Southern Wind River Winter Adventures: Lava Mountain

Lava Mountain: Sled Rescue Operation/ East Side Turns

Shoshone NF
March 17th, 2007
(St. Patrick's Day)

Lava Mountain

Chuck skins up the west of Lava Mountain, Skidoo style.

I wasn't sure if we were even going to get any turns in at all on this trip. Chuck called me up earlier this week and asked if I wanted to help retrieve the sleds of some folks he works with. He said they got them stuck around Lava Mt last Saturday and actually spent the night in there before they hiked out the next day. "Yikes!", I thought, they must have been stuck pretty bad. Having been in that position a time or two myself, I gladly volunteered to join the expedition. I needed an excuse to explore the Lava Mt area more anyway.

The rescue crew, assembled on top of the west side of Lava Mt.

Five sleds with eight folks left the Mocassin Basin road/ turnout area around 9am or so. Chuck and I just followed the caravan. Turns out they headed almost exactly to the area we tried to ski back in January (the west side of Lava Mt). We drove right up the west side of the mountain that we had skinned up before. Actually quite a trail going up it, which seemed great to me- the skiing was horrible on this face (very wind hammered).

The view from there was awesome! So was the weather.

My reindeer; parked on Lava, the Tetons in the background.

A view of the drainage we would drop into a very long ways. They called it Calf Creek. We actually skied it back in January- just the top part. There was some pretty good powder on it back then.

The sleds that needed rescuing.

After about 3 miles or so of riding our machines down into the drainage, we parked them and then proceeded by foot, snow-shoe, ski or splitboard for yet another couple of miles. I guess the folks that got stranded followed some tracks all the way down into here, hoping they would come out the other side. The tracks dropped into this hole and then turned around. It sounded like they tried for most of the day to get up this hill, but it denied them. Easy to see why.

Took about an hour of digging around, to clear a path to (hopefully drive the machine up) and dig one machine out. Then the plan was to have Tad, an amazing snow machine driver, hop on and attempt to drive the machine straight up a 35 degree wooded slope. Hoping like heck it wouldn't spin out and roll back down the hill. Well, that's nearly what happened on the first go. Tad, Chuck and I found ourselves being drug down the hill trying to keep the machine from rolling. We managed, but barely. Plan B had me leaning out over the slope with a come-along tied to a tree, in hopes of hooking a ski on the sled to keep it from sliding back down, incase it spun out again. Thankfully, it didn't come to that. Tad was able to rip all the way up the hill this time. Whew! After that, he had it dialed. He ripped the other sled all the way up too, narrowly missing trees at breakneck speeds. That was it though. After that they were pretty much able to drive the machines all the way out.

"Whoohoo! I'm free!" I'm sure that's what the Polaris was thinking anyway.

Chuck and Karla motor up and out of Calf Creek.

Chuck and Karla head for the top of Lava Mt.

We finished up the rescue business around 1:00pm. Since we were pretty much on top of the mountain already, we figured we'd better at least snoop around and see if we couldn't get some turns in too.

We found some...