A Peak So Near, So Far

Story and Photos by Alice Schenk

I lay flat on a slab of rock about 9,400 feet in the air, in full panic mode. To get onto this slab I had torn my shirt and now my heartbeat revved into overdrive. I was about five football fields from the peak that was our goal. The drop below was very far.  It was 3:30 pm and we would have a long hike back to camp. As I pondered whether we should try to reach the peak, my husband Wayne spoke up. “No, Alice.”  

It was to be the first of four times this peak in the Bitterroot Range—the high point of Idaho County—made me taste defeat, and I didn’t like the flavor. But I do love a challenge.

This high point doesn’t have an official name. It sits directly on the Idaho-Montana border and is a tower or lower summit on the summit ridge of 9,459-foot Bare Peak, which is just east of the border in Montana. County high-pointers often refer to this tower as Bare Peak Northwest. It was the only one of Idaho’s forty-four county high points I had not climbed during a quest chronicled over the years in the pages of this magazine.

As I lay on the slab during our first attempt at scaling the peak, in August 2021, I took a mental picture of the pinnacles along the ridge that included the county high point marker, a tall iron pipe. Whoever packed that pipe up there was crazy. 

The previous day, Wayne and I had hiked three miles into Nelson Lake on the Montana side. With us was Kaleb Houck: young, agile, and full of stories. Early the next morning, in thirty-six-degree weather, we started bushwhacking and bouldering uphill. We gained and lost elevation as we followed the ridge, trashing our quads.