In early 2002, Mark Flood, decided to take a climbing trip out West in the late summer/fall. It sounded great to me, and a group of us decided to include ourselves in his plans. Everyone had different opinions about where we should all go; A couple of us wanted to go to Colorado and there was some mention, although briefly, of Yosemite. Grover argued for The Cirque of the Towers in the Wind River Range of Wyoming. Grover made a trip there in 1998 and fell in love with the place. He began to send Mark almost daily e-mails about how sweet the trip would be and whenever we would get together, Grover would talk about the kick-ass climbing in Wyoming. He had a guidebook, pictures from his trip, a few magazine articles, and various other props and tools to persuade Mark. Under that kind of crippling peer pressure, Mark broke. In addition to the week that we planned to spend in Colorado, we decided to also spend a week in Wyoming. When my friends decided to visit the Cirque, the extent of my research consisted of looking on the web and reading an article about someone else’s trip in a climbing magazine that off-handedly mentioned Lynn Hill . I’m such a dumbass… I REALLY should have done some more reading!

The Cirque is about 30 miles from The Wind River Reservation, which home to the Eastern Shoshoni and Northern Arapaho tribes. Native American history of the Cirque has been lost to us, and the recent use of the area really begins in the 1930’s when Finis Mitchell and his wife started a fishing camp and guide service in the Big Sandy Opening . The Wind River’s upper peaks and Lizard Head Peak, at the mouth of the Cirque, had been attempted in the 1920’s, but climbers really started coming into the Cirque itself on the trails used to get fisherman to Lonesome Lake and Billy’s Lake. Orrin Bonney, Frank and Notsie Garnick named Pingora , the most prominent peak in the Cirque, in 1940 . It was first climbed in 1962 H. Daley, J. Yensan and is the most prominent tower in the Cirque. Since the 1950’s, the Cirque has accumulated an exceptional number of routes and some of the world’s best climbers have been there: Lynn Hill, Todd Skinner, John Long and others. This popularity does have a downside: Lonesome Lake was the first lake in the Winds to be declared unsafe to drink because of fecal contamination.

It was early June before we got everyone involved schedules work out. I couldn’t make the first week of the trip (Colorado) due to my crazy work schedule and because of school Ross Brown wouldn’t be able to stay for the Wyoming leg of the trip. We made plans for Ross to fly out of the Denver airport Friday August 9th at 8:00 PM and for me to fly in the same night around 10:00 PM. Mark, Ross, Grover and David Vasquez left for Colorado on Friday August 2nd. Before they left, Ross came by the house and took my rack , helmet, pack shovel, camp chair and trekking poles. That way, I wouldn’t have to carry that stuff on the plane and they would have the extra gear if they needed it in Colorado.

They took Grover’s Jeep and David’s Chevy Blazer. The trip could have been done with just one vehicle, but Grover had to meet his girlfriend on the West Coast after the Wyoming leg of the trip. I wasn’t real crazy about the idea of having to drive back with David. A buddy and I took a trip to The Red River Gorge in Kentucky with David during the 2002 Memorial Day Weekend. He scared the SHIT out of us: He fell asleep behind the wheel, cut people off left and right, a rig ended up in the median after he cut it off on the entrance to an exit-ramp and he insisted on going 40 miles an hour over the speed limit on the Interstate, on dirt roads, and through ninety-degree mountain turns with little or no guard rail. I don’t know if it was the expectation of a great trip or denial, but some how I put David’s driving out of my mind and continued to make my lists and plans for the trip.

I left work on Friday the 9th and had a buddy drop me off at the airport. After an uneventful flight, I met Mark at the baggage claim area of the Denver airport. We hooked up with David and Grover outside. They had a run-in with a parking Nazi and had to circle a few times before Grover swooped in just long enough for me to throw my gear in the back of his Jeep and barely get my ass on the seat before he roared off. We drove into Denver and met a friend who lives there at a bar called The Funky Buddha. We talked, made fun of one another, ate a couple of appetizers, had a beer and said our good-byes. From there, we drove six hours northwest through the night onto the desolate Wyoming high-planes and finally had to stop in Rocksprings to catch a couple hours of sleep in a truck stop parking lot.

After waking up, we drove north to Pinedale. At the ranger station there, we learned that we had gone about 30 miles past the last turn off for the Big Sandy Trail Head. We gassed up and turned around. After finding the turn off, we drove on dirt and gravel roads for about 45 miles and parked at the very feet of the Rocky Mountains. At that point, we were about three hours behind schedule. Grover and I talked about the hike in while dodging RVs on the gravel road. Having flown in the day before, I knew that my body wasn’t acclimated to the altitude. The parking area was 9,500 feet above sea level and I live about 150 feet above sea level. Everyone else had been above 6,000 feet for 8 days and their bodies were starting to deal with the limited amount of available oxygen. I told Grover that it would be a beast, but I thought that I could make the 12-mile hike into the Cirque before dark. I had been running and biking almost nonstop for three months to get my lungs in shape for the trip. I just knew that I could do it!

The parking area was filled with cars and trucks from all over the West. Our first thought was that the trail and the Cirque were going to be just overrun with people. Well, fuck the crowds, after traveling 1,450 miles we were going to climb! We pulled our gear out, sorted it, packed WAY too much shit, and started our walk to the trail head where we signed in and had two hikers on their way out take a picture of us. The thing that really grabs you when you look at the picture is the size of everyone’s packs: they were stuffed and had various pieces of gear; food, pots and pans, ropes, etc… hanging off them. None of us was carrying less than 75 pounds. I had about 85 pounds on my back and I was hurting before we got completely across the parking area.

Taken just as we began the hike in to the Cirque.

The first leg of our trail took us to Big Sandy Lake, six miles from the trailhead. The trail rose gently (80 feet per mile) uphill the whole way to the lake, but I started lagging behind after the first mile and a half. Mark would wait for me to catch up every so often. David and Grover made it to the lake about five minutes before we did and sat down on a large sunken boulder to rest. The first thing I did after taking off my pack was take off my boots and take care of the blisters on my heels and toes. They were huge. Grover and I, for some unknown masochistic reason, decided to break in new boots on the hike in. As we all sat on the rock passing a bag of peanut M&Ms, craisins, and banana chips around, Grover and I taped our feet and putt on fresh socks. That tape stayed on for the entire eight days that I was in the Wind River Range because I was afraid to see what my feet looked like beneath it. We passed some people and a few packhorse trains on the trail to Big Sandy Lake, both coming and going, but not the amount that we had imagined. After the lake, we saw very few people on the trail. Which was great because that meant that relatively few people outside our party saw just how big of a pussy I was on the trail.

During the planning stages, a buddy that had been into the area told us about an alternate climbers trail into the Cirque that would keep us from having to use Jackass Pass , which is very steep, painful, and right at the end of the hike. We got a cryptic description of how to find this “easy” trail: “to the left after the second lake and go through a boulder field “ sort of thing. David, being David, got ahead of the rest of us and took an unknown trail near Arrowhead Lake. We took a left after what we thought was the second lake and walked right into a boulder field. It all looked right, but it was oh so wrong. This little “short cut” took us over house-sized boulders with 20-foot drops between them. Apparently, this was not the trail that we should have taken. Hopping five feet across a void with an 85-pound pack is not an easy or pleasant thing to do. We wasted an hour and tempers flared while we were amongst the boulders. It was at this point that I threw up for the first time. It was a combination of altitude, exhaustion, and a belly-full of water and Trail Mix. I got a regurgitated half-digested chocolate peanut M&M lodged in my nose for a little while during the whole retched process. It was, at least, a momentary diversion from the hell of hopping boulders.

David had been at the end of the lake waiting on us for about thirty minutes. After linking up again, we took a trail that went straight up about 125 feet. At the top, in a small meadow, everyone else sat down to catch their breath. I flopped face first in the grass, slithered out of my pack and downed the last of my water. I took my pulse and it was running at about 260 beats a minute. God, I was hurting! From this meadow, we found the correct shortcut and got to hop some more boulders before we climbed another 75 feet straight up, where I puked again, and at the crest of the hill we crossed over the Continental Divide, which was at 10,700 feet above sea level, into the Cirque of the Towers. That meant that we had climbed roughly 1,200 vertical feet, while already at altitude, with heavy packs on without dying.

After a little downhill hike/stumble, we set up camp in the first semi-flat semi-grassy spot that we came to. I ate a small quick dinner and fell into a coma-like sleep. The wind howled that night, so I’m told, and Grover decided that morning that we should move camp to a better location. He and Mark went looking for a site while I found running water and cooked my breakfast. During our entire stay in the Cirque we drew our water from a fast moving, cold, clear stream that emptied into Lonesome Lake. While it looked as if you just needed to put your mouth in the stream and drink your fill, none of us dared; we filtered all our water with hand pump filters. Getting the shits from contaminated water twelve miles into the wilderness would have really sucked! Once a day we would all grab every available container and sit by the stream or on a large fat boulder in mid-stream, pumping water and teasing each other for thirty minutes or so.

Second Campsite

There are two year-round ice formations on the walls of the Cirque, three deep cold lakes, and a large amount of snowmelt every year. All of this water gives the Cirque its wonderful emerald green wash of color. There is short meadow grass everywhere, thorn-less waist –high thickets populating the spaces between boulders and stands of trees here and there. The trees are all pine and don’t exactly grow tall: the high winds, ice and snow keeps them fairly short. The ground in the Cirque is spongy everywhere you step except for the most traveled trails. In and around the main stream, there are little clear pools that have dear and elk prints at their edge. It gives one a sense of what an ice age summer was like.

Grover and Mark found a site to the southeast and we hiked about a quarter of a mile into some trees in the shadow of Mt. Mitchell . Our new camp site was SWEET: flat, soft, with trees for shade and a wind-break, and it had a fantastic view of Lonesome lake, Pingora, Wolf’s Head and Texas Pass. The realization that it was completely across the valley from absolutely everything that we wanted to climb didn’t occur to us until that afternoon when we hiked to our first route of the trip. Grover thought it would be a good idea if we checked out the rappel route for the big climb we had planned for the next day. We climbed three of the four pitches before daylight started to fade. We rapped off, hiked back to camp, and I ate one of the Chinese food backpacking dinners I bought. We went to sleep under a blue/black sky lit by an uncountable number of gleaming stars. The Big Dipper came up right over Pingora. The night sky was so beautiful and it is what I now miss most about the Cirque.

Views of Lonesome Lake and Mountains from camp.

Below is Flood’s account in itallics of our first full day of climbing and our most epic route of the trip with a few comments of my own in the middle of his account thrown in for clarity:

“Monday we hit the trail at 4:00AM for the Northeast Face of Pingora---a 10 pitch - 1800 foot free face classic . We started climbing at 6:30 or 7:00. By the time I finished the first short slabby pitch, we had a group of 5 (a - man team and a - man team) and a guide with a client waiting on us---a total of 11 people counting our 2 groups of 2. We let a group of three cut in front of our other group and we shared belay stations with them most the way up the climb. The guide and his client blew past us by the 4th pitch.”

Route map of Pingora's North East face.

David and I partnered up. I led the first pitch and because there were people stacking up below us, I wasn’t placing a lot of protection. The route led up a slightly laid-back dihedral . I was about twenty feet above my last piece of gear and barely holding onto a finger crack when the guide moved from the face to the left into the crack about two feet under me. If I had fallen, I would have probably really hurt myself and killed him. I put in a sketchy cam and just kept moving up for another 60 feet with the thought of someone dying rolling around in my head. It really screwed with my concentration! David led the next pitch and I followed. When it was time for me to lead again, I pussed out and asked him to lead the rest of the route because I was getting jumpy. This was completely unfair to David and I am ashamed of myself, even now, just thinking about it.

Bad weather moving in while we were still on route.

Matt looking out into the Cirque as foul weather rolled in.

“He [the guide] was moving---30 to 40 feet between protection at times and running way out on hard thin slabs to get by the cluster of people on route. It was fantastic to watch someone that seemed so comfortable on the wall. We let the group of three pass us on about the 5 pitch so that we would climb with our other 2 guys. A storm moved in on us about the same time. The cloud cover turned it into a full whiteout condition . Most the time you could not see your belayer 30 feet below you. The 2-man team from the group of 5 started talking about bailing. Talley persuaded them not [to] because of the traversing nature of the route. If they started rapping, they would have been off route with no way to go up if there ropes got hung---a good potential for them getting stranded and having to spend the night on the wall waiting for outside help. David and Talley started pulling ropes for them on the last 4 pitched of the route ---they were moving too slow on [their] own. The last 2 or 3 pitches it snowed on us, making for a memorable climb. Thank God we had scouted the rap lines the day before. It was somewhere between 7:30 and 8:30 when we summited.”

The two climbers we hauled up were great guys and they were easily strong enough to do the route, but the foul weather, time on the route and negative thoughts about their ability to finish the climb really affected them. I’m sure the thought of being stuck with me cuddling on a narrow ledge overnight didn’t help their state of mind either. One would think that I had some subconscious need to show perfect strangers my private parts. Every time I get on a multi-pitch route with people I don’t know, my body chooses the very worst possible moment to decide that it needs to expel excess fluids. It happened in Switzerland and again in Wyoming. I had to pee twice on route, both times on a small pencil ledge. Our new friends got the full view of my wears. When all six of us got to the summit of Pingora, we had a mini party. Jeremy, the older of the two, started passing out all his food, we coiled the ropes, took a couple of pictures and started down.

On the false summit of Pingora.

“We made the 3 raps to the shoulder and started the slow scramble down. The group we helped out didn't have a clue where the raps were, and their buddies had abandoned them ---they would have been screwed. The rest of their group came to the base when they saw our headlights coming down. They [fed] us like kings as we sorted the gear---it was their last night in the cirque and they were eager to lighten their packs for the walkout. We waddled off towards our camp at 12:00ish, only to get turned around in the valley. We bived until around 3:00 and then David got motivated by the cold and took off on his [own].”

After walking around almost blindly for an hour, we pulled out the space blankets and huddled together on a large flat rock. We uncoiled the ropes to give us some insulation to lie on and I put my sandaled feet into my pack to keep them warm. Mark’s digestive system was way out of whack and he had been having terrible loud rotten gas every few minutes since the Colorado leg of the trip. David had gotten up and it was so cold that we decided we would wait until the sun came up to go look for his frozen corpse. We were laying chest-to-back, trying to share all available warmth. Mark was in the middle and Grover was cuddled up to his back. Mark cracked a huge, foul, rank one off just millimeters from Grover’s flesh. He giggled a little bit and said, “ The methane will certainly warm things up for him.” Poor Grover, he had to suffer the indignity of spooning with another man and dealing with a foul stench that kept welling up from beneath his thin plastic blanket.

“By dumb luck David found camp and called us in. We were about 150 to 200 yards from the tents. I say dumb luck since the cloud cover was so think that we had no bearing. It's lucky he didn't have problems---according to Talley's thermometer, the lows for the week varied between 28 and 35. He put himself in a bad way by venturing out on his own.”

The next day, we slept late and ate breakfast twice. Both of my breakfasts consisted of Chinese food. I really do love Chinese food, so when it came time to buy food for the trip, I thought that I might as well eat something that I enjoy. It was great the first two days! After that, my taste for Kung Pao Chicken started to falter. By Saturday morning I was fantasizing about smacking the lady at Campmor who took my order. She should have known better than to sell nine days worth of Chinese to one short hairy white man! Anyway, we sat around after breakfast that morning, making notes in our journals, enjoying the azure-blue cloud-free sky, feeling the warmth of the sun and the crisp, fresh mountain air. David was laid out on a rock, shirtless, listening to techno on his Walkman. He humped a Walkman, extra batteries and a HUGE full CD case into the Cirque because he just couldn’t possibly live without techno. His fondness for his music was the source of constant ribbing and jokes from the rest of us. He took them all well.

Around lunch, a hiker/fisherman and his son walked up to our camp and we talked about the Cirque and surrounding areas for a while. His name was Doug Olsen and his son, Nate, was 12. Doug was originally from Utah and had moved to Pinedale in the mid-eighties so that he could be closer to the mountains he loved. He makes about three week-plus trips a year into the Wind River Range. Doug has been taking Nate along on these trips since before Nate could walk, and was an encyclopedia of information about the area. During the conversation, it became apparent that Nate was interested in our gear. Mark went over how the nuts and cams worked and we found a few cracks in some of the small boulders to show him how the gear was actually set. There was a large boulder on one side of camp that we had played on earlier that morning. Nate wanted to give it a try. I had the smallest feet, so I gave him my shoes. He was a natural! Mark spotted him and showed him how to hold on to the rock and move. I took a few pictures that I sent to Nate and his dad after we got home. Doug and Nate set up camp about 40 yards downhill from us and we shared dinner with them for the next two nights .

A rest day for Mark

Mark spotting Nate on the boulder near camp.

There is a route in the Cirque called Wolf’s Head that’s a half-day climb, but not a too-terribly difficult one. Getting off the route is another matter. There is a lot of exposure, the belay anchors are sketchy in places and there have been more people killed getting off of the route than have died actually climbing it. I was reluctant to get on Wolf’s Head, but Grover finally talked me into it. We were going to get up at 4:00AM the next morning and tackle it. Instead, we all overslept. After breakfast we trekked across the valley and David and I did the South Buttress Route of Pingora again while Mark and Grover got on East Ledges and played on the easy cracks and big ledges. As we were gearing up to take the two different routes, I looked over and Grover was staring off into space. I asked what was going on and he mentioned something about wanting a slingshot. Confused, I made him elaborate: On the side of Pingora and all over the Cirque, there are the big bugs that fly off the rock face about five feet, make a loud high-pitched metallic buzzing sound, and then fly right back to the rock like they are afraid of falling. Apparently the bugs were really working Grover’s nerves and he wanted a slingshot to fire a couple of them out into space and see if they could really fly. I eventually stopped laughing and David and I decided to alternate leads. My head was screwed back on straight so I led the first pitch and linked two pitches together and by the time I got to a belay ledge, I only had two cams, four nuts, a tri-cam and one hex left. David had torn down his belay station as I was nearing the end of the rope. To give me some extra rope length, he had to climb up about seven feet so that I had enough slack to get the new belay rigged. We sat at the uppermost rap point for two hours waiting on Mark and Grover. They were having a ball on their route while we sat in the high altitude sun and burned to a crisp. My toes broiled inside my black rubber climbing shoes and my nose, neck, wrists and ankles (the only exposed skin) turned beet red. As we cooked off, David and I sat on the belay ledge and just talked about school, girls, plans, climbing, ect… We wrapped off and met Nate and Doug in the Valley. They had watched us through binoculars on and off during the day and Nate wanted to meet us on the trail back to camp. On the way back, Doug took a picture of all four of us in front of the largest waterfall in the Cirque.

Everyone at the waterfall

We missed the alarm again thenext morning and David and I decided to get on Pingora’s East Face, Right Side Cracks. We had seen some climbers on it the day before and decided to give it a try. While crossing the Cirque, we found bear prints in a small dried-up pool. I stood next to one and the track was about an inch longer and 5 inches wider than my boot. It was the first bear sign we had seen on the trip and it wasn't exactly a welcome sight. There was a group of three at the start of the route when we got there: two older guys (50+) and a young girl (19). The girl turned out to be one of the guys daughter and went to UCCS in Colorado Springs. She lived about a block from where my apartment was when I lived in The Springs. Small world… We mentioned at some point that we had been on the Northeast Face Route a couple of days before. The two gentlemen shook their heads in a gentle fatherly manor and said that they had been praying for us. Some of the climbers in the valley had seen the weather roll in on us and were mounting a nighttime rescue when they saw our headlamps coming off the mountain. While we were climbing, Mark and Grover took Nate to a small rock face near Lonesome Lake and let him climb a few routes on top rope. Our route was pretty straightforward. We climbed a very obvious crack system, switching leads for five pitches and had a long slabby pitch to finish it off. About 4 pitches into it, Doug cracked on to the walkie-talkie and said goodbye. He and Nate were headed home. He thanked us for our company and told us that we always had a place to stay in Wyoming. Getting off the route wasn’t exactly straightforward. The decent wasn’t at all protected and there were all kinds of crazy exposure. The guidebook didn’t mention anything about the REALLY shitty descent. When we got back to camp, I took out my photocopied page and pissed on it. All the route descriptions in the book were somewhat vague on purpose. The guide’s author said it was done to “maintain a sense of adventure ”. Fucker.

After Mark and Grover climbed with Nate, they crossed the valley to scope out the approach to Wolf's Head and went over New York Pass to the north side of Pingora. They wondered back into camp that afternoon looking beat. They had walked about five miles round trip, climbed about 1300 feet during the hike and at one point had surfed down a scree field. In one of the high passes they found what looked to be fresh bear droppings (again, not a good thing).

Mark made the group meal that night: bean and chicken burritos. They were great, but none of us, especially Mark, needed any more flatulence fuel. Everyone but me turned in shortly after the meal because they planned to get an early start on Wolf's Head. There was no way in Hell that I was doing the route. We had been talking to some other climbers who’d been on it recently and they said the rappel was even rougher than advertised. So, that night I stayed up to write in my climbing journal. I was sitting in my camp chair on the edge of our clearing writing by my headlamp when I heard a snort right in front of me. I almost shit my pants! I just knew that it was a bear. I looked up and saw a cow elk not ten feet from me. I tried to wake everyone up, but the elk took off before anyone could get out of the tents. The stars overhead, the bear signs and the nervous elk really made me aware that we were in a place that, despite our presence, was truly still wild.

At this point, I feel it is my duty to my friends and myself to discuss Mark Flood’s multiple and severe gastrointestinal problems during our trip. Mark is use to a diet of canned tuna fish, pop tarts, and eggs. I don’t know how he survives on that noxious mix, but he does and he gets stronger every time we climb with him. I was told after the first day or so in Colorado, Mark started having problems with flatulence. It got progressively worse as the days wore on. In the Cirque, we identified the source of his problem. He was eating about five Clif bars and 3 cups of oatmeal a day. His system was not used to all that grain and lashed out at those around him. Every morning, Mark would visit the cat hole and he and Grover would discuss volume, color, content and consistency of what was deposited there. Below is a quote taken from an e-mail that Grover sent out after we returned home:

“…In fact his stench was so extreme that it did permeate the fabric of David’s tent then mixed with the air and ether and found its way to mine own nostrils some two leagues in distance which was in a zippered tent and sleeping bag…”

Poor David ran to the tent every night so that he could be asleep before Mark crawled in and began to sound off. David wrote in another e-mail ,

“…I still have heart murmurs from the night Mark gassed me and the two unfortunate souls in the other tent. It was so bad that I know that my heart actually stopped for a brief period so my lungs would not inhale the toxins…”

While it may seem that I am dwelling far too long on this subject, trust me when I say that I’m not. You see, Mark knew the source of his troubles and he didn’t care. He denied all of our multiple offers of non-grainy food, I believe, so that he could punish us just a little more each day for some unknown transgression committed against him.

Either Mark or David, confused Mountain and Central time the next morning, so everyone but me got up about three-thirty and headed for Wolf's Head. They ended up biving at the start of the route for a couple of hours, until the sun came up. I slept until about 8:00AM and had a nice hot leisurely breakfast. About 8:30 I got on the walkie-talkie to check on my buds. They were well on their way up the route and expected to be back at camp around 2:00 that afternoon. I boiled a pot of water, washed my wool socks, and found a nice soft grassy spot beside the boulder we had scrambled on with Nate. I had picked up a book entitled Wind River Trails at the ranger station in Pinedale. I read it and napped for most of the morning, moving around the boulder to follow the shade. About 4:00PM Mark radioed that they had started their descent and would be in camp shortly: they rolled in about 7:00. I had water boiling for them and the food out because I knew that they would be spent. After guzzling down a few bites, Mark started talking about the descent. David looked at me very seriously and said: “Man, it was crazy exposed. You would have hated it!” Marks summary of the climb was:

“Friday 8/15 we left camp at 3:30 for Wolf's Head---a 9 pitch climb along a ridge. We bived for a couple hours at the base of the route until the sun came up and then we simo-climbed the 4th class and the first pitch to the saddle. We got the first 3 -230 foot pitches done before 2 groups of old hard men from Yosemite caught [up to] us. The pup of the group was over 45 and the oldest was [probably] near 60. They hit the saddle at 9:00 and simoclimbed the first 700 feet in one pitch. We followed behind them for the next couple pitches, but they soon blew us away. We summited near 4:00 and spent a couple hours working on the decent. It was pretty tricky and involved a lot of 4th class scrambling over large exposed drops (a couple hundred feet). It was very intense. It was a grand climb that I would highly recommend. The first 3 pitch may go at 5.5, but the exposure was frightening---in some places a 2 foot wide slab with a 700 hundred foot drop on either side. It's kind of wild to think that we climbed a climb were we had one hand on each side of the continentally divide. I manage to draw the traversing leads near the top. I linked up the first 2 traversing pitches---again a full 230-foot pitch. It was really wild, exposed climbing with nothing below you for several hundred feet.”

Grover taping his hands the night before.

We packed up some Saturday night, ate a HUGE meal so we wouldn’t have to carry food out and went to sleep smelling incredibly ripe! We hadn’t showered for at least nine days. The fumes welling up from our campsite were, I’m sure, overpowering. Instead of telling one another goodnight, Grover and I would apologize repeatedly to each other for smelling so foul. We woke up about 6:00AM, made our last cat hole deposit, covered it up, and packed up camp. Although my pack was a bit lighter, it was still a beast. The trail back to the parking area was fairly uneventful and we made the trip in about 5 hours. We threw the packs in the vehicles and took off towards civilization. Mark and David were behind Grover and I and David almost went off the road a couple of times. Grover commented that he would like to take David to the hospital ICU (Grover is a medical student) and show him the first-hand results of poor and inattentive driving. It took us about an hour to get to Boulder, which consisted of a few ranch houses, some cows, and a post office/store/pool hall/bar/restaurant all under one roof. We sat in the restaurant area and ordered huge bacon cheeseburgers. Our stomachs were so small from a week of limited portions that no one was able to finish their meal. After eating, we said good-bye to Grover, who headed off to a motel and cable TV, and then on to Portland, OR. David, Flood, and I drove into Pinedale and went straight to the showers at the local campground. It took each of us about 30 minutes to wash off all of the accumulated funk and grime. After I put on fresh socks and underwear, I was a new man. We left Pinedale and spent the next 22 hours scared, nervous and pissed off: David insisted on through-driving to Little Rock, almost killing us twice in Denver. The high point of the trek home was at a rest stop somewhere in Oklahoma around 4:00 in the morning when Mark and I almost killed David. Scary…

I have some regrets about the trip, but it was an epic journey filled with laughter, fear, excitement, hardship, splendor, exquisite scenery, unimaginable foul odor and good friends I will never forget. Grover’s dry sense of humor made all of the pain and soreness bearable. He did a little skit with an imaginary pile of Oreo cookies that had me and David crying! He would stack up the pile of them, square it off side to side and front to back, hold the bottom of the pile and cram it into his mouth rocking it from side to side in an attempt to shove it all in. His eyes would bug out, his teeth would stick out, and he would make a sound that was amazingly like a greedy piglet at a feed trough. I swear that I almost pissed myself the first time he did it! David was our rope gun during the trip. He ate up every route we were on and wanted more as we hiked out of the Cirque. Mark’s burrito dinner was absolutely the best meal of the trip. You could hear his good ol' boy laugh for a quarter mile every time Grover let a one-liner fly and it was Mark who really made the whole trip happen. A few weeks after I returned home, I began to look on the web for other peoples’ tales of trips into the Cirque, so I could decide on a format for my own. What I found was story after story about “…and we almost died…”, “the weather turned real bad real fast…” and “…he got sooo sick…” Apparently, our trip was mild and uneventful by those standards. Even after finding out all of this, I plan to make more trips into the Cirque, taking with me the knowledge I gained on this one. As soon as my son is old enough, I would like to take him hiking and fishing in the Winds.

One year later…

Exactly one year ago, I was sitting in the middle of a high alpine meadow breathing crisp air, enjoying the high altitude sun, and laughing with three dear friends. We hiked into the Cirque of the Towers in the Wind River Range of Wyoming for eight days of climbing. It was an epic trip that I will remember for all of my days: Grover’s pantomime about eating Oreos, Nate and Doug, the crazy heavy packs, David’s CD collection, Mark’s burrito feast par excellence, one huge cat hole, sleeping on a cold wind ravaged rock, puking peanut M&Ms, Mark’s infectious laugh, the night sky, the spongy ground, Pingora, the cold clear stream that we pumped water at everyday…

Last Thursday night I went by Borders Bookstore and picked up copies of the August issues of Backpacker and Climbing. I opened them up and thumbed through them a bit. Backpacker had an article on hiking to the Cirque and Climbing had a picture of the waterfall in the Cirque that slapped me in the face: The same waterfall that we all posed in front of, arm and arm, while Doug took our picture. With all this nostalgia rolling around in my head, I teared up and had to leave the store for fear of some hottie catching me crying like a little bitch. I miss my friends very much! In the span of a year we have all made drastic moves; David is serving proudly in Iraq, Mark is in Golden, Colorado, I’m in Southern California, and Grover in is Klamath Falls, Oregon. I truly hope that each of them remembers our time in the Cirque as fondly as I do. The best trips are the ones where everyone comes home safe and all are left with a sense of unfinished business so strong that each of the participants longs to return to that time and place.