Fifth Time Lucky

The Last, Toughest, and Best
Story and Photos by Alice Schenk
I should have let myself off the hook in 2024. Mountain climbing is a serious business and I had spent most of my summer trying to summit a mountain that had required much from me. But it was a hook I’d been happy to stay on.
I seem unable to resist the pull of the mountains, especially Bare Peak Northwest, Idaho County’s high point, at the border with Montana. Four times over the past four years I had tried unsuccessfully to reach its pinnacle [see “Almost There,” IDAHO magazine, January 2025] and now in September 2024, here came the fifth attempt. It was the only high point I had not yet reached among all of Idaho’s forty-four counties.
My daughter Sarah and I discussed a forecasted blue-skied window of opportunity and decided we would go if we could find someone to come with us. That same day, Jason Lee Nipper contacted me to ask if I was going up Bare Peak Northwest anytime soon.
Jason, who is retired from the Navy, intended to go with us in early August but rain and storms canceled that trip. He had just finished his goal of tagging all 124 of Idaho’s mountains of at least eleven thousand feet in height. He was in stellar shape and his schedule was open.
The plan was for Sarah and me to hike in a day earlier than Jason did and spend the night at our base camp. Jason would sleep at the trailhead and start hiking early the following day even as we headed for the peak.
Sarah and I backpacked four miles and then kicked rocks, dug them out, pulled up grass, and moved dirt with a sturdy piece of bark to make a semi-level place to pitch our tent. At 4:45 am the rain started tapping on our tent on the hillside. I knew the time, because Sarah’s alarm had just dinged.
My body alarm had woken me twenty minutes earlier. The wind had howled through the night, rocking our tent. What had been forecast as a perfect weather window now had become rainy and snowy with a steady wind faster than 20 mph.
We left our tent and hiked into the gale at 5:45 am. Our headlamps were burning, our daypacks brimmed with food, and we carried overnight bivy sacks. The three-liter water bladders were full and we had extra bottled water in case we needed to spend the night on the mountain.
“It’s terrible that clean water is carried in what’s called a bladder,” my other daughter, Megan, had remarked. She will never hike into one of these remote locations with us but her humor and perspective go with us.
As the skies lightened it became obvious they were overcast. We knew the fog on the mountains ahead could easily be rain or snow. I considered bailing because for the life of me I couldn’t believe this day would bring success. I felt weary of it all but even so I was determined to finish what I had started.
I imagined we would meet Jason at the same crux where we had been forced to turn back on each of the previous trips. It seemed logical that Sarah and I could cover our three-and-a-half miles to his seven miles and beat him there but I was wrong. At 10:30 am he met us at a saddle about a half-mile from the crux, and then he took off for the top. He scouted the pinnacles, found a route he thought we could follow to the top, and waited for us to catch up.









When we reached the crux, we spotted him across the expanse high up in the rocks. I dropped my pack, Sarah emptied most of hers, and we hiked around the ravine to meet him. Jason showed us a section he had climbed down that he thought we could climb up. As I looked down at the drop-off (bad idea) and up at the rocks, my fear of heights and exposure made me disbelieve I could do it. I balked.
But to the right, I found a rock I could muscle onto, from which I should be able to climb to the ridgeline. The problem was I couldn’t be sure this route would enable me to follow the ridgeline to the metal pole that marks the high point. We asked Jason to climb the rock that he had wanted us to climb to see if this new route would work. Away he went. He was gone longer than I expected but then he popped out above us and called down that the new route was OK.
We climbed up to meet him on the ridge and tagged a pinnacle but pointy, exposed pinnacles are not my cup of tea. I had a hard time moving forward. Jason coaxed me to the end of the pinnacle and pointed out the obvious: I was on a four-foot-wide rock that was flat and stable. I should be fine.
Still, I crouched and crawled on my hands and knees until I felt able to stand. With his assistance, we down-climbed through the pinnacles and crossed from one to the other to reach a trail below us. Excitement pinged off me as we made the final ascent to the high point.
It was now a wonderfully easy hike to the top although I could not see the iron pipe on the way up. At the base, before the final push to the pipe, Jason turned to me and said, “I didn’t climb up there when I was over here earlier. I saved that so you could be the first to reach it.”
Even though Jason and I had communicated in the past, today was the first time I had ever met him in person. After such a thoughtful act, he was my new best friend.
As I climbed towards the pipe on top, he videoed me from below. “Nothing below the hips,” I told him, because I knew what part of my anatomy would be most prominent from that angle. No problem, we cropped the video. The top was windy and very exposed. It took me a while to stand upright but I didn’t want my final high point photo to show me crouching and riddled with fear.
The 360-degree views were incredible and I took a mental picture that I felt sure I would recall forever. I couldn’t have scripted the moment any better, except for the absence of Wayne. Sadly for me, my husband had a meeting in Boise and couldn’t come with us.
After Sarah and Jason tagged the peak we sat on rocks below and Jason ate an amazing-looking sandwich. Sarah and I had snacked our way to the top. We left a register up there, an empty plastic peanut butter jar in which we put a small notebook and pencil. In it I had recorded the names and dates of everyone listed on the Peakbagger website who has summited this beast.
On the way down we followed Jason’s original route suggestion and slipped through a notch high in the rocks. I realized as we climbed down that this route wouldn’t have been as difficult to go up as I had imagined. It also dawned on me that in response to my request, Jason had climbed through this notch, then went around a section of trail, climbed part of a pinnacle, traversed to another pinnacle, and climbed to the top to tell us the route I preferred to go up would work. I hadn’t realized how much extra climbing I was asking of him.
At the risk of pulling the “female card” from the deck, my fear was real on that mountain. Jason had to encourage and rescue me a couple of times when I was frozen in place. Usually, when you hike with friends, you have a wonderful time visiting and getting to know each other. We didn’t get to spend much time with Jason on the mountain but his assistance over the last stretch will forever be one of my favorite memories.
When we arrived safely back at the crux, I hugged him a second time (the first was when he met us at the saddle) and thanked him profusely. I was convinced he must think I was over-the-top ridiculous but I felt okay about that, since I’m his mother’s age.
At 2 pm we snapped a quick group selfie and Jason headed down the mountain. Sarah and I repacked the gear we had left at the crux and I began to take my bruised and battered body back down the mountain. She thought if we could make it through one other steep ravine on the route before dark, there was a good chance we could sleep in our tent rather than in our bivy sacks.
Shortly after we navigated that ravine, the sun dipped below the western ridgeline and night swallowed up the last of sunset. We flipped on our headlamps, slowed our pace even more, and trudged on. When our headlamps hit the reflective tape on our tent at 8:45 pm to finish a 14.5-hour day, I breathed a sigh of relief. The stars were brilliant as we tucked ourselves inside for the night.
Jason was gone, having made it to his truck at the trailhead more than an hour before we reached our tent. On this day, he covered almost fifteen miles to our seven.
When we broke camp in the morning and finished the hike down the mountain, we were in no rush. It was a beautiful day, and I was delighted to have become only the tenth person listed on Peakbagger to have surmounted all of Idaho’s forty-four county high points and just the second female.
I’ll miss this brutal mountain and all it gives and takes from anyone who challenges it. Of all the county high points in Idaho, this last one is my favorite. I feel like I know the mountain well, having spent so much time there in agony and defeat and finally in triumph.
Instead of the summit photo I wanted of me standing tall and brave against the sky, I’m slightly bent over or sitting down. I could go again and take that photo with Wayne. He has two county high points remaining (Bare Peak Northwest and Diamond Peak) to finish all forty-four, but Sarah said she wasn’t sure her dad wanted to do that, since it was my goal.
She knows the risks this mountain presents with bouldering, lack of water, and distance. You constantly have to stay focused and alert. Muscle fatigue increases the risk of falling down the rock-infested hillside. I think Sarah was being proactive when she said she wouldn’t climb it again.
Her leadership, support, and encouragement—not to mention the extra water she packed in—made all the difference to my success. A few years ago, as I neared the end of my quest, she said she’d like to climb one of the mountains with me. She had no way of knowing that the only two I had left were the most difficult of all.
I’ve encouraged her to finish the rest now that she’s done the worst two, and said I would love to join her and relive them all again. But the climbing bug never bit her. I can’t imagine why not. I’ve set an excellent example!
A decade from now, I doubt I’ll be able to hike to this high point, but I’ll never forget the rare days of adventure the mountain gave me. I’ll remember the elk and deer we saw, the bighorn sheep by the side of the road and a bear that raced across another road as we headed home. I’ll never forget finally touching the pipe on top.
I’ll remember all the time, love, and energy given by Wayne and Sarah, by our friends and guides Kaleb Houck, Keely Eliason, and Jason Nipper, and by all those who went before us who offered insight and GPS tracks so that I might succeed.
I had set my sights on climbing all of Idaho’s county high points in 2019. The sun set on that goal but another one arose and now, as surely as the sun will rise tomorrow, a new goal will dawn.
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