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.