Ice Cave at 10,000 feet

Kyle and I have been tossing around the notion of camping above 10,000 feet for the entire winter season. We’ve even gone as far as picking out certain days and weather conditions to best suit our interest and were dead set on carrying out our mission; at some point anyway.

The evening of Sunday March 13, 2011 will go down in infamy as a day when two people did a spot of research on snow caves and drank until two in the morning discussing why they were better adventurers than the other. The next morning we rolled out of bed around 10:30 and sat on the couch in our underwear, eating a simple breakfast as was capable with our meager food options. We lounged around until noon and then Kyle got a hair in his brain and could not be talked out of preparing to leave the house to build our snow cave.

We hastily gathered our gear and double checked that we had all the necessary basics: food, water, clothing, and booze. This was to be an epic middle finger to all rational thought regarding proper winter camping--we weren’t even bringing a tent. We did have a tarp, peanut butter, Nutella, summer sausage, a half handle of coconut flavored rum liqueur, snowboards, shovels, knives, boots, and snowshoes. I also brought two oranges for breakfast and a pack of cards to keep us busy during the long night.

We left the house around 1:30pm and were in the gondola on the way up the mountain by 2 o’clock. This gave us two and a half hours before the lifts closed and the gondola made its final run down the mountain, which was reiterated to us by the slightly annoyed sounding liftie guarding the gondola entrance. “You guys going into the backcountry?” She asked, eyeing our massive packs and shovels. “Yep.” We responded. “K. Just be back by 4:30 or you’re stuck on the mountain.” Her tone was less than sharp but her eyes said “idiots.”

After a few traverses, three lifts and a slow hundred yard hike up the top of the peak we were finally at the entrance to the backcountry gate atop ninety-nine-ninety, the highest mountain in the resort. From here it was a simple lateral traverse along the ridge top with another winding hike and we had made it to our destination.

We’d scoped out our campsite the day prior on a ski break at work, taking time to find a place that was sheltered from the wind by trees and rock. What we’d found was beyond perfect for our needs. It consisted of a deep depression atop McDonald’s peak, to the left of ninety-nine-ninety, where a patch of evergreens poked out of the snowpack in a small ring large enough for our snow cave. It was out of the way of the wind, the trees stabilized the snow pack and best of all: we were out of danger of being blasted by ski patrol when they grenade the mountains in the morning.

By three fifty we’d made considerable progress, though not enough to convince me that we could feasibly stay the night and survive. Kyle was more optimistic but was eventually persuaded that tomorrow would be the day when we’d finish the cave and spend the night. We stashed our packs inside the burrow we’d created in the cave and I plugged up the entrance with a few shovels full of snow to prevent looters, something Kyle found hilarious. “Do you seriously think that someone is going to come down here, find our snow fort, find our packs and then steal our sleeping bags?” I couldn’t be sure, and didn’t want to take the chance.

* * *

The next morning we woke up at ten, again, due to the fact that neither of us had our phones with us which served as our alarm clocks. Mine was in my pack, four thousand feet from where we were now living and Kyle’s was left in the hotel storage closet. We quickly got up and dressed and were out of the house by ten after. Not satisfied with our breakfast from the morning before, we snagged a coupon for a buy one get one free breakfast buffet at the Hungry Miner’s Breakfast Bucket, located at the Best Western ten minutes down the road.

The Hungry Miner feels like a truck stop in Iowa, except that there are less obese, type-two diabetes ridden, families and more people wearing ski pants. The fare was average but there was plenty of it, each of us loading up a plate of sausage, bacon, cheese covered eggs and an assortment of sugary delicacies. We ate quickly and were in, seated, fed and out of the place in less than twenty minutes, heading straight back to the mountain for round two of cave construction.

We stopped by the hotel to say goodbye to our friends, promising to be safe and take pictures. We left with a lot of people feeling that they’d never see us again. There were a lot of smiles. The hike back up Ninety-nine-ninety was a breeze without our packs and we reached our camp at half past noon.

It surprised us both how little work was required to finish our cave and render it habitable. By one thirty we were content with our progress and I decided it was time to build a backcountry kicker a’ la every snowboarding movie I’d ever seen. After an hour we had ourselves a nice little jump and a manageable runway which landed on a steep, powdery face. On my third jump I nosedived on the landing, sending me tumbling down the mountain with three consecutive face plants. It’s the coldest my head has ever been.

After hitting the jump a handful of times, I noticed a group of guys no more than a couple hundred yards away, heading up the last hike before summiting McDonald’s peak. I called over to them and asked “Hey, do you guys want to hit this kicker with us?” They hardly shouted a reply before they were strapped in and coming right for us.

It was a group of five friends from Boston who were on vacation in Utah, snowboarding for a week in the majesty of our home mountains before heading back to their snow covered high school football fields back home. They descended upon the ramp in a flurry of shovels and enthusiasm, quickly transforming our meager kicker into a lippy booster capable of launching our flailing bodies ten to fifteen feet high and twenty feet across the face.

Jessie, one of the Boston crew, happened to be a photographer and pulled out his Canon 5D to snap some photos and capture the action on video as well. He doubled as ramp construction manager and with his help we were able to keep hitting the jump and get bigger and bigger air while documenting the excitement. I decided to step things up a notch and threw my signature, and only, trick: The backside one-eighty. It didn’t really impress the way I had planned, they were all pretty good snowboarders with ten years under their belts, but it did step up the level of tricks from there on out. Pretty soon “back flip” became the word on everyone’s lips and within two or three tries Jessie and his brother had both landed one, cruising away from the landing with massive cheers and shouting. Kyle and I knew we were outdone, but I still wanted to show that I had some skills too, so I began trying backside three sixties, which I never really did land, but the photos Jessie got of my attempts were glorious.

By three thirty we’d demolished the landing zone and the Bostonians were eager to get down the mountain, lest they be left behind like us. We said our goodbyes and exchanged info with Jessie so he could send us the pictures and clips. I showed them the way to McDonald’s peak and explained the way down, giving away the secret to my single favorite run in the entire resort. They thanked us and took off for the descent of their lives while Kyle and I looked around for another place to build a jump, seeing as there were still four hours between us and sunset.

* * *

What we built next was supposed to be named “The Backcountry Buck Huck” but a more appropriate moniker would be “Death by Air.” Our initial plans were to build a wedge shaped ramp which would gradually lift you off the surface of the mountain and float you through the air to the soft, un-spoilt spring-corn landing. The runway was smooth as glass and shot straight down to the edge of the lip, which was not supposed to be a lip at all. After an hour of laboring Kyle and I stood to the side, he turned to me and asked “Well, you wanna guinea pig it?” I hiked up the hill to a place that I thought would give me an appropriate amount of speed then strapped in and pointed the nose at our beast. I have never flown so far, or with so much fear in my heart, in my entire life. My initial jump put me about twenty-five to thirty feet down the hill, where I promptly crash landed. Kyle, standing next to the ungodly creation, could be heard up the hill behind me laughing hysterically and sucking in air like there was a shortage. I got up and brushed the snow out of my hair, shook out the cobwebs and began the hike back up to the top.

Kyle’s first hit was no more gentle than my own, though he did manage to outdo my distance record by five feet. Climbing back up to the start of the runway, it was no easier to stare down the face at the behemoth than it was the first time, in fact, it was even worse because you knew what it was capable of doing to you. We took turns crashing terribly into the snow and climbing back up for more. After hitting it no more than five times a piece, we looked at each other, the dread in our minds apparent in each other’s eyes, and nodded. It was done. We wouldn’t go near it again.

When we got back to the camp we were completely devoid of energy and vigor. Kyle grabbed his pack and dug out the peanut butter, bread, Nutella, and summer sausage which were our only food stores for the night. We made sandwiches of equal parts all four ingredients and ate the way famished disaster survivors eat. Seconds was a must, but this left us with only one piece of bread. I turned to Kyle, “There’s only one more piece of bread in the bag. We’re going to have to do something drastic to decide who gets it.” He nodded in agreement; his mouth full of peanut butter and sausage. I looked down at my own sandwich and dug in again, my mind distant as I thought about how we would decide who got the last precious piece of food. A few minutes of silence passed before either of us spoke. “Kyle, I have an idea.” He looked at me, mouth too full again for speech. “We could cut the bread in half so that we both get a piece.” It was a flash of insight that neither of us were used to. “Yeah, yeah we could do that. That’s a good idea.” I went on, “I say this because, while I was eating this sandwich, I thought about you eating that last piece of bread in front of me and I knew that I would have to kill you.” He laughed so hard that a piece of sausage flew out of his mouth, which he quickly retrieved from the snow and ate again, “Dude, I know, me too.”

Our batteries recharged we traded in our snowboarding boots for hiking boots and strapped on the snowshoes. Then we grabbed the bottle of liqueur and my camera and set out for the nearest peak to watch the sunset. Along the way we discussed China’s ability to take over the world economy, America’s situation in the Middle East and our last remaining options there, how cool our snowshoes were and how, with every pull, our body was being warmed from the inside from our magic bottle of booze.

We made it to the top just in time and sat down on the icy snow to enjoy the blaze of yellows, oranges, pinks and reds which saturated the sky before us. The gunmetal gray clouds whisked by, their bottoms painted with the blush of the fading sunlight. We sat entranced, neither of us speaking for many long minutes as the scene played out in front of us, caught up in another episode of Nature’s television--the same ongoing nightly broadcast which has entranced man for the past millennia.

As the sun smoldered into the distant peaks the air grew chill. We grabbed our stuff and started the downhill saunter back to camp, not wanting this moment on the top to end.

Back at camp, we climbed into our cave to settle in for the night that had been destined since we first stepped foot in Utah. Snuggled up in six layers a piece, we slid into our sleeping bags and flicked on our headlamps. I grabbed the cards and Kyle grabbed the booze, the game was Texas Hold ‘EM, the stakes: pulls from the bottle.

I lost, or won, depending on how you look at it, nearly every single hand and when it was noticed that only a small portion of the alcohol was left, we played high card for the last chug. Kyle won that too. With that, we plugged up the mouth of the cave with our packs, flicked off the headlamps and squirmed around in our sleeping bags for a while until we found something resembling comfort.

Within five minutes I felt the first icy cold drop on my face. Two minutes later, another. After three drops in ten minutes I called to Kyle, “Are you getting dripped on?” He replied that his situation was the same. We wiggled deeper into our bags and tried to forget about the fact that our very breath was condensing above our heads and raining down upon all of our gear.

Sleep was caught in fits. The only way you knew you had actually been out was the fact that you could still faintly recall a dream, a dream that was now far away from the wet, cold, windblown surrounding you were now faced with. Kyle’s dreams were so vivid that he woke up a number of times with a start, sitting up stock straight, questioning me about trains, ski patrol, and wild moose. He had dreamt that we had placed our camp on top of train tracks and spent five or six seconds desperately searching the ground for them, then he woke me up to ask me whether ski patrol was going to knock the cave in while we were still inside it, sure as anything that they were right outside with shovels in hand. The last time he woke up he didn’t get more than five words out about the moose before I told him to shut up. If he wasn’t waking up to badger me about scepters from his mind, he was complaining about being cold and wet or tossing and turning back and forth while bumping his gangly arms and legs against me. Dawn could not have come too soon for us this morning.

At seven thirty Kyle couldn’t take it any longer and got up to check the weather. It was snowing and windy, with low visibility and a high chance of both of us being grumpy. I crawled out of the warm sanctuary of my sleeping bag and into the reality of our situation. We were up hours before any lifts were open, we had only two oranges to eat for breakfast, our boots and gloves were frozen solid and there was nothing to do but pack everything up and get home.

We shoved our soggy sleeping bags into their cases and folded up the wet ground pads enough to stuff into our packs. I was in charge of packing up the tarp we’d laid on the floor of the cave, possibly our most ingenious item of the whole trip, and struggled to keep the snow out of everything. When we’d packed all out belongings I noticed some trash strewn about and began to collect it. I called over to Kyle, “Dude, grab the Malibu bottle out of the cave. If ski patrol finds that, they’re going to think two teenage girls slept the night up here and got drunk.” He nodded solemnly and we strapped everything together, not looking forward to our victory lap down the mountain.

After struggling down what would normally be a routine line down the hill, we reached the one and only chairlift that separated us from the gondola, and hence home. We pulled up to the front of the gate at a quarter to nine, where the liftie controlling the chair informed us: “I can’t let you guys on until nine unless you have early riding passes.” Our faces must have said it all because he followed with, “I’m sorry guys, if it were my resort, you’d be on there right now. But, rules are rules.” We stood aside as a couple of people who were properly passed made it onto the chair and counted down the minutes until we could get the hell out of the cold. Another liftie came up to us, “Do you guys have passes? I need to scan them.” We both said that we did, but that they were in our packs and we really didn’t want to take them off and dig through our gear to find them. He said he couldn’t let us on the lift until we had our passes scanned. At this point I was getting irritated. “We couldn’t have gotten to this lift without a pass, we both work here at the Sundial hotel and we just want to get home. We camped last night on Ninety-nine-ninety and were miserable. Can you just let us on the lift?” He walked over to the hut, where the head honcho apparently sits and gives out orders, and came back. “I need to scan your passes.”

By the time we reached the bottom of the gondola, where all the eager tourists were waiting in line to get to the top of the mountain where it was forty degrees and raining, we felt like hell. We marched over to the Sundial hotel to stash our stuff in the back and grab my car, greeted by our smiling friends who were happy and astonished to see us alive. “You guys actually did it?” “You guys are nuts!” “I can’t believe you guys did that, was it worth it?” We mumbled and grumbled our replies, though it was nice to have a little adoration cast upon us after the night we’d endured. Our boss, Mary, walked up and asked us why we had all the gear, before we could reply one of our coworkers blurted, “They camped out on Ninety-nine-ninety! Can you believe that?” She couldn’t and she broke out in laughter as she walked into the hotel.

Upon reflection, a few changes to our planning and execution would have gone a long way towards making our night more enjoyable, but you can’t beat the feeling of coming down off a mountain at 7:30 in the morning to confused and bemused ski patrolman. We knew what we wanted, we knew we were capable of doing it and we executed our plans, however haphazard, with style and class. These are the times we’ll remember when we’re old. These are the stories I’ll tell my grandchildren, for the hundredth time, as they tune me out while sending instant brain messages to their friends through implants which connect them to the internet in their mind.

Next it’s Alaska, where I will hopefully find myself in more interesting situations with better gear and more appropriate training. But, who needs that stuff anyway?