Spur of the Moment Adventure – Big Day!

Soaking in the Summit. 5,000 vertical there and back.

Spur of the Moment Adventure

We made up our minds on Friday evening. Enough locals had made the trek and we sure as hell weren’t getting any younger, we were in better shape that day than we had been five years earlier, and we had just bought two new pairs of trekking poles. ‘Nuff said. We were doing this. We got up at 0-dark-thirty, having prepped our packs with appropriate food, water, and emergency gear for the day and stowed them in the truck the night before. My wife and I crawled into our hiking clothes, grabbed a quick cup of joe, and bailed into the truck for our spontaneous adventure. We are lucky…we live only 15 minutes from the trail head, so it was considerably less 0-dark-thirty than it might be for others!

I had loaded the maps into my iphone topo app and had researched the best routes to the summit. We were off! When we donned our packs and locked the truck, there was just enough pre-dawn light to not require headlamps, so as Forrest Gump would say “one less thing”. The first two and a half hours of the hike were a climb on the order of about 3,000 feet and a little less than three miles. The trail came and went, marked only by rock cairns stacked by those who came before, and it got steeper and rougher until we reached Griswold lake, a high mountain snow-fed blue crystal surrounded by steep bluffs and topped by a beautiful Nevada blue sky.

Griswold Lake

Would I do it again? Oh hell yes!

We filled our bottles (filtered) from the crystal clear stream and began the climb out of the lake basin with some trepidation, as the trail was very vertical at this point. The summit loomed. We reached the saddle above the lake and this is where our willpower and our bodies started to wage war against each other. Luckily, we’d completed about 75 percent of the vertical at this point, nearly 4000 feet, and so we began the mind game of “just a little farther…to that rock over there”. As each milestone came and went, we continued to fight against our desire to end the pain. Eventually, time began to become the enemy, as we knew we would be in  a lot of pain going back down and dreaded donning headlights in the rocky and dangerous country.

As we made the last 700 vertical feet of our adventure in a house-boulder rockpile, our willpower finally flagged. We were beat and we knew it. In one last vain attempt to salvage something cherished from the trek, we agreed to climb to the ridgetop instead of summitting. When we reached the ridge, the view was worth it!

A Final Decision

As I looked out over the landscape, I heard a low-pitched and high-pitched harmony coming from the ridge above. A young boy and a man were about 100 yards above me yelling encouragement. My wife and I could see we were out of the rockslide and the ridge was far more navigable, so we climbed up to them. At that point, they told us we were just a couple hundred yards from the summit, so we made a snap decision to finish the game. I can’t explain how rewarding it was to summit Ruby Dome at 11,388 amsl and look at everything around us, or should I say below us? We took a few snapshots, caught our breath, and hauled ass off of there at 2:00 pm in a slight panic, knowing it took us most of 8 hours to get there and we only had 6.5 to get down.

The trail off the mountain had lengthened significantly in the heat of the afternoon, perhaps warping and stretching like a lazy snake. Our truck was so much farther than we expected, and we leaned downhill into our trekking poles in agony, getting worse with every mile. This was our first try at using trekking poles and I don’t think we could have succeeded that day without them. I can’t say enough good about my little friends, the trekking poles.

Relief

While it is always a welcomed sight, I don’t think I’ve ever been more happy to see my pickup truck in my life. As luck would have it we got there just shortly enough after sunset that we again did not need our headlamps. If I remember correctly, it was about a 15 hour day, roughly a 12 mile hike. We had climbed almost 5,000 feet and descended those same almost-5,000 feet. It seemed like a lot more to my screaming knees. We woke up the next morning, in adventure hangover, with the mothers of all sore bodies, where stepping over our front-door threshhold was an exercise in pain tolerance and we were relegated to shuffling instead of walking.

Would I do it again? Oh hell yes! With any luck, we are planning to go again this year, having picked up a few tricks along the way. We will pack lighter and take a slightly better path to avoid the boulder field, and I think we can make it work. We dared to go on an adventure and we survived it. Not only that, we had such a sense of self-accomplishment and pride as we summitted and as we soaked our sore feet and muscles, it is difficult to explain. I quite literally had no idea. No idea about the difficulty, the pain, or the actual, palpable sense of accomplishment.

Applied Lesson

So, please, just get out and do it. Adventure is just about possibilities and going for it. If you long to take that big day hike, give it a try. Just have a go/no-go plan so that you know when it is time to admit defeat and turn back. Luckily my wife and I reached our go/no-go at the summit, but we shaved it as close as we could have. I would advise you not to do it the way we did. But I would also advise you to go for it!