I’ve done a descent amount of rock climbing over the years, but have never really branched out into the alpine category. I began thinking about it and realized that I have never so much as hiked up a mountain. No kidding, I have never been over 12,000 feet .

It was with that knowledge in the back of my mind that I agreed to fly out to Jackson, Wy for a week and attempt the grand traverse with my brother. After a successful trip out to The Valley a year ago and numerous other climbing trips, I was feeling pretty confident that we had the technical skills to climb a route like this. I was, however, lacking alpine experience. I did a little ‘google’ research about how to properly traverse steep snow – plant your ax, kick, kick, repeat – seemed easy enough. I felt that excitement of trying something new when I strapped on my crampons and hiked myself up the first snowfield on the east side of Teewinot Mountain.
The Grand Traverse is big goal for two Iowa boys, one of which has never climbed in the Tetons, but we committed to giving it a try. It’s quite a big route, covering 14 miles, 12,000 vertical feet, significant amounts of 4th class, rappels and many pitches of 5th class. Hell even most of the 3rd class was so exposed that a slip could be disastrous. The most challenging part of the route, however, was route-finding.
We lost about an hour at the top of Teewinot Mountain when we climbed to the wrong summit block – over the course of the next two days this would be the first of many, many false summits we would accidentally climb to.
Our route finding was primarily guess and check, but we did manage to find our way to the Koven col without significant troubles. The Koven route up Mt Owen was really fantastic. We had a warm, windless bluebird day with the Teton Glacier and the North Face of The Grand as a backdrop. Wearing our crampons, we traversed the saddle and worked our way up through the snow. The sun was blinding as it glared off of the vast white glacier surrounding us.


The summit of Owen might have been my favorite location of the route. On one side, Valhalla canyon seemed to go forever as it descended back down to the valley. From one side you could see the flat expanse of Idaho stretching away towards the horizon. From the other angle the North Ridge of The Grand looms ominously towards the sky and the Teton Glacier falls away steeply. It was a lot to take in, and we didn’t take much time to do so as we had a lot of work left to do.

Everyone says that route finding to get into the gunsight notch is the most difficult of the route. We had no difficulty finding the gunsight notch though, and before long were racking up to climb out of the notch onto the grandstand.

Things started to go downhill at this point. We didn’t find the right route out of the gunsight and ended up climbing loose completely unprotected 5.9-10. We burned a lot of time and were mentally exhausted by the time we stood at the base of the north ridge. From this point all the beta we had said to take the Italian Cracks up the north face rather than the original north ridge route. The clusterf*#k continued as we again got completely lost trying to find the Italian Cracks. I think we didn’t go far enough left but again we ended up on some loose discontinuous and poorly protected 5.9-10 and decided the time had come to bail. Time was running thin, our bodies and minds were running out of juice, and we had just bailed back down to the grandstand from four pitches up the North Face.

Our second attempt up the North Ridge was much more successful. This time heading up for the predominant chimney system that carved its way up the traditional North Ridge route. With the sun beginning to set and a sense of urgency we began again up the North Ridge. We climbed the 5.8 chimney in two pitches and simul climbed the rest stopping only once to re-rack. We were standing on top of The Grand 1 hr and 10 minutes after leaving the grandstand.
The down climb off Owen-Spalding was brutal as it was night time and we didn’t really know the way. We made it to the upper saddle before full darkness set in but had to finish the descent by headlamp. We stumbled down to the lower saddle with no juice left in our legs and collapsed on the ground under a rock.

I’m pretty confident that both of us wanted to bail when the next morning rolled around. I know I sure did, but I defiantly didn’t want to be the one to bring it up. For the remainder of the route, the crux was pure physical. The steep uphill slog to get to the summit of the South was the worst. It seemed to last forever and just when I felt that I couldn’t go up anymore the grade leveled out and the summit was in sight.

The next few peaks were all spectacular. This was the knife edge ridge traversing that I had pictured in my head.
The steep exposed peaks reached their way into the sky one after the other.
There were a lot of them, and they were close together so they all blended together.
At one point we actually thought we were nearing the summit of Cloudveil Dome. We expected to get to the top and see Nez Perce, which was to be our last mountain. Upon getting to the top, however, we realized that Cloudveil dome was still up ahead which meant we still had two mountains yet to climb.

Nez Perce looks so close from the summit of Cloudveil. Yet the descent from Cloudveil turned out to be a real bear. We scrambled our way down a loose broken set of ledges and ramps leading on the North side of the mountain. The ramps and ledges kept getting steeper and I feared that they would soon disappear entirely. I envisioned our trail cliffing out into the abyss and the fear kept growing in my stomach.

I was not entirely wrong as the cliff did come. Luckily for us, we were able to rig two full length rappels which barely reached to the bottom of the col.
The col was not quite the salvation we had hoped for; it felt more like a prison, with cold dark walls on both sides blocking out any light. The bottom of the col held a steep ice chute that sent any rocks we kicked down cascading out of sight, and the loose rock was abundant. I could not wait to get out of there and into some sunlight and descent rock quality.

We scrambled up out of the loose col onto the north face of Nez Perce and made the summit. Finally we were done. All that was left now was getting back to the car. A torturously long scramble led to the embrace of the pine trees at the bottom of the valley and the long slog down the trail lead back to our truck waiting in the parking lot.


Car to car in two 17 hour days, nothing but a few cliff bars apiece and a two liter camelback.