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Dave Cawley
One of the challenges in telling a story that takes place in a mountain wilderness is figuring out how to describe the level of risk involved in traveling through it. To you, the Hayuentas Wilderness might sound like a daunting, dangerous place. Someone else might think it's relatively tame. It's all a matter of experience and perspective, Dave I'm Dave Cawley and this is a bonus episode of Uinta Triangle. Throughout this series, you've heard hiker and mountaineer Art Lang say hiking the Uinta Highline Trail isn't overly risky.
Art Lang
The High Line is not especially difficult, but it has navigation challenges. It has potential snow travel challenges, but the entire walk is not especially technically difficult for someone with an intermediate to advanced level skill.
Dave Cawley
You've also heard me point out Art's high degree of competence.
Art Lang
Preparation is key and experience is key, and skills are key.
Dave Cawley
Every outdoor activity carries some degree of inherent hazard. You can trip and roll an ankle just walking in the park, but simple injuries can easily become life threatening when you're far from help. I do worry about the potential for this story to lure someone who's unprepared, inexperienced, or unskilled into the Hyuentas Wilderness.
Art Lang
A beginner. They should aspire to do it and they should come out and try it, but they should do it the first time in shorter stints. They should also learn to go with a person until they're accomplished enough to have the experience to do it by themselves. And they should learn how to be comfortable in high angle snow.
Dave Cawley
Another challenge I've grappled with in telling Eric Robinson's story is how to balance explaining the choices he made without it sounding as though I'm judging him for the outcome.
Art (continued, more detailed commentary)
In defense of Eric, his long distance
Art Lang
backpacking resume is bigger than mine. He's traveled the world more doing this than I even have for backpacking, but for some reason he avoided seeking out and learning the skills to be comfortable in a place like this that might have snow. He couldn't get that in Australia. Maybe they do have ski resorts and snow there. He could there's some world class mountaineering in Australia, but he wanted just to do a walk and that's fair. At the end of the day, he ended up making a few bad decisions because of that. And that's his right. He should be allowed to come out here and make bad decisions and self rescue or get rescue fire off his ELB or perish. I mean, I don't hold it against him that he ended up failing. All I try and do, I hope, is to let people know that this is a good place to learn your intermediate long distance solo backpacking. But please get some experience and wisdom in the high and wild. So not a trivial place for sure.
Dave Cawley
From my perspective, there are two major factors that increased the degree of risk Eric faced. Or another way to say it, these were two risk multipliers. Eric was alone and he ventured off trail. And yet Art says the fact Eric suffered a fatal accident while going solo off trail in the Uinta Mountains won't deter him from continuing to do the same.
Art Lang
We keep being driven to go do it anyway. And my wife and my family and friends are knowledgeable that this is what I want to do and where I choose to live my life. My life is wrapped around places like this. So it's something that I choose to be out here. And I am proud that he decided he wanted to push through. But it might have been a less risky decision to bail right there at Dead Horse Lake.
Dave Cawley
By bail at Dead Horse Lake, Arts describing another way Eric might have gone. Instead of veering off trail and trying to cross that unnamed saddle between Dead Horse and Allsop Lakes, the safest option for Eric would have been to bail out on a trail. I considered doing this myself during my hike following Eric's footsteps when heavy rain pinned me down at Dead Horse Lake
Narrator or Hiker
just a few minutes ago, I heard this enormous rock fall from over in the direction of Dead Horse Pass. I'm a little concerned about what it's going to look like. The snow is not an issue for me this year like it was for Eric. But with all of this rain, the ground is very loose and there are parts of that trail that I don't want to walk on while they are loose.
Dave Cawley
My contingency plan if the weather didn't improve was to bail out by following and established trail north from Dead Horse Lake down the West Fork Blacks Fork river and out of the wilderness. And that's what Art's suggesting Eric could
Art (continued, more detailed commentary)
have done when he got to Dead
Art Lang
Horse Lake and looked up that Dead Horse Pass and blocked at that point
Art (continued, more detailed commentary)
he should have turned, in my opinion,
Art Lang
should have turned north and walked out Black Fork long ways from where maybe his pickup is going to be at the Highline trailhead. But he's safe and there's people always coming to that.
Dave Cawley
That's true, but at the same time, that trailhead's not a bustling depot. Had he gone that way, Eric might have ended up waiting a day or more to catch a ride. And as a first time visitor to the Uintas, he wouldn't have known that this is one of those places where a dash of local knowledge can make a major difference.
Art Lang
That's one of the reasons why I think the High Uintas is not a terribly dangerous place to backpack. Because there's finger canyons going up and down off this spine, as you call it, that go out to 20 different trailheads. And each one of the trailheads has facilities, has people, often has a parking lot, has a place where people will drive daily, if not all the time. So each one of them is a valid escape route only 10 miles out. And so being able to call it and say, hey, this is too difficult or this is too dangerous to continue is an important piece of wisdom, important experience to have gained.
Dave Cawley
Eric's wife, Marilyn, told me he understood this concept during his hike on the John Muir Trail. He and his friend Alan Beck had to hike out in a similar fashion to find a dentist after Alan broke a tooth. Now, we'll never know whether Eric considered that bailout option, but I can understand why he went the direction he did. From where Eric stood while taking his final photographs at the outlet of Dead Horse Lake, his view west to the saddle was clear.
Art Lang
Choosing to go over an unknown ridge that didn't have a trail is a brave thing to do and good if you're experienced. And he may have been perfectly capable of doing that. And it was an objective hazard. Just bit his butt.
Dave Cawley
An objective hazard is one that's inherent to the environment and out of your ability to control the steep snow that Art and Eric both had to contend with on Anderson Pass during their Uinta highline hikes in 2011 was an objective hazard.
Outdoor Expert or Commentator
That's fun.
Dave Cawley
One of the most common objective hazards when going off trail in the Hywintas is scree and tailless butt. Scooting my way down scree, that shattered rock that forms on slopes below cliffs,
Outdoor Expert or Commentator
just trying to inch my way down a very steep slope, kicking the rocks
Dave Cawley
in front of me to hold enough
Outdoor Expert or Commentator
friction to keep me from rolling too far too fast.
Art Lang
All these boulders are just sitting there kind of half cocked and often on an edge. So they've been known to roll and you can get trapped under them and people have died that way, including climbers. So when you're traveling down it, it's not only strenuous, but you'll step on a big rock and the whole thing will go and then you jump over to another rock. I mean, so it requires some quick reactions. But even then it's an objective hazard and it could go awry. And that could happen to me at any time too. That's part of being out here is my experience and wisdom aren't going to help me on something dumb.
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Dave Cawley
When Eric diverted from the Uinta Highline Trail below Dead Horse Pass headed toward the saddle between Dead Horse and Alsop, he probably didn't realize he was making a life or death to decision. When he crested the saddle and started down the far side, it would have Become clear. The way down was interrupted by bands of cliffs he couldn't see from above. During this conversation with Art, I pulled a large photo print out of the car and spread it across the hood. The picture showed an aerial view of the saddle.
Art (continued, more detailed commentary)
So this is a great image you created of the pass, Trailless Pass coming over from Deadhorse Lake on the other side, which is to the east and Alsop Lake drainage in the foreground here to the west. You've marked in red two paths.
Dave Cawley
One for Eric's presumed path, another for Art's. Yeah, Art's one of the few people I know who's gone over this saddle. He did it in 2007, four years
Art (continued, more detailed commentary)
before Eric perished at this pass. My buddy Jeremy and I came over this pass just goofing off, as I'm wont to do. I often just go wandering the mountains and we try and connect the dots just to see if we can get from place to place. In this case it was a car shuttle. So he and I had left a car way over at the Hayden Pass trailhead and we were walking out all the way out to the end of this drainage. So we had parked a car at the end of east fork of the Bear and so we were doing a through hike with a car shuttle. We didn't know whether you could make it through here, but we're experienced and we're still just out for the exploration adventure anyway.
Dave Cawley
The route Art's describing involved going eastbound on the Uinta Highline Trail, crossing Rocky Sea and Dead Horse Passes before reaching Deadhorse Lake. From there, Art and Jeremy left the trail headed for the saddle the same way Eric would go four years later.
Art (continued, more detailed commentary)
After going over Dead Horse Pass we go down in Dead Horse Lake and we ascend an easy grass slope coming up from the back and that grass slope is an easy walk up and we get to this pass and we stood there for a moment, looked down in this beautiful drainage and said okay, well let's just, let's just find a way down.
Dave Cawley
They decided to split up here. Jeremy went to the left and dropped into a steep chute. Art went right, scouting for a way down.
Art (continued, more detailed commentary)
I had never been here before so I didn't know about all these cliff bands. And I traversed over here to the north and suspected I could get away down through here.
Dave Cawley
Art's pointing at the photo at the red line I've drawn indicating the path he took. I only know which way he went because he took photos from the top and bottom. His route wasn't direct. He had to probe along the top of the cliffs to find a place where they weren't too tall.
Art (continued, more detailed commentary)
I call it smelling out or sniffing out away down. For a explorer, this is not uncommon, but it's kind of sketchy in that it's the hard way to climb something. Going down is much harder and perhaps more dangerous than going up because you can see right in front of your face when you're going up. But I just kept poking my way down here and it was a little bit sketchy, but not really. You can see that there's no real cliff band in here. So I made my way down successfully and really with not a lot of. A lot of stress.
Outdoor Expert or Commentator
You're able to find the place where the cliffs are kind of behind, right. Or they're not visible anymore because there's so much material accumulated on top of them. Path of least resistance. When you get down though, to the bottom of that, you found something.
Art (continued, more detailed commentary)
I descended this slope and found a carcass. Basically a skeleton of a pack horse or pack mule with a. A pack on a sub that pack animals carry to carry weight, like for a guided group or for a shepherd or whatever. And it looked relatively modern, as in.
Art Lang
In the last 50 years.
Dave Cawley
Art's Photos of this carcass show bleached white bones and dried out leather straps held together with rusted metal rings. A dented and deformed plastic cooler sat a short distance away. This pack animal clearly fell from up high and tumbled to its death.
Art (continued, more detailed commentary)
Getting there and seeing that didn't make me any more nervous because by that time I'd made it and the nerves that were dispelling and I'd been fantasizing a misadventure the whole time down. So seeing that there, my reaction instead was what the hell are they trying to do getting that quadruped down this thing?
Dave Cawley
It seems the animal's owner didn't dare come down to retrieve the lost property.
Art (continued, more detailed commentary)
It may have fallen all the way from the top. Who knows?
Art Lang
All I can do is speculate.
Art (continued, more detailed commentary)
But in any case, it didn't bother me at all seeing it. It would bother me a lot coming upon Eric's remains if I was descending,
Art Lang
but only because it was a human being.
Dave Cawley
I've walked right past the place where Art found these bones without seeing them. To me, that just goes to show how lucky and improbable it was. Someone found Eric Robinson's remains a short distance away on that same rocky slope. I pointed the photo to the line showing Eric's presumed path down from the top of the saddle.
Outdoor Expert or Commentator
Basically he starts coming down, he's following just, you know, path of least resistance. And then at the top of this upper cliff band, it looks very vertical in this image because we're so far away and zoomed in, but it's much more broken. And so you would kind of be stair stepping down ledge by ledge, right until you get to the point where suddenly now it's a big, bigger drop than you are tall. And you're having to figure out how do I lower my body with a pack on. Yeah, all the way down. And that's essentially where that rope is, is at that kind of critical point. I see where he would have had to descend.
Art (continued, more detailed commentary)
I see.
Outdoor Expert or Commentator
And then his remains are in a straight line below that. How does that change the way you approach high angle terrain though, if you're
Art (continued, more detailed commentary)
carrying a pack versus completely different pack looking down, especially your down climb. And looking down tends to throw you over the handlebars. So it increases instability as you step down and it tends to imbalance you. And so you become more conservative, quite a bit more conservative. And if you're not strong, it's even. It's just harder because your legs have to step down and hold a backpack up as well as you. One of the many, many reasons why I walk with a hiking stick. So I've been hiking everywhere, anywhere off a sidewalk my entire life with a single pole. And part of it is to reach down and help lower myself down a steep slope. There are many reasons, but this is one of them. Getting a tripod going instead of a two legged descent in which one of the legs might slip. If it does, you get another leg to pull.
Outdoor Expert or Commentator
One of the things that stood out to me in the photographs that I've reviewed of Eric's effects and remains where his poles were both found in the rocks on that slope right where you're pointing. And they were telescoping so you could collapse them. And his were both collapsed, which I read as he at some point stowed him, which tells me he knew he was in vertical. You know, he didn't fall from the top and tumble all the way down. He was midway down when he had that fall.
Art (continued, more detailed commentary)
There's a point when you're going down at this point, you're exploring down, you're trying to find a way. There's a point at which the stick is going to be not helpful, especially two of them. I never walk with two, but at some point it becomes a problem and then I stow it simply and easily or I throw it down if I can see where to put it?
Outdoor Expert or Commentator
You know, somebody who comes to hike up here, if they stick to a trail nine times out, probably 9.9 times out of 10, they're not going to have a problem. But if you don't have the sky to do kind of off trail exploration, doing something like this could be kind of next level up.
Art (continued, more detailed commentary)
No doubt, no doubt. And do you think he had any off piste? We call it off trail travel experience.
Outdoor Expert or Commentator
For Eric, my understanding is probably very little.
Art (continued, more detailed commentary)
Yeah, for me, I've been searching this kind of thing out for 20 or 30 or 40 years and going there just because. So that's the attraction, that's why I came here, was to try and find a way down. Whereas he's got a heavy backpack, he's a trail guy, very experienced, doesn't know much about high angle, doesn't like snow. And so this was a stretch for him to go down. And I am a little bit surprised that he did. I don't fault him for it. Again, that's his prerogative to try it and he could have found a way down that was doable.
Art Lang
Maybe.
Dave Cawley
Climbers and other outdoors people use a slang term, beta, to describe a set of instructions on how to complete a route. It's worth remembering Eric didn't have any beta about this saddle. I've stood at the bottom looking up at the cliffs and visualized how I might have gone down in Eric's place. But he lacked that perspective.
Art (continued, more detailed commentary)
You can plot a course to go up and you can't do that coming down. So this is all blind and down climbing is harder than up climbing. And so this is a severe flaw in his strategy. Just trying to find a way down through here and encountering that cliff bend. Nothing much. He could have done different except bail earlier before he came to this pass, or get down here where it was too high angle for his comfort level and turn around and go back up and decide something else. Or again, maybe he was competent enough to do this, but he just stepped on a rock or a handhold on the cliff, cliff gave way and he fell to his death.
Art Lang
The rope thing is intriguing me too.
Art (continued, more detailed commentary)
Maybe that had a play. He tried to trust that and it broke, but it didn't sound like it was broken when it was found.
Outdoor Expert or Commentator
How skeptical are you of any rope that you find in that environment?
Art (continued, more detailed commentary)
If you don't see the person that left it and it's not in a high use climbing area where people are maintaining stuff all the time, you don't ever trust it. Nylon, any kind of rope Material degrades quickly and significantly by sunlight, and you can't examine it and tell whether it's whole or not. So we don't use fixed gear ever as a backcountry traveler.
Outdoor Expert or Commentator
But just the sheer in my mind, irresponsibility for somebody leaving a rope in that environment and not taking it out with them is something that I want to talk about.
Art (continued, more detailed commentary)
So I'll comment on that.
Outdoor Expert or Commentator
Okay.
Art (continued, more detailed commentary)
That's not uncommon in rich.
Art Lang
Really.
Art (continued, more detailed commentary)
It's somewhat justifiable. So say you're at your limits and you're going down and you get to a point where you're going to deploy a rope and you aren't experienced or savvy enough to rappel on it.
Art Lang
You don't have the gear to do that.
Art (continued, more detailed commentary)
You're going to use a hand line.
Dave Cawley
A hand line is a rope that's just intended as an assist to help people who don't have strong scrambling skills get up or down a tricky obstacle.
Art (continued, more detailed commentary)
So you hand line down, you get to the bottom of the section which was above the edge of the cliff, and you drop or you down climb from there. There's no way to retrieve the rope. It's up out of your reach. So it wouldn't be irresponsible. It'd be more responsible to leave it. You have no other choice. It saved your life or made you able to get through. And maybe you worry about the finances or leaving the blight out there, but really that if they used it to get down there, they couldn't go back and forget it.
Outdoor Expert or Commentator
They're not going to risk their life to go pull the rope that they
Art (continued, more detailed commentary)
just used because, yeah, yeah, yeah, that would be foolish.
Dave Cawley
I have no way of knowing who placed that rope in the rocks directly above where Eric Robinson's remains came to rest. It's a piece of the mystery that still bothers me. I can't prove the rope played a role in Eric's death, but I strongly suspect it. Then again, it could just be coincidence. Eric might have simply fallen victim to one of those objective hazards.
Art (continued, more detailed commentary)
Route finder is always subject to the risk. Objective hazard. So if I came down here and I tried to step down onto a rock that was a roller and I wasn't prepared to jump off it, I could have fallen to my death just as easily. So it may not have been his lack of experience or anything that caused it, has just been the luck of the draw. There's always that risk in the high and wild. You can have something go wrong that biffs you. And if you're by yourself, you got
Art Lang
nobody to save you.
Dave Cawley
This bonus episode was produced by me, Dave Cawley. Our executive producers are Jessica Cordova Kramer and Stephanie Wittleswax for lemonada Media and Cheryl Worsley for KSL Podcasts. For more on the story of Uinta Triangle, visit our website@uintatriangle.com that's uinta spelled uinta. Thank you for listening.
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Art (continued, more detailed commentary)
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Host: Dave Cawley (Lemonada Media)
Featured Voices: Art Lang (hiker/mountaineer), outdoor experts, Marilyn Koolstra (referenced), others
This bonus episode of “Uinta Triangle” centers on what outdoor adventurers call "objective hazards"—dangers that are inherent to wilderness travel and impossible to control. Using the disappearance and death of Australian trekker Eric Robinson in the Uinta Mountains as a starting point, host Dave Cawley and mountaineer Art Lang discuss risk, personal limits, and the ways in which both experience and circumstance shape fateful decisions in the backcountry. The episode is thoughtful and candid, exploring the fine line between adventure and peril and the humility required when facing the unknown.
"Objective Hazards" is a contemplative journey through risk, responsibility, and grief in the wild places we love. The story of Eric Robinson is told not as a cautionary finger-wag, but as a sober reflection on the real, sometimes heartbreaking costs of passion for the outdoors. The episode ultimately encourages humility: go forth and explore, but respect the wild, know your limits—and understand that, in the high and wild, there are no guarantees.
For more on Eric Robinson’s story and the larger series, visit uintatriangle.com.