Crow Peak in the Snow - Montana Mountain Project

In February 2018 I started going stir crazy. Because I missed some of the fall running season due to a broken or torn something-or-other in my foot after Golden Ultra, I spent most of the winter running rather than skiing. This lead to a serious case of the February antsy pants. I needed to get up high.

So on our birthday (Sara and I have the same birthday) we set our sights on Crow Peak, the high point of the Elkhorn Mountains just outside of Helena.

The Elkhorns play host to a Montana-famous ultra race that is known for being tough with a lot of elevation change and sometimes loose trail. Fortunately, in the grand scheme of mountain climbing, the ascent to the top of Crow Peak is not as tough. This meant that we could snowshoe up in the winter without too much worry of avalanches.

We left Missoula early in the morning with our friend Nate. He's always up for a ridiculous adventure and was game to join us for a multi-hour slog in the snow. Plus having an extra person came in very handy, but we didn't realize it quite yet.

The Elkhorn Mountains are situated Southeast of Helena, West of Townsend, East of Boulder, and North of the middle of nowhere. Many of the ranges we have explored so far consist of huge uplifted shelves formed by tectonic plates crashing together. The Elkhorns began forming that way when one plate (the Farallon tectonic plate) sunk, which allowed some magma seepage. From there the magma did it's volcanic work and formed the now defunct Elkhorns. We drove up a snow packed road into what felt like the main exit point of the lava to access our desired route. This also put us in the middle of Elkhorn ghost town.

All the pictures I've seen of Elkhorn make it look like a charming little ghost town, but those are taken in the summer. In the winter it looked like a great place for our car to get stuck and we'd have to hoof it out before the locals (10 people at the last census) put us in stew. I really should go back in the summer. The one local we saw gave us a friendly wave before continuing to chop firewood and didn't seem like the human-stew type.

Elkhorn was originally a silver mining town. At one point 2500 people lived in this little valley working the silver lode that Swiss immigrant Peter Wys discovered. Anton Holter (of Holter Lake fame) invested in the mine, which lead to $14 million in silver being excavated from the hills. The populace of Elkhorn consisted of more married couples than the typical mining town, which meant there were schools, churches, and many places of good-repute rather than the standard brothels and bars.

Ultimately a decrease in demand for silver combined with the mine playing out and a diphtheria epidemic that killed many children caused the town to fall apart in the 1890's. Railroad service stopped, which at that time was the death knell of any town.

Again, I'd like to go back in the summer. In February it was easy to only see the difficulty of living through the winters in the middle of the mountains in the 1890's. Snow piled high between woodsheds and fragile houses and the drifts from one night of windstorms formed impenetrable walls on the cleared roads that grabbed at the chassis of the Subaru. That must have been a far cry from Elkhorn in the summer when the grass is green, gardens are blooming, and tourists are in full season.

We parked at the top of the town and set off along a snowmobile trail hoping it led us to the correct
place. The funny thing about hiking in the snow is that it is really easy to be off trail. And for the most part that's okay. After 1/2 mile the snowmobile trail clearly veered where we did not want to go so we "followed" an old road bed through the trees up a drainage.

Without the pre-made tracks we found breaking trail to be exhausting. We quickly settled on a 5 minute maximum lead time before falling to the back of the line and follow the footsteps of the other two. This allowed for 10 minutes of recovery before it was time to battle the fluff again. This is where having three people was much easier than having only two.

The first half of the climb was heavily treed, but was quite peaceful. Heavy snow still clung to tree branches and made marshmallows out of boulders in the stream bed. In the shelter of the trees we couldn't hear the gusting wind that buffeted the summit and quickly warmed up with the exertion.

As we moved into the thinner tree coverage and the terrain got steeper, the wind came out to play. With the steeper terrain I started losing some steam. A couple days before I had combined a tooth filling (read: a shot of numbing stuff in my mouth) with a dinner beer and then an elevated heartrate for five hours during an adventure, which combined to form the perfect cocktail to spend an entire night vomiting. Needless to say, trudging through snow in steep terrain required the energy reserve that I voided the day before.

We crested onto a gorgeous, wind-packed ridgeline as I struggled to catch up on calories and morale. Fortunately the terrain leveled a bit and I was able to enjoy the blue sky and arctic chill. The wind on the ridge had a created incredible snow formations in the trees and on the ground. As we got closer to the summit the formations began to resemble the size and shape of crow feathers (probably not how the mountain got it's name) lodged into the ground at a slight angle. Presumably these were formed by snow crystals whipping against each other and carving shapes. After taking a few pictures of each other my fingers were too cold to take pictures of these feathers so you're going to have to live with that rough description. Or go up on Crow Peak and see if they are there each year!

From the summit the clear blue sky allowed us to see a number of ranges stretching into Central Montana. The wind, however, forced us to only look East. Turning to the West immediately and painfully froze our faces.

We didn't spend long on the summit and quickly dropped back down to a low spot on the ridge where the wind abated. From there we retraced our steps, cutting the switchbacks because we could in the snow, and quickly dropped back to the gradual valley that led back to the cars. Although our progress was much quicker following our own footsteps down, the retreat seemed to drag on forever and we were all quite happy when the car reappeared. The warm food in Helena made us even happier!