It was 23 degrees and snowing lightly a little after 6:30am, as I started walking up the snow-packed road from the Twin Sisters parking lot. After about half a mile of that, the road-walking came to an end and I continued up into the pole timber forest on the trail. Deep snow blanketed the entire forest, but the trail atop the snow was hard-packed most of the time, and I didn’t have any trouble following it.
It was practically a wind tunnel between the Twin Sisters’ summits. I passed the stone hut and tower and made it to the West Summit quickly and sat down at the summit for a brief rest in the wind. The time was 9:30am. I hadn’t seen another person yet, but I would pass ten or so on my descent.
Then, just the east summit to go, I crossed the boulder field and then started working my way up the broken blocks toward the top. The gusting wind was the very harshest here, and the terrain ahead looked a little more challenging, so I stopped a couple times to pick my next line before walking again.
It was on one of these brief pauses that my plans came to an abrupt end. Suddenly, my feet were not on solid ground anymore; the rock I had been standing over was rushing to meet my face and–THUD. My jaw had slammed into the rock before I could fully react, and I immediately reached up to see if there was any blood. There was some, but amazingly I did not feel anything out of place, or any pain in my teeth or jaw.
I don’t know for sure what had happened. I think I had been standing on a somewhat tenuous snow-covered rock, something I’d done thousands of times before—but a strong gust of wind made what little friction I was taking advantage of worthless for that split second. I had instinctually reached out my arms, because there was blood on my hand as well; maybe that had helped soften the blow to my jaw.
My hands and face had been getting numb by this point, so I knew I needed to get out of the wind and back to easier terrain to assess my damage.
My fun was over. Fifty feet from the true east summit, I turned around and started down, getting back to the car in ninety minutes.
For a little while, I thought my right hand might be broken. When I first got my feeling back and took my glove off, the hand was hurting and about twice as big as it should be. I did develop a bad headache the rest of the afternoon, and wouldn’t be surprised if I had a slight concussion. Leave it to this lowly elevener to break me off a good old slice of humble-pie.
Otherwise, great day in the mountains!