HANGING TOUGH:
JASON FORRESTER
Forrester crashes with companions at the base of the 1,000-foot climb up Elephant's Perch.
Photo by Mike Wohner
Elephant’s Perch, a chiseled, gold-tinted granite monument to rock climbing in Idaho’s Sawtooth Mountain Range, is not easily approached. Climbers must hike in for 13 miles from the nearest road or, to save time and effort, take a ferryboat across Redfish Lake and then hike six miles to its base. Either way, you arrive after noon and find yourself staring up with eager anticipation 1,000 feet to the bare summit.
That’s what Louisvillian Jason Forrester and three companions encountered on a trip to Elephant’s Perch last July. Their prudent first thought was to practice on a few lower portions of the dome and then tackle the top with an early-morning start the next day. So Forrester, 27, and his partner, Justin Griffin, a Bowling Green native who now lives in Sun Valley, Idaho, began an afternoon ascent. Prudence soon took a free fall.
“The weather was kind of spotty, so we were just going to go up the first two pitches and check them out, kind of mess around, and leave our gear and rappel back down and start off fresh in the morning,” says Forrester, who co-owns F & A Remodeling and Construction in Louisville. “But we ended up going up the first two pitches — and we were moving so smoothly and quick that we ended up going up three and four — and at pitch five we had to make a decision about whether to come back down or go for it. We decided to go for it.”
Forrester and Griffin were on the Fred Beckey route, one of the most well-known of 25 ways to the top of Elephant’s Perch. It is rated 5.11 (in a league with the steeper routes up Yosemite’s El Capitan). There are 10 pitches — or climbs between bolted off sections of the safety rope that are affixed at natural breaks in the ascent — to the top, each of approximately 100 feet. Forrester was in the lead on pitch nine when the heavens let loose with rain. “It turned into kind of an epic scenario,” Forrester says, “because the rock got really slick and really wet, and I ended up having to make a makeshift belay station.”
Belay stations are those fastened-off spots between pitches. With lightning in the distance and a pelting, cold rain drenching his shivering partner below, Forrester fastened down, but with only one cam inserted into a crack in the rock instead of the usual three that better distribute the weight. “All the pull was off one cam because of the situation I was in,” he says. “I had no other choice. My buddy was coming up and he was slipping all over the place and getting freaked out because he couldn’t make it.”
They were close to 900 feet up Elephant’s Perch and starting to run out of daylight, with only one quart of water between them. Forrester made a mental note of the 13-mile hike back to their car and the one-hour trip to the nearest hospital. “It gets in your head a little bit more when you’re using all of your own gear and you’re so far away from anything,” he says.
A shaking Griffin made it up even with Forrester and then led the final climb up pitch 10 to the top. “I remember getting to the top and just basically running down (the backside) the whole way,” says Forrester. “It took us about 35 minutes to get down because we had to do these steep switchbacks on the backside and come down this ravine. We were moving.”
The pair were worried that the two other members of their party might be stuck somewhere near the summit, but those partners had stopped at pitch three and returned to the base, planning a full ascent for the next day. The group climbed a little the following afternoon, after a cloudy and misty morning, and then all four scaled the dome on day three, the last of the trip. They had Elephant’s Perch to themselves until the arrival of two climbers from Boulder, Colo., near the /files/storyimages/of their stay.
Forrester and his friends took a different route up on that third day. He and his climbing partner reached the top before the other two. “We hung out in the sun and enjoyed the view,” he says. “There was a little more time for celebration.
“Then we realized it was almost four o’clock and we still had to get back down, break up camp and get back to the ferry.” Out of food and ready to get off the rocks, they rushed to meet the 7 p.m. deadline for the final ferry. “I think we made six miles in one and a half hours,” says Forrester.
TRIPLE-TESTED: NANCY McELWAIN
McElwain spins through the lava flows and runs past the Energy Lab. Photo by Bakke Svensson-WTC
The Hawaii Ironman's splashing start.
Sp/files/storyimages/a half-day swimming, cycling and running nonstop in a triathlon and you’ll be no stranger to cruel irony. And the cruelest of all might be at the Ford Ironman World Championship in Kailua-Kona, Hawaii. There, during the final leg of the U.S.’s most famous three-event endurance race — a 26.2-mile marathon run — competitors trying to will their way through the last half of the race come upon a wickedly named landmark: the Natural Energy Lab. This facility devoted to perfecting alternative forms of energy happens to be situated at a particularly challenging part of the marathon course that can exhaust an athlete’s resources more easily than restore them.
“That’s where many Ironman races have been won or lost by the pros,” says Nancy McElwain, a 39-year-old Louisvillian who competed Oct. 15 in Hawaii. “It’s hot. You’re about three-quarters of the way done with your run, there’s a significant climb up out of the energy lab, and there tends to be no breeze down there. It’s a little bit of hell’s kitchen.”
But McElwain was determined to leave the lab on an upsurge. “I told myself that I was going to get energy there, that it would not sap my energy,” she says.
She downed some supplemental food and pressed on, picking up her pace for the last four miles of the race and passing other competitors who were laboring to the finish line. McElwain’s energy surge powered her to a four-hour, 10-minute and 12-second marathon finish. More remarkably, the former Louisville lawyer, who is now an endurance-sport coach and fitness consultant, came in with a surprising overall time for the three events of 10 hours, 59 minutes and 44 seconds.
“I had never expected to break 11 hours,” says McElwain, whose only other Ironman finish was 11 hours and 32 minutes in Wisconsin in 2004. “The finish on Alii Drive is the most thrilling moment in sports, I think. The announcer Mike Reilly is the voice of Ironman, and he gets the crowd worked up and he tells everybody when they finish: ‘You, so-and-so, are an Ironman!’
“When I turned the corner, he said, ‘Come on! Come on! You can break 11 hours!’”
McElwain crossed the finish line 914th out of 1,688 who completed the triathlon and came in 19th of the 64 women in her 35-39 age group. She remembers an early start on that October Saturday. She awoke by 4 a.m. and was at the transition area (where the athletes change equipment and clothes for each event) by 5:30 to prepare her belongings and get her body stamped with her number, 1035.
The first stage began at Dig Me Beach, where McElwain waded in the swells with all of her fellow competitors. They treaded water for 10 minutes or longer while waiting for everyone to get in place for the cannon blast signaling the start. “It was awesome,” McElwain says. “There’s something about being in the water — you’re in a common medium with all of your competitors from all around the world, who each had a long journey to get to that race, a very different journey in each case. It’s an amazing feeling of camaraderie, actually.”
Halfway out into the clear Pacific Ocean on the first leg of the 2.4-mile swim course McElwain settled in behind a strong male swimmer and remained in his drag for the rest of that stage, finishing in one hour, five minutes and 50 seconds. She stayed in her swimsuit for the 112-mile bicycle ride that followed, heading away from the beach along roads past lava flows, climbing toward the mountains and then turning around to return to the beach. Ironman competitors fear the headwinds that normally shove against them on the trip back toward the ocean, but this was a rare calm day and McElwain took advantage of the conditions. She’d saved energy for the winds and when they didn’t come, she says, “I just kept going fast.”
She completed the cycling stage in five hours, 33 minutes and 16 seconds (averaging 20.17 miles per hour). After a quick visit to the changing tent, McElwain emerged in running attire and shoes for the marathon. “My swim and bike were both very, very good,” she says. “I had a dream race, really had a dream experience. I had a perfect day.”
FREEZE FRAME: MARK STEVENS AND MALCOLM CASON
The fortuitous campsite provided spectacular views, including a 1,000-foot ice sheet between granite walls.
Stevens on another expedition. Photos courtesy of Mark Stevens
Nature reveals some of its greatest treasures reluctantly, as Louisville adventurers Mark Stevens and Malcolm Cason learned last July on a breathtaking traverse to a wide glacial valley between mountain peaks in remote Alaska. The reward they shared was a campsite so spectacular that even their two experienced mountain guides were awed by its singularity and majesty.
Nine days into a nearly two-week trip in the wilds of Lake Clark National Park, approximately 185 air miles southwest of Anchorage, the four expeditioners were making their way through nearly unexplored territory using maps that had not been updated since 1956. They gazed across the raw landscape and noticed a bare patch rising out of the distance in a seven-mile-wide valley of ice. “You really don’t want to camp on a glacier because it’s so wet,” says Stevens, who owns Stevens & Stevens Deli with his wife Susan. “And from about two miles away we saw this rock. The closer we got, the bigger it became.”
A huge granite boulder had been carved free from the mountainside by the glacier and somehow landed flat side up. To the party’s great relief, terra incognita would, for the night, become terra firma.
Getting there for Stevens, 43, and Cason, a 33-year-old who owns a home theater and commercial audio-visual business, proved arduous and technically challenging. The group was dropped by propeller plane at remote Telaquana Lake and began its journey by following the Telaquana River (which drains the lake) to the southwest until it became too deep to ford. At that point, they were forced into bush country so dense with vegetation that they were able to cover just seven miles in three full days of heavy going. “This brush line can bring a grown man, including myself, to tears, and make you wonder whether you can possibly make it,” Stevens says. “But then once you get out of it, there’s your reward.”
The ultimate goal of the expedition was to hike up a mountain pass and then asc/files/storyimages/onto a glacier that few, if any, humans had ever walked upon. The four hikers would then plot a path to the “glacial fork” of the Tlikakila River, the frozen headwaters of a stream that, after it melts, flows into finger-shaped Lake Clark. When they got off the ice, they were scheduled to meet their pilot, who would drop off an inflatable catamaran for floating the four
men and a new batch of supplies down the Tlikakila to the lake.
“The only people who have seen this area are pilots,” says Stevens, “and when we were coming across the pass we found seven downed aircraft — wrecked
airplanes.”
The maps indicated a route following the glacier from the top of the pass to the Tlikakila headwaters, but the group found that the moving ice had pulled away from the side of the mountain, creating a false canyon and compelling them to scale a wall of ice to continue their course. “Malcolm and I, having never done it, had to climb in crampons and with ice axes up a route that was completely over our heads. But it was the only choice: It was either do that or turn around and go home,” Stevens recalls.
Cason calls that climb the “crux move of the trip” where he and Stevens, who have teamed up on other expeditions, were pushed beyond their experience and
technical know-how in unexpected ways. “You get an adrenaline junkie fix in situations like that where you’re in uncharted areas for you personally,” says Cason.
At last, they were on the craggy glacier’s surface, weaving along bumpy braids of ice interwoven with strands of cold water. Then they spotted their rock. It sat on a large hunk of ice with water flowing through crevasses on its surface. With little difficulty they climbed up to its flat surface, pitched their tents and started dinner on a propane-gas stove. The Louisvillians had packed in some Maker’s Mark bourbon and Stevens suggested they toast the occasion with a drink they’d invented a bit earlier. One of the guides slid down the rock with his ice axe and broke off a large chunk. They chipped the ice into a quart bottle containing the whiskey and toasted the view with a Glacier Mist. The recipe: six-year-old Maker’s Mark and 5,000-year-old glacier ice.
“We watched snow avalanches all night long,” Stevens says, pointing to a photo of a 1,000-foot-thick glacier on top of an 8,000-foot granite wall with an even larger mountain face in the background. “Any climber who’s ever climbed anywhere would just be drooling to get here, but the problem is that the approach to get there is the whole story.
“We were absolutely sure that we’re the only four people that have ever had this vantage point, and that’s really what makes it awesome.”
