Death Hike!

I was looking forward to a great couple of day's in the Boston Basin area! We had some ambitous plans of climbing multiple peaks during our short two day adventure. We slept in the back of Marks truck on Sunday night with a full parking lot at the Eldorado Trailhead with hopes of an early start. I figured it would be fairly quick to get into Boston Basin as I had done it in less than 3 hours before! Boy was I wrong! Most of the hike ended up being up random gullies and scree fields partially covered in snow. I quickly started post holing in the wet sun baked snow. As we were following the most obvious route up it ended up kicking us way East of the lower Boston Basin camps. We started a long traverse on slippery snow that if we weren't post holing up to our knees in than one leg was slipping down the steep slope as we struggled to stay up right! AARRGHHH! I was getting so frustrated!


Mark on the traverse to the lower Boston Basin camp.

We took a much needed rest at the camp and enjoyed the scenery. We also decided we did not have time to post hole all the way to Forbidden and the avalanche activity concerned us. Our best chanced of climbing something would be to head up to the Quien Sabe Glacier and try to get on Sharkfin Tower. We started the long snow slog up through the snow covered slabs.

Mark hiking to the Quien Sabe Glacier.

I was already tired from crashing through to my waist to get into the basin now we had to climb another 2,000 vertical through wet oatmeal snow to get to the glacier! I was not looking forward to it. But we pushed on.

Me post holing to the knees.

After about 7 hours of hiking we were on the flat camp area of the Quien Sabe Glacier. We could see the route on Sharkfin Tower and we couldn't wait to start climbing! After a long rest and lots of food we dropped our bivy sacks and sleeping bags and headed toward the gully. I was immediately swimming in loose avalanche debris. I made it up to the bergschrund and started poking around with my ice axe looking for a safe place to cross. I immediately poked through to my waist with 20 feet of beautiful blue glacier ice glimmering through the hole my foot made! I backed off and called it a day. Mark still poked around for a bit hoping to find a place to cross but eventually came down.

After a couple minutes of discussion we decided to turn around and head home. Why? I'm not really sure. I think we were both so disappointed with the snow conditions that we decided they would not improve.

Turning around.

On the way down I had this horrible idea of just cutting down the avalanche path down to the road. It worked great for a couple thousand feet but eventually ended up in a mess of thorn bushes, twisted trees, cliffs, rivers, waterfalls, moss, and steep loose slabs! It was horrible! Don't ever do it!

Moments before hell!

We could of stayed the night on the glacier and made an early morning climb of Sahale Peak. Morning conditions could have solidified the snow a bit? Right?