Art Lang
Appearances
Uinta Triangle
The Tyranny of Distance
The Yuntas has a couple dozen drainages, major ranges that come in from the north and come in from the south.
Uinta Triangle
The Tyranny of Distance
And every single one of those has a trailhead and often people at them. And so it's a simple matter if you get sick or get injured, it's a simple matter to crawl or walk down 10 miles to any trailhead and you're out of there.
Uinta Triangle
The Tyranny of Distance
Not especially difficult to navigate. It's not an especially dangerous place. Weather, sure, it can be bad, but there's many mountain ranges that are far more risky than the high Uintas.
Uinta Triangle
The Tyranny of Distance
Art challenged me on that. Is it rare that someone gets lost in the backcountry and is not found, or is it common?
Uinta Triangle
The Tyranny of Distance
I'm asking you as a reporter and an aggressive researcher in this field, is it more common for people to be not found or people to be found in an environment like the high Uintas?
Uinta Triangle
The Tyranny of Distance
Dan McCool was having some trouble. He was off the couch and out of shape. As usual, he got in shape on the trip. But this was early in the trip, so he wasn't in shape yet.
Uinta Triangle
The Tyranny of Distance
King's Peak is a lightning rod, both literally and figuratively, in that it's always hit by lightning, but it's also attracting people from all over the world, and especially Boy Scouts, to go climb it.
Uinta Triangle
The Tyranny of Distance
It was pretty continuous and frequent. They were buzzing around all over the place.
Uinta Triangle
The Tyranny of Distance
So in my years of experiences, as we came up Painter Basin approaching Kings Peak, it has been unusual to see or hear a helicopter.
Uinta Triangle
The Tyranny of Distance
And then as we got closer to Kings Peak, we either saw a flyer on a post or we talked to a person that talked about Eric. That's the first we heard of it. Art took a close look at the flyer. I thought, wow, if we're walking the same thing, I guess we're going to be looking for him the next four or five, six days.
Uinta Triangle
The Tyranny of Distance
That is one of the prettiest places in the whole mountain range and I've gone back there over and over again because it's open and beautiful and it's dotted with these big boulders all over the place.
Uinta Triangle
The Tyranny of Distance
He may have just been wandering around looking for wildflowers or just enjoying the solitude.
Uinta Triangle
The Tyranny of Distance
The trail there's through a big tailless slope and it's a descending, pretty good path.
Uinta Triangle
The Tyranny of Distance
Looked like they would be too steep for us to comfortably cross.
Uinta Triangle
The Tyranny of Distance
I don't think there was yet much trail put in across the steep portion. Because really to do that, you'd have to be a, I'm not sure what, a mountaineer with an ice axe.
Uinta Triangle
The Tyranny of Distance
We considered briefly just going down the steep talus slope to Mountaineers. A steep talus slope can be enjoyable if it's the right size particles, in this case stones or pebbles. If it's small, it's fun. You glissade down or you can plunge step down and go down quickly and it's actually fun.
Uinta Triangle
The Tyranny of Distance
Keep in mind, Dan and I are both mountaineers and skilled in high-angle travel, so we're used to steep snow and steep, tailless rock cliffs, actually.
Uinta Triangle
The Tyranny of Distance
That part wasn't too bad, and we just angled towards the top of one of these fingers, and it was up against a cliff. And where it's up against a cliff, there was a moat. A moat is a term in which deep snow that's up against a cliff starts melting out against the cliff because of the temperature differential. And it melts out a gap, a hole, a chasm between the two.
Uinta Triangle
The Tyranny of Distance
And in the real mountains, that can be very dangerous, as bad as a crevasse. It can be several hundred feet deep. But in this case, you really can't tell how deep it is. It just looks like a black hole, and it's a little bit intimidating.
Uinta Triangle
The Tyranny of Distance
But in this case, we were able to walk across the top of that snow on a knife edge of that snow. And I think it was a small enough moat we could even have a hand on the rock. Not terribly intimidating, but a bit sobering. So we did it one at a time, watching the other guy in case something happened and successfully crossed it.
Uinta Triangle
The Tyranny of Distance
We wanted to go out to point X in the distance, the horizontal direction. We didn't want to mess around and go down the talus.
Uinta Triangle
The Tyranny of Distance
If you were scared of that steep snow slope and didn't figure out, you'd get across on the moat.
Uinta Triangle
The Tyranny of Distance
I just knew that we'd be thinking about that and dealing with it the rest of the trip.
Uinta Triangle
The Tyranny of Distance
I'm a longtime backpacker and mountaineer and climber, so I've been traveling the high and wild for in the neighborhood of 40 years.
Uinta Triangle
The Tyranny of Distance
I'm a natural navigator and experienced in micro-navigation, what's in front of my feet, and in macro-navigation, looking a long distance and seeing peaks and knowing where I am intuitively on my map.
Uinta Triangle
The Tyranny of Distance
I like to wander around there, so intended just to walk from A to B and connect all those places that I'd explored. He'd made meticulous plans. I knew where I wanted to camp. I knew how many days and how many miles in between each camp. And he didn't anticipate any trouble. It's not as committing as some of the places I've backpacked in Alaska or even Yellowstone or places like that.
Uinta Triangle
The Tyranny of Distance
That highline trail runs the length of the mountain range, and the mountain range is a rare mountain range that is oriented east and west.
Uinta Triangle
The Tyranny of Distance
Like what you see in the sound of music from the singers running through these big wildflower fields, that's alpine tundra. In the alpine tundra of, say, Utah, the High Line, that tundra exists because the conditions at altitude are desiccating cold winds in the winter that cause the trees to not be able to grow.
Uinta Triangle
The Tyranny of Distance
There are plenty of wildflowers and plants that create flowers, but they're only there for a month of the year. So everything's struggling to survive. To me, the ecosystem is precious because It is surviving on the hairy edge of what's possible and it's doing it with aplomb. Life abides, so it lives through those harsh conditions.