On the history of climbing on the Seward Peninsula

when it began to rain, the prospector took shelter under an overhang of rock... seldom see lightning in these parts, not like in Fairbanks, he thought, chewing on a chunk of tobacco and venison... the year was 1912, and the prospector, a middle aged man named Johnson from the timber forests of Washington, was on his way from Nome to Council, hiking along the ridge you see here...

by and by, as he sat dry and contented under the rock while the squall ran its course, he noticed a little bird's nest just above his head nestled on a tiny ledge, and above that, a little 12 foot high wall wrinkled with little horizontal dikes of schist...

now, Johnson was more than a logging camp son turned prospector- he had studied for a time in Dresden, a student in classics, and had climbed with Perry Smith and Fehrmann on the Elbsandstein... and so it was that when he found himself squatting underneath this odd leaning schist boulder up on a barren ridge somewhere in the Bendeleben Mountains on the Seward Peninsula, he did what any climber would naturally do... he pinched the first hold and began to crank the move...

the rock was surprisingly compact, better than the Elbe thought Johnson... he edged his big duckboots on a wrinkle with the inside of the toe, leaned back, and stepped up... what a pleasure, but uh-oh, the top holds were wet... Johnson clawed at wet lichen and stepped over...

he climbed other outcrops then, and arrived late in Council and had to siwash... the foreman threatened to let him go, but when Johnson tried to explain, he fumbled for words...

Many years later, in 2003, Nils Hahn and I swept along this ridge, devouring any boulder problem under V1 that we could find... highballs, lowballs, and cool 15 ft. overhangs... we parked the car on the Council road several miles past Solomon and headed up towards marble bluffs which are prominent from the road, hundreds of feet up on a bluff to the west of the road... turn the corner on the marble and you come to a pleasant series of schist outcrops on the ridge in the picture..... don't know who owns the land... we never took the rope out of our pack, instead preferring the freedom of the Seward Peninsula boulderer...

i claimed all the boulder problems as first ascents for myself... i gave them each a clever name reflecting the workings of my own psyche... i gave each one a YDS rating...

but what of Johnson? but what of Johnson.

Sinuk River Alexander Supertramp Bluffs

I renounce the dominion of your daily hassle

Our tangles of accountability...

With this threshold we become ourselves, Lazarus

Time to range out through the topples of marble and schist (we five)

Beat out the kinks in the springs of our hearts

Pick berries as they are melting in the cold rain

And smash them as we fall

I returned to the Alexander Supertramp Bluffs. This time I was accompanied by human mothers, just as fearsome as sows with cubs, IMO. We reached the bluffs. The males went climbing for rocks while the females picked blueberries, just a bit sparse this year.

An overhang presented itself in the Greenschist Gardens. So Scottish was the weather, we were loathe to don our rock shoes, and so cranked it in our hiking boots.

A second metamorphic event, heat and pressure of some kind during the Cretaceous, (as if these dog-dooey clumps of crust had been dumped back into the oven for a moment) (I have been told, by more than one unnamed geologist staggering in Front Street bars) (Geology is a mural) may account for how sketchy a problem like this can feel... This is Mr Collins attempting SrikSrik. We are praying he shall not be crushed...

Cold clam lichen and slime, with the usual conundrum: whether to spend some of your "nine lives factor" and dangle your two hundred pounds out on the lip of the non-adhered multi-ton, cantilevered thing, or not. The fulcrum of the paradox becomes: is the boulder problem worth nine lives? I felt this one was. Some surprise jams at the lip made the pullover casual . Srik-Srik, 5.8 .

We proceeded around the corner to the marble bluffs. A buffet of rain streamed in from the Norton Sound and soon we were ensconced in Fall drizzle. We bouldered up the cliff in the photo, but only the super easy slabs on the right, for rain renders the marble friable, not to mention our fingers freezing. Back some day again, maybe for the mixed and turf midwinter...