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Climbing on the Side
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It was about this time last year, mid spring when the mountains are still under feet of snow and summer seems like it should be just around the corner but it’s actually still so far off that you’re trying not to think about it. Thinking about it just makes you anxious to put in some miles on the high mountain trails. That’s about how it felt last year when the three of us hatched a brilliant, so it seemed at the time, plan to cover 37 miles and 18,000ft of elevation and enough desolate landscape to feel like a lunar rover as fast as we could. This is how it works: you throw Dave Clark, Mitch Thompson, and Max King five mountain peaks (four over 9,000ft) near by, an affinity for truly masochistic feats of endurance and punishment, a lot of Hammer Gel packs, together with a bit of spare time they should be relaxing with family, and suddenly you hear a conversation like “Hey I’ve got an idea. I’ve always wanted to climb the Three Sisters, Broken Top, and Bachelor…in a day.” “Ok, I’m in” “I’m in too, when” Five peaks, fast. This is what I like do in my spare time when I’m not running.
So we planned one day late summer to attempt all five peaks. We didn’t feel particularly challenged by any of the peaks, especially since between the three of us we had all summitted them before. The challenge was going to come from the unknown of stringing five of the tallest mountains in Oregon together…on foot. We’ve even had experience in that department as well; Dave has done the Three Sisters in a day, I’ve also done the Three Sisters in a day that my climbing partner claimed was a record 8hrs from trailhead to trailhead, and Mitch did an incredible marathon of 9 cascade peaks (with no assistance between) over 48 hrs. Despite all that experience this was still going to be different. Anytime you attempt something like this, even if you’ve done it before, it’s always going to test you physically and mentally, there are always unexpected variables that come up no matter how many times it’s been done, events that you just can’t plan for.
There was some argument as to how long it would take, though none of us knew for sure we had a pretty good idea of what our pace should be without any unforeseen events that would hamper our adventure, like Dave falling off the peak of Broken Top (it didn’t happen luckily but that is definitely something that would slow us down a bit). I thought about 14 hrs, Dave and Mitch were thinking a bit longer but not much. One thing we were pretty certain about was that no one had done it under 24hrs. I thought that was definitely doable and I really didn’t want to spend the night hiking.
The day before Mitch and I drove up to Todd Lake to stash a little extra food for the next day as we were trudging from Broken Top to Bachelor. I had the brilliant idea of getting a ride up to Todd Lake and biking back to town, Mitch said no (more on why I’m glad I listened to him later). Our route we decided on that night was to park at Pole Creek trailhead, traverse the peaks from north to south and ending at the Mt. Bachelor parking lot where we had left a car.
We were on our way out to Pole Creek about 4:30am the next morning. For some reason waking up at such an hour only seems unbearable when you have to catch a flight. Looking forward to getting our adventure started it really didn’t seem that bad. Our gear, what little we had, was pared down to only what we needed to make it through the day. We really didn’t plan to spend the night out and if we had to we would hopefully be moving. This is the part where we’re supposed to say: “We’re professionals, do not attempt to try what you read here on your own.”We packed enough food to get us through about 10hrs to Todd Lake, we each had a few liters of water since there were multiple places we could refill easily with good clean water and Mitch had a Miox water purifier that is about the size of a large pen. That came in handy. The only extra clothing we carried was a lightweight wind jacket for the peaks, other than that is was the clothes we were wearing, shorts (long tights in my case), a long sleeve and a short sleeve shirt, some sturdy trail running shoes, and a climbing helmet we each had to bring or Mitch wasn’t going with us. Oh, we did have a small first aid kit. Some people may be wondering where we put the ropes and climbing gear. Did I mention we packed light?
Looking back on it, I wouldn’t say we were unsafe or over our head at any point but there is always a scenario on a trip like this that would make the evening news if anything had gone wrong.
We took off from the trailhead at 5:45am just as the horizon was turning a pale blue. We still needed our headlamps for a good 20-30min so we just jogged down the trail slowly to get our legs warmed up and ready for the climb ahead. About 3 miles down the trail we passed a small creek and decided that we probably blew right by where we wanted to head right through the forest and up the southeast ridge of North Sister. About midway up we watched the sun rise and as we rested from our legs burning with lactic acid we knew this would be a long day. We felt good at this point though so it was important to hold back the reigns a bit and not burn ourselves out early.
We reached the summit of North at 8:45 in 3hrs. The climb across the scree field and up the bowling alley went smoothly and was relatively easy, even though climbing on stuff like that still gives me the heebee geebees. We snapped a couple pics and headed back down, one down, four to go. Still feeling strong we skied down the scree to the snow field between North and Middle and cruised right on up the Middle Sister by 10am in 4:15 total time. Middle is a good place for a little food break before tackling the most difficult section down the baby-head boulder field and up the loose North face of South Sister that I think I’ll rename “Suicide
We did make it, as you can tell. We summitted South at 1pm in 7 hrs 15 min and I vowed never to do that again...at least for two years at which time I’ll have forgotten about and I’ll agree to do it with some other sucker. It was a relief to be on South and know that the hardest climbing was out of the way and we were over half done. We were all feeling a bit of relief actually. It was now onto Broken Top. We cruised down South to Green Lakes pretty quickly. At some point going up North I came down with a painful case of tendonitis right on the top of my ankle that was especially painful going down hill so cruising down became more of a hobble for me. We connected with the climbers trail up Broken Top, scrambled over and around a shear drop that was pretty hairy at the peak, and summitted at 4pm. Seeing Bachelor in the distance and knowing that we still had all that distance to traverse, time became more of a focus at this point so we tagged the top and were up and down as quickly as we could climb. Coming down Broken Top there are two options: go back down the way you came on the trail, or jump off the edge and post-hole down the scree. Dave was all for post-holing but Mitch thought it would be faster just to take the trail. This is still up for debate since we all decided to take the trail since we knew where that went and to save the post-holing for another day. It had potential.
We’ve been going hard now for about 10hrs and it was obvious we were slowing a bit. I’ve been feeling pretty good, eating and drinking, so is Mitch, but Dave was starting to noticeably struggle. Now Dave has got endurance like no body else. He can just go and go and go. I think it started on about Middle when we stopped for food. Dave didn’t eat much when Mitch and I did but I figured he would eat when he got hungry and it would be fine, but when you’re exerting yourself and you’re hot, it is sometimes very difficult to eat anything, let alone another cardboard energy bar or sticky sugary gu packet. Dave was having some trouble running across the flats down to Todd Lake and Mitch and I started to piece together exactly why Dave started to struggle. Dave hadn’t eaten anything in the past couple of hours and was starting to pay the price. When we stopped for our stash at Todd Lake he managed to force some food down which helped, but once you’ve gone past that point of no return, getting your energy back can be very difficult. The three of us power hiked at a good clip without losing much, if any, time over to Bachelor and took the West Village Getback trail up to the Summit Lift where we caught the trail up to the top of the last peak. We summitted Bachelor in 15hrs just in time to catch the beautiful sunset at 8:45pm. The cool breeze starting to blow started to bite at our damp clothes so we didn’t hang around long but looking North over what we crossed during the day we could all appreciate the journey that we took and what we learned about ourselves and each other. I certainly feel like the whole journey was the reward, the time spent on each peak just a waypoint or rest stop on a much greater mission.
We were off the mountain and back in the car by 9:20, on our way to a juicy hamburger and huge milkshake. Ohhh, that was good.
Sidenote on biking: The next day I was pretty sore but ok, so I thought it would be a good idea to bike to get the car at Pole Creek Trailhead. Bad idea. By the end of yesterday I was glad I had taken Mitch’s advise and hadn’t biked to town from Bachelor. I should have taken his advice again but I didn’t. I got to Sisters no problem but then struggled and cursed myself for attempting the ride up Pole Creek Rd. It’s washboarded and I swear it climbs 10,000ft in a couple miles. Now I’m cooked, and I have Hood to Coast tomorrow. I love what I do.
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