Four Bath Towels and an Axe: Greenhorns in the Tetons

It was late July in the Summer of 1977. I was living at my parents’ house in New Jersey at the time, and Marty, a friend that I had made at college, and I got a ride out to the Tetons with Barbara, a friend of Marty’s.

Barbara dropped us off at Jenny Lake. Marty and I set up at the hitchhikers’ camp, and then set off for the Ranger Station to plan a 6-day hike through the Teton Backcountry. We planned a great trip on the Crest Trail that started at the top of Rendezvous Peak, Jackson Hole Ski Area, then went to the General Store at Jenny Lake and bought lots of ramen noodles, oatmeal, and whatever other meager rations they sold in those days. The next morning we stuffed this food into our packs, along with all the other gear we were carrying, and hitch-hiked to the base of Rendezvous Peak.

Marty and I got to Teton Village at the base of the ski area in the late morning. We had two choices for getting up Rendezvous Peak, we could pay $10 each and get a ride up in the tram or we could hike the 4139 vertical feet to the top. Being the poor wandering souls that we were, and being full of youthful confidence we opted to hike up. We figured it would take us about an hour.

Our perspective on the hike we had ahead of us was honed in the hills of Northern New Jersey and Harriman State Park in Southern New York. In Harriman, which had the bigger hills, the base elevation was typically around 1,000’ and the hills topped out no higher than 1,300’. Trails to the top rarely took longer than 15 minutes to ascend. We’d hike mountain upon mountain in a day’s outing. Mt Rendezvous was bigger, that’s why we figured we need an hour.

That was our first mistake. In those days, water bottles were not yet a regular backpacking item and Camelback style water pouches wouldn't be available for decades. We each carried a canteen around our necks. We had full canteens when we broke camp at Jenny Lake that morning, but we drank most of it while waiting for rides. Anxious as we were to start our hike, we hadn’t looked for a place in Teton Village to refill them. On this note, however, we got lucky. Just as we started to grunt up Mt Rendezvous, we met a guy wearing a day pack hiking down. “Wow, you must have gotten an early start.”

“No, I took the tram up and hiked down.”

“Are there any creeks along this trail?”

“No, it’s dry all the way to the top.”

“Ah, bummer. Marty, maybe we need to go back and get some water.”

“I have some I can share with you,” the hiker offered.

With that, he gave us his remaining water, about a half canteen each.

A tram started up. He asked us, “Are you sure you shouldn’t catch the next one of those? You guys are wearing big packs. It sure would make your day a lot easier.”

We were all “no, we’re experienced backpackers, we got this.” Before he walked away, I asked, “Just in case we change our minds, how frequently do those trams run?”

“About every 15 minutes. That’s how fast you’d be at the top.”

We thanked him for the water and the information and started up. We got after it. I was a distance runner and weight lifter. Marty was a serious tennis player. We were young and strong. We were confident.

We felt good but progress was slower than we had hoped. The trail followed the tram line upward. When the fifth tram passed above us we knew we hadn’t made the top in an hour. We looked up at the tram, looked at each other, and kept hiking upward. Neither one of us was yet willing to consider that we should go down and ride the tram up. We could see a big tram tower in the distance. Surely that was the top.

As we hiked steadily upward, Marty suddenly pointed to a nearby copse of trees, “Look there’s a moose.” “Cool.” Sure enough, there was a big male moose munching on the brush in his little forest. It was the first moose for both of us. We dropped our packs and just sat in awe for a few minutes.

Taking off our packs, we both felt like we had grown a few inches. That should have signaled to us that we were carrying too much weight, but it didn’t. We donned our packs again and kept climbing. The first tower was still above us, but it we were slowly reeling it in.

About 15 trams into our climb the wind picked up. “Looks like a thunderstorm is building,” I noted. The rain gear for each of us amounted to a poncho. “Let’s head into those trees,” pointing ahead of me, “take our packs off and see what develops.” What developed was an intense thunderstorm with high winds blasting us. Marty ripped the tarp off his pack and we huddled under it with our packs as the worst of the storm hit.

We were down to our last few gulps of water as we sat huddled. The wind and heavy rain were freaking us out, and the temperature was dropping. Building angst about all that I was carrying finally came pouring out of me as we sat huddled and shivering. “Marty, I’m carrying too much shit! I never carry this much stuff backpacking.” I reached into my pack, the first thing I pulled out was a dress shirt. “Why the fuck am I carrying a dress shirt into the Teton backcountry. I reached in again, and pulled out a sharpening stone, and not just a small stone, a large block of stone. “Why am I carrying this?” Then reached in and pulled out the hand axe I was carrying. I held the stone in one hand, the axe in the other. “What the fuck? Was I planning to hew a forest and keep my axe keep it sharp with this stone?” I dropped the axe and stone, opened the extra bag I had attached to the top of my pack and reached in and pulled out a small bath towel. “I have 4 of these with me. Why am I carrying 4-bath towels up this goddamn mountain? This is why we’re struggling, we have too much stuff with us. We aren’t going to make it up this mountain.”

Marty laughed as he watched me freak out. Then he got in on the action. “I’m carrying a fishing pole and tackle box and there aren’t even any lakes back here with fish in them.” Then he pulled out his dress shirt while exclaiming, “I too have a dress shirt, and an extra pair of jeans, and way too much clothes.” We’re sitting under this tarp. I’m carrying a freaking tarp!”

“I see your tarp and raise you a toolkit that I have no use for.”

“I see your toolkit and raise you a “Birds of the Northwest book,” Marty responded. We were both kind of punch drunk tired and dehydrated at this point.

The list of stuff we were carrying but didn’t need was long. It wasn’t that we were completely clueless, though as two 19-year-olds having their first adventure in big mountains, there was clearly an element of that, it’s that we were hitchhiking around for 6-weeks and we had nowhere to store the stuff we used in the front country when we were in the backcountry. Marty started laughing and asked. “With all the shit we’re carrying, the thing that baffles me most is the 4 bath towels. Whatever made you take 4?”

“I actually have an explanation. It’s not a good one,” I said as I too started laughing. “My mom washes our bath towels every day. I figured that I would likely take 4 showers a week and we’d only do wash once a week, so I needed 4 towels.”

“But there’s 6 kids in your house. Did you ever consider that your mom washes the towels after each use because there’s no where to hang that many towels.?”

I looked over at Marty and then whacked my palm into my forehead. “No, I never considered that.” Then my eyes lit up, and I reached into the top bag and pulled out my 4 washcloths. “Probably didn’t need 4 of these either.” We both cracked up.

The storm came to an end. We shook out the tarp and put it to the side to dry, then started stuffing all our things back into our packs. As we did, we discussed what to do.

Marty searched the tram line for a car and noted that we hadn’t seen one in a while. “It’s getting late, do we hike back down?”

“I looked up at the tram tower we’d been trying to reach all afternoon. “We’re almost at that tower. That has to be the top of the mountain. We’ve been told that there’s a store up there. There’s got to be a spigot where we can get some water. Why don’t we lighten our loads and head up there.” Then after thinking some more, I added, “Let’s leave our packs here and just carry our canteens, our sleeping bags and some snacks.”

“Why do we need our sleeping bags and what do we do with our packs?”

“It’s getting late. Let’s bring our bags just in case we decide we need to stay up there. There’s nothing flat around here,” I said while looking around.

“Tomorrow, we come back down, grab our packs, hike down, head to a post office to ship home whatever we can do without and then give it a second go,” Marty suggested and I agreed.

With that we put on the clothes we thought we’d need, threw a few snickers bars in our sleeping bag stuff sacks, stacked our packs, rolled them in the tarp and nestled them under a tree. With our empty canteens around our necks and sleeping bag stuff sacks dangling from our hands we started up. We were making much better time, quickly closing in on the tram tower, but also becoming severely dehydrated.

As we approached the tower, we could see cliffs begin to rise up behind it. “Holy shit, this mountain is a lot bigger than we thought,” I offered.

“Maybe the tram doesn’t go all the way to the top, maybe the store is right over this rise.” Marty’s thought assured us for just a moment until the next tram tower up high on the cliffs came fully into view. “We have to go up there,” Marty said in a defeated tone.

I looked up and down the mountain. “We are way more than halfway, and we’re moving well. The cliffs just look big, and the trail continues straight up. We’ll be there in no time.” I said with more confidence that I felt.

The reality was, we weren’t even halfway up the mountain yet, but we didn’t have topo maps with us and we couldn’t accurately gauge how high we had climbed.

We came to a road. “Do we take this,” Marty asked.

“Uh, I don’t think so. The trail continues on the other side, it’s got to be faster to stay on the trail.” Looking around I noticed a chair lift to our right. I pointed to it. “That’s where the road goes. We want to stay on the trail. I’ll bet it cuts right through those cliffs, gets us to the top in no time.

We kept climbing and reached the tram tower shortly after crossing the road. We reached a second road crossing and the end of the trail a little while later.

“I guess we’re not cutting through those cliffs,” Marty said with a mixture sarcasm and deflated hope. “Which way?”

“It’s uphill to the left, so that’s how we go.” We were dragging. It was our first full day in the Tetons, our first full day at altitude and our dehydration was only getting worse. Up close, the cliffs looked massive to us. We kept moving forward because we felt we really had no choice. If we decided the top was too far and turned around there was no way we would make it down to our packs and then down to the bottom with our packs before dark and without water. We needed water.

Marty and I had never seen a ski area that looked like this. We were intermediate skiers that spent time at resorts in New York State and Vermont. “There aren’t any trails,” Marty noted.

“Yeah, I noticed that. I guess skiers just ski everywhere.”

“But there are rocks and trees and damn this is steep.”

We could see small snowfields among the cliffs. “I guess they get a lot of snow. I don’t think it hangs around in July in Vermont or New York.”

As we dragged ourselves along, we slowly moved out from under the cliffs to the base of a bowl. We could see the road switchback up through the bowl and suddenly Marty shouted, “Look, the top of the tram.” It wasn’t close. We had to climb the switchbacks we could see and then hike up a steep ridgeline. We were getting headachy and sick, but we didn’t have a better option. We kept hiking, at least now with the goal in sight.

The store came into view. We were literally zombified with parched mouths and ferocious headaches. We dragged our sleeping bags along in our arms that hung limp at our sides. I remember thinking, if there’s no spigot, I’m going to break in. I can’t go much longer without water.

The owners of the store must have been prepared for just such a situation because as we approached the store a young woman stepped out and said “Can I help you?”

With a crazed look on my face I blurted out, “Water, water, we need water.”

She ran inside and reappeared with a 5-gallon jug of water and started filling our canteens. We drank and she refilled, and then when we regained our composure, we apologized for being stupid kids from New Jersey and getting ourselves into a dangerous situation. Then we asked if she could spare a few aspirin.

Her name was Claire. She was about 28 years old. “Where’s your gear?”

We explained how we had too much gear and not enough water with us so we left our packs partway down the mountain and had set out in search of water. She was heating up stew, she invited us in and offered us some. We were in no position to be proud. We sat inside and ate with her as darkness settled over the valley now more than 4,000 feet below us.

Claire was from Chicago. She showed up in Jackson when she was our age on her own Discover America tour, but she never went back. She made her living by working retail during her days in Jackson, and guarding the top of the mountain tram station from the likes of us at nights.

She’d dealt with others in our predicament a few times each summer. Most, like us, were affable, and just needed a little help, but some were in much worse shape than we were and a few were downright mean.

“Why would someone be mean?” Marty asked.

“Well, there was this one guy who yelled at me, like it was my fault the mountain was bigger than he expected, and his group just stood around closed mouthed. He was screaming at me to start the tram up for them so they could ride down.”

“What’d you do?”

“I locked myself in the store and called the rangers. It was nerve racking for about an hour with that angry guy outside but then one of the rangers got up here. They calmed down and just set up their tent until morning. Then they got the ride down that they wanted.”

“Wait, you said an hour?”

“He ran right up here using the route you just climbed.”

“Whoa.” Now we really felt like east coast greenhorns.

“Remember, he lives here and he wasn’t carrying much.”

A local FM station was playing the sound track of our youth: The Eagles, Jackson Browne, the Stones, Hendrix and others in the background while we talked.

“This is quite the perch you have,” I said as I got up and looked out the windows at the night sky. “It doesn’t look like this in New Jersey at nights.”

“Chicago neither, and I don’t even have to climb up here.” Claire said with a smile.

“Don’t rub it in,” Marty replied.

“You two should go down and get rid of the unnecessary stuff in your bags and finish this hike. It’s beautiful in the backcountry. Coming from New Jersey, I can’t imagine you’ve seen anything like it. I know I hadn’t when I moved here from Chicago. Just big beautiful vistas everywhere you look.”

With dinner finished we helped clean the table and insisted on doing the dishes. “Can we just sleep outside on the porch?”

“You are welcome to crash in here if you want. It’ll be warmer and free of critters coming to visit. Just put your bags on the floor.”

In the morning we thanked Claire for her hospitality and quickly headed down to find our gear. Luckily no critters had gotten into our stuff overnight. We hiked back to the bottom then hitchhiked to the Post Office at Moose. They had boxes we could use. Seems we weren’t the first ones that needed to do this. I shed 9 pounds of weight; Marty shed 7. We wouldn’t have dress shirts, and I wouldn’t have a sharpening stone or an axe, and I even sent 3 of my bath towels back. I was glad to see it all go. Our packs were much lighter now. We headed back to Jenny Lake to plan our next adventure.