To whit: three years of waiting.
Three years of looking at one line.
Three couloirs connected by lateral bands descending 3000ft or so on the northwest face of Mt.
Allen in the Many Glacier area of Glacier National Park, Montana.
In that time since I first spotted this option, I’ve learned.
My abilities as a ski mountaineer have grown.
Maybe the stars will align.
Once home, I scrambled to find a buddy with some free time.
Carl was down to make it happen.
We’d just need the weather to cooperate.
Instead it gave us this forecast:
Carl summed it up with one adjective: “Western.”
Then Tuesday came and went, seeming not that bad via the webcams.
Maybe we’d get kind of a window.
It dried up for a while, then rained on the tent as we were going to sleep.
Not too encouraging, but with three years of waiting, I was ready to make this thing happen.
4am was our wakeup.
By 5:30, we were on the trail.
She hardly seemed to care, and kept coming towards us.
So we backed up, eventually crossing a bridge.
The bears followed us across, then split off into the woods.
They, like us, didn’t feel like getting wet on an overcast morning.
Four miles of trail went past before we dodged east and into waist high thickets of shrubberies.
Though low, the cloud ceiling had been going steadily uphill all day.
Maybe we’d get clear weather for the summit and descent.
The fog, and the way that the line sidestepped twice made it hard to tell.
Cracks I couldn’t see from the photo a few days previous were now visible, but seemed manageable.
We talked it over, and agreed that we felt fine.
I would have guessed the middle sections would have been extra steep, hence bringing our ice tools.
The angle never went past 40 degrees, even in the steepest choke.
As we neared the top, the fog swallowed us again.
Pockets in the clouds would open for a few minutes, then envelope us back into the murk.
Hence why I don’t have a summit shot.
Instead, we started skiing.
Even once on the apron, the snow remained sticky.
We made a few wider turns, gave some high fives, and skied back down to our shoes.
From there, it was all about linking together patches of snow.
It didn’t seem to matter very much to Carl.
At some point, my skis went back on my pack.
Then both of us went back into the thickets, as it started to rain.
The walk out was muddy, rainy, and pretty quiet compared to our chatter on the trip in.
On the other, the wet snow made for mediocre turns.
Perhaps it’s nitpicky to not be entirely stoked, but we were both hoping for better snow conditions.
At least it wasn’t dropping lightening bolts like the forecast suggested.
Likely, the line is melted out for this year.
And I can’t help thinking that maybe next spring, it will fill in again.
But arguing over that isn’t the most interesting to me.
Here’s to not just first descents, but lines that are worthy of second and third ones too.
It was an honor to be out there with him.
