Teton Tales

Norm Larsonwrote:

I moved to the Tetons in 1975. By 1977-8 I was working as a guide for a guy named Vince Lee doing adventurous climbing trips in the Tetons and Wind River mountains for his outfit High Country West. He had a permit for the Winds and used Exum’s permit for Teton climbs.  He was a great mentor and showed me many tricks of guiding novices and more experienced clients up mountaineering objectives. Vince died recently and I miss him.

Starting in 1979 or so I started working for Bill Thompson and Jackson Hole Mountain Guides. It was a great scene to be part of back then. We had our base at Teton Village, lived in tent cabins, accessed our class areas via tram, and guided routes in the Tetons and Winds. Life was great.

After almost a decade of that,  guiding in the Tetons was losing its sparkle for me so I continued to guide more part time in the Tetons but travelled to the greater ranges with some of my best clients. Life was even better.

One of my last guiding trips on the Grand was very memorable. An elderly client came in to the office having always wanted to climb the Grand and figured it was now or never for him. Our office manager Ken told him it might be possible but he would need to have a guide plus an assistant to go with JHMG. Somehow I was the guide picked and Ken would be my assistant.
We made it up to high camp very very slowly and things were going kind of OK but painfully slow.
  Always a believer in early starts I was up at 3:30 forcing instant oatmeal and tea down the clients gullet. Off we went to climb the upper Exum. It seemed many hours later when we got to Wallstreet and the real start of the route. I was concerned at how slow we were going but the client insisted he could continue. Up we went. The weather was stable and clear with no wind. Things were going kind of OK until I was halfway up the “V” pitch when Ken yelled up. “Norm, you know what this asshole just said?” Ken was from Texas and never quietly mannered. “He says he wants us to untie from you and he wants to go down with me.” “He says I can have all the money and that you will be fine alone!” Wow! That was a first.

Somehow we got him up the pitch and I told him if we just go a bit more we can get to the rappel and call it a day. But when he sees the summit he decides he wants to go to the top. OK what the hell I haven’t lost a client yet. off to the top. When we finally arrive there are two other parties there including two Russian guys who just climbed the complete North Face and are toasting it with vodka. My client asks everyone to be quiet as he wants to thank god for getting him up the Grand. Ken hears this and yells “God my ass Norm was pulling and I was pushing” which totally cracks all of us up on the summit. The Russians offer Ken and I sip of their vodka. We accept. 

The descent was endless but we finally got him down at midnight.

I think I only guided the Grand a couple of times after that and quit Teton guiding for good. Life got even better.

Great story Norm. Ah, the guide's life--glad I never experienced it!!! But your your description of the summit ' dedication' resonates with me from my 'other'  ( professional) life. I once had a client very loudly and ostentatiously get on his knees and 'thank God' in front of the departing jury who had just found him not guilty of a serious crime ( appropriately I believe, though he was far from fault-free in the overall situation). He never once thanked me!!!!!

Also, great pictures of that route on Whistler--just shows that really impressive climbs can be accomplished on the 'lesser' Teton peaks. Great job!!!!

Nick Goldsmithwrote:

Awesome! where is Mt Wister? 

Jabroni McChufferson wrote:

Any picture overlay of the face in condition?

Sorry no, but the newest edition of the Jackson/Ortenberger Teton Guidebook has that route description and photo overlay in it.

Looks really impressive. 

I was hoping to get more stories from you guys.. 

that's some rather chilly water... 

The classic Teton view, Mt Owen is my favorite Teton peak.

Tell us another Teton story, Norm. I bet you have some good ones!

Norm Larsonwrote:

The classic Teton view, Mt Owen is my favorite Teton peak.

Yep!  It was always looming over the house.  It's a good way to get away from all the riff raff on the Grand.

Norm Larsonwrote:

The classic Teton view, Mt Owen is my favorite Teton peak.

This pic appears to have been taken in late spring when the roads have just been cleared. It's still very winter like up there.

I have many Teton Tales, some involve Ranger Danger. Let's start with one of those. 

Spring 1989. I was working for Patagonia in Bozeman and my two great friends from our hometown of Cody, WY were attending college in Missoula. We had a plan to climb the "Run Don't Walk" on Mt. Owen as soon as the roads from the north were cleared. Jim and Ric picked me up in Bozeman and we headed south thru YNP. It was dark by the time we entered GTNP and Jim was on a mission to get the driving behind us. We were within 12 miles of our planned bivy at Jenny Lake when we got pulled over for speeding. The Ranger lectured us about speeding in the dark with elk, bison and moose on the roads. He commented on the WY tags on the car and then asked what we were headed to climb this time of year. He let us continue with no paperwork involved. After continuing on, Ric pointed out the bag of weed and pipe sitting on the dash in clear sight.

Next morning we post holed around the Lake and bivied below the NE face at the entrance to the RDW. As we had climbed the Black Ice several years before and done many FA's in the Southfork, It was a pretty uneventful ascent. We had plans to summit, but I was injured by icefall near the top of the route so we bailed down the NE snowfields.  

1956. Two inexperienced friends and I follow the guidebook to the summit of the Grand. Or we thought until we looked over the summit blocks to the Grand off to the north. Here I sit atop the Middle Teton contemplating how we could have gone so wrong. If I had only stuck with boulders this would not have happened.

John , that is hilarious. I did the exact same thing. As very young climbers in 1974 my partner and I somehow ( we may have been smoking something!) went up the wrong fork of Garnet in the dark of late evening and bivied at the saddle. Got up in the morning and found most every pitch of the Exum ridge on the Middle Teton with our noses buried in the Ortenburger guidebook. Near the top was another party coming up the SW couloir. They asked us which route we were on and we said the Exum. They said “we thought that was on the Grand?” When we got to the top we found out our mistake.

Wonder how many times that has happened?

Edit: Yes Al I did tell Leigh about it. He thought it was pretty funny.I had many great conversations with Leigh.

 His guidebook descriptions actually had too much detail. It felt like if your nose wasn’t buried in it you were going to miss the most important pitch. The opposite was what was really the case.

I learned a lot from that lesson on the Middle. Think for yourself when routefinding!

Great stories---John and Norm!!!! Did either of you ever tell your story to Ortenburger---he was so careful to make his route descriptions very precise? If so, what was his response?

Now I don't feel so bad about not finding the route the first time I tried following Ortenbergers guide up Tweewinot

To cut him some slack, Ortenburger faced a daunting task in writing the Teton guidebook.  Teton rock is often jumbled and amorphous, lacking in the kind of clear-cut geometric features that are typical of granite.  And Ortenburger had to rely on the wood-cut drawings of Eldon Dye, which were lovely works of art but of only the most general help in figuring out where a route went. I think Ortenburger did his best to confront these issues by writing precise descriptions, but these were sometimes too detailed and forced the party to keep their noses in the guidebook rather than evaluating the terrain.

The result was that a lot of parties got lost. The trick was to get so lost that you ended up with a guidebook entry for a "variation," thereby covering your routefinding incompetence with a thin veneer of purported adventuring.  I'm not going to claim to be a master of this bumbling art, but I have had some moments of glory.  One of them was in 1962 on an outing with friends from the University of Chicago.  We were not total novices but had not become fully experienced either.  We set out from the Platforms early one fine morning to do the East Ridge of Nez Perce. What we ended up doing should have been called WareDaFugawee but instead is named the East Hourglass Ridge. I don't think we were ever on any part of the East Ridge route, but we soldiered on with determination if not alacrity, using ever more fanciful interpretations of the guidebook text in a series of vain attempts to make the terrain we were on fit the descriptions we were reading.  In spite of glaring mismatches, we persisted in believing everything but our own eyes.  Mind you, this took a lot of time, with back-tracking, traversing, peering around corners, etc, and as you can probably guess, we used up all our daylight and arrived at the summit in the dark.

I'm not sure whether headlamps were a thing yet, but in any case, we had no means of illumination and had to settle for a very cold bivouac.  This was particularly uncomfortable for me, because I had stripped down to a t-shirt during our arduous hours of route-losing and then, in pursuit of the world's record for human clumsiness, I managed to kick my pack with everything in it off a ledge, leaving me with nothing but the t-shirt for insulation. (My friends barely had enough for themselves so there was no help coming from them.). I shivered mightily through the night and discovered, the next morning, that my balance had been affected and I could barely stand.  I suppose nowadays I'd pull out my InReach and call in the 'copters, but options for help in 1962 were rather more limited.  So I placed a piton in the wall, tethered myself to it because my balance was so bad, and jumped up and down for twenty minutes under the questionable assumption that if I warmed up everything would be hunky-dory.  Amazingly, this shakey assumption turned out to be true, and I returned to my former physical vigor and intellectual indolence.

Having had an entire night to think about it, we recorded our climb in the summit register as a "new route" (which Ortenburger downgraded to a "variation").  Then, with the sun warming things up, we bounded down the NW Ledges and glissaded down to the Platforms for a much-anticipated and well-deserved hot brew.

Just finished Orttenburger's book. What a wild read.