February 20th, 2011 - Borah Peak

For those who don't know how, here's your sign.

The town of Mackay is... full of character.

After working Saturday morning, we set off towards the east to the town of Mackay, ID at the base of the Lost River Range about 3 1/2 hours from Teton Valley. We would spend the night in town before setting off in the dark hours of Sunday morning to attempt a summit of Borah Peak and, if all went well, a ski down. That afternoon, a well-developed storm rolled into the area and left 6 inches of snow on the ground in town. We figured this 6 inches in town would translate into maybe twice that up high and would add nicely to whatever snowpack existed up higher on the peaks and offer some pretty good skiing conditions. Not only that, but the system was expected to blow through by morning and allow for at least partly clear conditions while we would be up there. Everything was falling into place.

About 1hr, 30 min from the truck. The summer TH is just below the sagebrush. The snowpack here consisted of about six inches of snow on top of maybe a six inch base. Not quite as much as we expected. Not even close.

Ascending the summer route up the ridge was challenging with a variable mix of snow conditions from icy crust to six inches of fluff over scree to pockets of 2 foot deep drifts. Climbing up through the trees was slow going.

After about 3 hours, we were finally able to begin catching glimpses of Borah through tiny breaks in the clouds.

4,000 ft higher than where we began, and we were still on the same six inches of fresh snow that now covered the jumbled, loose, rocky chaos that makes up Borah's flanks. It was just enough to hide the uneven surface hidden underneath and make walking in a drunken stupor look better. By this point, we had been out with our skis on our backs just about the same amount of time as we had been on them while skinning lower down.

After close to 7 hours out, we arrived at what was likely Chicken Out Ridge. It definitely poses a formidable barrier to moving further along, but it really didn't seem to be all that bad except for the now annoying six inches of snow that was covering every rock surface, hiding everything safe and unsafe, and providing an incredibly perilous chance of slipping. We had ice gear, but there was no ice, just the same six inches of fluff we had been traipsing over since we left the truck 5,500 ft below. The most unusual snowpack (or lack thereof).

At this point, we mad the call to turn around. The conditions appeared to be deteriorating. Our pace had been unreasonably slow just getting to this point with another 2 hours at least to go before summiting, and an area of high danger in front of us wasn't looking good. So, we did exactly what we needed to do and walked back down a few thousand feet with our skis on our backs, tripping and falling along the way down, slipping and imbalanced.

Finally, about 1,500 ft off the valley floor, we got back into the woods and found a shallow gully where the snow was a bit more protected and we actually linked together a fair bit of turns through the same crusty, icy, shallow, drifted, warming, cooling, soft, hard, abstract snow we had ascended hours earlier. It wasn't easy. It wasn't good. But I was honestly just thrilled to be finally skiing.

We got back to the car mid afternoon sometime, I don't know exactly when, I wasn't paying attention anymore. I didn't care. It didn't matter. I was just happy to be back. I guess we found out the hard way why there just aren't that many trip reports out there on skiing Borah.