Well, nothing ever happens as it was planned. After driving all day to get to White Butte, it turns out the road was closed to get to the base of the mountain. On top of that, the climb looked much more difficult than we had anticipated. We had thought that we would be able to quickly tag the summit and hop back in the car within 30 minutes. We quickly realized that we were in store for much more. Even getting to the point where the road was closed was a chore. My NAV system took us over a "road" that was more like an over grown trail through 4 miles of fields before we found an access route along a gravel road.
However, there was no way in hell that we were leaving North Dakota without tagging this damn summit. Road closed or not, we were getting on the top of that mountain tonight.
We started getting out our gear...headlamps, plenty of water, warmer clothes in case the temps dropped too much, trekking poles and any food we had in the car because we hadn't eaten dinner yet. It looked to be about 6 miles round trip and the sun was just setting so we knew this was going to be a bit of an adventure.
The 1.5 mile walk along the closed road was really easy and went very fast. Luckily, we got to the base while it was still somewhat light out and we could see the best way to approach the mountain. There wasn't really a trail and there were no markers or anything to indicate which path was the best.
The first pitch was a bit of a scramble up some loose rock. Once we got done with that we found an approach that seemed to be a cut trail and were up on the summit within 30 min or so. There was still a little bit of light left over the horizon so the view was pretty spectacular.
We took some pictures and made some phone calls as the last sliver of sun light disappeared over the horizon. We powered up our headlamps, signed the log book and started making our way back.
This is when things got interesting. We were able to follow the "trail" off the main part of the summit pretty easily, but we couldn't find the spot where we came up. In every direction we were surrounded by a steep drop off. We made our way down into a drainage basin that appeared to be the best way down. What we didn't realize was that we overshot the point where we came up by about 200 feet and we were on this crazy ridge that was made out of a sandy type of loose rock. The drainage basin started to get narrower and narrower until we found ourselves surrounded by almost vertical walls on all sides along a very thin sinewy dried up stream. It wasn't that it was all that dangerous, it was just that we felt that at any moment the path could have just stopped and left us at a complete dead end and we'd have to climb back up 400 feet to get out. Luckily, the sage words of Jack Donaghy came in handy, "Sometimes the way back up is down...sometimes you have to climb down into the crevasse". The path finally led us out into the clearing in front and we both just sat down and stared at the star lit sky for 30 min. The stars were so bright and our surroundings so dark that we could see the faint lights of the milky way.
It was pretty amazing.
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