Summiting the Grand Teton (13,770 ft) August 10, 2007
Ok. I know it’s taken a while to get this posted. But of all the training hikes I’ve been on to get ready for Kilimanjaro, I want to post this experience. I have a good friend that offered to take me up the Grand Teton (13,770 ft) as a shakedown hike. So we took our families to Grand Teton National Park for a few days. We took them on the boat ride on Jenny Lake and hiked to inspiration point. We camped in Gros Ventre (grow-vaunt) campground and on Friday, August 10 left our families to play in the park while we made a summit attempt.
We left from the Lupine Meadows trailhead at 5:00 a.m. and had reached the lower saddle by 9:30 a.m. We planned to take the Owens-Spalding route, and as there are so many great and detailed descriptions of it on the Internet, I’m not going to include too many details here. Suffice it to say it’s steep, rugged, and beautiful.
Just above the lower saddle we missed the “Eye of the Needle†and ended up climbing a small pitch or two that we didn’t need to. But that just served as a good warm-up. We hit the upper saddle around noon. While this is not a seriously technical route, the magnitude of the exposures really took me by surprise. Looking down on Cascade Canyon from the upper saddle was like looking out of an airplane. As I traversed the “Belly Crawl†I found it necessary to focus directly on the rocks, not looking down. I’m not usually squeamish about heights, but this was a challenge for me, as were the couple of pitches after that. Thankfully I was with an experienced friend that not only lent technical expertise, but moral support.
At this point we got behind a group of five guys from Kaysville, Utah. They offered to let us go by, but after talking with them we decided to group up. Together we had enough rope to do the big rappel on the decent instead of having to down climb from the peak to the upper saddle.
About the time we hit the upper saddle, the wind really picked up and a series of dark clouds spitting snow granules pulsed over us for the next several hours. But we finally summited around 4:00 p.m. The view was indescribable. Thanks to the weather we enjoyed our moment briefly, quickly took our summit pictures and began the decent. As I waited my turn at the top of the 120 foot rappel the wind was blowing the snow horizontally. I can say with certainty that I’ve never been so cold in August.
The “Big Rappel†was exhilarating in every sense, which was mostly due to the negative pitch it developed after about the first third of the decent. There’s just nothing to get the blood going like dangling from a rope looking down thousands of feet over Eastern Idaho as you literally twist in the wind.
We finished the rappel around 6:00 p.m., and after planting our feet on terra firma, we began the steep but non-technical decent to the trailhead. It was dark by the time we hit the meadows, and the most difficult part of this stretch was probably trying to navigate the boulders in the dark. We did get slightly off trail a couple of times, but were quickly able to correct and continue our trudge down the mountain. Once we cleared the boulders, it was just an exercise in endurance, and we finally reached the car at 11:30 p.m.
Total for the day: 18 miles and 7,000 foot ascent and decent.
