Living in the Shadow of the White Mountains

Living in the Shadow of the
White Mountains by DAVID HUEBNER

“For me, seeing the stark beauty and remoteness of the [White Mountains] range in winter, with constant views of the snowy Sierra as if from an aircraft, rivals any mountain experience I’ve had in the greater ranges of the world.”

—Galen Rowell, High and Wild

As the sun rises across my backyard, the first thing it hits is White Mountain Peak, the 14,246’ high point of the White Mountains just east of Bishop, California. Then, like fire spreading along a trail of gasoline, the entire crest becomes a flaming silhouette, the sky beginning to explode across the Owens Valley and burn the peaks of the Sierra Nevada. For over 50 miles of their length, the White Mountains remain above 10,000 feet, with more than half of those miles being above 12,000’. It is a continous, singular crest—just one beautiful swooping line.

For years now I have lived in this shadow of the White Mountains. We watch from behind mugs of coffee as the sun continues its climb, the massive shadow of the Whites slowly backing down the flank of the Sierra and crawling across the valley to meet us. Most folks would think of it another way, looking always at the impressive eastern wall of the Sierra Nevada, but for me the Sierra Nevada casts no such shadow. The Sierra Nevada is the “Range of Light”, the “High Sierra” and the subject of uncountable photographs, guide books, and magazine articles. The Sierra has also been a primary playground of mine for almost a decade, and though it still holds a lifetime’s worth of exploration, it feels welcoming, known, open and brightly lit. On the opposite side of the valley however is where the shadows remain, the rewards lurking in plain view but unexperienced, unknown. Our first real adventure into the range was a winter ascent of White Mountain from the valley floor in a day—to date still the most brutal day of my life. Then, the next Fall, we backpacked along all the named summits (from Blanco Pk. to Boundary Pk.) of that beautiful cursive crest. Then, after a couple years of waiting, the Whites were graced with a rare late spring snowpack from the big winter of ’04-’05, and we finally broke into the White Mountains on skis, deciding once again to go from end to end.

The White Mountains were first traversed on skis in February 1974 by a group of mostly Eastern Sierra residents: Jay Jensen, George Miller, Galen Rowell, and Dave Sharp. Their journey, thanks to Rowell, was sponsored by National Geographic, including a flown-in food cache and use of the Barcroft Research facility. Jensen, Miller, and Sharp had tried the traverse before but had been stormed off twice, encountering ferocious winds and bitter cold both times. This time, prepared with new gear, two food caches, and use of the Barcroft facilities, they were able to weather two serious storms, one of which was the worst storm of the entire winter, lasting five days, and keeping them precariously tent-bound in 100+mph winds. When all was said and done, they had taken 16 days to complete the traverse. Ironically, National Geographic decided not to run the article because of a lack (!) of life-threatening circumstances.

Anyone who has done, tried, or even seriously contemplated a traverse of the White Mountains on skis knows that simply to go out there, into the middle of that 50 mile arctic desert, is to risk your life. The weather is notoriously cold with winter temperatures regularly falling below zero and rarely getting above freezing, accompanied by steady winds that can grow to hurricane force on a moments notice. Also, simply to bail off the crest of the White Mountains towards Bishop would mean a drop of nearly 10,000 vertical feet in about 10 miles beginning with steep snow slopes leading into loose scree, sand, and talus intermixed with impenetrable mountain mahogany groves, steep ridges of scattered bristlecone and pinyon-juniper forest, and eventually some miles of sage and rabbitbrush covered slopes and alluvial plain. Few of the drainages are navigable on foot, the ridges being the only possible routes. Then there is the fickle nature of the White Mountains snowpack. I’ve seen back to back years with nary a lasting pack at all the entire winter, and most years the pack is shallow and short lived.

So it is understandable then why very few have even tried, much less completed the traverse in the past three decades.

Local fascination with the White Mountains ski traverse grows every morning and every evening of every winter. It roars at us with the clearing of storms—a pure white row of fangs growling at the sky. After years of watching the Whites come and go, my good friend from Bishop, Greg Haverstock and I went out one spring day and skied great corn off the summit of Sheep Mountain on the south end of the Whites. That day trip got us thinking, and within another few days, we’d rounded up another friend, Todd Calfee to attempt a fast traverse starting at Boundary Peak, Nevada, and finishing at Sierra View, California, a distance of 50 miles with over 10,000 feet of vertical gain. Based on our experience walking the whole crest, we figured we could move even faster on skis and cover the distance in two big days.

But the morning of our planned start Greg woke up sick, not in any condition to go. Todd was feeling ok, but not great, they’d both picked up some sort of bug, but Todd still wanted to give it a try so we headed out of Bishop as the sun began to lick the crest of the Whites.

It was a steep climb to the summit of Boundary Peak, alternating between talus and bulletproof sastrugi. After a few thousand feet of this we reached the top, to stare out across a very snowy and rocky ridge to Montgomery Peak. Here Todd told me he could go no further. He could feel the sickness in his swollen glands, a profound lack of energy, and did not want it to worsen. I pondered continuing on. I was nervous. I felt that it would perhaps be the most dangerous, toughest adventure of my life, all alone along the highest desert mountain crest in North America. But I couldn’t turn down the opportunity, there it lay before me, the sun was warm, with plenty of snow, I had to go. So I waved goodbye to Todd and went walking off down the ridge toward Montgomery Peak and his truck at Sierra View, 50 miles away.

All along the traverse to Montgomery I thought about a rabbit we’d run over on Highway 6 that morning. I was a bit haunted by it, and the strange sudden sickness that had taken down my two friends. Was all this a bad omen that I should be heeding instead of ignoring? I took extra caution.

After the top of Montgomery I began descending a challenging ridge that allowed some skiing mixed with short scrambles over rocky bands. I’d never done anything quite like this before, negotiating steep avalanche prone pockets along a relatively narrow ridge that provided few alternatives.

After making my way down the ridge, I began hiking up the completely blown off talus leading a thousand feet up to The Jumpoff. Once there, I finally began actually skiing—kicking and gliding across glistening corn on the giant eight-mile 13,000 foot plateau of the Pellisier Flats, with the Sierra Nevada lining the horizon for over 200 miles. Galen Rowell describes being able to see from Mt. Rose bordering Lake Tahoe in the north, all the way south past Mt. Whitney. It was a little hazy on my visit, but I could see past Mt. Dana and the Sweetwater Mountains outside of Bridgeport to the north, and well past Mt. Whitney to the south. Really the entire breadth of what is called the High Sierra was laid out before me in staggering detail. Through the onsetting pain of a huge day, and a terrific, growing, shoving howl of ice-cold wind gusts, I allowed this Himalayan landscape to lift my eyes from the constant shuffling of ski tips and rest for awhile. There is no place like it, no geology so impressive as the parallel running ranges of the ancient White-Inyo and youthful Sierra Nevada; one previously glaciated, one still glaciated, both peaking at over 14,000 feet and draped in snow, with the Owens Valley digging a 10,000 foot trench below them filled with cottonwoods and greening sagebrush; budding wildflowers and agricultural lands; the snaking Owens River cutting a gorge through the old lava flows of the Volcanic Tablelands.

Over the decades since the first ski traverse of the Whites, the few trips I have heard about would begin at Sierra View on the south end and descend off The Jumpoff on the north end, skipping Montgomery and Boundary Peaks; most described bad snow, or wind, or storms, or all of the above. But the best story of a foreshortened traverse trip surely belongs to a trio of Eastern Sierra locals John Dittli, Urmas Franosch, and Ben Grassechi.

Having lusted after the traverse for years and only rarely seeing it in good shape, the epic El Nino winter of ’97-’98 blanketed the Whites with deep snow through late spring. The problem was getting a decent weather window, El Nino didn’t give one till the first week of June. So believe it or not, John, Urmas, and Ben started their trip at the beginning of June, with plenty of snow, and perfect corn. They planned for five nights to take advantage of possible descents along the way, and to ski among the Ancient Bristlecone Pines. The snow was so good on the first couple days that they thought once they finished the trip they would immediately return with nordic skate gear and go for a fast traverse.

But El Nino would not stop. As they set up camp on the summit of White Mountain, with their tent tied to the summit research building, a cloud bank began crawling in off the desert, a ‘Tonapah Low’, as it’s called around here—and that night it began snowing.

“It was 20 degrees and snowing with no wind.” John tells me years later as we sit around cups of tea in his beautiful strawbale home in Long Valley, outside of Mammoth, a home he spent years building himself. We can just look to our left from his dining room table to see the bowls pouring off White Mountain. “It dumped all night and all the next day—we got 18 inches.”

Once the storm cleared a decision had to be made, but there was really no decision to be made at all, the giant bowls pouring off the summit of White Mountain were coated in perfect dry powder with the snow line roughly 4,000 feet below them.

“We skied the Southwest Bowl first, “ John says, pointing at it out the window, “then we climbed back up, got our packs, and skied the Northwest Bowl.” All I can do is shake my head as we look over photos of June powder skiing that looks mid-winter. John was pressed for time, or else they probably would have stayed for more skiing, but he had to be the best man at his friend’s, Andy Selters, wedding the following day. “White Mountain is really one of the few places you can bail off the traverse because of the Jeffrey Mine—it felt Himalayan, coming down so far to those buildings, like coming upon a small village or something.”

I began descending off the Pellisier Flats, finally getting some turns, relaxing into the perfect corn surface until suddenly, unexpectedly that surface gave way, my skis plunging through and grabbing me to a stop in sagebrush. I had feared this, and now realized what I could be entering into for the rest of the journey. I skied and plunged my way to the big low saddle several miles north of White Mountain where a couple of springs support creeks on both sides of the crest. Down on the western facing flank, huddled against the relentless wind, I filled up a gallon and a half of water (I wasn’t carrying a stove to melt snow) and tried to eat. Something about being alone out there, the constant roar of the wind, the obsessive dialogue of my mind, everything, was causing a nervousness in my stomach that had killed my appetite. I had all this heavy food going uneaten, so I forced myself to eat for awhile but before long I could not stop shaking from the cold, so I began the climb up out of the springs. Once I’d climbed out of the springs, the snow became more spotty, blown off, melted or completely unconsolidated, so I avoided what was there, walking a few miles till the rocks and grass began to glow rich orange with the end of day.

Crawling into my tent was such a comfort—to actually escape the howling wind was unbelievable. I tried my best to stretch out my tortured muscles before zipping into my sleeping bag, everything hurt from over 20 miles with over 8,000 feet of gain. Thankfully most of the uphill was now over, with White Mountain only a few miles away, but all night I had nightmares of getting sick, becoming too weak to make it. I kept waking up thinking I had a sore throat. It was an awful, sleepless night at over 12,000 feet set to the beat of flapping nylon.

The sun rose far out over Nevada. My leather telemark boots were frozen with wetness, feeling foreign and uncomfortable. The wind was still raging, perhaps stronger, and it continued to shove and trip me as I walked through the small talus along the crest, approaching the short north ridge of White Mountain.

I’d been anticipating this ridge throughout the previous day, unsure of what it would be like—it has a few class three spots when bare of snow in the summer, and I remembered Galen Rowell’s photo from ’74 that made it look rather terrifying. I’d assumed that whatever it was I’d be able to handle it without a problem. But what I saw when I finally reached it that morning appeared completely impossible. It was filled with snow and ice into a mixed knife-edge of granite blocks, and the gusts of wind were pushing and shoving while I stood there and stared. For a moment I was horrified. Then I saw my escape: a short snow chute cut down from the toe of the crest which allowed a narrow passage into the steep bowl underneath the ridge. The sun was shining on the firm snow softening it just enough, so I put my skis on and side-slipped my way into the bowl, taking a high, precarious traverse directly beneath the rocky crest. I couldn’t believe my luck, and in a matter of minutes I was taking my skis off again to walk the last bit to the summit of White Mountain.

The stone building that sits on top of White Mountain is a high-altitude research laboratory operated by the University of California, originally built in 1955. It is the fourth highest lab in the world, and the highest of the three labs operated by the UC in the White Mountains. Down below, five miles away, is the Barcroft Lab at 12,500’, and several miles from that is the Crooked Creek facility at 10,150 feet. You could say more research has been done in and about the White Mountains than any other range in the country. Since the 1950s there has been ongoing study on a wide array of topics including the ecology, behavior, and physiology of land vertebrates, insects and plants; dendrochronology of the Bristlecone Pine, geology, geomorphology, and biogeography; archeology and anthropology; and astronomy, astrophysics, and cosmology.

Radio-carbon dating, or Carbon-14 dating, owes its accuracy to the research and subsequent chronology of the ancient Bristlecone Pines in the White Mountains. Our understanding of Old World prehistory owes much to these trees as well. Earlier, uncalibrated carbon dating, had reinforced the theories of cultural diffusion spreading outward from Mesopotamia and the Fertile Crescent, but with the calibration of the Bristlecone chronology, artifacts in Europe were found to be older than previously thought, and completely disrupted the convenient theory that ‘civilization’ began and spread from one source. The oldest living Bristlecone, “Methusela”, is 4,767 years old, and by finding ever older overlapping dead snags and remnants of snags, a climate record of nearly 9,000 years has been established, with ongoing study hoping to push that record another thousand years.

The study of tree-rings (dendrochronology) has been around for a century, but it came to the forefront of public attention in the 1950s with Edmund Schulman’s discovery of the Bristlecone Pines in the White Mountains. Schulman found that in fact the Bristlecones were the most ideal species for tree-ring study because of their harsh living conditions. This hardship produced very sensitive, responsive rings (closer together in times of drought, wider in times of moisture), and the trees turned out to be the longest lived in the world.

As I sat in a fierce cold wind on the 14,246 foot summit of White Mountain, the lab building wrapped in drifts of snow, I looked out to the far southern crest of the range, looking for those familiar forested hills that mark the “Schulman Grove”—out there, just beyond those ancient trees sat Todd’s truck, and my salvation.

It was an almost continuous ski down the south face of White Mountain, my skinny waxless skis chattering across bulletproof sastrugi, dodging toothy rocks, soggy leather boots wobbling. I was now into the long southern end of the journey. Perfect corn beckoned on the slopes above the buried Barcroft Research station, and I knew as I kicked and glided gently downhill that I would be leaving that good snow behind, entering the land below 12,000 feet, the land of unconsolidated mush. The snowpack was just barely holding me up, occasionally giving way as I left the faintly snowcat-packed road to climb over the shoulder of Sheep Mountain. I was hoping to use a little downhill glide off Sheep Mountain, and surprisingly I got the most turns of the entire trip dropping down to the road at the Patriarch Grove of Bristlecones.

The wind was now beginning to back off, with a reflective heat building in its wake. I glanced over at what I could see of the mystic timberline ancients of the Patriarch Grove. I was entering such a world of pain I wondered how I would make it to the end of this journey; I felt so pathetic, me this hapless bumbling human, sunburnt and exhausted in my alien clothing and plastic skis, dependent on so much for survival, while these 5,000 year old trees roam like enthusiastic dancers across the landscape.

I later discovered that Bristlecone Pines have developed a variety of unique survival strategies beginning with the brilliant white dolomite in which they’re often found growing. Dolomitic soil discourages the growth of most other plant species leaving little competition for moisture and nutrients, while dolomite also retains more moisture than the other sandstone, volcanic and granitic rock found in the White Mountains. Bristlecones also have the ability to allow for die-back of significant amounts of bark, xylem (the tissue that transports nutrients up through the tree), and most of the trunk and limbs if necessary during times of hardship or to recover from damaging weather. This die-back is what slowly creates the barren, wild forms so characteristic of the Bristlecone Pine. And while most pines, including the Limber Pine, which grow side by side with the Bristlecone in many places, have to replace large percentages of their needles each year, the Bristlecones have needles as old as 46 years, giving their photosynthetic system much greater stability to endure their harsh and variable climate.

Not far beyond the Patriarch Grove I hit my first bare patch on the road. I knew it would be getting pretty spotty towards the end here as I walked my skis across the short patch of mud. My leather boots, now thoroughly soaked from hundreds of plunges into mushy wet spring snow, had finally blistered my toes and were now proceeding to hammer down on those blisters with punishing severity. As the sun rolled overhead towards afternoon, I skied painfully, and limped sorrowfully down the road.

Miles later, with barely any conviction left, I crested the last hill, the last remnants of snow all but disappearing in front of me, and slowly, horrendously, limped my way towards the pavement. I could barely walk with the pain in my feet—it had spread out from the blisters into a soggy sensitivity that enveloped both of my feet; now they just plain hurt no matter what. The afternoon sun was shining hotly into my face, the cold wind nothing but a bad memory as I dragged myself onto the pavement at the Schulman Grove. The road was plowed, but the gate still remained locked two miles away at Sierra View. I could’ve killed whoever makes those sorts of decisions. But the pavement was my reward. I pulled off my torture-chamber, three-pin battering rams, and, after a good rest on the warm asphalt, pulled on my puffy black down booties, the only other footware I had. As the Sierra loomed back at me in golden hazy light, I walked, much less painfully now, smiling at the scene of it all—such a grand ski traverse finished in a pair of down booties.

When I reached Sierra View there was nothing glorious in my head, no ego balloon to lift me up and cheer, just an ending, a burden released. I sat in the truck and thought about the long, white, glowing crest I’d just crossed, how it lies there like a beautiful naked siren—calling, calling, calling—and me just another ski bum Homer whose friends weren’t strong enough to tie to the mast.

end/close window to return to contents