During the first half of the traverse, it was just Kaytlyn, myself, and the rugged and rarely traveled ridgelines of the far-north Cascades. Iced lattes at Azure Col, the lone deer at the toe of a glacier, and that peaceful acceptance that comes after benightment, when darkness is no longer a threat but a companion.Īnd there was, looking back, a clear organization to our week-long journey. There were times when it felt like we might fall off the tightrope of our big idea, and there were moments of calm: watching the last light color the Chilliwack range from our camp near Luna Peak, the warmth of a hot water bottle in our shared sleeping bag. There was tree rappelling and steep snow descents and broken crampons. There were gracious passageways through slide alder, docile frozen lakes, and rolling ridgelines. But if a journey is a sum of its parts, what did this one contain? There was snow and scree, the odd boulder field, rock slab, or heather-laden slope, and more snow and scree. In the aftermath, I find it difficult to write about any one section, day, or moment of the traverse. Whatever you name it, we were moving quickly through the mountains. Somewhere along the way, we started calling it ultraneering, a term borrowed from one of Kaytlyn’s friends that probably means nothing but somehow feels accurate. In the end, it’s hard to know what to call this style of travel-it’s neither mountaineering nor trail running, but it’s high on shenanigans and certainly nails the “ultra” part of ultrarunning. We set our watches to record in “trail run” mode, but ran so seldomly that we made a habit of calling it out each time we did. The North Cascades high country is unlike anywhere in the Lower 48: It’s incredibly steep and rugged, difficult to access (often requiring hours of bushwacking), and almost void of trails-our route included glacier crossings, sections of technical rock, and painfully slow navigation. The snowpack was unseasonably high-making for easy travel-and the forecast showed seven days of almost-perfect weather. I had just recovered from Covid Kaytlyn still had some time before needing to shift her focus to UTMB, a premier ultramarathon in Chamonix. We embarked on the afternoon of July 23, starting with a boat ride up Ross Lake to Silver Creek, just a few miles south of the Canadian border. And then, with our gear prepped and our crew at the ready, we’ll get down on our knees and beg for a unicorn of a window, when weather and conditions and schedules and health align. We’ll slowly piece together a line across our shared map. She was calculated, organized, and skilled at whittling down the impossible into manageable parts: we’ll recon this section, scour the internet for beta on that section, hassle our friends (and friends of friends) for their secret and hard-won gpx files to fill in the gaps. I don’t think I would have ever personally drummed up the ambition to take something like this on, but-even though I barely knew her-something about Kaytlyn’s approach was incredibly confidence inspiring. It goes without saying that I responded with an emphatic YES. Each of these five traverses take the average mountaineer anywhere from three to seven days to complete, and Kaytlyn wanted to do them all in a push. She wanted to link up a series of North Cascades high routes on foot, starting somewhere near the Canadian border and finishing at the southern end of the park. Back in the spring, Kaytlyn-who I’d never met at the time-approached me with an ambitious proposal. All good plans start with a wild idea, but this one might just take the cake.
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