The Grand Teton: A tale of mountain adventure

Only seconds after starting down the trail at Lupine Meadows a grizzly bear and two of her cub's walked out on the trail in front of us. We should have taken fate's warning and went home right then, however, a thick sense of adventure courses through our veins so we continued on our journey and thus, I recount this epic tale of adventure (or perhaps misadventure). 

I packed my backpack as soon as I got off work and waited for Josh to come pick me up. Josh, Adam, Jacob, and myself were planning to hike up to The Meadows (9,400 ft) in Garnet Canyon that night. Our goal was to wake up before sunrise and get an alpine start to climb the Grand Teton (13,770 ft), the tallest peak in the Teton Range. Jacob was planning on hiking around the meadows for the day while waiting for us to descend because all the routes up the Grand require technical climbing and he is not a climber. After getting off to a late start (7ish pm?) to begin with, our bear encounter only prolonged time spent before we got on the trail. We were forced to get back in our car and drive to the climber's ranch to start hiking from a different trailhead in order to avoid the bears.

Ominous clouds followed us up the trail that first night, however, we were lucky we only got rained on the slightest bit.

Eventually we were cruising up the trail. About halfway up the switchbacks to Garnet Canyon Adam came to a short stop and I crashed into the back of him - there was a huge bull moose standing in the middle of the trail. We quickly backed up, allowing the moose some space due to his unfriendly response to our presence. The moose was not moving and we were losing sunlight, however, there was nothing we could do but wait. There was no way we were going to walk any closer to that moose. After a good 15 minutes the moose started walking down hill off the trail and we were able to cut up off the trail and make a wide enough circle around the moose before connecting back up with the trail. We made much progress up the trail after this, but we were soon left to finish the hike by headlamp, as the sun had set and stars were beginning to blink into sight. We finally arrived at the Meadows and began looking for a relatively flat spot to pop up our tents. We were crossing a snowfield when we all stopped dead in our tracks. There were two glowing eyes at the bottom of the snowfield among some small willow plants. Are you kidding me?! As a wildlife ecology major I am usually overly excited with wildlife viewing opportunities - I was not amused. By this time our imaginations were running wild with all the possibilities of what creature these eyes might belong to. Adam started walking towards the eyes, trying to investigate further while we all held our breath and waited... As soon as he got close he began laughing. It was two reflectors on someone's tent that had been catching the light of our headlamps. 

We were exhausted so we slapped together our two tents. The golden moon appeared to be almost full and sat in the sky just above the canyon walls. We finally got to bed around midnight, although it was a relatively sleepless night, as we had three people crammed in a two person tent and the lack of a flat surface meant that we were constantly sliding down to the foot of the tent. We woke up just before sunrise and backed a light day pack for our summit attempt. 

Josh, Adam, and I packing up at our tent at first light on the morning of our summit attempt.

Adam, myself, and Josh starting up the trail - the first rays of sunlight hitting the top of the peaks.

We made great time on the trail and stopped to harness up by the late morning. We were climbing the Petzoldt Ridge route, which is rated 5.7 (although this is an easy grade Teton climbing is notorious for being much more challenging than the average ratings and the exposure of these climbs are extreme). The technical climbing was really exciting - the exposure really gets your adrenaline pumping. There are thousands of feet of vertical exposure as you look down, which is much different from your average sport climb. The rock was beautiful granite, although there was a good amount of loose rock, which made everyone cautious when climbing above others. Everything seemed to be going smoothly until we got to the second pitch of the climb and we saw huge storm clouds rolling in. The weather in the Tetons is highly variable and changes super fast. Weather comes in from the southwest, which is blocked by the mountains, and, as a result, allows storms to easily sneak up on you. Exactly this happened - we heard the first roll of thunder and I felt a bit of panic. A granite peak - in fact the tallest granite peak - is not the place you want to be in the middle of a thunderstorm. I suggested that we bailed right then and rappelled down, which would mean losing some of our personal gear, since there were no rappel anchors at this point. Adam said that if we kept climbing a few more pitched up there would be a bail site of a route called Wall Street with a fixed anchor so we would not have to leave any gear behind. We agreed on this and kept climbing up. The climbing was fairly easy, however, the sky was getting darker and the thunder was getting closer. We finally reached the top of Petzoldt Ridge and it started hailing. We were so close to summitting, however, it was just not safe with the weather conditions to do so. We did not see the rappel anchor for the Wall Street bail route and the weather was not holding out any longer for us (hail and thunder) so we started building our own anchor to rappel off of, which was not a quick undertaking. We ended up having 4 rappels (which meant building 4 different anchors) in order to get down from the technical rock. We were happy to be back down on the trail (although it is still loose steep scree rock, which is not the easiest to travel over) and it was no longer hailing. The thunder seemed to be getting farther away as well. Our only problem now was that it too much longer to rappel than it would have from the fixed anchor so we were running out of daylight. We were once again hiking back to our tent in the dark. Josh and I were both suppose to work in the morning so we had planned on hiking all the way out that night, but we were all exhausted and hiking in the dark exhausted just did not seem like a safe idea so we hunkered down for another night in the Meadows and at first light (another relatively sleepless night) we packed up and hiked out to the trailhead. As soon as we had service we called Jacob and my roommates so that they knew we were safe (they also notified our boss so that they knew we would be a bit late). Josh and I picked up breakfast burritos on the way back to campus - they were by far the BEST breakfast burritos we have ever tasted. Sitting through our staff meeting that day I could barely keep my eyes open from the lack of sleep in the past 48 hours. That night I slept like a rock (and for work the next day I had to day hike a 14 mile route up to Alaska Basin). Word got around the school about our epic adventure and thus began my reputation, as my fellow instructors would say, as a "total bad-ass". 

(The next chance we get we are going to try again and hope for better weather so that we can actually summit!)