It didn’t bode well. I was sure that when George said, “OK I’ve got ski poles,” he meant he had mine, too. No. Mine were undoubtedly still leaning against the hedge at his house in Seattle. So we stood there in the morning sun, watching a scrub jay hop around in the middle of Route 2, brainstorming alternatives, none of which any reasonable person would actually consider for a ski mountaineering trip on an 8,875 foot mountain. Share? Cut branches? Tape ice axes together?
May on the dry side of the north cascades: flowers, sunshine, the smell of Ponderosa pines in the air. Nice day for a drive. So we headed into Mazama, the nearest town, to look for an outfitter. Services are kind of limited in Mazama, but a shop owner directed us to a tour guide who luckily turned out to be home and was cool enough to let me just borrow a pair. “Silver Star? One of my favorite backcountry ski trips.” He agreed with our choice to blow off Beckey’s approach instructions, which involved too much altitude gained, lost and regained for my taste, instead following Silver Star Creek from where it crosses Route 2. “Just remember to keep to the left.”
You couldn’t ask for a finer day, but the trip would have been a lot easier a month earlier, before the snow melt exposed all the blowdown littering the climbers’ track. It also would have been a lot easier starting many hours earlier, before the canyon walls above Silver Star Creek began reflecting the day’s heat, but a late start and our little pole misadventure killed that idea. One advantage: So much blow down. That meant plenty of places to sit, study the map, and contemplate how out of shape we both felt.
Fourteen hundred feet and a mile later (it’s too embarrassing to say how long this took us) we encountered our first snow field spilling down from the heights. The canyon had been narrowing, and where we stopped to put on skis, an unseen waterfall rumbled. Time to say goodbye to the creek and tedious woods and start really moving. Or not. A quarter of the way up, George’s skins began to malfunction. Time to break out the duct tape and limp on. After gaining another 300 feet and a half mile, we got our first view of Silver Star and the spiky range of the Wine Spires. And it just so happened the view spot was at the foot of a boulder field with enough melted out space for a camp. We probably should have forged on, but the day had grown long and discouraging. Why not kick back and enjoy the afternoon? We entertained ourselves watching shadows of jagged peaks reach across the U-shaped glacial valley and submitting to camp inspections by the world’s cutest climbing rangers: Pikas. Besides, we only had a little over 2 miles and 3,800 feet left to go. Piece of cake tomorrow morning ...
The next day promised more perfect conditions. We made our way across a scenic basin, about a half mile of relaxing skiing to warm up. The going was about to get tough, with a half mile and 1500 feet of slogging to get out of the basin, but on such a fine day, what could go wrong? The lift on my left ski could break. Fortunately, a pile of rock jutted out of the snow nearby. A little searching and George turned up a perfect little wedge of granite, just the right size to fit under my heel. More duct tape to secure it, and I was ready to bag that peak!
I love skinning uphill, especially when the snow’s perfect, and the slope is reasonable. (Alpine skiers, and climbers, often 'skin' the bottoms of their skis in order to climb upward.) You get into a rhythm, and the work becomes almost a Zen thing. However, Zen things are not really about speed. We’d set a 12:30 p.m. turn-around time, and it was 9 a.m. before we made it to the top of this first pitch. We took our time traversing to Silver Star’s glacial moraine, admiring the bare larch trees and the long, long views north over the endless ridges of the Pasayten Wilderness. Breaking for lunch on the moraine, I wondered why we hadn’t camped up here, closer to the peak. From this spot, we still had 2200 feet to go, and things were not looking good. We both had to reapply duct tape (it was kind of amazing our field fixes actually managed to hold this far), we were woefully behind schedule, and neither of us had exerted ourselves remotely this hard since a trip up Shuksan the previous July.
We hit the wall at 7,600 feet. George was sure we could make it all the way (only 1,300 feet more!) but we’d reached our turn around, and the thought of doing a class 4 scramble at 8,500 feet in uncomfortable telemark boots after (how many more?) hours of slogging didn’t seem wise. Not to mention the black diamond-level ski back down, and then having to navigate that semi-bushwhack of an approach. To work off our frustration, we threw snowballs at each other until George realized that this way, we could get dinner and beers in Winthrop before the drive home. With this consolation prize in mind, we wadded and stowed our masses of used duct tape, and sailed down some of the most glorious backcountry skiing I’ve ever done.
About the Author: Darrin Gunkel considers himself lucky to make it up a challenging peak in three tries. So, in 20 years of wandering the Cascades, he’s learned how to make the most of attempts. He puts to constructive use lessons learned in both success and failure assisting BCEP.
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