Jumper/freelance writer Emily Stifler sent in this great essay about a climbing adventure she had in Grand Teton National Park, Wyo. Read on and enjoy every nuance of the outdoor experience as she did.
Hands in my pockets, I hop between talus and ledges, hunting for a bivy for three on the Grandstand. The dull shine of aluminum appears between gray rock and lichen, so I crouch down to see what stash a previous traveler left here. I fish out an old pot and rusted stove. Beneath them is a 20-year-old plastic fuel bottle with a chubby cartoon devil printed in red on the plastic. Wearing a sailor’s cap emblazoned with his name, “Eenie,” he seems oddly out of place in this cold, alpine world. Thunderheads crouch over the Gros Ventres in the east, and smoke from mid-July Idaho fires backs up against them. Above me, the North Ridge of the Grand Teton traces a border against white and blue sky. Lisa, Cortney, and I stopped short here this afternoon, one day into our bid for a traverse of the range. I leave Eenie under the rock, and take the pot back up to the girls and our packs. “Hey, Em, did you find a better spot?” Cortney asks, and looks at the sloping, four-foot sandy plot where our sleeping bags are thrown between ledges. “I think this is the best one,” I say and show her the pot. I climb up to a seep near the ridge crest, scrub out the pot with sand, and set it up to collect water for morning. I look down at my friends—they seem content, so I scramble over the west side of the ridge to stretch and write. The air is still, and dark clouds hover, as if time has stopped. The highest lakes are still iced over. Beyond them, Teton Valley farm fields reach green and sun-splotched, their geometry a reminder of summer. Creeks in Valhalla and Cascade canyons echo constantly, thousands of feet below, filling the space in this otherwise eerily quiet world. Rocks fall down the thin, rotten snow of the Black Ice and the Enclosure Couloirs, clattering like small gunshots. These climbs are remnants of a vanishing range, a mirror to the past: when Underhill and Fryxell first climbed the North Ridge in 1931, their approach via the Teton Glacier was a true, clean mountaineering line. Now, that approach follows steep scree, with shards of the wall embedded in a ramp beside snow. I am nostalgic for an era that in my 27 years I could never have known. I get up and scramble back to the narrow apex of the ridge. Twelve hundred feet down, beyond the brown-smeared summer snow of the glacier surface, appears a sharp-crested, rocky moraine, freshly uncovered. Since the 1930s, the Teton Glacier has receded 400 feet, and if warming trends continue, these glaciers could be gone as soon as 2030. Exposure drops away from either side of the Grandstand like a metaphor, tumbling steadily forward. As I walk down to our bivy, I find a butterfly wing, camouflaged orange, brown and black alongside speckled lichen. Fur from the wing comes off on my fingers, and time begins reeling slowly past again. The last drops of evening dissipate above the smoke, lighting Owen and the Grand in an ephemeral golden glow. The highest peaks cast long, jagged profiles on the valley floor in a map of smoky shadows. I pause again and consider I have no idea where I’ll be tomorrow night. Perhaps the map is showing us the way.