In the evening of April 22, 2024, Teton guides Adam Fabrikant, Michael Gardner, and Brendan OâNeill started skinning up Death Canyon in Wyomingâs Teton Range, aiming for Buck Mountain, near the south end of the range. A little over 20 hours and seven peaks later, they skied off Teewinot Mountain and back to the valley floor to complete the Enduro Traverseâan unprecedented ski mountaineering adventure.
Adamâs story about the Enduro will be in AAJ 2025. Weâre offering a condensed version here. You can read an extended storyâreplete with Adamâs history of Teton link-upsâat the AAJ website.
In 1963, John Evans, Richard Long, and Allen Steck completed the Grand Traverse, a summertime traverse of ten Teton Range summits, from Nez Perce to Teewinot (the opposite direction of how this now-classic traverse is usually done today). In the 1965 AAJ, Steck wrote, âAny route or time of day is acceptable, however, only be sure to finish within 24 hours.â For the Enduro ski traverse of the Tetons that I envisioned, sub-24 hours was our sole metric, as Steck had laid it out for us.
For some years, Iâve been exploring Teton link-ups on skis with various partners, culminating with a day of skiing the Grand Teton, Mt. Owen, and Teewinot Mountain by some of their most technical routes. Sam Hennessey, Brendan OâNeill, and I pulled off this fine adventure in March 2023.
To me it seemed logical to bring all of our experiences together in a much longer traverseâto see how far we could go in under 24 hours. In the Alaska Range, I have enjoyed moving under the midnight sun for 24, 30, hell, even 64 hoursâwhy not see how this would work back home? It gets darker in Wyoming in the spring than in Alaska, but we have headlamps.
The idea of the Enduro Traverse was to enchain the Teton skyline from Buck Mountain in the south to Teewinot, crossing over Mt. Wister, South Teton, Middle Teton, Grand Teton, and Mt. Owen along the way.
At 6 p.m. on April 22, with the dayâs heat still in the air, Michael Gardner, Brendan OâNeill, and I started skinning up Death Canyon in wet, sloppy snow. Under an endless sunset, we climbed the east ridge of Buck Mountain (11,938â) and clicked in on top for our first descent at 9:15 p.m. (A full moon allowed us to complete all the climbs sans headlamps, but we did use the lamps for our descents.) We skied down Buckâs hyper-classic east face and used a piece of terrain called the Buckshot to drop into the South Fork of Avalanche Canyon.
The next climb was the South Headwall of Mt. Wister (11,490â), which flows into the upper east ridge. We reached Wisterâs summit at 10:53 p.m. This was the lowest peak in our traverse, yet it packed a punch. The northeast face offered up some proper steep skiingâit felt engaging via headlampâand deposited the three of us in the North Fork of Avalanche Canyon.
Our next ascent took us up the South Tetonâs Amora Vida Couloir (much more fun to descend than ascend), and here we encountered our least efficient travel of the day, with heinous breakable crust and soggy snow engulfing our entire legs. From the top of the South Teton (12,514â), the descent by the Northwest Chute was fast and uneventful.
Now in Garnet Canyonâs South Fork, we began our climb up the Middle Tetonâs Southwest Couloir, where efficient cramponing put us on the summit rather quickly. The descent down the east face into the Middle Teton Glacier route was harrowing on the refrozen undulating snow left by skiers who had descended in the warm days before us. But we were not there for the ski quality, rather the continuous movement.
From the North Fork of Garnet Canyon, we made quick work of the Ford-Stettner route, topping out the Grand Teton (13,770â) at 6 a.m., 12 hours into our journey. The sun was beginning to rise above the horizon, and it felt great to embrace its warmth again.
With a long block of daylight ahead, the three of us were confident as we descended the Ford-Stettner, with some thoughtful downclimbing in the Chevy Couloir, which is normally rappelled. (To save weight, we did not carry a rope and chose lines that would go without one.) We made our way into the Dike Snowfield an...
https://americanalpineclub.org/news/2025/5/19/the-enduro-traverse
