Neil
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The Big One That Got Away
If you don't like long TR's hit the back button now!
I’ve read trip reports and threads about people coming home empty handed as far as getting the summit goes, so I knew my turn would come eventually. Yesterday was that day. Hindsight has coldly and objectively revealed most of the factors that led to us turning around and I think I’ll write those down on my gear list that I print up and verify every trip.
I’ll spare you the details of the drive down on Saturday night in a snowstorm because the next morning was so much more interesting. It was just after 6am and Dominic and I were on our way to the TH when we saw somebody walking along the road. As I whizzed past Dominic yells out, ‘It’s Doug’! At least he too made it through the storm but what the heck was he doing there? Well, in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of the night, in a snow storm between Long Lake and Newcomb his alternator belt broke. Talk about lucky being able to limp into Newcomb where he parked, climbed into his sleeping bag and calmly read until he figured we’d be on the road. We spent an hour with the snowplough guys in their garage trying to find a replacement belt but no luck. So with one dead car abandoned in Newcomb we arrived at the TH at 7:30.
Man, were we a bunch of wimps! or was it cold? The wind was howling and luckily, we didn’t have a thermometer with us. We did all the preparations to go, including signing out, with the car heater blasting away. I was determined to follow my own advice and was wearing a very light synth shirt only under my gore-tex which made the simplest TH stuff like getting the skis down from the roof rack seem like a huge chore.
Once we got going and were out of the wind we of course warmed up quite nicely. We were skiing and I was having wax trouble. There was 4 inches of fresh, cold dry snow and now I remembered that in those conditions your ski bases only contact the very sharp snowflake points with lots of empty spaces in between those points. On went the softer blue wax with a longer pocket and the improvement was immediate. After Lake Sally the trail goes through some open land with mature birches. The grey skies were breaking up, Redfield stood ahead and the fresh snow was blowing in the stiff breeze. I felt absolutely great as I powered through the fresh snow. Underneath it was very icy so it was a good thing for the new snow. We made good time to the turn-off and there we switched over to snowshoes which killed 20 minutes. I suppose you could debate the merits of approaching the mtn. on skis. Do you spend the time saved by skiing changing over? My ski boots are a little sturdier than average and I snowshoed up Phelps with them which saved time on the switch but it was too cold for that this day so I switched boots as well. They were already in the snowshoe bindings so I just slipped into them.
Anyway, we pushed fairly hard and followed the home made yellow discs that showed the way on the already easy to follow herd trail. It didn’t look like anybody had been on it this season but it was a cinch to cruise on. I kept checking my watch and we were looking good for the summit…when all of a sudden the yellow disc road ended. We were just beyond the height of land and about to drop down to Skylight brook a half mile away and had been cruising on what we thought was the trail when we realized we’d lost it.
And here we made our first and most important mistake. I suggested it to Doug, and Dominic thought about backtracking, but we were pushing hard to make up for the late start (we began at 8 which for a Jan. trip up Allen is late in my books). Backtracking would have cost us 20 –30 mins. whereas if we picked up the trail we’d be flying.
The second error was made before the start of the trip. In retrospect, we were depending on the trail to get us up the mtn. However, the trail was an untravelled herd path trail in winter through open hardwood forest and yet we never though to pre-determine compass bearings, load waypoints into a GPS etc.
We decided to cut due north in hopes of crossing the trail but after a while we realized we were climbing the lower slopes of Redfield so we stopped and pulled out the map and the GPS (yeah, we had one but with no waypoints in it). I had a home made lat-long ruler stapled to my map and with that proceeded to pull a waypoint for Allen’s summit off of it.
The unit said we were about a mile and a half due west of Allen, the snow was firm and the forest was open so we motored thinking we were best to forget all about the trail. We went fast and sure enough we got to where we could see Allen. The coordinates were bang on which made me feel pretty good. (Try manipulating a freezing cold map in bare hands measuring precisely tenths of seconds with a home made paper lat/long ruler while snot runs out of your nose and your damp shirt sucks the heat out of your body. It can be fun if the sun is shining and your with the right people!)
Our plan was working perfectly until the bush got real thick and our forward rate of progress (velocity made good) dropped to almost nothing. We were at what we thought was the east branch of Skylight when we decided to enter another waypoint for where the herd trail crosses the brook and the GPS pointed 500 feet downstream! That was the result of heading north towards Redfield looking for the trail earlier on.
By now it was close to one o’clock and we had a stiff 2000 foot icy climb between us and the summit, plus we had to take care of Doug’s car and Dominic had school the next day. Our new goal became to find the herd trail and go home so down we went bushwhacking. At one point I mentioned to Doug that if we found the trail (and that was a big if for me, GPS or not) that I didn’t see why we couldn’t lose it again and that our snowshoes had just left a perfect bread crumb trail back to the herd path. Hey, I might be dumb once on a trip but I ain’t gonna do the same thing twice! So, at 1:15 with a mixture of relief and regret we chucked in the towel and did an about face. The sky was perfectly clear and at 2:00, when we had hoped to be begining our descent, we reflected on what the views would have been like..
When we got back to the yellow discs we realized they ended where the trail crosses from private to public land. We figured out easily where we should have gone (kinda like a true or false question when you know which choice is false). So if you go and do Allen in the near future don’t follow our tracks beyond the private land. Bear right and go down to a gulley. The trip back was fantastic, lots of warm sunshine and big peaks to admire. I timed the switch over to skis and it took 20 minutes but was well worth it because the trail descended 250 feet (net) to Lake Jimmy and we glided beautifully in our morning’s tracks. We had dynamite views of Allen, Redfield, Cliff, Colden (we thought) and Adams. With the sun in our faces and the wind at our backs there was no better place to be. Near Lake Sally the one-day-shy-of-full moon rose over Popple Hill and we had great views of the Santanoni Range. ‘Views from below’, huh Doug?
We noticed three parallel slides on Santa, the leftmost one was very long and steep but the Ermine Brook slide wouldn’t have been visible from there would it? When we got to the car at 5:30 we were completely whacked and we hadn’t even climbed the mountain! It was very, very cold back at the car.
) convinced us to call it quits while we were ahead. It's a whole different thing climbing when PinPin hasn't broken out the trail already. When you don't even know where the herd path is it's very hard to make your way to the summit. I've floundered around in that same situation a few times. It's still better than staying home 
