Big Ambition, Bigger Fear

Summer is upon us (hurray!) and I am up north where the daylight begins around 5 AM and doesn’t go away until 10:30 PM. As fun as that it is, extended daylight is not why I’m up in the Idaho/Montana/Alberta region. I am here for mountains. This year, I opted to start my season with Mount Borah, officially called Borah Peak but apparently no one calls it that. This “hike” has 5,300 feet gain in just 4.1 miles from the trailhead to the summit on the standard Chicken Out Ridge trail. Brutal.

But I kicked off my ultramarathon training for the year on May 15th, so I was feeling quite fit and ready by the time June 25th rolled around. I read a bunch of trip reports about this summit and my understanding was that it was a solid class 3, with the added challenge of remainders of the insane amount of snowfall we had this year. I’ve done a handful of class 3s before and I was prepared with crampons, so I took off at 5:15 AM after packing up my gear from this lovely camping spot at the trailhead.

As advertised, the gain on this trail is insane. You start at 7,300 feet and gain 1,000 feet in the first mile (my time, 29:11) and 2,000 feet in the next mile (my time, 57:56) before you get a little break in the third mile. There’s a small downhill and some flat-ish parts and a section I dubbed “the stairs” where it’s kind of dealer’s choice if you want to switchback or go more straight up until you pass a small snow patch (at least in June) and reach 2.96 miles, where the scrambling begins.

Like I said, I’ve done some class 3s before that put a healthy but exhilarating fear of death into me, so I felt prepared. While Borah was intimidating at first, I felt like I could handle it. Except then it kept going and going and going and going. The scrambly parts with extreme exposure that I’ve done before did not last very long, or, when they did, I was roped up to a guide in South America. Borah has a lot of scrambling with zero margin for error, plus a bad stretch of snow to cross, even before I reached Chicken Out Ridge.

Chicken Out Ridge, as you might guess, is where most people chicken out and turn around. I went a little ways and a little ways more and little ways more, but then I was stopping every five moves or so to collect myself. The 2,000 foot drop on either side was terrifying. When I came to an especially pointy pile of rocks I had to maneuver over, that was the end for me. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t see what was on the other side and I didn’t want to find out. Once the fear really sets in, it’s time to turn around.

You can watch a video of the Chicken Out Ridge crossing here. These people are roped up and they actually have a trail. I had almost no trail because it was still under snow and was certainly not roped up given that not only was I solo but there was literally no one else out there. One guy had gone up before me, but he had also failed to summit and was well on his way down at that point. I could see his hot pink shorts on the lower ridge, on the flat-ish part.

I also knew I should quit because even if I made it past this section, it was going to get even more difficult. You can read all about it on this site in the section labeled “Distance: 2.9 mile to 3.1 mile (4.7 km to 5 km)”. Note that their marked distances are not the same (about a half mile behind) as what I logged and what AllTrails says. They say the last section starts at 2.9 miles, while I was only at Chicken Out Ridge at 3.4 miles. But the gist of it is that the summit push is extremely challenging with lots of loose rock and limited footholds. Yeah, I was never going to make it, even with (or especially because?) all that chaos was covered in snow.

But the worst part for me still lay ahead – the big snow section I had crossed before Chicken Out ridge. There was an upper path (which looked easier and safer, and which was the way I had gone out) and a path that went downward through the middle of the snow. I tried the upper but at the end of it was a small rock wall that I wasn’t strong enough to hoist myself up, though I had previously managed to lower myself down it. I had to take the low way. Like I said, I had quite a few scary moments on this hike, but this was the one that I truly thought I had 50/50 shot of not making it through. I had the deep internal I-don’t-want-to-be-here feeling that makes you want to curl into a ball and cry, hoping you’ll wake up from the nightmare. Had it not been for depressions from other people’s feet, I would have fallen to my death, no question. I jammed my crampons hard into each step and hoped for the best.

After that, the scrambling parts that had been scary on the way up really seemed okay on the way down. And that 2,000 foot crazy descent made me almost wish I had died with the beating my knees and toes took, but none of that section has any exposure.

When I got back to the car, I didn’t have that dopamine rush I usually do after finishing some hard trek. I still felt rattled, and had to just sit in my camp chair with a beer and stare into space for awhile. I’m glad to know that Summit Post classifies this route as 3/4, not just a 3, because that was way harder than any class 3 I’ve done before. I was in over my head, and I honestly don’t know if I could have done it later in the season with less snow and more experience for the season under my belt. But I’m not going to try again.

But wait, there’s more! Halfway down the peak, I ran into two guys on their way up. They were a team from the National Kidney Registry – five living kidney donors attempting to set the Guinness Record for the fastest time for summitting the 50 state high points. They want to break stereotypes about being a living donor and show that you can still accomplish amazing physical feats after a donation. How fabulous is that? And I got to be their official witness for Idaho, in case the Guinness people call to validate. Check them out on Facebook: Team NKR- 50 U.S. State Summits Speed Record. After Borah, they only had two summits left! One of them made it up Borah that day. This is his post. Yikes!