The Ski Journal - Volume 14, Issue 3
FOLLOW THE RIDGE: A Winter WURL in the Wasatch
2020-12-09 17:58:14
Weather forecasts are hard. We had mostly sunny conditions when we departed for the Wasatch Ultimate Ridge Linkup (aka the WURL), but clouds came in and out most days, which made everything a little more fun and challenging, and also kept some of the snow in better condition.
For seven hours, I sang “Crazy Eddie’s Last Hurrah”—my favorite childhood song—on repeat. I cried, I laughed, and I chatted with the tree. As it got colder, I led a stuck-on-a-cliff aerobics class, making sure to always keep at least one foot bracing and one hand holding. For dinner, I ate a handful of nuts and M&M’s and when I heard nearby rockfall, I squeezed the tree and cliff wall tighter, thankful for the overhang above me. I was ready to spend the night on the edge, but thanks to the search and rescue team, I climbed off that cliff enveloped in darkness, and attached to a rope.
I had made a mistake. I was tired after multiple hours of navigating through the summer heat, and on the crux of the day, the section of ridge heading up toward the summit of Monte Cristo, I had gotten off course. I had failed to follow the one simple rule of the Wasatch Ultimate Ridge Linkup (WURL), the iconic trail loop through Utah’s Wasatch Mountains: Follow the ridge.
Since my lonesome night on the Monte Cristo wall, I have continued to spend my summer days navigating and running the ridgeline—humbled but not discouraged. Living in Little Cottonwood Canyon (LCC), I look up at the cliffs from my backyard. When I go to the grocery store, I can see the tallest peaks covered in snow late into the summer. In the winter, it’s where I ski.
I grew up playing in the mountains, originally in Idaho as a Nordic ski racer and on the ski team for the University of Utah. Eventually that love for adventure led me off the groomed trails as I transitioned into freeriding and backcountry skiing. My Nordic fitness helped me push deeper into the mountains, turning my Wasatch backyard into a place where I felt comfortable and energized. But, while I’d completed numerous summertime trailrunning loops in my adopted mountains and skied from the summit of almost every peak in LCC, I had never truly linked them in the wintertime. The thought was exciting—fun ski lines, big back-to-back days, and a chance to push my limits and challenge my familiarity with the range I now called home.
There is only one recorded winter WURL, dubbed the WURLOS, or “WURL On Skis.” Jared Inouye, Andy Dorais and Bart Gillespie, all accomplished local backcountry skiers, did it in one push—21 straight hours of bootpacking, traversing and skiing, in the spring of 2015.
Friend and fellow Nordic-turned-alpine skier Lani Bruntz and I set out to be the second contingent to tackle the winter WURL, albeit in our own way. Along with cinematographer Anthony Bonello and local photographer Adam Clark, we wanted to loosely follow the route of the WURL, while skiing some of the best lines in the Wasatch. Rather than rush toward a temporal objective, we set out to carve our own deep signature into one of the most unique winter routes in North America.
The WURL follows the ridge that circumnavigates Little Cottonwood Canyon just outside of Salt Lake City. Starting at the mouth of the canyon, the route is horseshoe-shaped, traveling counterclockwise, up the canyon’s east ridge before circumnavigating the top of the canyon and the powder paradise of Alta and Snowbird. Then it cuts west back down to finish at the canyon mouth. The route covers 36 miles and hits 21 summits, climbing more than 18,000 vertical feet. Rarely completed on the first attempt, it takes most runners over 24 hours and features harrowing scrambles off trail and along knife-edge ridges, like the one I was stuck on in 2018. Jared Campbell, a world-renowned ultra-runner, set and mapped the run 16 years ago, and the WURL has since challenged Wasatch mountain runners and climbers. Starting and ending just outside the city, the WURL is not contrived or hard to comprehend—just follow the ridge.
The WURL is also home to numerous classic ski descents, like the East Face of Twin Peaks, the South Face of Superior and the Northeast Couloir of Lone Peak. Those routes drew us to the mouth of LCC on March 10. Far from pioneers, we were walking into a range plastered across countless books, blogs and apps detailing its every summit, saddle and drainage, but the winter WURL offered a chance to explore it in a new way: four days of skiing and three nights at camps we had stashed along the way, starting from Twin Peaks and working our way around the horseshoe to Lone Peak—if the snow stayed stable and the weather calm.
After months of planning, our first day started with headlamps on, the morning light chasing us up Twin Peaks. A mild storm had blown through Utah over the past few days, leaving a clean blanket of snow over the range. From the summit, the fresh layer contrasted against slate rock as our fingers traced the ridge we would be following for the next few days. We could identify key landmarks along the beginning of the route with detail, but as we continued the details blurred in the distance until we could no longer see the ridge, leaving us to imagine the summits and saddles at the top of the canyon. Eventually, the ridge came back into view, now across the canyon, toward Lone Peak. Intimidating and ominous, Lone Peak stood as the final summit of the WURL. We had a long way to go, with a lot of skinning up and skiing down between us and this final pillar of rock and snow.
Overwhelmed, I wondered if I would make it. Two days earlier I had felt a tickle that had grown into a sore throat, cough and headache. A simple cold that would barely be noticed during a routine workweek, but, heading into four full days of skiing and winter camping, a problem that could grow into an energy-sapping, fever-inducing menace. My body would have to work extra hard to fight the virus and keep up with the physical demands of the trip.
Luckily, Nordic skiing had introduced me to long days moving through the mountains and how to be comfortable with the uncomfortable. If anyone understood that it was Lani, a skier I had grown up racing against and training with for over a decade on the Nordic racing circuit. We were both drawn to the sport for the day-in-day-out challenge of pushing our limits. We thrived while digging deep into our endurance wells and were accustomed to the unpleasantries of exhaustion. In recent years, Lani had been working toward becoming a backcountry ski guide, while I had been pursuing a professional ski career. That shared strength in suffering had shifted, but never waned. It’s what made us an ideal backcountry team, and as our skill sets grew away from the Nordic track and into the high alpine, she had become my go-to backcountry partner.
With Lani in town and our weather window shortening, I chose to dull my senses and ignore my symptoms, pushing through my poorly timed cold. Our hair whipped in the wind and snow sprayed behind us as Twin Peaks’ scoured East Face opened into a soft powder apron. Our concerns were whisked away by the joy of sliding downhill. One peak down—we were on our way.
While the next morning treated us with soft pink light as we climbed back up to the ridge, the weather quickly turned gloomy and gray. And as we continued to march, the wind grew stronger, the clouds grew darker and it started to graupel. With visibility disappearing and the skin track turning to ice, we hunched against the gusts, quietly shuffling onward. Today would be a short day as we moved through the popular and easily accessible top of Little Cottonwood Canyon. Usually busy with multiple backcountry groups, it was empty, leaving us to scrape down the refrozen Emma Ridge and trudge up Grizzly Gulch—alone.
Having spent my formative years skiing at Alta, I was intimately familiar with the top of the canyon. Patsy Marley had become my go-to zone for solo skis before heading into work at the Alta Clinic, and branching from Alta’s adjacent backcountry had become a norm for lapping powder on both bluebird and storm days. But today, the area felt foreign. What was usually an easy skin turned slow and arduous. Each hill felt steeper, every switchback longer and the view, usually invigorating even during a storm, fell upon unappreciative eyes. The afternoon dragged on as we took long snack breaks, with Lani redressing her blisters and my cough worsening. Heads down and buffs up, we marched robotically toward camp. Forward.
That night at the Alta patrol shack, with its benches, heat and stove, felt like luxury accommodations. We drank water without having to melt snow, dried our skins and damp gear and, instead of dehydrated meals, ate fresh food with beer and cookies for dessert. We discarded anything we didn’t need. What we left behind could easily be skied down to the road, and with unexpected fatigue already on day two, every gram of excess weight was worth shedding. I even ditched my watch and small deodorant. Lani got rid of the team toothpaste. That night in the warmth of the hut, sleep came easily.
I awoke with a pounding headache and shaking chills. Lani had been up most of the night with active bowels—the result of going from a mostly vegetarian diet to eating a hardy pot roast for dinner. We moved slower that morning—maybe it was the comforts of a warm hut causing us to slow down to sit and enjoy our coffee, or maybe it was because we were both distracted by physiological distress. But as we topped out on East Castle, the warm light and sparkling, wind-whipped snow helped us pop back to life, suddenly chatty as we looked out over the waking canyon.
Technically, the WURL continues on the ridge through both Alta Ski Area and Snowbird. Both ski areas had granted us passage through their terrain as long as we were beyond their boundaries before they opened. Tired, and opting to avoid any unnecessary rush, we skied south around the resorts and up Mary Ellen Gulch, eventually reconnecting with the ridge. Both Adam and I were familiar with most of the trip’s terrain—until that day. Adam had never skied or hiked this zone, and I had never even looked at it, always gazing toward bigger peaks. This sliver of the Wasatch, which sits literally on the corner of the map, is hard to access without traveling through one of the resorts or driving two hours from the city to approach from the small town of Alpine. However, on our unique path, we were conveniently already done with the approach, and only needed to make it to our final stashed camp. From there, we had the whole third day to wander our way through this new zone.
Off the ridge we skied frozen corn, but as we dropped in elevation, the snow transformed into creamy turns. We raced through the aspens, one after another, our tracks carving in and out of the shadows. With a beating sun and blue sky, we wove our way over a saddle and up the valley, and as morning turned into afternoon, we found our way back to the ridge. From the barren summit of the American Fork Twin Peaks we stared into Snowbird, bustling with activity and noise. With just a step back into the meadow, we were alone again, the high alpine skyline cutting us off from the crowds below.
Two days prior, standing on Twin Peaks and drawing our route, we had worried we might be in over our heads. But our confidence grew with each summit. We had peeled back new layers of a canyon that I assumed had few surprises left, and, as we ripped skins for our final descent back to camp, the uncertainty had faded, replaced with renewed motivation.
The plan had been to finish the traverse skiing the northeast face of Lone Peak. Steep and covered in rocks and cliffs, the face juts abruptly into the sky, with indiscernible shadows and ramps. It sometimes doesn’t even look skiable. However, in good snow years like 2020, a chute drops from the notched summit. While it ends in a cliff, it is skiable by navigating hard skier’s right at the bottom. An exposed and classic Wasatch line, with a long approach and serious consequence, it is one of the golden carrots of the range. Tempting, technical and daunting. But on our last day, the decision was easy. With poor visibility and an oncoming storm, paired with fatigue, we headed down Bells Canyon toward the safety of Salt Lake.
We’d stood atop 14 summits, skiing 37 miles, and 17,500 vertical feet. Still, we weren’t quite ready to reenter the world. So, in between snippets of reminiscences, we ignored the world below for just a little while longer.
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