Objective: Eklutna Taverse; ~ 38 mile glacier ski traverse from Girdwood, AK to Eklutna, AK

Trip Length: 4 days; overnight at Rosie’s Roost, Han’s Hut, Serenity Falls Cabin

Trip Type: Glacier ski tour

Ski Setup: K2 Talkbacks and Scarpa Gea boots

Group Size: 2

Dates: March 30-April 2, 2018

The Tale: 

I’ve spent a great deal of time living in Alaska preparing for the Eklutna Traverse as my first longer glacier travel objective.  I had been told for a couple of years that I had the skills to do it, but until this year, I didn’t feel quite ready or knowledgeable enough to complete the traverse. Finding a reliable partner with the same objective was also important to me. At the beginning of the winter, I evaluated my goals, and timing felt right to attempt the traverse in the Spring.

I originally took five days off to complete the Eklutna Traverse in early March, but due to snow and weather conditions, we decided to push the trip back by a couple of weeks. We got the perfect weather window from March 30th through April 2nd when I happened to have another long weekend. I was a bit nervous about cutting the trip down to 4 days with work on either end, but it turned out well.

Tyler and I did a good amount of trip prep, and since we both come from different climbing/skiing/glacier travel backgrounds, we made sure to practice our systems before heading out onto the glacier. We spent one evening the week before the trip, skiing around the park in my back yard, trying to avoid clotheslining an angry moose. After our quick review, we felt ready to go.

We decided to do the traverse from Girdwood to Eklutna Lake, so that we would have a nice downhill the second two days of the trip. My sister happened to be up visiting that week, so she helped us with a car drop at Eklutna the night before.

On Friday morning, we checked the weather and noticed that there would be low hung clouds in Girdwood that were reported to clear off by the afternoon. I had scouted out the start of our route the day before, but the top of the ridge was covered in clouds. I did not feel comfortable heading up into the unknown with recent avalanche conditions, so we decided on a later start to wait for most of the clouds to clear.

Once we arrived in Girdwood, the clouds had cleared up to lower end of the ridge line and we felt comfortable heading out on the trail. We skinned up Glacier Gulch, following a defined track from skiers ahead of us. Once we got away from the creek, I started to become a bit more nervous about the trip ahead of us, as it would be the longest time I had spent in glacier terrain. We made our way halfway up toward the ridge, and I started to feel better about the way the day was going with the sunshine beating down on us, and the Turnagain Arm shimmering in the background. Tyler went out of site behind a knob, and I made my way up to him. At the point where I met him, the mystery skiers ahead of us had started to boot pack. We decided to go a bit further and see how the conditions were. Tyler skinned about 20 feet up from where I stood, but because of an icy layer, he decided to take off his skis. I decided to do the same. We spent the rest of the way up to the ridge boot packing on a thin icy crust and frozen moss. One step forward, one slide back. After sweating profusely the whole way up, we finally made it to the ridge line.

I was excited to make it to what I thought was the top of the ridge, thinking that it would be a fairly easy skin over to the glacier. It had taken us four hours to get to that point, which was on track for what we had planned. We could only see a little ways ahead of us because of the lingering clouds, so we put our skis back on, and headed up the ridge a bit more. After a little while, we realized that we were in for a lot more uphill than we anticipated and we had to take our skis off again. We went a bit of a ways up the ridge, and I became more and more frustrated by the conditions. The ridge kept going up and up at steeper angles and I was exhausted and depleted. I realized that I could no longer be stubborn, and crampons would be necessary to speed things up and put me in a better mood. We continued on, and I continued to slow down. Without a colon, I dehydrate very easily, and the sun that day had really gotten to me. I was trying to drink as much water with pedialyte as I could while still rationing to last me the rest of the evening. By 6:30pm, I wasn’t sure we were going to make it to the hut that night. But I also knew I didn’t want to down climb the ridge. Tyler and I discussed our options, and we decided to keep going. We figured we had until 8:30 until sunset. Worst case scenario, we could dig a snow cave on Eagle Glacier.  We made it to a snow slope to avoid the steep rock the folks ahead of us had chosen as their route, and  we climbed up with my skis jabbing the side of the hill the whole way (apparently my pack is not made well for carrying skis). We made it up onto the top of the ridge around 8:00pm. I was excited to see the glacier, and wanted to get down onto it as soon as possible. We had switched rolls a bit at that point, and Tyler needed to refuel. We stood in the cold windy shade of the mountain as the sun began to set (not the best decision, but I didn’t want to backtrack to the sun). At that point, my extremities started to get quite cold, but we ripped off our skins and made our descent onto the glacier. I’ve never skied with a heavy pack before and am fairly new to downhill skiing, so it took me a while to make it down the slope. We finally made it down to the glacier, and made it onto a ski track that we had seen from the top of the ridge. As the sun began to go down, I became a bit more nervous about our odds of making it to the hut, but the ski tracks put my mind at ease. Of course, we weren’t sure if those ski tracks would lead to Rosie’s Roost, so I kept an eye on the terrain in the distance and my GPS as we skied along. Once the sun went down, we were glad to see the moon, as it was almost full and lit up the whole glacier. We were able to use the moonlight to travel all the way over to Rosie’s Roost, and I only fell once in a darkly lit section. We plowed our way up the hill and made it to the cabin which was lit up by a green head lamp. We were just in time for the party.

We went into Rosie’s and there were two other skiers settling in for the night. They had a helicopter bump up to the glacier that evening, and had done the traverse before, so we were able to get beta from them about possible conditions ahead. After chatting for a bit, we broke out our Reactor, boiled some water, and made dinner. We quickly found our places to sleep on the floor downstairs, and crashed for the night.

After waking up, I was feeling optimistic about day two of the trip, although we were planning on covering quite a bit of terrain from Rosie’s Roost to Pitchler’s Perch. We spent a bit of time gathering and packing our gear, figuring once we got to Whiteout Glacier, we’d have a good amount of downhill to Pitchler’s. We left Rosie’s and headed down to the glacier. Trying to minimize our transitions, we decided to keep our skins on going down from Rosie’s to Eagle Glacier. I struggled getting down to the glacier and completely turtled at one point with my pack on, as my skins caught on the snow. We finally made it down to the glacier, and I felt better about cruising across the glacier to the icefall up to Whiteout Glacier. From Rosie’s we had scouted our line up the icefall, and we decided to stick to the rocks just to the right of the ice fall. The uphill wasn’t too bad at first, and the rock features made good short objectives for me as we went up. We finally made it to the end of the rock band, and made the decision to head out left onto the snow covered ice fall and up a medial snow bridge. I took the lead and we made our way up the pass to Whiteout Glacier. My spirits began to lift again as we made it to what I thought was the top. After sweating my way up the ice fall, I welcomed the wind at the top. But the temperature quickly dropped and the rollers continued up the glacier. As I saw no downhill in sight, my spirits lowered as we pushed through the wind. Finally, we reached a bit of a downhill and we began to scan the distance for Whiteout Pass up to Eklutna Glacier.

At that point, I felt completely depleted again, and my pace had slowed down significantly. I hadn’t quite recovered from the day before. We finally skied down to a low point on the glacier below Hans’s Hut. We discussed taking a quick rest at Hans’, but I didn’t want to expend more energy going up to the hut, so we decided to take a break where we were. Once we finally stopped for a bit, I could tell that I was developing an abdominal blockage. I told Tyler that I needed to take a break and irrigate. It’s always interesting telling someone about my medical issues, even if it’s someone I know really well. It’s hard for me to get over the feeling that I am jeopardizing someone else’s trip or worrying him by having challenges that our outside my control. I could tell Tyler was concerned since he asked if the blockage was serious, but at this point, I have a good sense of my body and blockages, and I figured I could clear it enough to finish the traverse by irrigating.

I plopped my pack down, got out my irrigation supplies, and started irrigating my ileostomy right in the middle of the glacier. Luckily, the sun was out at that point, and the temperature had risen, so I did not feel too rushed to irrigate. After I cleared enough of the blockage to continue on, we re-weighed our options. It was about 3:30 in the afternoon, and we figured that if we made it to Pitchler’s we would be getting there around dark. The folks we had met at Rosie’s had told us that the area around Pitchler’s was heavily crevassed lately, so we decided that it was best not to try going there in the dark. We made the decision to bail to Hans’ Hut for the evening, and arrived at the hut around 4:30. The decision to refuel, hydrate well, and get some good rest was our best decision of the trip.

After about an hour of hanging out at the hut, Tyler spotted some other skiers following our skin track up to the hut. Our friends from the night before and a couple of their friends who had taken a helicopter up that morning had decided to make the trek up to Hans’ Hut. We spent the rest of the evening chatting with them and recuperating a bit. I irrigated a few more time, and could tell things were moving again. It felt nice to get to bed early, with a plan to make it the 13 miles to the Serenity Falls Cabin the next day.

Day three was my favorite day of the trip. I started out the morning with a good laugh. I was all geared up and ready to go with my pack on, when I realized that my triple bagged bag of poop from irrigating was still sitting in the snow next to the hut. Because of the way it had frozen, it had turned into a giant block of poop. I picked it up and began to hand it to Tyler, asking, “Can you put this in my pack?” He just stared at me and I realized that I often forget that most people don’t have the same comfort level with poop as me. Having Crohn’s and an ostomy and working inpatient as an occupational therapist, bodily fluids don’t quite garner the same repulsive thoughts in my mind as they do in others’. Tyler finally flatly responded, “We are not carrying your poop out with us,” and he set it down in the bin outside the hut. That was that, and we took off skiing.

We decided not to repeat our skinning mistake from the day before, and kept our skins off to ski down from Hans’ Hut to Whiteout Glacier. The ski down was mellow and fun and we cruised across Whiteout Glacier to Whiteout Pass. I lead the way up Whiteout pass, taking off our skis to hop up and over to the top of the pass. From there, we spotted a group of skiers down in the middle of Eklutna Glacier. Rumor had it, they were headed for Hans’ Hut the day before. Seeing the skiers and their skin track down the glacier, I was the happiest I had been the entire trip. At that point, I knew that we would be able to cruise down their track to Serenity Falls. We enjoyed the ski down to their bivy camp with perfect powdery snow conditions. As we pulled up to say hello, I recognized one of my friends in the group. We spent a bit of time chatting with them, and hearing about the route ahead of us and how to descend off the glacier. After leaving them, we jumped in their track and flew down the glacier. The clouds had lifted and it turned out to be a beautiful bluebird day. We headed into the toe of the glacier with a bit more caution as we passed by Pitchler’s. Partway down, we gathered up the tent poles of the group who had bivied (more training weight!). We were easily able to follow their track from the day before. Per their recommendation, we took skis off and put crampons on as we neared the edge of the toe. We looked at the steep section we assumed, based on tracks, they came up. But after looking around a bit more, we located a mellow snow slope off to the right which we descended. We walked a couple hundred yards over flat terrain and then came to a steeper snow slope which we down climbed, climbing off the glacier and out of the technical terrain. I sent a message to our safety contacts saying we were off the glacial terrain, we popped our skis back on, and we headed down the trail toward Serenity Falls. The skiing was a bit tricky because of exposed rocks in the melting snow and rockfall above us, but we made it down safely to the snow machine trail at the bottom.

Once we made it up onto the trail, we ran into a couple of snow machiners, who asked if it was possible to ski up to the glacier. I think Tyler’s favorite moment of the trip was saying, “Yes, we just skied from Girdwood.” The couple paused for a minute and then just nodded their heads and we took off toward the hut. The sunny empty hut was a warm welcome and we quickly took over the place. I was so tired from the days before, that I decided to go to bed while the sun was still up at 8:30 pm. I went to sleep feeling accomplished that we had made it off the glacier.

The next day was a slog. We had to follow the bumpy snow machine track to the Bold Airstrip at the end of the lake and then head out onto the lake. It felt like the longest section of the trip, as the terrain and mountains on the sides went slowly by. We finally started to see people in the distance at the Eklutna Lake trailhead. It felt good to reach the edge of the lake, ski up into the parking lot, and dump our gear next to Tyler’s car. We had made it.

Of course we still had to make the drive back down to Girdwood to pick up my car. We decided to get my car and then have dinner in Girdwood, so that as smelly skiers, we would fit right in. Upon reflection, the beautiful bluebird days, good snow coverage, and fun ski down the Eklutna glacier made the difficult uphills not seem so bad. I was happy to finally achieve a goal I had set out to achieve 3 years prior.

A Few Lessons Learned:

• As someone with no colon, I MUST keep up with hydration and not allow myself to become so depleted.
• I need to continue identifying safe foods for trips that decrease my risk for blockages.
• Put crampons on sooner than later if on an icy boot pack.
• Skiing with skins on is challenging for a newbie AT skier.
• Take care of your own poop and don’t hand it off to someone else. It’s quite unpleasant for that person.