Backcountryoutlet.com Newsletter Articles

We recently asked the Backcountry.com Pro Team of skiers, climbers, and all-around badass athletes to tell us about the dumbest things they have ever done in the mountains. We thought the problem would be getting such experienced people to actually come up with anything. Instead, the crux was sifting through the mass of stupid mistakes that these world-class athletes have made. Most had stories about one epic that stuck out in their minds; some couldn’t narrow it down to one and wrote about a few things they did. And one athlete admitted to making so many mistakes he just gave a list and left the rest up to the imagination.

So don’t feel so bad the next time you get in over your head.

Ingrid Backstrom has stunned the ski world with her ability to rip apart big, imposing lines with ease, but she sometimes forgets to look first.

The dumbest things I've ever done in the mountains have resulted from being like "Oh, well, I think I've got it—I'll just go for it and see what happens!" rather than being 90% sure I can do something. One in particular that comes to mind involved a pillow line and what looked like a tiny mini-tree at the bottom of it. It looked to be right in the line, but I just figured I would ski down and figure it out when I got there. The problem was that I overestimated my ability to redirect between pillows, saw the tree coming at me off of the last pillow, went to take it to the hip, and hit what turned out to be a broken-off, splintered tree stump right to my right butt cheek. I still have a small dent where it happened, and it hurts when I sit for a long time, but I would like to think that I'm just a bit smarter now.

Andrew McLean has more first descents than most people have days on the slopes. He has gathered a story or two along the way, but he had a hard time picking.

I've done so many dumb things in the mountains it's hard to pick just one, but in order of the dumbest ...

• Skied avalanche-prone slopes and had friends get buried and die. Twice.
• Gone too high, too fast, and came down with pulmonary edema. Twice.
• Skied unroped on a "safe" glacier ... until a snow bridge collapsed and a partner was left dangling from a single Dynafit toepiece over an inky black crevasse for 30 minutes.
• Driven way too fast on snowy, icy roads and crashed my car, my friend's car, my parents car, or my wife's car. Many times.
• Fired up a wood stove in a small cabin which was packed with aviation fuel while using a propane tank for a seat.

Greg Hill drops into lines that would make the average skier wet himself, or worse. But he’s made plenty of mistakes that strike a familiar tone with most.

“Light is right” is often the motto in the mountains—bring less and move quickly. Well that makes sense when you know the severity of where you are going but when the guidebook mentions "equipment needed" it may be worth paying attention. In 2005 we were going to attempt a quick ski traverse and a summit attempt of Sir Sandford—the highest mountain in the Selkirk Range. Five of us packed our bags and ignored certain hints that the guidebook was giving us. The guidebook mentions the hourglass as the crux of the mountain, and how it is often glacial ice and requires a 50m rappel, ice screws, crampons, and ice axes.

Going light, we brought a 40m rope, one screw, and one pair of crampons—for five of us. It seemed to make sense while we were packing, but as we stared up at the ice bulge and examined our options we realized the stupidity of our actions. Luckily we had stubbornness to overcome our ignorance. Super Dave led the pitch, completely stretching out the rope and built an ice bollard from which to belay each of us up. Then he tied the only pair of crampons to the end of the rope and tossed them down. Each of us would have to climb up the 45-degree snow till we could reach up and grab the crampons, whereupon we would fit them to our boots and tie into the end of the rope. Holding our mountaineering axes as tight as possible we would claw and scrape our way up the blue ice till we reached the safety of the belay and then repeat for the next person. It was a 150-foot pitch that took the five of us 3.5 hours to surmount. We then climbed quickly to the summit and skied off and down to the "hourglass" where we had to repeat the whole epic in reverse. So it ended up being: bring less and go slowly.

Matt Hart has dominated 50-mile ultra-marathons and 24-hour races, but one of his biggest mistakes took place before the day even started.

One winter I crossed the Teton mountain range with my alpine touring gear. It was a pretty straightforward tour. I made the mistake of choosing to wear my randonnee rally race boots because they were lighter than my other pair of boots (stupid move #1). These boots are sized quite small, and I'd never worn them more than 10 hours before. We were camping on this trip, and it got a whole lot colder than we'd planned for. I left my socks on and didn't check my feet at all that night (stupid move #2). After getting back home and taking my boots and socks off I found two completely black frostbitten big toes! Ouch.

Tyson Bolduc started skiing when he was two and made his way to the dream of becoming a pro. That’s plenty of time to make a few bad decisions.

It was spring, and we had received about 10 inches of fresh snow overnight. We got our panties all in a bunch and rushed to the mountains with the intention of skiing fresh snow, but it was late March, and we did not take into consideration that the slope we wanted to ski faced due south. Consequently, we did not get on the trail at sunrise like we should have, but lollygagged until about 9 am. Furthermore, to get to where we wanted to go was about a two-hour skin, so by the time we got to the top, the fresh snow was turning from spring pow to roller-ball warnings. Solar heating was cooking the snow off the rocks and the moisture content in the air from the melting snow created a level of humidity comparable to a Southern Summer. My buddy and I had skinned to the top of a line that required us to jump a pretty sizable cliff, but as we felt the sweat drip off our noses and chins as we got to the top we started to reconsider. It was around 11:30, and wet slides were releasing all around us. We radioed to our friend, who was waiting on the other side of the valley ready to film the endeavor. We said that we were not feeling so good about the snow. It was going to be so firm, wet, and unstable that we came to a consensus that we should find another way down and play it safe. However, stubborn and ardent to ski something fun as opposed to skiing down what we had just skinned up, we asked our buddy across the valley if he could see something safe to ski. He radioed back that there was a fun slope to the right of us that we could get to, and he could loop around on the sled to pick us up.

We gathered our gear and traversed across the ridge out across this massive bowl, trying to traverse to the slope he was talking about. Just as we reached the point of no return, we looked around and realized that we were on top of the 200ft cliffs that separated the two areas. We were under the impression that we were on a ridge behind the hanging snowfield, but to our dismay we were traversing across a hanging snowfield, in 60-degree blaring sun, with fresh snow sliding all around us. As we scurried from safe zone to safe zone, we did everything we could to not panic, but fear took control. My buddy froze in the middle of one slope holding onto a tree and demanded we call for a heli-extraction. I fervently talked him through the ordeal, and we miraculously scaled our way across the zone to safety, but looking back at our tracks later that afternoon when we got down, we knew that one wrong slip or any sliding snow would have been our deaths.

Lesson learned, and I will never again venture down a slope without knowing where I am going and furthermore never venture out into the backcountry without fully taking into consideration the conditions, weather, my equipment, etc. The mountains are a dangerous place and while providing a lot of fun, they can take that fun and make you swallow it just as fast.

Kim Havell has worked as a ski guide in Valdez and the San Juan mountains, but her biggest mistakes seem to happen on climbing trips.

Well, there are some contenders for the dumbest thing I’ve done in the mountains, which definitely sets the stage for preferring to be more lucky than good. A really great one was on a climbing trip into the Weminuche Wilderness. My partner Jeff Haskell and I divided up the loads and the responsibilities for gear. We hike in for a two-day trip to climb a ridge traverse from Wham Ridge on Vestal Peak, Arrow Peak, and the Trinities. I forgot the fuel to go with Jeff’s stove. We ended up having to soak our Ramen noodles, which thank goodness we had, letting them “cook” in the sunshine and cold water.

Another all-time great was also with Jeff on a traverse of the San Sophia Ridge in Telluride. The route takes no pro, and so it’s a high-exposure hairball scramble to get from one end to the other. In one section, I was moving up and over a rock gendarme, encountered a tricky move, and had to take off my pack to pull off the down climb. I figured I would lower the pack by hand to a flat rock and then climb down to it. The pack ended up cartwheeling down the side of the ridge, luckily landing on a small bench 40 feet below, which I was able to climb down to and retrieve. It was about five feet from going off a major cliff band. The weather moved in quickly on us during this climb, and we ended up having to bail out at the end of the ridge and rappel off the route. Good thing I had my pack back.

Chris Davenport may be most famous for skiing all the Colorado 14ers in a single year, but it’s a trip to Makalu that led to his biggest mistake.

The year was 1999, and it was spring. I was coming off a long winter ski season and was a bit burned out. But still I had made my way to Kathmandu to join an international climbing expedition to the world's fifth-highest summit, Makalu. I was a couple days behind the rest of the expedition with my travel, and all of them but one had departed for the eight-day, 80-mile trek into base camp. My friend Bob Slozen had stayed behind to wait for me in Kathmandu, and we met our porters in the steamy village of Tumlingtar for our march toward Makalu. Because we were late, we hoped to push hard on the approach and catch the team before base camp. Four or five days into the approach, we were gaining a lot of elevation and reached a high pass late in the day. Our porters were nowhere to be found, and we got stuck on the pass with nothing but our trekking packs and clothes. Fortunately we found some Sherpas who were camped up there, and they allowed us to cram into their fabric tent for the night. At this point a big storm rolled in, and Bob and I shivered the night away without sleeping bags, listening to the loud crack of lightning and hoping the tent was not going to blow away. We woke, or more appropriately, just got up, the next morning to a foot of new snow and beautiful blue skies. It was one of the most terrifying and uncomfortable nights I have ever spent in the mountains, and it would come to haunt my expedition.

As we continued trekking for two more days, I began to feel weak and tired. By the time we caught up with our team a day before base camp I also had a deep cough. The next day we were climbing to 18,000 feet and the Makalu base camp when I realized, with the help of my teammates, that I had come down with pulmonary edema. I dropped my gear in base camp and immediately turned around with one porter and headed back down the valley, losing maybe 5,000 feet of altitude that day. I spent the next four days alone in a meadow trying to recover from my edema. After four days I felt well enough to climb back up to base camp and rejoin the expedition. Although I was able to climb high on Makalu over the next month and help the expedition succeed, I was never able to shake the illness that I had contracted by pushing too hard and foolishly getting caught out in the elements unprepared. I learned a serious lesson on this trip about being conservative in the high mountains, a lesson that I have carried with me from that point on.