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A Sawtooth Scene
Walking the Line in the Heyburn Couloir
by Jonah Cantor
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There was this one picture that kept appearing on the tabletop throughout the months that I lived at Johnny’s place. A mountain with two summits dominated the 8x10. An impressive hatchet-split feature tore the saw-toothed summit towers in two. To this, Johnny would point and proclaim with reverence, “The Heyburn Couloir.”
It was his dream hatched during an internship two years before hauling sleds, stocking huts and skiing on the clock for Sun Valley Trekking (SVT), a backcountry hut and yurt operation in the Sawtooths and neighboring ranges of Idaho’s Sun Valley. The previous season, while recovering from a serious climbing accident, skiing the Heyburn had become an obsession. And every time that picture surfaced on the table, I listened, usually washing the story down with a pull of bourbon. Before long, I, too, had bought into the Heyburn myth.
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These are just the facts—the picture, the whiskey—of how the dream became the plan that, in the end, has gotten us here, skinning across the fifth and highest Bench Lake. I grasp tightly onto this inspiration and enter the line of shadow cast by Mount Heyburn (10,229 feet). The temperature drops to what feels like twenty-below in the morning shade, and my mind pleads for me to retreat back down to the cast-iron “People Heater” in the Bench Hut, where we’ve been welcomed to join the owners Joe and Francie on a SVT family trip.
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Up we climb past the pits we dug yesterday, probing the couloir. The midwinter snowpack is as stable as anyone in the area can recall.
I think about the hut again and recall Joe’s last words to us at the door: “Johnny, you’re hyper-focused on that line. I think you guys should be the ones up there.”
Faced with the cathedral architecture of the Heyburn Couloir, I wonder if hyper-focused isn’t a polite way to warn us of large ambitions in these mountains. We’re far from help should something go wrong. I don’t mention this to Johnny; after the string of our shared adventures, I already know what he’s thinking.
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Booting up the 50º swath of snow narrowly cutting up between granite walls, with skis strapped to back, axe in right hand, left hand provoking and cleaning a touchy wind slab of a few centimeters, I’m completely enraptured in the Sawtooth buzz—a vibration to which everyone who logs time in Idaho’s high-country can attest. The couloir chokes and pitches to 55º, doglegs up left, then approaches 60 and tops out to the left of a cornice that unnerves me.
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A platform the size of a picnic table teeters on the crest, entrenched beneath Heyburn’s dual summits. It is bathed in a golden eastern sun. I leave the shadow and feel the warmth and look out over the Sawtooths from this perch. I am buzzed.
Johnny is up now and we swap out our wet gloves for mittens; we secretly dread the cold shadow below. A transmission crackles in our radio from the lake below. Joe and Francie have had their eyes on us up until the dogleg. They’ll spot us from below.
I sidestep back into the line first, breath in the cold, then commit. The snow is Styrofoam-firm, almost like a springboard. The pitch is cambered against the rock walls constricting my comfortable turning radius. But the rhythm finds me and takes over. I am no longer jumping and scratching. I am a pendulum fixed by the ski tails swinging freely down and down with gravity.
Pulling off to the side below the choke, I wait and watch my partner hold a long turn and howl by me. He vanishes into a bottomless deposit of slough and reappears far beneath as an ant-sized being with hands and arms reaching up in victory. I snap a photograph to replace the 8x10 on the table then do my own victory dance to the apron below.
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Source:
To contact Sun Valley Trekking for more information on skiing in the Sawtooths or to book one of their backcountry yurts and huts, visit www.svtrek.com or call owners Joe and Francie St. Onge at 208.788.1966.
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