The Wild Basin Traverse has been on my mind for years, but scouting the technical sections took time and patience. Earlier this year, I explored the missing puzzle pieces and finally felt ready for an earnest attempt.
At 05:00 on August 28, I started the route from the Wild Basin Trailhead with the steep bushwhack up to Lookout Mountain. The sun rose and the wind picked up as I approached Meeker summit. On my way up to Longs, I met a group of climbers and hikers who would remain the only people I would see for the entire day. After the transition to Pagoda, I took the west ridge bypass to find my way over to Chiefs Head. From there, Alice, Tanima, and Cleaver went by smoothly, but I cliffed out on the west side sneak to Isolation. It had been a while since I'd scouted this section and I'd forgotten how far I had to downclimb to the gully leading back up to the ridge. Approaching Isolation summit, I saw weather coming in from the west. I hastily moved forward to be less exposed, but by the time I reached Ouzel summit, I realized that the rain had stayed further north, engulfing the Longs massif. The transition first to Ogalalla and then to Elk Tooth was quick and easy thanks to fresh memory from my recon just a few weeks ago. On that run, I climbed the ridge from Upper Hutcheson Lake but hadn't managed to scout the path through the gendarmes waiting for me further east on the ridge. While navigating this last technical section, the rain set in and the wind picked up. I spent a few tense minutes finding and executing a safe downclimb on the south side of the ridge. The final two climbs to Saint Vrain and Meadow felt like the dessert after a wonderful day. The sun was setting, highlighting the dramatic peaks of the skyline while drowning the basin in dark shadows. I originally planned to bushwhack all the way down to the Wild Basin Trail, but struggling through endless downfall in the forest north of Meadow quickly changed my mind, and I opted for the Finch Lake Trail back to the trailhead instead.
I consider the following sections to be the cruxes of this route: minor 4ᵀᴴ class downclimb through Clark's Arrow from Meeker to Longs, low 5ᵀᴴ class and exposed 4ᵀᴴ class downclimbs on the Pagoda to Chiefs Head west ridge bypass, minor 4ᵀᴴ class downclimb and upclimb from Ogalalla to Elk Tooth, low 5ᵀᴴ class downclimb from Elk Tooth. Other than this, the route is generally 2ᴺᴰ and 3ᴿᴰ class on (some) faint or (mostly) nonexistent trail.
Roughly 5,000 calories of bars, gels, and gummies covered my nutrition for the day. With no access to streams, lakes, or snowfields along the route, there was no point in carrying a filter — instead, I brought all the water I would need from the start: 3 liters in a reservoir and 1.2 liters in soft flasks. The 4.2 liters proved just enough for the mild and windy conditions.
Peter Bakwin's route starts and ends at Sandbeach Lake, but in our correspondence, he confirmed that "you can start/finish where you want as long as you close the loop and hit all the summits.” By that measure and my own, the day was a complete success: loop closed, all summits tagged, and every angle of the entire Wild Basin explored in 15 hours and 4 minutes.