On Bouldering

   (below) Cabin Rock Crags (not Cabin Rock itself) in rime.  Drive up Teller to Cabin Rock (extremely disappointing in and of itself for bouldering potential), slog up hillside over a 1000 ft. to east, walk over the crest to scruffy hillside boulders and crags up to 40 ft. high, overlooking Penny River.  Land stewardship unknown to me at this time, but please leave comments if appropriate.

    Bouldering is the interstitial glue connecting the all too infrequent occurence of significant climbs in the Kigs.  In between the failures to get out of town, the failures with partners, the #%#@*&$$ snow-machine incidents, lies the wonderful bouldering experiences.

    What may not be realized is the miraculous access here in (region to remain unnamed for now) for BOULDERING, medium to low quality, but gloriously free, so many lost ridgelines with tors of metamorphic rock poking out of the top like vertebrae.

(below)  Sunset Boulders, Beginners Wall, Tuft Route.  Head out Teller Road to berry fields before you get to Penny, you see a crooked orange crag a short hike up the hillside to the right (north) of road.  Cool little M1 or 2 on exfoliated turf tufts.  Land stewardship unknown to me at this time, but please leave comments if appropriate.

Bouldering doesn't seem to sustain everyone.  Bouldering feels at times like reading fantasy or science fiction.  You creep out there and pretend you are really climbing.  You perch on little footholds a foot off the deck and imagine that those bryophytes under your heel are really the tops of trees in Yosemite.   Then you find a little turf mattress out of the wind and take a little nap listening to the wind howling over the top of the rock....

(below) Sunset Boulders, Orange Wall, Ian experimenting with figure-4 unsuccessfully. He is worried the metamorphic schist flake will catastrophically disengage.  Many of the local  bouldering gardens have a featured orange wall.  I don't know the name of the lichen.  Please leave comments if you know the classification of this orange species of lichen.  If you feel I have broached some common law by climbing on this formation, or especially if you have ethical problems with the spraying of geographical locations on a blog, you simply must leave comments stating your reasons, so that this entire blogging enterprise may be discontinued.  Thank you....

What were bouldering a social event?

Then I'd have arms a praying

And raising in supplication

And on their lips they'd be spraying

Of all the routes they would steal

We'd all have to get out on Friday

Right when the day is done

But bouldering ain't a social event

And I'm out here all alone... 

(below) Cabin Rock Crags-  M-bouldering paradise.  Made it up there one good day so far in February.  The ice in this picture is not the glaze ice I have referred to elsewhere as the "shellac";  in this picture we have rime.  It wouldn't hold your weight, but it came pretty close.  What caused the riming?  Wind.  Did I mention it was cold?

The last thing to comment "On Bouldering" is the Four-Seasonality of bouldering around Sitnasuaq. The summer bouldering can be fine at a time;  the winter bouldering can be superb when it ain't brrr.  The winter bouldering is the best.  Crunchy little torquing puzzles, moss, moss, cam, hook, lieback flake, ADZ!  Keep your heels down when you top out.  Fox!  Fox!  Cease bouldering and check for rabies?

Rocky Mountain Bluff.  Drive out Kougarak, before you get to Dorothy you pass a large foothill (Pk. 2374) on your right (east).  Could it be "Rocky Mountain" that rises above Rocky Mountain Creek?  (Leave comments if you know.)   A hundred foot bluff (1231) is visible.  Wouldn't touch it in the summer, but in the frozen Fall it becomes pickly-stickly and mossy-chossy.  In the picture is Earp in blue puffy soloing up the crumbling hideo-choss in some Fall of the later '00s.  Land stewardship unknown to me at this time, but please leave comments if appropriate.

none of this bouldering is of the least bit of importance, it is so far below V grade it is HIKING, but there is a reason that Alex Lowe's quotation has endured:  "The best climber in the world is the one having the most fun."