Mt. Borah the tallest mountain in ID

Getting ready the morning of the hike

















Friday night we drove down to Mackay  ID with my parents and hiked Mt Borah. We spent friday night at the base camp. We met a friend from Boise who todl us all about the hike he did earlier that day. His hike began at 6 AM, two hours into it he hit a hail storm, following a snow storm, which made us scared to go on ours the next day. We also found out that the car parked close to ours belonged  to a man who started hiking Borah on the 12th and had been missing on the mountain ever since. After our chat with this man we were so excited to start hiking the mountain where people freeze and get lost. We started at 6:45 Saturday morning and began the dreadful hike. We enjoyed the beginning 1/4th of the hike which included hiking through the trees and going up steep hills that I only fell down once!! we finally made it above all of the trees and thought we were almost to the summit when we found out that we were only half way. 

We then had to hike up to the ridge also known as chicken out ridge where lots of people actually did chicken out. Chicken out ridge included climbing on rocks with a 1,000 ft drop to our left and a 800 ft drop to our right while Traversing across this ridge. we finally made it past that when we were faced with snow. We had to walk across a snow covered couloir. This was where sean and I got scared the most. If we slipped on the snow we would probably die or have broken bones. After that we had the summit right in front of us... or so we thought we actually had another hour of 1,200 vertical feet of scrambling up to the summit on all four searching for sturdy rocks that we can actually put our weight on and not fall down the cliff. Finally making it to the top we signed our names in the book and took a few pictures then headed down for the dreadful decent of the hike. The scramble was even worse coming down, which i didn't think was possible. Then the snow had melted in the couloir and we were slipping with every step we took. At chicken our ridge we couldn't chicken out if we ever wanted to get home again, and lastly we had 3,500 vertical feet decent in gravel and trees. We finally made it down to the base camp with a few blisters, sore knees, and dead tired legs. We probably will never do Borah again, but we are glad we did it and can say we hiked the tallest mountain in Idaho.

Lets not forget our friend who got lost on the mountain. After four days of being lost up there the helicopters that we saw and heard over us the whole hike finally found him ALIVE! he fell down one of the ridges got hurt and lost and couldnt find his way. The found him on the neighboring mountain and took him to the closest hospital. Good job search and rescue