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.