Teton Tales

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

John Gill wrote:

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.

Thank you John.

dandy shirt and slacks 

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. 

I keep bumping this thread hoping you guys will pony up.  

Randomly ran into friends from back east at cotton wood creek pull out.

I only lived there  one year of my life and have been a very occasional tourists since so do not feel  like I have much to contribute and I know some of you folks do have the goods. 

after reading Petzholt's book I am made aware that Jackson had a reputation as a wild place. When I was 18 years old I knew none of that but did experience a few wild things. 

When I lived at the Richmond hotel on the north end of town  a crop duster from Idaho got thirsty on the job. He flew his plane over the Tetons and landed it, almost,  a block or so from my flop house. Minor detail of hitting an irrigation canal and shearing off the landing gear.. That didn't phase him a bit as he walked right by our front stoop to get to the Cowboy bar where he bought another bottle of whisky. They found an empty fifth in the plane. 

I was going to post more on the old timers' thread, but that's been taken over by anti-Trump diatribes. The three boulders at Jenny lake were popular in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and Falling Ant Slab (Chouinard's naming) when done no-hands was a real challenge.

Coming off, which I did a few times, might take one all the way down to the lake.

Nick Goldsmith wrote:

Is this at the base of Buck E. Face? 

start of the North East ridge. We came down the East face.  So essentially yes. 

we are right where the red dot is. taking a break, stashing un needed gear and getting ready for the business.

we went up that skinny little snow gully just above the red dot to gain the rock ridge.

This is  typical  example of an easy route with high consequences. 

here is our friend Steve Glen emerging from an 80ft  flared chimney that I would not have a problem rating 5.4? 

Descending the East face

Nick Goldsmith wrote:

start of the North East ridge. We came down the East face. 

I soloed that during my last (and maybe final?) Teton trip in 2019.  Got off route at the start (stayed way too high contouring in from the North) and ended up climbing this wall (on the white rock to the left) to get onto the ridge, which in the picture stretches out to the right. 

RG I wonder if you ended up doing the north east ridge?  if you look at the 2nd photo of my edit 

the red dot is where we started really climbing and I wonder if your first picture  is of that spot with less snow? 

Nick Goldsmith wrote:

RG I wonder if you ended up doing the north east ridge?  if you look at the 2nd photo of my edit 

the red dot is where we started really climbing and I wonder if your first picture  is of that spot with less snow? 

Yes, I definitely climbed the NE Ridge and came down the E face.  I think I started somewhere around where your red dot is, but there was no gully to climb, with or without snow.  There are probably a whole bunch of ways to gain the ridge.  I think the "official" way is up the gully that is the start of the E face route after which you bear right in order to gain the ridge.

What you both are calling the NE Ridge is here on MP as the E Ridge. Great day out. I've asked the rangers many times what their favorite scrambles are and Buck E. ridge always comes up in the top 3. 

Others are Disappointment, the Middle, and Teewinot (although that one is up for debate if it qualifies as "good"). 

What other good scrambles are out there?    

East ridge of Symmetry Spire is a good one.

Cloudveil to South is an awesome alpine day in earlier summer. Some might want to rope up for Cloudveil.

I agree Teewinot is a great viewpoint but the East face route not so great.

I had a great time on the East face of teewinot in1981 Climbed it in Redwing logging boots. Cool chimney at the top. 

The mention of Cloudveil reminded me that Dave Dornan and I climbed an existing route on the right side of the north face back in about 1957. I remember some sort of a jam crack that I led and face climbed around, but virtually nothing else about the climb. I seem to recall that Pete Cleveland may have gone up later and done the north face direct, but can find nothing about it on the web. Many years later free soloing the W (?) face of Little Bear (a lot of hazardous rock) in Colorado I was somehow reminded of Cloudveil.

Those pictures and the discussions about climbing Buck, have brought back some 'interesting', though still ambivalent memories. My first season in the Tetons, immediately after finals in early June of a very heavy snow year, resulted in very little accomplished---basically post-holing our way to and up the easiest routes on Storm and Disappointment. The following year, though starting at the same time of year, we encountered much better conditions. Early in the trip we spent a couple of days in the southern part of the range, and did standard routes ( not really sure which ones) up Buck, Veiled, Wister, and a couple of others. What really still stands out for me about these climbs though, even after many decades, is that after the months of climbing at Devil's Lake, where any unbelayed climbing was very sternly 'forbidden'--even bouldering was discouraged within the Club, once in the mountains a totally contradictory 'ethic' was in force, and we did those routes without roping up, no matter the amount of exposure or any climber's ( including mine) discomfort with the situation. The complete contrast in attitudes--unroped=bad at the Lake, roped=bad in the mountains--was very hard to adjust to. While I understand why 'third classing' is often appropriate in the mountains ( and have done so many times in subsequent years) and, I'm sure the climbing that we did wasn't  difficult ( though it was exposed)--and we all 'survived', I still am perplexed by the 'all or nothing' attitudes of the Club leaders of that generation.