Granite Peak

As promised, here is a post about Al's, Andrew's, Brad's and my trip up to the highest point in Montana.

At one point during the trip, we figured out that apparently this was my idea. I think it is one of my not as sane ideas in my life. Overall, the hike was ok, but the 7 hours hiking over boulders the second day really left a bad taste for all of us.

The hike started out with a nice gradual climb up to Mystic Lake, shown below.

Then after the lake, we began a pretty steep climb on a trail that had 28 switchbacks. On this section of trail, we gained about 2000 feet of elevation to get us up near the Froze-to-Death Plateau. Below is a picture of what most of our hiking looked like once we got onto the plateau. At this point, there ceases to be an actual trail (you just walk in the general direction of the Peak). It is roughly marked my cairns (rocks piled on each other). The only problem is, most of the time, the fog (or I should say cloud, since we were actually up in the clouds) was so dense that we had no idea where the cairns were, thus our hike across the plateau took a lot longer than planned.

Eventually we got to a point where the sun was starting to go down and we needed to set up camp. So we tried to find the smoothest spots possible, which involved moving a lot of rocks (and in the end just sleeping around the rocks underneath the tent). Before we went to sleep, the clouds around us cleared for a little bit, and we were able to see some peaks across the way sticking out of the clouds. So, we slept above the clouds for the night.

Here is a picture from our campsite the next morning. Luckily, our second day was already turning out to be much nicer (at least in the beginning).

So we kept hiking across the plateau, and along the way ran into a lot of goats. The goats came very close to us, as the one the picture below is only about 3 feet away from me. They also kept us up all night digging at the rocks for some reason right outside of out tents. I was tempted to spray one with bear spray because he would not go away.

Then was time for climbing the actual peak. Most of this time, I was more scared than I have ever been. I was more scared on this climb than I was when I was climbing over Panda, the bull. The first major scary part was what is called the snow bridge. It is a section of snow over a saddle that is about 20 feet long and only about 3 feet wide. And the snow drops off right away, so falling would results in about a 1000 foot slide to death. I went across basically scooting on my butt.

Then, after the snow bridge, the entire rest of the climb involved scaling up rock faces that are really high and very vertical. It was pretty unnerving for me, since I have absolutely zero rock climbing experience in my life.

Eventually, about 200 feet short of the summit, we all decided it was getting way too scary for us and we decided to turn around. Here is a nice Michigan Cycling picture of us as high as we got.

Then came the way down. We decided we wanted to explore a different way down and not take the plateau back. When we looked out at the next ~3 miles of what we had to do, for some reason we didn't register the fact that there appeared to be absolutely no trail across the boulder field that extended further than we could see. I thought that there would be a trail once we got a little lower. There wasn't. The picture below shows much of what we spent about 7 hours hiking over. Sometime the rocks were really loose, so we had to be careful not to start rockslides (which we were not always successful at). Sometimes the boulders were the size of cars and trucks and were also difficult to find a way around.

Finally, we found our way to a river, which led us back to a very primitive trail. Here is a good picture of a waterfall along the river.

Like I said, overall, I want to say that I enjoyed this hike. But the second half of the second day was just miserable for all of us. Brad is still having trouble walking because the bouldering put humongous blisters on his feet. And it started storming and downpouring on us when we were still trying to get out. And we had to hike the last three miles in complete darkness. So, if I was to ever do this again (I'm still telling myself I will never do it again), I will make sure to stay away from the way we went the second day.