Cloud Walker meets Rising Wolf. This love was like bad medicine.

Wow. Rising Wolf (9500′) is a real son of a bitch. You can search my entire blog (which is around 200,000 words right now), and you’ll find it’s the first time I’ve thrown out that gem. All the drama and all of the heartache that Mt James kept to himself got served to me on a platter with all of the fixings.

The near mile of gain is only one part of it. It is as mentally challenging with the route finding as it is exhausting to climb. Not often am I so spent after grinding out the up, that I look for an alternative down? Which, by the way, has NEVER worked to my benefit. Let’s dig into this ordeal. On the bright side, it could have been My Own Private Idaho. But I think I’ll leave that to Keanu Reeves.

My days off have been hit or miss for the last month. And I’ve never gotten off two in a row. So when I find out at 4 pm that tomorrow is all mine, I have to make some fairly quick decisions and set the alarm clock early. AND I need to make it count.

Rising Wolf Mtn out of the Two Medicine area was next on the list and sounded good. I wanted to do a nice trail loop like Dawson/Pitamakan, but I’m kinda saving that until the end of the season with the hopes of having someone to hike with.

There are many routes up this mountain. All of them suck. You can either take the 9-mile trail/ ridge combo from Dawson Pass (safer, but exhausting). Or try your luck with one of the drainages up from the Elkhorn valley floor (lots of cliffs, lots of brush, lots of bears, and lots of luck). I chose the former.

This one was a bit of a drive for a change, so I got out early but not as early as I would have liked. The first thing that caught my eye at the trailhead was this really cool electrical box thing next to the parking lot. I guess the NPS is updating its communications and installing a bulletproof radio repeating station with a solar power package.

I guess there is some money in the NPS budget after all. Wouldn’t mind seeing a little of that go to fixing the last 2.3 miles of potholed gravel on the Many Glacier Road. But I digress.

First things first, I need to bust my ass up to Dawson Pass. This trail is a killer. Starts as forest bottomland and then gains and gains and gains. The gains just a little more. The skies were giving me mixed signals for what would be a minimum 12-hour day in my mountain paradise.

It was nice to see Sinopah again up close and personal. Although most history and writings show her as a powerful female Blackfeet warrior, I’ve come across some evidence she was most likely transgender. But again, I digress.

Rising Wolf was looking a little cranky this morning. Yeah, I’m glad I passed on these cliff routes to the summit.

At a backbreaking 6.5 miles one way, you gain 2450′ feet step by (gasping) step to get to Dawson. I set the cruise control and was eating pretzel thins at the saddle in 2.75 hours. I found out also that a 2.0-mile hiking speed is the only pace at which the mosquitos CANNOT catch you and drain off all of the blood from your pumping heart. The bugs were brutal. The sweat burned my eyes the entire time.

Once at Dawson Pass, I could see Rising Wolf ALL THE WAY back there to my left. Now I would have to run that ridge for a couple of miles to get back to the summit that I passed in the valley. Maybe trying one of those drainages wasn’t such a bad thing.

Goofy Dave at the pass. This would be the last time I smile all day.

Better yet, let’s enjoy a little commentary before I leave a perfectly good trail and go somewhere much more difficult. To a place that didn’t want me there. And then try to return.

The first thing I have to do is traverse the ridge from Flinsch Peak to the one that will take me to Rising Wolf. Just as the clouds rolled in and covered my route.

Better yet, come and take a walk with Dave at about 7000′ without a clear idea of where he is going. Consider yourself an embedded reporter.

Finally, after keeping my eyes peeled for werewolves, the sun started burning off the clouds and giving me a vision of things to come. Ah, there is the prize. If I could only see what is between me and the summit.

Oh, there it is. Just a little knob. No worries. I could not be sure if this morning’s vapor thing was a good omen or a sign that I should turn back and keep away from the light.

Climbing up and walking the ridge gave me great views of Young Man Lake, with Flinsch Pk and Mt Morgan slightly obscured on either side.

A clear open ridge walk along the edge with 1000 plus feet of fall off. Thankfully little wind today.

Now I was getting the real picture of the challenges I’d need to overcome. Cross this first hump, then over the next, shoot thru that gap, then climb the next hump, then hit that last saddle before the summit, and finally find a way thru that break in the crumbly igneous band just below the top. AND I’m still a good 1.5 miles away. What time is it???

Looking the other way I’m getting great views of Pumpelly Pillar and massive Mt. Rockwell.

All righty then. Got that first hump behind me. A simple up-and-over with a little side traverse. Flinsch Pk and Young Man Lake getting smaller. This is a LONG ridge.

Now it is time for that notch. Hmm… It ended up being a lot rougher than I had hoped. First I sniffed out some game trails to come in low (cliffed out on the left), then more game trails out onto the face before I could cut back up and get on top (at the right). Took some careful steps and more time than I wanted.

From the notch (which was a much shaper fall off on the left and right than it appears in the picture) I got some great views across the way at Flinsch and Morgan, with Young Man and Old Man Lakes.

Now across the notch and on the last ridge (still need to hit that final high saddle before the summit), I get commanding views. Again, the colors and the sky were perfect. This is some of the best that Glacier has to offer.

At last, the final ridge up to the summit. I’m still the better part of an hour out. Still not sure how getting thru that upper broken band of rock is going to play out.

Looking back on my route from Dawson pass. It has taken over 3 hours since I left the trail.

To make it easier for you, follow the red dotted line. Yeah. Exhausting. So much for a nice clean ridge walk as I had on Mt James. Rising Wolf makes you really work for it.

I found a great break in the cliffs. No cairns. No boot marks. Lots of digging from bears, but nothing that looked like it was from this season (yet). The angle of the climb started rolling off and suddenly (after six hours) I was there.

I’m much more tired than I look. But the day is barely half over at this point.

Bundled up to keep off the chill from my sweat-soaked shirt as a cool summit breeze kick up a bit. Bonus: no bugs up here!

Some comments from the top.

Some wonderful still summit shots that don’t really need words. Just scroll thru and enjoy.

In case you want a nice panning video without having to look at my face, here is another option for you.

Now that the fun time is over, time to start thinking about getting down. After all, that is when most climbing accidents happen.

I had no appetite to return to the ridge route. Navigating the game trails on both sides of that notch were pretty exposed and the rock was rotten. Without being able to stay on top of the ridge itself, the risk was such that it was worth checking out options.

From the summit and the last high saddle, I scouted a scree slope that looked pretty promising. No cliffs, and plenty of room to dodge the lingering snow fields.

It also appears to have a fairly gentle run out to the forest. From there I should be able to find enough holes in the brush to work my way to the main trail on the valley floor.

The descent from the saddle went kind of ok. I really should have traversed over to that scree slope I scouted farther on the left, but instead took the more wooded drainage to the right. It became pretty clogged and cliffy toward the bottom, but I was able to navigate without too many scratches. This was turning into bear country pretty quickly.

Now came the moment of commitment. I was 90% sure this drainage was cliff free. If I found a vertical band I couldn’t get thru, I’d need to up-climb the 1500′ I just dropped and take the original ridge route out. Which would put me in the truck at or after dark. The forest looked a little thick, but navigable.

And that’s about the time everything pretty much went to hell. In the drainage I wanted to descend, there was something dark that moved. I used my phone to zoom in on it.

There was more movement, than stillness. Hmmm. I put my phone away. That’s when I got the flash of eyes and the snout. Bear cub. Hunkered down and hiding as mom taught it. Couldn’t tell if a black bear or a griz. Didn’t matter.

I made a very hurried traverse to the side of the drainage where the vegetation was less lush and less dense. Found a rough game trail going my way and jumped on it for a good hundred yards. Keeping my eye out for movement, I continued to hike farther away. I assessed and picked another drainage to follow down to the trail. At that time I noticed the pack pocket where I keep my phone was unzipped and empty. I had lost my phone somewhere on the mountainside.

Well, I owed myself to at least look for it. I retraced what I thought had been my route to the best of my hurried recollection. Stashed my pack and continued with my bear spray and trekking poles. I carefully re-entered the drainage making lots and lots of noise. No movement. Returned to the spot I had seen the cub. It was gone.

For the next hour, I traversed the area back and forth. Sweeping thru the brush, checking down scree fields, doing a grid search over all the areas I thought I might have traveled thru. I put on my pack and gave up with a rock feeling in my stomach. The first new phone I’d ever had, and only for a couple of months. And kind of an important tool for this summer. But at least I didn’t get mauled, so totally a small price to pay.

Started to scout the route thru the forest, and decided I owned it to myself to have one last look. Another hour of sweeping the brush and nothing. Just as I gave up, I took a different route to descend about a dozen feet higher than where I had been looking. And there was my phone lying on a clump of Beargrass.

The happiness lasted about six minutes. That is when I hit the worst brush I have encountered since that epic climb on Mt Kintla back in 1996. That time the slide alders were so tight they locked you in, tore away every square inch of exposed skin, and I fell off a hidden dry waterfall and almost broke my leg. This was on par if not a little worse than that experience.

To add to the misery was the heat. And now I couldn’t move fast enough to keep the bugs at bay. As a bonus, the brush pulled the safety off my bear spray can. Only a little puff got out, just enough to make my eyes water some and have me thrash thru the forest like a blind Tasmanian devil for about twenty minutes or so. I didn’t need any bear bells, as the steady stream of loud profanities spewing forth from my thirst-chapped lips would have certainly scared off any living creature within a two-mile radius.

In the end, I fell onto the main trail, and from there had another arduous and soul-searching two hours of boot pounding back to the truck. All the time trying to keep the black flies from laying eggs in the festering open wounds the brush had left in my legs and arms. I knew I was getting close to the trailhead when I passed a group of young women walking to the lake with coffee cups for the sunset, all wearing Lululemon yoga pants. And they smelled like Bounce fabric softener.

No more climbing drainages around Rising Wolf or in the Two Medicine Valley for me. My curiosity about alternative off-trail routes has been satisfied. Although a wonderful day to look back on, with pictures that say a thousand words, I was just tired. Time to go home. Dave out.

Oh, and did I mention another climber died climbing Rising Wolf the same day I was there? I remember seeing a rescue helicopter in the late morning just before reaching the summit.