From Hood to St. Helens: A Beginner's Take on Backcountry Snowboarding

            I pull the drawstrings on my boots, lacing them as tight as they’ll allow. I attach the leash and then clip into the bindings, my right foot first, and then my left. I press my hands into the wet, slushy snow behind me and propel myself forward before quickly falling back on my ass. I try again, this time finding my balance, the snowboard planted firmly under my body. I look over at Walt, who’s sitting on a rock, snacking on a sandwich. “How do I do this again?” I say.

            Walt Laughs.

            Perhaps that’s not the best question to be asking when you’re a mile high up a mountain—an active volcano, for that matter—without any emergency personnel around to save your ass if something goes wrong. But isn’t that part of the appeal? Part of the adventure? Knowing that you are seriously in the wild. Knowing that you are absolutely vulnerable. Isn’t that why you decided to go backcountry snowboarding in the first place?

This is what’s running through my mind as I look down the mountain, down the steep slopes of snow that I’m about to slide down on a thin piece of fiberglass that’s affixed to my feet by a few straps of plastic. And though I admit I’m a bit nervous, and can definitely feel that rush of anxiety creeping through my core, I’m not quite overcome with The Fear that’s oftentimes associated with these kinds of ventures. No, I think I exhausted all The Fear on the climb up here.

            We left the city early—6 am—but in retrospect, we should have left much earlier. We should have been on the mountain by 6 am. After driving, picking up our permits, driving some more, arranging our packs, and then re-arranging our packs, it was well after 8 am by the time we even hit the trail. The climber’s bivouac remains closed for the season, so we parked at the Mount Marble Snow Park and followed the Swift Ski Trail north through an evergreen forest that slowly thinned as we gained elevation. By the time we reached the timberline, the air had become so warm that we were forced to strip down layers, and head towards the snow wearing only t-shirts and shorts. It’s always a surreal feeling, to be surrounded by the white stuff when the weather is so warm, but I’m not complaining, not even in the slightest, for the long bitter cold season is what drove me away from the Northeast years ago. I’ll take sixty and sunny any day of the year, even if I am snowboarding.

            The path was well-beaten, or so we thought, and even though the large blue diamond markers had disappeared with the trees, we could still follow the footprints of those who had ascended earlier this morning. And so up we went, over boulders ranging from the size of basketballs to the size of Buicks, through mud in which we’d sink to our ankles, over weak bridges of snow in which we’d break through up to our thighs—the sharp, jagged ice crystals cutting our bare skin, leaving thin scratches like those from the claws of a housecat.  

            Mount St. Helens is amazingly large. I’ve seen it a thousand times before, but almost always from a distance, from the city, where it looks like a white hill with its top cut off—a plateau, not a mountain. But seeing it for the first time up close, there is no argument, no other way to describe it, even if it doesn’t have a peak—it is most definitely a mountain, and absolutely awe-inspiring. I’ve actually climbed it once before, but on a different route—the easier “summer” route—but on that particular day, you couldn’t see a damn thing. It was thick with fog, the visibility, twenty, maybe thirty feet. But during peak season, the National Park Service only allows 100 climbers per day, and if you intend to climb on the weekend, you’d better reserve your permit months in advance. And if the weather doesn’t cooperate—let’s say the mountain is fogged in—too bad! No refund! Just another major flaw in the system if you ask me, one that will certainly take a catastrophe to change.

            But today is a Thursday, and we were able to purchase our permits late last night, last minute, with another 65 still available. And on the way up it was so clear—a “bluebird day,” some might say—that we could distinctively make out the other mountaineers, like ants marching in the distance. They ranged from large groups slowly clambering up, to a pair of black specs careening down in such a blur of speed that you couldn’t tell if they were on skis or tumbling franticly end over end. Though the majority of St. Helens is covered in a blinding white blanket, a handful of strips—consisting primarily of dirt, rock, and ash—run up the mountain like the legs of a tarantula. It was one of those legs that we were scrambling up when we realized that we had somehow gone off course. I could see the wooden posts two legs to the west—the wooden posts that I knew marked the route in which we were supposed to be following. It’s not that we weren’t on a route—on an exposed mountain with no trees, just about every which way is a route. We just weren’t on the easiest, most traveled one. In fact, we happened to be on the steepest, most difficult path on this side of the mountain.

           

Fortunately, we weren’t the only ones to have gone the wrong way today. The footprints we had been following must have made the same mistake as us, so naturally, we continued to follow them. Instead of continuing up a long treacherous path, the footprints darted west, and so did we. The first snowfield was no big deal—a quick dip downward, a few dozen yards at a reasonable grade, and then an easy incline up a rocky leg. It was the next crossing that got my heart pounding. It was the next crossing that brought on The Fear.

            As we stopped for a breather, I studied the steep embankment in which I knew we somehow needed to scramble down. It was nothing but loose soil and rock, with no clear path—at least nothing that I would describe as “safe.” I watched as two skiers sped by in the gully below—the gully that we needed to traverse to get back on the beaten path. Oh good, I thought. They were on skis. The other side of the ravine was even steeper, though covered in snow—a slope I knew would feel more comfortable going up than going down. But before we could go up, we had to go down.

            I strapped on my helmet and started down. For some reason I crossed my feet in an attempt to find solid footing, when the ground suddenly started to slide. I quickly turned—the weight of my pack shifting my body, throwing me slightly off balance—and grabbed for whatever solid rocks I could find in front of me. But the rocks at my hands weren’t holding firm either. They felt loose, as if they’d pull right out of the ground with little effort at all. In an act of desperation, I dug all four of my extremities into the loose soil and scurried back up to the top of the ridge as fast as I could, sending basketball-sized boulders dribbling down the slope beneath me. Suddenly the mountain seemed EXTRA LARGE!

            The Fear almost always strikes suddenly. Anybody who’s ever experienced it knows exactly what I’m talking about. One minute you’re fine. The next minute you’re questioning every life decision that helped guide you to that exact moment: What if you had done this differently? Or that differently? What if you had simply stayed home this morning? What if? What if? What if? The answer is always the same. If you would have done it differently, then…well…then you wouldn’t be in this situation right now. But it’s too late, you are in this situation, and now you have to deal with it. You have to deal with that horrible sensation that’s currently rushing through your soul. You have to deal with The Fear.

           

I’ve only experienced The Fear a handful of times in my life, and in my opinion, it never gets any easier. A few summers ago The Fear infected me three times in the span of a month—in the form of whitewater, a tornado, and a forest fire—causing me to seriously question my adventurous spirit. Though that spirit did briefly go into remission, I never entirely lost it. Perhaps it’s because the memory of The Fear faded with time, or because, for some of us, adventure is simply a way of life. Whatever the reason, it didn’t much matter as I looked down into the ravine, and then back up, at what earlier appeared to be a mountain, but now only reminded me of death.

            It’s very easy for this particular mountain to invoke the notion of death. This week happens to be the 34^th anniversary of when Mother Nature decided St. Helens was just a bit too tall, bringing her down a few notches, and taking 57 poor souls in the process (I could go on and on about the 1980 eruption—the most deadly in U.S. history thus far—but this story is already growing longer than I had anticipated, so we’ll have to save the destruction for another time). Have you ever been inside an old building that felt eerily creepy and were not the slightest bit surprised to find out that someone had died there before? Well, that’s how standing on St. Helens can feel.

But it wasn’t merely the eruption that was running through my mind. Yesterday a priest from New Jersey fell off the high side of Mount Hood—a 1,000 foot vertical fall. The reporter on the local news refused to use the word “die,” or any variation of it. He just kept saying, “He fell.” He fell? One thousand feet—give me a break. Did an angel catch him? And then there’s that entire town in Northern Washington that got buried by a mudslide earlier this spring. They didn’t even know what hit them. I know…I know…these aren’t the kinds of things that you want to be thinking about when you’re in a squirrely situation, but when your mind becomes infected with The Fear, the choice really isn’t yours anymore.

Careful not to kick any rocks down on him, I waited for Walt to make it to the bottom before I attempted my decent. To be perfectly honest, I’m probably making this seem a hell of a lot more dangerous than it actually was, but to be clear, one wrong move could have certainly resulted in death. Would it have? It’s hard to say. There most definitely would have been some severe broken bones, several contusions, even more lacerations, a helicopter ride to the hospital, absolutely no recollection of what had happened, and a possible life-sentence to the confines of a wheelchair. But would it result in death? Probably not. Could it? Yes—without a doubt.

Normally it wouldn’t even have been than big of a deal. As a child I would have jumped down the bastard, rode a landslide full of dirt like a wave, and slid across the snow at the bottom with my arms flailing in a display of triumph. The real problem was all the junk hanging from my back. I normally travel light, taking great pride in my minimalist attitude towards life. But when you’re backcountry snowboarding, there’s just no way to do it. You need your snowboard and you need your boots, and those items alone weigh more than any loaded pack I ever remember carrying. And then you have to add the water and food and extra clothing. And it’s not only the weight, but the awkwardness of the entire package—there really is no proper way to carry a snowboard up a mountain. I had mine strapped on perpendicular to my body, like a set of wings extending outward between my shoulder blades and my hips. I figured if I fell, I needed to fall backwards, hoping that the board might catch on a couple of rocks, slowing me down enough to regain my composure.

           

People react to The Fear in a variety of ways. Some panic, some cry, some curl up in a ball and refuse to move. Myself, I’ve always conquered The Fear with movement--with speed. So I scrambled down the hill without even blinking an eye, a cascade of dirt and rock flowing at my feet. I rushed past Walt at the bottom and attacked the snow covered incline like it was a competition. Crampons would have been nice, an ice axe, ideal, but I had neither. So I simply kicked my boots into the wall of hard-packed snow, stabbed through the ice with my bare hands, and climbed it like a frozen ladder. If looking down brought with it visions of death, then heading up induced revelations of life. Sure, experiencing The Fear can be a dreadful event, but one positive side-effect is that it reminds you of what is really important in life—a wakeup call, you might say. And so, as I climbed, I thought about what’s really important in my life—my writing, my friends, my family, and that beautiful woman who’s expecting to me make it home in one piece so I can take her out on a date tonight. Desiring a life of adventure is one thing, but if you don’t make it home safely, then it’s all for nothing.

            “You guys are crazy!”

            When I finally made it over the edge, my feet firmly on solid ground, I noticed a man sitting on a rock, chewing on some jerky.

            “Yeah, that was a little sketchy,” I reply.

            “I can’t believe you went down that.”

            I waited patiently for Walt to appear from the abyss, wondering what I could possibly tell his family if something was to happen. When he told his parents of our plan, his mother replied with, “You’re really still friends with that guy?” As if we were children, and I was the kid who encouraged the others to jump off the highest point on the playground. I let out a sigh of relief when I see his blond hair poke over the snowy edge.

            Unless he was faking it, he wasn’t nearly as rattled as I was. But then again, he’s definitely more of a mountain man than I’ll probably ever be. As much as I’d love to someday write in my autobiography of my “mountain man” years, it’s probably not it the cards. I grew up in the flat lands. Walt actually grew up in the mountains and buys a lift ticket every year. It’s funny, because in the past, if something happened to go wrong—like, let’s say a forest fire—I was the one who always kept my composure. This time it was Walt. This time we were in his element.

            As we continued up the mountain—again on the beaten path—I would look over at the sea of snow and think to myself: There’s no way I can snowboard down that. Not after The Fear traveled through my soul. But Walt kept reassuring me that it would be fine; that it wasn’t nearly as steep as it looked.

            And so, here I am—5,200 feet above sea level, a snowboard strapped to my feet, staring down a snow-covered mountain that’s already broken my confidence once today. And now I’m supposed turn my board, and slide down the bitch. Oh boy! Did I mention that this is only my third time ever snowboarding, and that the first two times were on Mount Hood, at an actual resort, with lifts, and runs, and emergency personnel? Maybe I’m not quite ready for backcountry snowboarding. Maybe I should have thought this through before coming up with the idea just last week and then convincing Walt to tag along. Why did I think I could go from Hood to St. Helens without any proper backcountry experience?

            “How do I do this again?”

            “Oh, just do it already!”

           

Walt’s right. Screw it! I turn the board and start down the mountain and immediately remember that this is supposed to be fun. And it is. And it’s easier than I recall it being the last two times. I head to the right, slow down, head to the left, and then repeat. After a hundred or so yards, I stop, unstrap the board and hike back up to Walt. “Let’s go higher,” I say. The Fear is gone.

            We hike up another thousand feet, decide that we’ve climbed high enough for the day, strap on our boards, and careen down the mountain, across fields of snow, through narrow gullies filled with obstacles, until we run out of the white stuff. And then we clip out of our bindings and huff it back to the parking lot, compiling our stories along the way.

            “I don’t know if I should tell my wife about the ravine,” Walt says.

            “You might as well, because I’m definitely going to write about it. That was rad!”

            “I think it was more epic,” Walt says, continuing an inside joke about the way snowboarders are perceived to talk.

             “I'm not quite sure if it was rad or epic,” I say. “Today I’m going with wild.”

*Some photos courtesy of Walt.