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Taking A Joke On The Trans-La Sal Trail

By Alan Kesselheim

When nine of us meet in Moab in the first week of July for the third annual "50-Year Birthday Hike," it has all the trappings of a classic CF. For those of you not up on your acronyms, C stands for Cluster.
It's 104 degrees. The group has arrived from points as distant as Alaska and Montana. It is a testament to the solidarity of this circle of friends, companions in adventure over several decades, that anyone showed up at all.
Despite having had a year to plan, the three group members who have their 50th birthday this year and who are in charge, didn't decide on a destination until the last week. There was lots of talk over the months, lots of emails zinging around cyberspace, some problems with mountain snowpacks, not a few dead ends, but nothing close to solid until the eve of departure.
And to use the word solid to descibe these preparations for a traverse of the La Sal Mountains, east of Moab, is like saying the government was ready for Hurricane Katrina. The plan is based on a couple of phone conversations, some tenuous personal connections, and a large dose of deadline desperation. We don't yet have maps. We don't have a route description with details. Our vehicle shuttle is one of those friend-of-a-friend things. Trail conditions are decidedly murky.
For several hours we bump around looking at maps in the air-conditioned Visitor Center, then troop over to the Forest Service office to pore over some topo maps with a resident trail expert. Sketchy as the information is, the route seems possible, but as we head for the shuttle connection, there are side conversations in every vehicle on the topic of Plan B options, most of which begin by aborting Plan A altogether.
But Marypat, one of the birthday planners, and the one with the most invested in this scheme, is adamant. "This is what we're doing," she says, once the shuttle arrangements are set. "We're going south to north. We're traversing the range. And we're going to camp tonight on the trailhead road."
With that she walks away from one of the clusters of doubt. No one has enough will or ammunition to fight her, so we make a grocery stop, rearrange gear into shuttle vehicles, and escape town for a campsite somewhere on the southern fringe of the range.
In what turns out to be a prophetic move, we drive right past the turnoff. Once we get straightened around, it's twilight. The camp we settle on is a little clearing with no amenities at a point where the access road becomes decidedly 4-wheel. The grumbling continues. Doubt is palpable. Marypat remains unshakable.
Night falls. We kindle a fire and trip angst is put on hold with libations circulating, birthday gag gifts along the thong theme being opened, and the catch up chatter between friends who go back as far as college, but who don't see each other more than once or twice a year.
Those of us who left our warm layers in the cars in Moab regret the choice as evening temperatures drop through a trap door. Who would have thought that a couple thousand feet would make that much difference?
In the morning, when we go in search of the elusive trailhead, the doubts are back. The road is a high clearance, granny gear affair. The vehicles are crammed with people and equipment. Even at that, a couple of us ride the rear bumpers and hang onto roof racks. We jounce a couple of miles along, trying to make sense of maps that are chronically out of date, often don't have the trails marked at all, and only rarely correlate with each other.
Once again we miss the turn, beetle a mile too far down the track, and have to come back before we find a paperback-sized, bullet-riddled hiker symbol hanging from a single nail on the trunk of a scrub oak about fifty feet off the road. It marks what could either be an ancient road, a cattle track, or a minimally-maintained trail, leading up Pole Canyon toward South Mountain.
Must be it.
"Jesus it's going to be hot," someone mutters. "I hope there's water."
The possibility of turning back, unraveling the trip and doing something else, almost anything else, hovers at the edge of group consciousness like the lingering mood of a bad dream.
The least hesitation on Marypat's part would have tipped the balance, but she hoists her pack and starts off, certainty in her stride.
She is isolated in that certainty, however. In the first few miles there is repeated confusion about whether we're on a cattle track or a trail. The creek that starts out with a reassuring flow becomes intermittent, then dries up altogether. Trail signs appear every so often but then vanish in meadows where you need them most.
Late in the day, up at nearly 11,000 feet on a bench below South Mountain, just when we are gaining a semblance of route confidence, we lose the trail altogether.
There is quite a bit of snow still lingering. Another trail heads downhill through forest into snowdrifts. Our route is supposed to contour through meadows, but all sign of it vanishes. We decide to camp, climb South Mountain, and put off decisions.
From the summit, at nearly 12,000 feet, the compact range rumples the northern skyline. We start putting together the mesas and peaks, the canyons and passes. Our putative route looks laborious, interrupted by dirt roads, and unclear, if we can find it at all. Other options, including turning around and scooting back to the cars before the shuttle drivers retrieve them, are openly bandied about.
Before we descend, Scott points across La Sal Pass to a long couloir of snow extending down from a ridge off of Mt. Peale, the highest peak in the range at just under 13,000'. The snow-filled gully leads more than 1,000 feet up to the ridge. From there we might access the heart of some cool-looking alpine terrain and shortcut our route.
"Looks doable," Scott says, after glassing the gully, "if we can get over there. And if we can coax everyone up it." He is referring to Carol, who is afflicted with a debilitating fear of exposure that could nix the plan, not to mention put unfair pressure on her to overcome that anxiety in the interest of the group.
We sleep on it, and after breakfast, without much discussion, we head downhill, postholing through snow drifts, on a trail that is not marked on the maps, and only briefly discussed in the trail description pamphlet. Yesterday's route has been abandoned. Our new goal is the snow gully. Carol is game, but tense.
Before that we have to leave the trail to bushwhack through forest to Medicine Lake. And once we climb the finger of snow, assuming we can, there is no telling what sort of trackless descent awaits on the far side.
From a talus-strewn opening about a mile into the day, we pause to take compass and GPS bearings for Medicine Lake, and set off cross country through the forest. A porcupine waddles over a hummocky rise ahead of us. But for the soft stirring of aspen leaves, the woods are quiet. We keep going point to point, contouring as best we can, and sure enough, an hour later, Medicine Lake shimmers in the middle of a wildflower meadow. A man and his young son are fishing along the shoreline, their four-wheeler parked nearby.
After a stint of dirt road hiking, an unavoidable aspect of trails through the La Sals, we divert on a faint track at the base of the gully, and clamber up to the snow, where we break. The snow conditions are ideal, soft enough to kick steps, but firm enough to support us. When the group moves on, several of us bracket Carol.
She takes it slow, doesn't look up or down, one step at a time. It is a long climb, but the angle is reasonable, the snow stays good, the sun pours down. Carol does whatever she has to do inside her head to tamp down the urge to panic, step after step, turn after turn. Our boots chunk into the glittering surface in a steady rhythm. The valley drops away.
Carol says little, pauses to catch her breath. We all pause with her. No one, including Carol, understands the labyrinth of experience and emotion that have led her to this burgeoning knot of unreasonable fear. The next breath, the next niche to fit the boot in is all we choose to understand. That is quite enough.
Finally we step off the snow, onto wind-twisted tussocks and firm ground at the top. Carol laughs with relief, then goes off to puke.
But we are here and it is gorgeous. We can look back down to where our other route would have taken us, and it doesn't look like much fun. Here the cool wind whips our clothes, ridges lead off to Mt. Peale and Mt. Tukuhnikivatz across talus and alpine tundra. Better yet, the way down into Gold Basin looks very doable, with the possibility of some glissading thrown in.
By late afternoon the tents are pitched at the edge of a glacial lake on the fringe of treeline. Sheer-walled peaks rise above. Ravens cluster on the high skirts of snow to feed on insects. There is no sign of humanity. Everyone is very grateful to Carol.
More to the point, we are finally hooked into the trip. The talk of Plan Bs has evaporated for good in the glow of this day of elegant route-finding.
Snow stays our ally. We lay over in upper Gold Basin another day to climb Mt. Tuk, kick stepping up a broad snow field to the approach ridge, then up a skinny white rib to the peak. The desert canyon country spreads below, down where it is undoubtedly 100 degrees in the shade. The valleys of the Colorado, the Green, and the Dolores scribe through the sandstone. At our feet, the plateau of Arches National Park, the blight of Moab, the distant whitecaps of other mountain ranges.
It is July 4th weekend and we have the peak-ringed basin, the airy ridges, the sugary snowfields to ourselves.
"If I lived in Moab, I'd be up here every chance I got during the summer," someone comments. "Where is everyone?"
Hiking north the trails become better marked, but the walking is still interrupted by dirt roads, old mining tracks, and high pasture benches full of cow shit. In between, however, are miles of mature aspen groves with bark as sensuous as skin, alpine meadows splashed with columbine and paintbrush, snowmelt creeks frothing down slopes, and the fresh avalanche debris hurled around by the huge snowpack of the previous winter.
The Trans-La Sal Trail, such as it is, climbs and descends a series of ridges, skirting the west side of the high peaks. In the heart of the passage there tend to be signs and trail markers and a good tread, but vigilance is required. Trail maintenance is clearly a victim of agency budget constraints or of bureaucratic triage.
This rendition of the 50-year hike series is infused with Marypat's enthusiasm for peak-bagging. Mt. Peal and Tukuhnikivatz during the Gold Basin layover, and near the end, she takes aim at Mt. Waas, from Bachelor Basin. Getting to Bachelor involves a couple of 1,000-foot climbs and descents across ridges. We are by ourselves.
A constant level of banter and grief-giving infuses these days together. There is plenty of material to mine from, stretching back to college debauchery, former adventures on which desire often got the better of good judgment, old romances, and a running litany of embarrassing moments that the passage of years has only served to embellish.
By the same token, there is an underlying camaraderie that has annealed over decades of friendship, backcountry jobs, bouts of sickness and grief, and a group resume of adventures that reads like a 50-trips-of-a-lifetime story from Outside Magazine. This is a group that has shared weddings, divorces, job crises, health scares, children, and not a few trips from hell covering several continents. A group that can take a joke.
Like the one that presents itself on the morning we descend into Bachelor Basin. There are bear tracks on the trail and a large pile of droppings near the tiny Trans-La Sal sign where an old mining road penetrates the valley. The plan is to make camp, bag Mt. Waas, and then hike out to the cars the next morning. Problem is, there is no water. The drainage is bone dry and we are low enough on fuel that melting snow isn't an option.
A couple of us hike around in search of a seep, but find nothing, until, downhill a ways, I notice a lush patch of green grass. Sure enough, a snow field is melting a trickle into the low spot, enough for us to fill pots and get through the night.
So Marypat gets Mt. Waas after all, another snow-aided climb, up a narrow chute and then kicking across a snow-covered talus slope to the peak. The view is immense. A smudge of fire smoke to the south, the San Juans over in Colorado, Shiprock and the distant float of New Mexico high country. We lounge there in the cool wind above 12,000 feet, empty snow out of our boots, snap pictures of each other.
No one mentions it, but the awareness of collecting another memory - another airy perch shared, another view savored together - is as tangible as the sprawl of country filling the horizon.

We have one last night together, our tents perched below an old mining camp, sleeping with those bachelor ghosts the basin was named for. There is hard frost when we rise at dawn. The deadlines of our other lives loom - kid-sitters who need relief, meetings to attend, all that we took leave of for this uncertain hike. Some of us have to be in Montana before dark.
The meltwater seep has frozen up. The Ibuprofen bottle is passed around. We head down, moving fast, loosening muscles in the chill air.
Halfway out, we come to another unmarked junction. The old mining road we've been following continues, but a significant trail breaks left. No sign anywhere. The maps come out, the one GPS in the group powers up, another discussion ensues.
In some vague way consensus is reached. We go left, downhill, toward the cars we trust will be waiting at the trailhead we trust actually exists.
The group has broken into small clusters, all hiking fast. The conversations are fueled, now, with a kind of urgency. Time is short. There are things that need to be said, gaps yet to fill, and the next 50-year hike is still only a blank space in the future, somewhere yet to be declared on the map of North America.

Writer Alan Kesselheim is the author of six critically acclaimed books, including Threading the Currents, Water and Sky, Going Inside, and Silhouette on a Wide Land. He lives in Montana and visits the Southwest frequently to play.