maintain not so much. However, if one could handle insect infiltration, it would make a fine three-season tent. I do not mention the name of the company or the tent because this is a critique of this particular style of tent, which remains readily available with different companies throughout the world.
For my part, after 39 nights of winter use in 2008, I quit the single wall, one-pole tent.
A four-season, single-pole pyramid tent on a pass in Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness
During a seven-day winter trip, the view of Bowman Canyon from Brown Pass bench in Glacier National Park.
During the winter of 2011, I completed the smallest of four trips into Glacier National Park’s backcountry, seven days. With my average daily travel at approximately six miles, I thought I had done well on my snowshoes and said as much on my website.
Less than a day later, I got an email with the subject being “Breaking the myth”. Accusing me of doing pathetic mileage, some fellow, his name is unimportant, informed me that on cross-country skis, he could do 20 miles per day. I think he may have missed the part about the ascent of a steep slope while I was carrying over 90 pounds.
At the low end of Bowman Lake in Glacier National Park with a 90-pound backpack.
Going back a little further, in 1976, during the autumn, I watched a man pull a steelhead trout out of the Snake River in Washington. He was teaching his approximately eight-year-old son how to catch a steelhead using 3-pound test line. It took him 20 minutes to land the behemoth fish. As he was removing the hook, I made the comment that the joke was on him, that he had caught a rainbow trout.
On one knee, he stared up at me for a few moments then glanced at his son. I watched as their facial expressions quietly noted that there was a goddamned fool in their midst. I slunk away and a short time later did some research. I found out that among some other things, rainbow trout are landlocked steelhead who do not have the ability to live in the sea.
In 2011, I deleted the fool’s email without responding.
Today, I suspect there are more than a few who believe my half-mile to three miles per day winter travel on the Continental Divide is pathetic. My reads of the doomed Scott Antarctic Expedition of 104 years ago say otherwise.
Glacier National Park personnel repeatedly stated that during the winter the high mountain cirque, Hole in the Wall was inaccessible. They were almost right.
This is the story and photos of four trips that almost took the author’s life twice.
