The Ridge Is Named After The People Who Turn Around

Idaho's high point does not ease into anything. Borah Peak stands more than five thousand feet above the sagebrush floor of the Thousand Springs Valley, and the standard route climbs almost all of that in three and a half miles. There is no lake to walk to first, no long approach to warm up on. You leave the car at about 7,400 feet and you start going up immediately, and you keep going up until the ground runs out.

For most of the way, that is the whole difficulty: it is steep, it is relentless, and it is a walk. Then the trail ends. The ridge narrows into a series of rock ribs, the ground drops away on both sides, and you arrive at the reason people know the name of this mountain. Chicken-Out Ridge is named for what a lot of people do when they see it.

• Summit: Borah Peak, 12,662 ft — the highest point in Idaho, with 5,982 ft of prominence
• Range: the Lost River Range, Custer County, Salmon-Challis National Forest
• Trailhead: Mt. Borah (Birch Springs) Trailhead, about 7,400 ft — off US-93 between Mackay and Challis, then roughly 3.5 miles of dirt road
• One way: about 3.5 miles with roughly 5,262 ft of gain — one of the steepest state high points in the country
• Grade: Class 3 on the easiest line, with harder variations on either side of it
• Where the trail ends: the maintained tread gives out near 11,000 ft; the scrambling starts around 11,300 ft
• The crux: Chicken-Out Ridge — rock ribs, a twenty-foot downclimb known as the nose, then the snow bridge
• Season: roughly mid-July through September for dry rock; earlier means snow on the bridge
• Water: none on the route and none at the trailhead

The numbers

12,662 feet, the highest ground in Idaho, with 5,982 feet of prominence — this is not a slightly taller bump in a range of equals, it is the mountain the whole Lost River Range is arranged around. About 3.5 miles to the top from the trailhead and roughly 5,262 feet of gain, which works out to an average of around 1,500 feet per mile for the entire climb.

Guidebooks and mapping platforms differ a little on the exact figures — you will see 3.4 to 4 miles one way and 5,200 to 5,300 feet of gain depending on who measured and how. OpenStreetMap's tracing of the actual tread, switchbacks and all, comes out at 3.85 miles one way, and a USGS elevation model over that same line reads 7,404 feet at the trailhead and 12,665 at the summit. However you count it, this is a very short route with a very large number attached to it.

The route, in order

From the Mt. Borah Trailhead the path climbs through sagebrush and then into thin timber, reaching a small saddle at about 8,600 feet. Idaho: A Climbing Guide puts that half a mile in; measured along the OSM tread, switchbacks and all, it is closer to a mile, and that difference is worth knowing before you start pacing yourself against a guidebook. Above the saddle the maintained trail turns into a climbers' path and starts zigzagging up the southwest ridge toward treeline. This is the long, unglamorous part of the day and it is where the climb is actually won or lost — you are gaining a thousand-plus feet a mile with a full day still ahead of you.

Around 11,000 feet the tread gives out and becomes an intermittent line over rock. By about 11,300 feet you are scrambling. From here to the summit the route is a sequence of specific problems rather than a path, and the standard advice applies: stay near the crest, and when a step looks harder than Class 3, there is usually a weakness a few feet to one side.

Chicken-Out Ridge

The crux section starts as a set of rocky ribs on the crest, with the mountain falling away on both sides. It is genuinely exposed and the rock is not uniformly good. On the easiest line it goes at Class 3 — hands on, but no rope for most parties — and it is entirely possible to wander onto something harder by drifting off the line. Wikipedia describes the formation as Class 4, and the difference in those two ratings is mostly a difference in which variation you end up on.

The name is not a joke someone made up afterwards. This is where people stop. OpenStreetMap has three separate alternates mapped through this two-hundred-metre band — the False Left Trail, the White Gully and the Foolish Bypass — which is a fairly precise record of a place where a lot of people have looked at the direct line and gone looking for another one.

The section finishes with a downclimb of about twenty feet, often called the nose. Downclimbing is the part nobody practises and everybody has to do here, and it comes at the end of the hardest ground rather than the start.

The snow bridge

Below the nose the ridge pinches into a narrow saddle that connects Chicken-Out Ridge to the final climb. It is a short crossing with air on both sides, and because of the way it sits it holds snow well into July long after the rest of the route is dry. That is the snow bridge, and it is the single condition that decides what kind of day you are having.

Dry, it is a brief walk on rock. Snow-covered, it is a traverse on a firm slope above serious consequences, and the honest answer is that it wants an ice axe and someone who has used one before. There is often a bootpack kicked across it by parties earlier in the day — which is convenient and is also not a substitute for being able to stop yourself. Mid-July through September is when the bridge is most often bare.

Past it, a good line follows the ridge around the west side of Point 11898 to the saddle on its north side, and from there the summit is broken rock and talus. It is loose, it is tiring, and after everything below it, it is walking.

The mountain that moved

There is one more thing about this mountain, and you can see the evidence of it from the road on the way in.

At 8:06 in the morning on 28 October 1983, a magnitude 6.9 earthquake broke the Lost River Fault directly beneath this range. It opened a zone of fresh scarps 21 miles long at the base of the mountains, with vertical displacement measured up to about 8.9 feet. The valley floor dropped. Borah Peak went up — by roughly a foot, in a few seconds. It remains one of the largest earthquakes recorded in the Intermountain West, and it killed two children in Challis, thirty-odd miles away, when a storefront collapsed.

The scarp is still there, a pale step running along the foot of the range near the trailhead turnoff, and it is worth the two minutes it takes to stop and look at it. It is not often that you can stand at the bottom of a mountain and see the exact line where it last got taller.

When to go, and how to not have an epic

The usual window is mid-July through September, which is when the snow bridge is most likely to be bare rock and the road is reliably open. Earlier than that is a snow climb with a scramble attached, and it is a legitimate way to do the mountain — just not the same undertaking as the summer route.

Start early. Parties commonly take somewhere between six and twelve hours car to car, and the top half of that is spent on an exposed ridge at over eleven thousand feet. Thunderstorms build in the afternoon here and the terrain gives you no fast way down. Early also means the snow bridge, if there is one, is still firm rather than sloppy.

Carry your water. There is none on the route and none at the trailhead, and a hot day on a south-facing limestone ridge takes more than you expect. The trailhead campground is the usual base for an early start; the Forest Service page linked above has its current season and status.

If it goes well

Borah is a good honest test of whether you like this sort of ground, and it is short enough that a bad day on it is a bad hour rather than an expedition. The people who enjoy Chicken-Out Ridge are usually the people who then go looking for Katahdin's Knife Edge, Kelso Ridge on Torreys Peak, or the Keyhole Route on Longs — the same combination of a real summit, a named crux, and a walk-off that only exists if you got the crux right.

The people who do not enjoy it are why the ridge has the name it has, and there is no shame in that at all. Turning around at 11,800 feet on your own judgement is a skill. Plenty of people who summit Borah did it on their second visit.

Sources

• Borah Peak is 12,662 ft with 5,982 ft of prominence, the highest summit in Idaho, in the Lost River Range in Custer County; the southwest ridge route gains about 5,262 feet in 3.5 miles and includes the Class 4 rock formation known as Chicken-Out Ridge, where many climbers turn back because of steep exposed terrain on both sides; the first ascent was by T. M. Bannon in 1912.
• The 1983 Borah Peak earthquake occurred on 28 October 1983 at 8:06 a.m. MDT, measured magnitude 6.9, broke the Lost River Fault, produced a 21-mile zone of fresh scarps with vertical displacement from -1.6 to 8.9 feet, and killed two children in Challis.
• The standard southwest ridge route begins at roughly 7,200 feet, reaches a saddle at 8,600 feet east of Point 8714, turns into a climbers' route toward Point 10632, becomes a scramble around 11,300 feet, and finishes with a twenty-foot downclimb known as the nose before an exposed, often snow-covered ridge; beyond it a trail follows the west side of Point 11898 to the saddle on its north side and then broken rock to the summit.
• The route is Class 3 if you stick to the easiest path, with harder variations; the snow bridge is an exposed ridge often covered in snow, crossed by kicking steps, and an ice axe may be needed in early season.
• The Mt. Borah Trailhead and Camping Area serves as the base for climbing the tallest mountain in Idaho, has an open season of May 20 to September 30, and has no potable water available.
• Road, trailhead and fire information for the Lost River Range.
• Mountain forecasts and afternoon thunderstorm timing for central Idaho.

Keep reading

• Katahdin's Knife Edge: a mile of ridge the width of a sidewalk
• Kelso Ridge on Torreys Peak: the Class 3 way up a mountain everyone walks
• Longs Peak and the Keyhole Route: where the trail ends six miles in

Hero photograph: Borah Peak from the valley floor, more than five thousand feet below the summit. Almost all of that is climbed in three and a half miles. by Leaflet. Public domain.