Trip Stats
Trip Report
Why do I feel like crap? Was it the coffee and beer I had the day before? I hadn’t imbibed too much on the 4th, but I was halfway up Inter Glacier and feeling like I wouldn’t make it Camp Schurman. The sun was blazing down and my brother, who lives near Philadelphia and only skins a couple times a year, was doing fine. I knew I just had to push through and make it to camp.
I missed the trail down from Inter Glacier to Emmons Glacier and we had to stumble down the steep scree field, which somehow seemed to give me more energy as it required a good amount of concentration to avoid falling. An hour later we were pulling into camp Schurman and I was feeling better. The remainder of light was spent boiling snow and getting our gear ready for the ascent in the morning.
I awoke with a start, surprised how light it was out for 4am in the morning. Damn, my phone had died in the night and with it, my alarm. We quickened our morning routine and were on the snow after 7am and following the super highway up Emmons Glacier. There were high clouds swirling above us, but visibility was good. We steadily progressed up the glacier, taking short breaks every hour. Near the top, a guided group passed us on their way down. Looks like we have the crater rim to ourselves today.
We made the call to ski down, even though the glacier hadn’t warmed up. It was survival skiing, but the thought of putting crampons back on wasn’t appealing. Somewhere around 13,000ft I heard my brother yell my name and go sliding by, one ski flying off. “Self arrest” I yelled. “Use your pole”. My yelling didn’t slow him down and I got a sinking feeling in my stomach – this is bad, this is very bad. Another ski came flying off, and finally my brother was able to get his pole in the snow and self arrest.
I quickly started skiing towards him, before stopping and calming myself down. I felt physically ill, like I might throw up. Better get my wits about me, before I end up in the same precarious situation as my brother He yelled up that he was fine, and I slowly made my way down to him, collecting his skis on the way. One of his poles was a couple hundred feet below him, near a large crevasse, and we decided to ditch it. Crampons back on, tie in the rope and we slowly made our way down the mountain. Around 11,000ft the snow softened up enough that we put our skis back on and skied down to camp. We packed up and headed down the mountain, sans a ski pole. Lesson learned – put the skis in the pack when the glacier is icy.
