Tired from the odyssey of almost 40 hours of travel from Indianapolis, we parked the car at Big Sandy trailhead and hiked in a mile or two to pitch our shelters in the meadow. Seeing them pitched against that backdrop made me almost forget about the shitshow that had been our lives for the last couple of days as we clawed and scratched to get out here. The total and complete silence and bright stars overhead helped put us to sleep. We covered a mile or two of trail on Day 0.

The next morning, Day 1, we woke up early to start hiking at 7. We were into the Cirque of the Towers by 11am, and immediately decided to take a long nap on a rock overlooking the lake after we were finished eating lunch. That was a great nap. Adam had trouble climbing Texas pass, as he had been at sea level only 12 hours earlier. Luckily, I had been out here less than a month ago with Sam on our Wild West Road Trip and was still somewhat acclimated. It took us well over an hour to grind out each thousand feet of gain, but we made it to the top of the snowy, very windy pass, where we took another break to talk with two different parties. Two young guys doing a speed run of something like 25 miles in a day couldn’t stop to talk for long. There were also two older guys who come here quite often to spend several weeks in these mountains. This was a theme with almost every older person we talked to in these mountains. The Wind River Range is addictive. We made it 13 miles that day and camped in a meadow just past Shadow Lake. 

The Dixon-Wilson Wind River High Route is often described as being 80 miles long, but I found a GPX file online that shows 92 miles of ground actually covered by a hiker, which includes all the little vagaries of off-trail route finding. I’ll be referring to these more realistic mileages throughout this post. I can’t find it again otherwise I would link to it here. 

We started the next day similarly early, and were at pyramid lake before 10am, and at the top of Raid pass at 1pm. As we crested the pass south of Lee lake, we decided to glissade down the snowfield there, which I had never done before. Apparently you’re supposed to remove your water bottle and map from your side pack pockets, or they fall out at the top of the snowfield. Then you realize it at the bottom and cuss for a few minutes. At that point, you squint upward as hard as you can, but can’t see them anywhere. You consider doing the rest of the route without a map, drinking directly from water sources, but decide against it because “getting lost” and “dying” isn’t something your partner wants to do. So you put on your traction devices and spend over an hour slowly walking up your glissade path, looking for the clear bottle and white maps against the camouflaging backdrop of glistening snow. When you finally find them, you don’t enjoy the glissade back down. Because you’re an idiot. Well, not you, because you read this blog. But the writer of this blog, he is an idiot. Adam forgave me for the wasted time and we camped between Lee Lake and Middle Fork Lake, having covered 14 miles that day. 

Day 3 started out late, getting on the trail at 9:30. The section between Middle Fork Lake and Hall’s lake is situated on somewhat “vague” terrain, and does not have established trails. By design. I was looking forward to navigating this section using map and compass, but I noticed many cairns had been placed, most likely by the growing community of WRHR hikers. My opinion here is that if you’re gonna do an off-trail route, it might be a good idea to be comfortable navigating off trail. I really don’t like it when people try to bring the wilderness down to their current level of skill, rather than leveling up to meet the demands of the terrain. Especially when their attempts at coddling remove the challenge from my trip. So I naturally destroyed every cairn I saw, and did my best to navigate my own path regardless of their influence. Wherever cairns are placed to negate the necessity of map reading, I’ll continue doing this. Learn to navigate off-trail, or stay on trails, please. The navigation in this section wasn’t even difficult, especially compared to off-trail hiking in Indiana. [Rant concluded] We washed ourselves in lake 10,555 at about 5pm, and then found ourselves on the south side of Golden Lake as the sun began to drop. We followed a horse trail east a few hundred yards to a site that almost had a view of the lake chain. It was flat though, so I’m not complaining. This day had a lot of short sections of up and down, rather than big passes, which was welcome. We had been able to cover about 15 miles.

This route has been cursed for me. The first time I attempted it was with another partner, in 2014. He was a day and a half late due to missing his flight, and we were slow due to a large amount of snow, so we had to bail on the route and improvise our own loop. We planned to come back in 2016, but two months before our trip, I tore my meniscus fighting a fire, and needed knee surgery. So that attempt had to be scuttled. My physical fitness took an entire year to bounce back from that one, but the knee is perfect today. This time around, Adam, who is never late, accidentally slept in and we missed our flight out of Indy. I’m not gonna go into detail on the standby/stranded/cancelled flight battle, but we made it to Wyoming a day and a half late. We thought we might be able to complete it in the time we had, but didn’t want to overextend ourselves. Before we started hiking we had decided the prudent decision would be to pull up short on this trip, leaving the route just before Titcomb Basin and exiting at Elkhart park, near Fremont Lake. 

The next morning we got started about 9:30. I was fatigued and felt slow today, but the terrain was easier so our progress was ok. As we passed Lake 10,787, we talked to an older gentleman who had been a park ranger in Cascades NP. Or was it somewhere in Alaska? Anyway, he had crossed over the pass just west of Douglas Peak. We were wondering why the WRHR adds several miles in order to avoid that pass, but he answered our question. He felt like it was a bad idea as he made his way up because there were no trails whatsoever. When he descended the other side, he found himself completely cliffed out at Lake 10,787. With no way to go around the cliffs on either side, he put his gear in trash bags, inflated his sleeping pad, and rafted around the cliffs, most of his body in the frigid water the entire way. I was pretty impressed. We’ll take the long way, thanks.

As we ascended past Camp Lake, the terrain became lush with grass, bushes and trees everywhere. We climbed a few cliff bands that looked like the easiest way upward, and found ourselves on a ridge right in the crosshairs of The Fortress. We noticed storm clouds were moving in from the north. Last night had given us an easterly wind, and it had been out of the west most of the day yesterday. Unsettled, and unhappy, the sky decided to start dumping on us. After a few minutes it became small hail. As the wind escalated, we decided to pull out the Duomid and drape it over ourselves as we sat in a tiny grove of stunted trees. We ate snacks and stayed for 15 minutes, before the wind died down to maybe 20mph. We started up again, but it soon became difficult to look at anything other than our own feet, as the now 40-60 mph winds pelted our faces with huge raindrops and hail whenever we dared to look forward. I wanted to keep going, but Adam wanted to stop and take shelter. The wind was deathly cold, and I didn’t have feeling in my extremities. I was chilled under my raingear. With perfect timing, we came upon a huge split boulder in a forest of 8 foot high trees. The split in the boulder was a perfectly sized cave for two people. I gladly followed Adam inside, where we put on layers and cooked Mountain Houses. We got really comfortable and stayed for almost 45 minutes as the storm did its thing outside. Eventually it stopped raining, and we reluctantly came out. I had difficulty explaining the concept of the exit crack to Adam, and with the recent storm and slickness it had caused on all the rocks, he didn’t want to try it, so we detoured around the south side of Lake 10,895. We stayed close to the shore, climbing and descending cliff bands. It took forever and ended up being pretty dangerous with the newly wet rock. With hindsight we both agreed we should have just climbed down the crack. The south side of this lake has a lot of difficult talus as well, and we estimated about 1500 feet of gain along this one lakeshore as we navigated along it. We finally found a sheltered area on the west end of the lake, behind the big isthmus on the map. We made camp at 7:45, having taken over 3 hours to scramble the last 2 miles. 8.5 miles painstakingly hiked on this, the most difficult day of our trip. 

Day 5 would be our crux day. We began moving a little after 7am. We were a bit anxious about continuing in the same type of terrain that gave us so much trouble yesterday, and then having to cross the Knife Point Glacier. We are both inexperienced glacier travelers. But that’s why we came out here. We reached the western shore of Lake 11,335 and hesitantly began picking our way around it. The cliffs looked formidable but we were always able to find a way through. I was watching our elevation, and we never needed to ascend over 11,420 ft to get around it. As we descended the half-trail, half talus below Alpine Lakes Pass, I was moving very carefully, because much of the rock through here is loose. As I moved downward, a rock I was stepping off of began to slide under me. I kept my balance, surfing on it for a second or two as it gathered momentum. The inevitable fall seemed to happen in slow motion. I remember telling Adam, “I’m falling.” All matter-of-fact. I remember thinking, “This isn’t bad, I’ll stop in just a second.” I remember deciding to drop my poles as they were interfering with my ability to use my hands to slow my bouncing slide down the steep mountainside. Then I remember my entire body beginning to spin as I tumbled down, now completely out of control. I yelled back up at Adam, “This is bad!” I remember seeing every single rock as it flew toward me from below, and being able to calculate how to move my limbs to try to slow my body’s rotation, and then being frustrated because it just didn’t work. Finally I was able to slow down my rotation, get both feet and both hands on the ground, and skid to a stop with my foot against a rock. Looking back up at Adam, I had slid/fallen maybe fifty feet down the mountainside. I lay there for about 10 seconds, thankful that I wasn’t in searing pain somehow. Zero broken bones, nothing torn or destroyed on or in my backpack, and both trekking poles intact. I got away with a few scrapes on my hands, forearms, and shins, and 2 holes in my merino shirt. Whew. we got back to the task at hand, making our way onto, across and then up the Knife Point Glacier. I used my Vargo titanium pocket cleats, version 2. They were ok, but needed to be repositioned on my shoes every quarter mile or so as the front “arms” kept separating. If I need to use pocket cleats like this again, I’ll buy the newer version 3 models, since they solve this problem. For 4.7 ounces, I was glad to have them, though. Adam didn’t have traction but made it across the glacier in the afternoon sun just fine. Adam’s sea level dwelling self was handling the thinner air very well by now. We made camp in Indian Basin at about 4pm after doing 9 miles. I washed up near one of the many small lakes, and we both ate two dinners and relaxed for hours before sunset. At this point, the rest of the trip would be almost all downhill, both physically and psychologically.

The next morning consisted of a lazy start and a lazy hike to a split in the trail, where we dropped our packs and hiked a little ways into Titcomb Basin. We could see Knapsack Col, which was the southernmost place I reached on my first, sobo, attempt at this route. It was good to “close the loop,” so to speak. I had now hiked almost the entire route, albeit over two trips in a four year period. It’ll do. We hiked around Island Lake in the rain, and camped near Photographer’s point. We could see almost the whole mountain range laid out before us at Photographer’s point. One of the best views I’ve ever had. 13 miles hiked today. 

The 7th day of our hike would be a 5 mile downhill stroll back to our car, which had been shuttled to the Elkhart Park trailhead for us. This trip had been difficult but well worth the effort, and a great learning experience for us both. As we hiked, we decided that we definitely could have finished the trip in 7 days, as this was a very low snow year. We both agreed that we would probably need an extra day if the snow had been higher. For reference, we didn’t hike quickly, and we took afternoon naps maybe 3 days. Both our pack weights were under 35 pounds at the start of the trip.