Pushing the Edge

A tale of a winter hike above treeline

photo credit: Stacy Boone 2018

After the first big snowstorm of the season, my friend, Stacy and I tried to snowshoe to a collection of high-altitude lakes. I think Stacy just wanted an excuse to play in the snow after the previous year when there had never been enough to ski or snowshoe in, but I was as excited as a Christmas-morning child at the prospect of getting above treeline in the winter. It was an experience I had fantasized about for years.

Stacy picked me up just after dawn, and we drove for almost two hours on steadily smaller and more snow-covered roads. When her four-wheel-drive truck bogged down in the powder on a narrow Forest Service Road, she pulled over as close to the edge as she dared.

“I don’t think anyone else is going to come in here today,” she said, eyeing the space left in the road after she parked.

We made good time walking the last uphill mile to the trailhead, but the snow on the path through the trees was knee deep even in snowshoes. Stacy and I took turns breaking trail, the leader slogging at a snail’s pace for ten or twenty minutes before stepping aside to catch her breath in the new leader’s tracks. We reached treeline at mid-morning and looked across a rolling plain of snow packed into patterns and pushed into cornices on the ridge tops. The sky was clear, and the wind swirled little tufts of snow along the surface. I knew those mountains in the summer, but they were different in the winter, like a friend I struggled to recognize when she wore a wig and showed up unexpectedly.   

“Do the mountains feel different to you in the winter?” I asked Stacy.

She shrugged and considered my question. “They’re quieter,” she said eventually. “There are fewer people and not many birds this time of year, so they’re quieter.”

That was true. Standing there, we heard nothing except the hiss of the wind—no streams trickled, no birds called, no coyotes howled—but the lack of sound didn’t explain the feeling I had looking across the tundra. It seemed to me that the mountains had hunkered down, gone inward to hang on under the snow, as if they were hibernating after the frenzy of growth and reproduction during the short alpine summer.

When we left the trees, the wind blew away any heat and most of our words. We leaned toward each other and shouted to be heard.

“I think the trail is over there along those little ridges.”

A nod and we were off again, crunching across the hard snow to stay warm. We really weren’t sure where the trail was. Being out in the winter meant that in addition to the usual challenges of hiking in the mountains, we also had to contend with bitter cold, and deep snow. With the wind whipping across the open areas, the small ridges, valleys, streams, and even ponds that we usually would have used to navigate off trail were hidden under drifts of snow. Although we couldn’t see any hint of the well-trodden, deeply rutted footpath, we were counting on being able to follow our own tracks back to the trees and the truck no matter where we went. I wondered how long our snowshoe prints would last in that wind, though.

On the drive to the trailhead, Stacy had told me she’d packed a tarp we could use as an emergency shelter if we got stranded overnight. She had mentioned it casually, as if spending a night in the snow above treeline in below zero temperatures was as commonplace as pulling the covers to our chins in our own beds. I had nodded calmly like the experienced winter hiking partner I wanted to be, but inside, I felt a mix of terror and panic.

A few weeks before, I had participated in a Survival Weekend Stacy offered through her outdoor education business. To my surprise, I had successfully spent one twenty-degree autumn night in a shelter I had cobbled together from an orange leaf bag, my hiking poles, and some string. Instead of my usual lightweight, self-inflating sleeping pad, I had created a mattress out of pine needles and twigs, and when I wasn’t trying to sleep, I huddled over the tiny campfire I had built with dried grass and pine cones. It was not a comfortable night, but when the sun came up, I painted my face with the ashes of my fire and returned to basecamp delighted beyond reason. I had survived.  

During the workshops prior to our solo overnight, Stacy had emphasized that much of surviving an emergency situation is about believing that survival is possible. After that weekend, I knew I could improvise as needed during a crisis in the spring, summer, or fall, but my meager experience did not extend to believin

g a tarp would be enough to get us through even one winter night in the mountains.

As we drove to the trailhead that morning, we talked about strategies for staying alive in the bitter cold—huddling together to share body heat, building a fire, walking in circles to stay warm—but they all seemed to involve both tremendous suffering and incredible luck in order to survive. Although I had been intrigued for years by the idea of spending days or even weeks in the winter mountains, I wanted more than a tarp for shelter.  

Stacy and I never made it to the lakes that day. We were slow in the wind and snow, and we took too many pictures. We wandered off course on the trail-less expanse and called it exploring until we ran out of time. Then we stopped for lunch in the shelter of a half-buried cluster of stunted trees. While we ate high calorie food and sipped hot tea under the clear sky, I thought again about what it would be like to spend a night there. Even in the afternoon sun, I could feel the bite in the air as if the cold had agreed to give way to tepid warmth for just a few hours. I knew we were pushing the edge simply by being above treeline in the pared-down beauty of winter. The howling wind, the sculpted snow, and the barrenness showed me what could happen, but Stacy and I were safe, whole, and healthy. We weren’t teetering on the edge between life and death, fighting hypothermia under a tarp.

Being out in the wintry stillness that day felt intimate rather than menacing, and I wanted to stay there, perfectly poised between connectedness and peril. Instead of returning to the truck, I wanted to build an unobtrusive shelter in the snow at the base of the pines, someplace where I could be warm and out of the wind when the temperatures dropped at night and the moon turned the mountain into a frozen, blue plain. I wanted someplace comfortable to retreat to after wandering around on snow so cold it squeaked underfoot like fingers dragged across a mirror. I wanted a refuge for when a snowstorm snagged on the mountaintops and fat snowflakes plummeted out of the sky for days like stunned sparrows. When the storm ended, I wanted to tunnel from the base of the trees to the surface of the blinding, untouched snow like a marmot waking from hibernation. I wanted to stand in the morning sun and feel the wind tug at me as if I was as much a part of the alpine environment as the hunchbacked, krummholz pines clutching the ridge tops or the snow, frozen, dehydrated, and sculpted into white patterns.