Yesterday Chaz and I went up to the Buffalo Plateau. With a 5am start our idea was a marathon across towards Yount’s peak to see how close we could get. Ultimately we got past Crescent Mountain right around 1pm with only one skin transition and decided to go back and ride Crescent. Getting out of that place can be a challenge so our marathon turned into making runs on Crescent and blazing back.
It starts with the challenging sledding to the Wilderness Border which took us about 6 attempts in the last few years before we ever made it to fly a kite, but now we have it relatively dialed. There’s a couple steep drops on the way in that linger in the back of your mind the whole time. The hardest climb on the way out took me 7 tries before I dumped my packs and finally made it. I was having thoughts of leaving my sled and skiing out the 10 miles…very unsettling.
Once to the Wilderness Boarder we launched our kites and made it about 6 miles deep into the Abseroka Mountain Range. We had only one skin transition that's a short climb at the base of Crescent. From there we made the distance easily, but linking the plateau sections led to some of our most challenging kite exploring ever. At one point I was dropping over a horizon which I was pretty sure I knew from Google Earth, but as it kept getting steeper and steeper I started to think it turned into cliffs and thoughts of a forced flight started flashing through my head as I started skidding down. Fortunately the steep slope was snowy and I pounded a series of steep jump turns with some minor sluffing of the snow. It panned out, but it was seriously intense. After that we were thrown right into another technical part where there was the skinniest line across this rocky blown off ridge and trees that I caught a glimpse of from my decent. At the beginning my kite sluffed and I kid you not, I backstalled my kite right around a tree, lines on both sides and kite behind. Then I relaunched it straight up and ended up making the crux of our kite adventure to make it past Crescent mountain and almost to Wall Mountain.
Anyway, Huge terrain reliable wind and a very suitable challenge for our experience, once again I hauled my camera so check out the pictures!
Cheers,
Will Taggart