26 FEB 2001
By Greg Seitz
The sun had already set when I fell through the ice. My haul sled, slung over my shoulders by its duffel-type carrying straps, combined with the full weight of skis and equipment, shoved me onto my hands. I couldn't rid myself of the load. I was stuck in freezing brown water to my waist, wallowing helplessly. Five minutes earlier I had been busy crashing through the choked slide debris and alders that made Slide Canyon nearly impossible to navigate. Now my situation was considerably worse.

I lunged onto my back and freed myself from my sled, freeing my feet and cursing. Deciding on this route a few hours before, we were all too optimistic to consider what's in a name. "Slide Canyon," the map read. Anyway, I had been in the bottom of the drainage walking over an ice crust covering the quagmire that formed when avalanche debris rerouted the creek. Never did I consider that this snowy surface had three feet of muck and water underneath. I was busy directing my skis—strapped along the sides of my sled hull—underneath the downfall and brush. After that fateful step, I was wet to my waist. Neither my partner, Harry, nor Slide Lake, our destination, was anywhere in sight.

With darkness all but upon me, I reached Slide Lake soggy and tired. Where the creek flowed into the lake there was scarcely enough open ground to lie down, let alone pitch a tent. I found half of Harry's gear (he resorted to a double carry and went back to retrieve the rest) and sat down in the dying light. We barely had any food left, and all I could think about were the meals I'd devour if I ever made it out of there. For the first time in three weeks, firewood was nearby, so I decided to try to build a fire. Before I gathered any kindling, it started to rain. When I finally got the fire going, I ate my last candy bar and reflected upon the events leading up to this moment.

I was 20 years old, and my longest wilderness trip to this day was overnight. I had camped in the snow but always with my creature comforts so near— something I had wanted to change. So it seemed only logical when a former ski partner recruited me to traverse the Wind River Range on skis. I'd set lofty goals the previous fall, and this one trip could potentially meet all of them. Harry had been living in Boston that winter, plotting to return to the Rockies once again. Working a computer job (nobody seemed to expect much work from him) allowed him plenty of time to read maps and plot a spring ski extravaganza. I knew when Harry set his mind to a project, it generally happened with grace and efficiency— or at least efficiency. Regardless, the middle of May 1997 found us plodding towards the Big Sandy entrance of the Winds with skis on our feet, climbing gear in our packs and sleds in tow. We'd even cached supplies at Seneca Lake, roughly halfway to the Green River Lakes trailhead.

The first week or so was really spotty. We skied some imposing couloirs in the Cirque of the Towers. We also spent some time stormbound in the tent. After about day nine, the weather really cleared, and we began to cover ground. We picked up our cache on schedule and proceeded to the Titcomb Basin area with a new vigor. Despite my partner being nine years older than me, we operated well together. While he was definitely more qualified on the organization and route-finding end of things, I pushed him to climb and ski some terrain that he wouldn't ordinarily have done.

We decided at Titcomb Basin that we had time to stick around and explore some wilderness climbing and skiing. Miraculously, the weather stayed perfect and we knocked off the south couloir of Fremont Peak, the Tower I gully of Mt. Helen, and a circuitous route on Gannett Peak that climbed an impossibly steep, southeast-facing ice runnel and descended the Gooseneck route. While hauling our loaded sleds over 12,800-foot Dinwoody Pass was an absolute slugfest, we beat the misery threefold. Basking in the glory of extended wilderness solitude, we accomplished what we thought was out of our bounds and enjoyed a simple and purposeful existence.

All we had to focus on was skiing and getting down safely. We only saw people we planned to meet, and our biggest concern was harassment from pikas. We knew early on that our food rations weren't sufficient, but we tolerated the hunger and spent hours each day talking about "when we get back, I'm going to eat..."

Harry arrived with the rest of his gear just as the rain began to get downright heavy. We hadn't seen much but cliffs alongside Slide Lake, but starting at the other end, a forest service trail eventually led to the trailhead. But even these logistics were too much to think about in our exhausted state. We cooked our last supper in silence.

That morning we started from Dinwoody Basin, at the base of Gannett Peak. We knew that our food was running out. The weather held up and it was time to get back to civilization. With light hearts and smiling faces, we headed north toward Sourdough Glacier. Within an hour of leaving, Harry noticed his skis were delaminating from tip to tail—our timing was perfect, we decided, and carried on. The Sourdough Glacier proved to be a pleasant alpine exit. We didn't make turns, but descended at about 10-15 miles an hour for what seemed like an eternity. Side by side, we slid along hooting, chatting, and watching the Green River meander slowly toward the Colorado.

At the glacier's terminus, we had to decide on an exit route, and for some reason that I can't explain, we chose Slide Canyon. Big mistake. But that was our choice, and within 15 minutes we were committed, heading down a flat, snowy ridgeline searching for a continuous line into the canyon. Finally we found it, and upon reaching the bottom we discovered how this drainage got its name. Massive piles of slide debris littered the floor with great heaps of a snow-rock matrix that slowed progress to a crawl. When we finally got below the snow line, the canyon floor was solid debris: deadwood, great boulders, and live slide alder. And it was somewhere around the end of the snow when I fell into the bog.

It rained nearly all night as we huddled underneath a tarp, soaking wet. At that point I would have done just about anything to get out of there. We decided in the morning to carry our gear around the lake in two trips, then walk the remaining miles with one load. Early afternoon and we were at the head of the lake, eating all the food we had left, and drying our gear in the warm sunlight. For the first time in weeks took off our shirts off and couldn't believe how much weight we had lost. My partner's decadent urban puffiness completely disappeared. I only wondered where my stomach had gone. We ate, packed up, and got ready for the final press home.

I don't know how long the walk was. I'd say somewhere between seven and 10 miles, but all the pain I'd experienced in my life, combined, did not eclipse what I felt the final three hours of that walk. I am not particularly tall, so the bottom lip of my sled extended well below my butt. The only way I could walk was hunched over or by not extending my legs backward fully. Harry did not seem to have this problem, and I soon found myself walking alone. That was not the only discomfort either. All my gear was stuffed into my sled, skis strapped to it, attached with only duffel bag-type straps. The result was like hauling cinder blocks with a barbed-wire backpack. Even worse, the trail downhill was unpleasantly steep. Suffice to say, I was in a bad way. My patience was at the end of its rope and all I wanted to do was stop, vomit, throw a temper tantrum, incinerate all my belongings, lie down and die. But I was too tired to do even that, so I pressed on.

The trail leveled out to the headwaters of the Green River, a meandering flood plain of fast-flowing, melt-swelled tributaries. I rejoined my partner and, by the looks of the map, we had to cross to the other side. Every time we tried to cross, the water was running too fast. We waded for a couple hours trying to find an area suitable to cross, to no avail. All we found were bones, and a great amount of them. They appeared to be deer, elk, and moose bones, and we encountered them in all stages of decomposition. We passed them frequently. Remembering this area was where a few grizzly bears had been trapped, I began to take this as a sign. The icing on the cake was when we encountered a small fawn that had curled up to die. No other deer were around, and this thing wouldn't even lift its head when we approached it. It just breathed shallow, silent forced breaths. I wanted to panic.

Luckily, we ran into a group of hikers who told us there was a bridge just downstream that crossed the river at the head of Green River Lake, the final obstacle separating us from our goal. Harry exclaimed, "Perfect, Seitz. Only two more miles to the trailhead! Are you ready to get funky?" Fortunately, I didn't have the energy to wring his neck.

The final two miles were more of the same mind-bending agony until I reached the end of the lake. The last few hundred yards I simply could not go on any further, so I sat down. It was just a little bit further, but I needed to rest. I sat with my head in my hands, utterly dejected, and then something curious happened, or at least I'm pretty sure it did. Looking back on it, it seems as though it might have happened in a dream that I've had sometime since then. It's so vivid that I've just always accepted it as true and still do.

I was sitting on a log alongside the trail when a young girl, maybe 10 or 11 years old walked by with tears in her eyes. She was looking at me very strangely. All I could think of was to ask how she was doing. She replied that she was okay, but she was lost. I couldn't imagine what she was talking about, this close to her campsite. You could see campfires through the trees.

"My family was right here and we were fishing and now they're gone," she explained.

"Well, maybe if you follow this trail further, that'll take you to your campsite." It was a dirt highway, for God's sake.

"Oh I don't think so, I don't remember coming this way."

"Well, give it a try, and I'll be along soon enough. If they aren't there, we'll do something about it."

She agreed and continued out of sight. The last three weeks had really been something, and if I could accomplish that, I could do damn near anything. With renewed vigor, I humped my sled onto my back and hobbled my way to the trailhead.

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