Pass Creek Pass

    The panic attack drifted swiftly around the corner like an afternoon thunder shower sweeping around a buttress, like the foen enveloping the climbers in the Eiger Sanction, except it wasn't the Eiger I was clinging to, only a Class 3 nothing slope on some obscure shoulder of a mountain in the Kigs. Mind phased in to the zone of anxiety like a starship entering sub-space, ship's systems malfunctioning, red alerts blazing on all decks. The anxiety was composed of multiple constituents, two parts paranoia to every one part legitimate worry.
       But the true spark point, I was well aware, though the awareness did not help, was nothing more than the fasciculation of a tiny set of muscles in my right and left pectoral muscles, still quivering due to the released strain of having taken the backpack off. The pectoral sensation had been transmogrified by runaway mind into a possible cardiac arrest in progress.  It was only June I knew, warm and fine. Nobody would freeze in the Kigs that night, nor would there be any horrific falls on this easy hiking ground.  But still, the headlines flirted in my imagination: Seemingly Healthy Fifty-Year Old Man Found Keeled-Over On Remote Mountain Slope.
       

(above) Pass Creek peaklets, the original objective of this 5-day Kigsxpedition—  foiled, due to the copious amounts of snow exhibited in the photo, and genuine June avalanche conditions at the pass from which the picture was taken. Lotta snow for June, ironic for a little snow year, the cause being cool temperatures in preceding May.

      JUNE, 2014.
       The trip had started off with GLUE OF TOWN so thick that I grew hysterical and lapsed into HISSY FIT MODE right there in front of spouse and children. Gear then became disorganized, as friend Mikey pulled up in the driveway on time to whisk me up the Kougarak Road to my drop-off.  On the list of things I had forgotten was shells for the shotgun, so we stopped at Salmon Lake to ransack Earp's cabin.  I found some old paper shells. They would burn me later that evening when one would jam in the shotgun, rendering it useless, and me naked. Worst of all to the fate of my 5-day Kigsxpedition, my spectacles chose that moment to go out of phase with this dimension, and vanished, which meant there would be no reading the entire trip.
         Persistent GLUE OF TOWN tendrils stayed attached to my psyche the first two miles of the hike. I treated my condition with Yukon Jack. Soon, and with great relief, the SNAP! came— the last long GLUE tendrils stretched, stretched, and then "snap," I was free. Worries, self-negations, chain-reactions of guilt and responsibility, inadequacies, self-flagellations, the flaming shards of burning ruin I had left in my wake, the house projects left dangling, the band going on without me, the long-suffering woman, broken-down 4-wheeler, literary mediocrity— these fixtures of GLUE suddenly resolved into vapor as the magical energy of the Kigluaik Range began to penetrate my mental process.

(above) Map of Salmon Lake area showing the pass between Fox Creek and Pass Creek, plus route hiked in June. Don't know if this is the pass that put the "pass" in Pass Creek— it looked to be Class 3 or 4 on the north side, but was laden with dangerous snow.

      When the first trial shell jammed in the chamber, I cleared it by firing the shotgun. Was this a stupid maneuver? I wouldn't know, because I'm not a knowledgeable gun guy. I win the award for the lowest ratio of shots per year versus hours carried, meaning I've carried and slept with the thing for months, years, but seldom fired it. When the second shell became somehow jammed in the barrel, I grew afraid of the whole device, dismantled it, and stashed it under a rock for retrieval on the way out. I've hiked the Kigs with a gun and without— with is better, given the huge denominator of hours spent alone out there. Yes, bear encounters are rare, this is merely paranoia, there's nothing to worry about, especially in a low bear year like this one— but maybe my denominator (hours spent in the wilderness alone) is different than yours. The gun acts as a bad piece of gear on a rotten lead: you take it for the illusion of pro, it calms your head. And now, in June, no bear protection had I, no companion, nor glasses to see.

(above) North Face of Pt. 2650+ on shoulder of Pk. 3190 between Paso Robles and Fox creeks. A somewhat complex hill with several high points, another clash zone of the gneiss and schist, elsewhere referred to in this blog as "Aaka," the father. I went scrambling around on its ridges this evening in June.

         Kigsblog has received a grant which mandates the author explore only north-side Kigs drainages, for the reason that a certain feeling of ennui has begun to creep in for southern Kigs drainages, given all  these years of road-acces hiking and snow-machines from the south. However, north side objectives present a problem for your average, penurious, Nome weekend warrior: an extra day, extra gas, extra person, an extra helicopter, just to reach those back-there places on the dark side of the range.

       The idea of the June trip to Fox Creek, then, was to pioneer a quick route from the Kougarak Road into Pass Creek, a territory which would definitely satisfy the north side requirement. Why would they name it Pass Creek? Surely there would be a pass to the north side.

(above) Pk. 3900+, (referred to elsewhere as Kayuqtuq, Pk. 4000+, Fox, Foxy, or Tog 7, due to hyperopia), June 2014. Hiking route went up Fox Creek and hung a left to reach the sunlit pass at left of picture.

       There turned out to be a pass to the north, but I CHICKENED OUT of passing it, which makes this the second consecutive kigsblog adventure thwarted by avalanche danger. It was real this time, massive slabs of saturated summer snow starting to calve off in the stress zones on the north side of the pass, the parabolic fissures all lined up like crevasses on a glacier. Might've crept down the Class 3 or 4 moat to the side, but it would've been spooky down underneath all that overhanging snow and choss. Besides, it was obvious that miles of miles of the same spooky snow awaited between the pass and the Pass Creek peaklets, my original objective. Strange, oxymoronic, slough / slab avalanches had recently run all over the long wall that forms the north side of the pass. Don't want that feeling, the sphincter unease, the nebulous boundary layer between high danger and mere paranoia, the inability to decide which it is. So I was awarded another LIVE TO SEE ANOTHER DAY CLAUSE, and turned back once again to the south side of the Kigs, though Pass Creek pass surely hikes in dry conditions. But I wonder: who's passed this pass on snow-machine?


(left) Lucy, looking down the face of Pt. 2650.

       A miserable night, for the dog at least, was spent camped at the pass in snow, wind, rain, and fog. Miserable for me without glasses because I could not while away the time reading the books I had stashed under a boulder down the valley. In the morning, a gray sky hung over the sloughing snow slopes, while the sun could be seen shining on the mountains lower down. So I descended.
        The GLUE of Earp's cabin at Salmon Lake sucked me past the event horizon, and I hiked all the way down to the road for the night. But the next day the glory of the mountains beckoned once again, and I hiked back up bear-free Fox Creek, and spent many, many hours up there clambering around with no monkeys on my back, no pressure to solo, no adhesive residue from GLUE OF TOWN, (only the occasional psychological shitstorm provided by my heavy metal-saturated amygdala) just getting my mind blown by the midnight sun, and the absolutely weird Miocenic BUZZ of the Sawtooths.

(below) Fox Creek drainage, with Paso Robles Creek coming in from the right, and Salmon Lake in the middle.
          My anxiety storm passed as a summer storm does. It rained, flashed, and thundered, then moved on, and I spent a fun rest of the morning wandering the ridges of Pk. 3190.
           Fox Creek was visited often this summer by we human pathogens. I laid down two heavy foot tracks in June, leaving TRACE in my big Italian boots. A week or two later, Jeff Collins and Wilson Hoogendorn began training in Fox Creek and performed feats of Kigs-running (below) that may never be equaled. Human footprints grew in August: a group entered the valley to investigate the psychic properties of boulders in the area. One erratic in the upper Fox drainage proved to be of significant interest. The team discovered that indeed, the rock emitted psychic resonance, though no hard scientific evidence could be extracted to support their hypothesis, as is usually the case in these matters. Their findings only confirmed what I had already known, for I had sensed the rock on my visit, too. Further research into the Fox erratic is merited.  

 

    

Peak 3250+ (SaGuiq), west ridge attempt

       Theme: people snowboarding down things I call climbs. The latest humiliating installation comes via this awesome video (below) of Miner Joe and another guy boarding the west side of Peak 3250+ near Mosquito Pass, shot from a Bering Air helicopter in 2012. From my personal viewpoint of everyday flow, I experienced this video as a synchronicity factor 1.2, a slight rise in the standard deviation of normal coincidence, as the following tale will tell.

       Eighteen Saturdays ago, ( the current rate of blog-lag), during the climate-change brief window of optimal snow conditions we experienced last April, I loaded the Bearcat, nicknamed Super Smooth Andy G., onto the trailer and slush-bogged it to the place at Mile 30 Kougarak Road where all the trucks and snow-machine trailers were parked, just before Nugget Pass where the plow hadn't gotten yet.

(above) Kougarak Road heading north to the Kigluaiit.

        The terror of driving the truck and flagellating trailer up the mud road, the horror of gunning the throttle to load  big, scary Andy G. on and off,  the loathing of this mechanically-inept, environmentalist hippy at the smoke-belching engine, followed by the hypocritical utter joy of whizzing off on Smooth Andy G. into the Kigs at incredibly high speeds, west over good Spring crust.

(above) Snow-machine mountaineering journey to Peak 3250+, April 19, 2014. Kougarak Road was open to that point.

           Snow-machine crept a thin strip between the Windy Lakes and the foot of the mountain, didn't want to go out in the middle of the lake on that big piece of metal, too much thought of the temperature weirdness that winter— Nome had been a Zambonied ice rink, its snow-plows sleeping, a winter with two or three different times of rain. I imagined parabolic thaw fields lurking in the ice cover of Windy Lakes, and hugged the shore, up against the many rocks showing through.

(above) "Never get out of the boat!" Looking northeast up the Sinuk headwaters, April 22, 2014. This was a trip to the same peak several days later, again unsuccessful when Super Smooth Andy G. could no longer cross the Sinuk, which was breaking up for miles in both directions.

    Parked Super Smooth at the foot of west ridge of Peak 3250+. This mountain is an old friend, a lump of quartzose schists jammed up against the neighboring gneiss of Tigaraha to the north, not quite sentient, but with enough presence to be referred to as an entity. The best camping spot in the Kigs, the "hundred-year old rock slide" sits at the base of Peak 3250+ to the west. On a long summer day in 2002, Kristine and I climbed the southwest ridge, a horrible, festering Class 4 choss mound. I went back on snow-machine to bag the next ridge to the left  (west ridge) on a school Sunday years ago, but was defeated by a large NAP that swept over me in the warm afternoon sun. But I had come back for another try, and the temperatures were too cool this time for napping.

(above) Saguiq from the south. Southwest ridge is left skyline.

       After many trips, a mountain begins to require a name. Other things require names as well: clumps of willow, glacial erratics, indistinct bluffs, tundra dips, morainal confluences, pee spots, hills— all those features hitherto without a name that now do require a name, just so you can use them as milestones to get through long torturous hikes into the Kigs under a 60 lb. climbing pack. But a mountain, especially, requires a name.
       Hiking in to Mosquito Pass from the Kougarak Road, the hiker crosses Buffalo Creek, then Hudson Pass, then Sinuk, and Northstar Creeks. Reaching Peak 3250+ in the Windy Creek drainage means the hiker has "turned the corner" on the hike and finally arrived. Thus, I have always thought of Peak 3250+ as "Turncorner Mountain," which, under the "First Languages Fairness Compensation Act" must necessarily be translated into Inupiaq, a translation which in this case has been taken care of by my new contacts in the Qaweraq dialect department at the school in which I work. The result is the word "SaGuiq" (sah-ghoo-ik) to refer to Peak 3250+, which means (kind of, sort of, maybe) "turn the corner" in Qaweraq, the dialect of the southern Seward Peninsula. The capital G designates an Inupiaq "dotted g,"  the consonant pronounced with a glottal growl. Henceforth, I will refer to Peak 3250+ as SaGuiq, even though the governing body which has made this appointment is nothing more than large and random agencies of neurons in my scattered head.

(above) SaGuiq from west, west ridge on left and southwest ridge on right. In between, the face boarded in the video.

         This post chronicles a climb far from rad. In summer, the west ridge of SaGuiq is probably Class 3, and as we saw in the video, is perfectly skiable in the spring. 

      Nevertheless, I bailed.  The issue this time was not a NAP descending from nowhere, but moderate avalanche conditions up near the top. It was the wind-loading problem: snow piles up in the deposition zone on the lee side of a ridgecrest. The slope had already whumpfed twice under me on the way up;  now the snowpack dynamics were changing once more within the little narrow band of weather tucked under the very top of the mountain. 

       My route traversed over to some rocks, but I began to visualize how the pad of snow supporting me would disintegrate under my weight;  my crampons would snag, my tib-fibs snap, my body tumble in a slither of snow.  MOJO power-leaked from my energy body.  Suddenly, the alternative of going down seemed perfectly acceptable

(above) Looking south across the southwest ridge from the west ridge of SaGuiq, April 19, 2014.

        Retreating due to avalanche danger creates a Schrodinger's cat of a paradox: if you had continued up the slope it would have avalanched, but since you didn't, it was never going to.  And you never get to find out the answer until the cat climbs up the slope, which if it doesn't, you never do. All in all, a situation designed to torment a self-negationist such as me. As I rode back towards the road on Super Smooth Andy G., my mind was busy performing obstreperous rationalizations. 

        I made the decision to invoke the LIVE TO SEE ANOTHER DAY CLAUSE (a rule of the mental game which basically states that the climber cannot be punished or battered by self-judgment in the case of ambiguous bails) and tried to convince myself that the slab conditions on the climb I was bailing from had fallen in the "fifty-fifty" category— it might've gone, it might've not— but my claim seemed false. My attorneys tried to throw together a defense based on me being solo—  "...if I had a partner I would have scampered right up it, you can't take any chances when you're solo in the Kigs..."— until it was pointed out the nullity of this argument in the precedent of allapa vs. Swan Slab Jamcrack (1981), given that the climb itself is exactly the same whether you are solo or with a partner. Most damningly for my case, Intuition was prepared to testify that the slope on Saguiq was fine. Eventually, a straight CHICKEN-OUT was handed to me. I took it home and logged it on the shelf with all the other CHICKEN-OUTS. 

(above) On the right, Kirgavik Inuatqi (Killer Falcon Peak), Pk 3000+, between SaGuiq and Tigaraha. Had a fine day on good rock in the summer of 2002 soloing those little, (60-80 ft.) dark, gneiss tors in the picture. A falcon tried to murder me near the summit, hence, my little pet name for the thing. Osborn in the distance...

         Retribution for a chicken out.  Back in school the following week, I was visiting a colleague in the second grade pod.

       "Dude," he called from his teacher desk. "You know where this is?" He flipped his laptop around and showed me the same youtube that started this post.

       I was flabbergasted... the Kigs!  On youtube!  We recognized miner Joe and the Bering Air helicopter pilot. But I couldn't identify the mountain. So we played the video several more times. My face grew closer to the computer screen. Planes of snow spun around in circles, cliff patterns riffled through like shadows, familiar landmarks swooped by, and I grew nauseous with motion sickness. Finally, the fragments in the Kigs-o-scope coalesced into a specific place. I recognized the place. 

       The scarlet "L" began to burn like fire across my forehead. These yahoos were boarding down the same mountain I had bailed off the previous weekend! 

(above) Peak 3250+ at far left edge of photo, looking southwest. This gives us an idea of the peak in relation to its friends. Moving right one sees the dark mass of Tigaraha, with its 800 ft. north wall.

 Link to Colby Coomb's interview on Project Jukebox

"It doesn’t matter how much effort it takes. The consequences of an accident are so huge, I think, in retrospect, and it's easy to see things in retrospect, what should we have done?  We should have had visibility. and should have waited, but it would have been a hard one to sell to us at the time...

"Avalanche danger is always high, and sometimes it’s really, really high, but that’s the attitude of walking on thin ice and really being highly aware all the time of the hazard so that you’re doing this right. All of a sudden you stop and say, hey wait a minute, is this going to be OK? Can I pick a better route, or can I get on belay and get out on the slope and dig a hole in it and see if I can reveal some layers and assess some stability, but really taking that avalanche hazard very seriously…

"I don’t hold anything against the mountains. I’d say that i’m hugely more… PARTICULAR about the things that I climb, and I’m just very PICKY.  I just won’t get on anything anymore…. in college, I was, we all were, just a little bit more ready to jump on everything..."

Thanks to Colby for the quotations, and the esteemed Dr. Krupa for listening. 

        

(above) Tom Walter, my great mentor from the eighties, sucked down by wind-loading. He would stubai his way up anything.

       After I trundled out Tom in Kigscourt, I was acquitted, lock, stock, and barrel. There was not a pin to be dropped after Colby's testimony. I was handed the LIVE TO SEE ANOTHER DAY CLAUSE that I had originally requested. I was even given a pass on self-humiliation over the snow-boarding video; it was remembered that around the time those boys were skiing SaGuiq in 2012, Tyler and I were over by PiNarut (Pk. 3367) (ping-a-root) throwing glory turns in tight couloirs. Sometimes the snow is O.K. And besides, these are all absurd turns of mind and deserve to be ignored. The truth remains that when traveling solo on snow-machine and climbing mountains in the Kigluaik, you want to avoid any kind of screw-up. /k/ /k/ /k/

(above) One of our Kigsblog photography staff, none too enthused with the skiing conditions at Nugget Pass around the time of this adventure, April 2014.

Regular Route on Mt. Osborn

I wrote this route description for a group of visiting climbers last summer. See Among the Peakbaggers to see how their ascent turned out, and for pictures that show the Regular Route on Mt. Osborn.

(above) Mt. Osborn from the east from Grand Central Valley.

Southeast Ridge, Class 4, 3000 ft. elevation gain.  This is probably the easiest way up Mt. Osborn. Should be fine without rope or spikes in high summertime, but weather conditions on the summit ridge are changeable year round. Be sure to continue north along the summit ridge to the highest of the rock towers, the highest of the summit towers by all of ten feet.  Average hikers will take four to six hours round-trip from the base.  Descent is best made by going down the way you come up. 

East Face, WI3, M4. This offensive yellow line is a peemark on behalf of Phil Hofstetter and allapa;  we climbed this fun face in April of 2004, veering around for 8 hours to contrive a route with technical pitches of mixed and ice. On the return snow-machine ride that night, dehydrated and spent, we had never been colder in our lives.

East Ridge, AI 2. Another leg-lifting peemark on the internet.  Soloed this ridge on April 20, 2006. This ridge would most likely be a Class 3 walk-up in summer, but in alpine conditions it presents thousands of feet of cramponing up 45° wind-crust ice. Accessible via a low-angled snow couloir in the Northeast Cirque of Osborn.

(above) Approach to Southeast Ridge of Mt. Osborn.

Approach:  Park on shoulder/parking area just to the north of Grand Central Bridge on the Kougarak Road. Philosophies vary on which side of Grand Central to take for hiking up the valley, but Kigsblog strongly advocates for the north side (the right side, looking up-valley from the road).  There is a bluff running parallel to the trend of the river for most of the 8-mile hike to the base of Osborn;  in general, stay above this bluff for the first 4 miles of the hike-- some bushwhacking is virtually inevitable through this section, but by going through the proper channels it's not too bad. A hundred-year old road built by miners follows this route; I would strongly recommend following this road as closely as possibly, though it is completely overgrown in sections.  

      Start angling to the northwest where the bushes open up past Thompson Creek. When you get to the glacial moraines at the base of Osborn, you can follow the creek into the moraines, or better yet, aim for some prominent glacial erratics a couple hundred feet higher on the hillside to the right, and enter the moraines from up there. A great camp can be had on the West Fork of Grand Central in the moraines around the base of Osborn, oh King of the Kigs. Most of the hike is on BLM Land

(above) Mt. Osborn from the west. the Mosquito Pass side, the opposite side from Grand Central. Looked at from this direction, the summit tor is located at the apex of the mountain.

       More Southeast Ridge Beta:  A definite change occurs as one transitions from the lower ridge to the summit ridge; it's as if you suddenly enter a new layer of upper atmosphere.  The summit ridge itself is studded with a long line of rock towers, so in order to make one's way along the summit ridge towards the north, it is necessary to traverse sideways across 40° - 45° slopes, skirting just underneath the rock towers as one traverses sideways. This part of the climb is Class 3 (assuming summer conditions), not difficult climbing, more like steep hiking on sand and tundra patches with the occasional handhold on rock—  a fall would be very unlikely, one would need to fling oneself down the slope, and even then you probably couldn't get rolling— but one does have the sweep of the east face under one's feet to create an exposed feeling.  A rope threaded in and out of the rock structures can create a feeling of security, but most climbers will not feel they require it.

       The rock tower (tor) that looks the highest is not the highest above sea level.  As one begins the summit ridge traverse, one soon comes to an 80 ft. tall tor that dominates over the others. One might be tempted to make the mistake I made the first time by climbing this first tor;  I rope-soloed it and did some 5.6 moves.  From the top of this spire I espied another tor a half-kilometer to the north that clearly (to the naked eye) was a little higher, but I didn't have time to continue on that day—  it had to wait until a year later, when I returned to Osborn, and this time made the hike a few hundred yards further north along the summit ridge.  

         To locate the highest rock tower: continue north along the summit ridge (you will will be on easy ground on the east side of the ridgecrest) until you have reached the northernmost tower on the ridge. Then count four spires back to the south: you should be in the vicinity of Osborn's high point. The highest spire is higher than the penultimate spire by only 10 feet or so. Climb 15 feet of very loose Class 4 rock to a ledge in the notch; then climb about 25 feet of loose Class 4 up the west side of the summit tower.  Remember:  you don't get to say you've climbed Osborn unless you've gone to the very tippy-top! 

(above) Summit pinnacle of Mt. Osborn

(above) Northeast Face Mt. Osborn

      Gear for the Mt. Osborn climb:  Lightweight travelers may eschew rope, crampons, axe, and helmet in "high-summertime" conditions on the Southeast Ridge.  However, some or all these items may well be necessary, depending on conditions and comfort levels.  One long ice axe makes a very nice walking stick on this climb in any conditions. The only rockfall zone is under the summit tors on the traverse of the summit ridge, but the danger is not terribly pronounced.  A forty-foot rope and a few nuts would be all that was necessary for the highest summit tor. 

(above) Northeast Face detail

       First Ascent?: No information regarding Osborn's first ascent has ever bubbled up into my random flow, but almost surely, locals and visitors alike have been climbing Osborn for the last century or more.  Its status as a mountain lies somewhere on a wide spectrum between "big serious peak" and "just a big hill," trending toward the latter in mid to late summertime when the snow has gone away.

       There are stories.  Someone snow-machined to the top, it is said, which is perfectly believable if by "top" one is referring merely to the summit ridge, but there is a tendency on the part of Nomens to disregard the rock spires that protrude from the summit ridge;  I'll wager no one has snow-machined that last Class 4 move on the tippy-top tor!

(above) East Face detail

      Can Osborn be done in a day from the road?   Roman Dial mentioned a wager he made in the nineties while working on a field crew in the Nome area: he bet he could climb Osborn in a 24-hour day round trip from Nome, on bicycle and foot. He made the prodigious trip in a day, but in a stiff Grand Central fog, climbed the wrong peak.  So he went back and repeated the wager, this time from the road only, minus the bike ride from town, and climbed the proper Mt. Osborn. He wrapped a length of purple webbing around the summit tor for pilots to see, but this purple webbing either disappeared, or it is still up there somewhere. Roman never got his fifty bucks—  this would be a good time to pay it back.

(above)  West Face detail, looking south towards the Sinuk drainage. Photo was taken while perching on the tiny, rime-coated summit on the First Winter Ascent.

      I finally got up Osborn on my third attempt, my second year in Nome. Trying to follow in Roman's footsteps, I tried to do it in a day from the road in September without any bivouac gear but I got a late start, and, of course, I am not Roman. I found myself getting to the base of the mountain after a successful ascent just as the sun was going down. This left the eight-mile hike through the jungles of Grand Central still to go. "Ah, I'll just eskimo dance right here until the sun comes up and hike out in the morning," I thought, but just then saw the redwood—  an enormous pile of cured California Redwood left over from the days of the Wild Goose Pipeline in Grand Central.  It fired up easy as could be, and I spent the night playing the game where you sleep in the fire, first burning one side of your expensive nylon clothing, then the other.  The black, night ionosphere over the Imruk Basin crackled with plasma, the lights put on a show I will never forget as I fed the fire all night. At first light, the vast swamp that is Grand Central Valley was frozen solid, but only until the sun came around the corner— I raced out of there while the footing was good, back to the GLUE of TOWN.

Thirty-Fifty-Four

      This started as a post about a minor peak in the vicinity of Mt. Osborn which Max Vockner and I climbed five weeks ago, but in the process of researching the article, a can of worms became opened: INDICTMENT!  It was discovered that Kigsblog is once again guilty of crimes of misappropriation. If you have arrived at this post seeking information about the GLACIERS OF THE KIGLUAIKS controversy, scroll down to the lower half of the post. 

       First, in accordance with Kigsblog's "Action Only" Posting Clause, it is necessary to report on Max's and my awesome day-climb of Pk. 3054 (Thirty-Fifty-Four) on April 6, 2014.

(left) Max on 45° ice, east face of Pk. 3054. We never really used the rope, though it hung there suggestively for a few lengths. At bottom is the pass that leads to the north heading left out of the picture.

   Max is one of these new-generation, grew-up-in Alaskans who can do anything, fly Super Cubs, fashion skis out of wood, high-ski his snow-machine, and climb ice, too— he passed the crucial "Litmus Test #1" which is, "Did you arrive in Nome packing crampons and ice ax?" Kigs-readers might remember Max from "Pk. 3147 Expedition On Trial" a year ago— he was the unclimberly influence that swayed Nate and me from our holy climbing purpose with his totally cool and laid-back ways. As a long-time, grew-up-in-California Alaskan, I have never quite lost my veneer of Lower 48 "bumbly-hood"--  what if my snow-machine should stop working, what then?--  so I was more than overjoyed to be riding with Max.

(above) Mt. Osborn and vicinity. The two glaciers are of interest due to the "misappropriation" suit currently being brought against the author of Kigsblog (by Kigsblog itself!)

      The GLUE of TOWN was running thick, around 8 or 9 kiloGlue, hampering our escape from Nome. An early crux came when the tire went flat on the trailer, which we solved by abandoning the concept of the trailer altogether and just making the ass-slapping ride over the bare countryside all the way from town. 

      Snow-machine conditions during the strange Spring of 2014 had been difficult to predict:  several freezing rains had created changeable crusts in the climate-changingly low snowpack. Once off the main trails into virgin territory, the machine tended to trench down alarmingly, and the willows seemed mutantly tall and thick above the anemic snow.  

       But I had a secret weapon for getting through the willows of Grand Central Valley:  my ski-tracks from the previous week. I had already tried to make it in to Osborn solo the weekend before, chickened out because of primal fear of solo snow-machine, then skied several miles ahead, carefully designing a path through the Salicacean jungle to be used as a guide for later machining. Having the tracks to follow a week later definitely infused mojo into our Pk. 3054 expedition a week later. 

(above) Looking up North Fork of Grand Central.  Pk. 3054 is above Max in this picture. We climbed the slopes visible on its right flank. The saddle to the right of Pk. 3054 is sometimes used as a pass to the north by snow-machiners, but steepness and iciness on the north side caused us to chicken out on northward passage the day we were there.

       We parked machines at the top of the pass. Crampons went on at dismount. The climb of Pk. 3054 from the pass amounted to 1400 feet of 45° hardened snow, perfect crab-walking on daggers and front points. You wouldn't want to snag your pantlegs, though; a fall would find you instantly accelerating to a high downward velocity, your ears filled with the irreversible whistle of nylon against ice. Super frisky extreme skiers might have been able to ski our climb, but for me the thing felt like a climb, not a ski. 

(above) Northeast Face Osborn, April 6, 2014. In each yearly ring of the Kigsblog tree, there must be embedded a photo of the Northeast Face. Officially, that is the Grand Central Glacier in the cirque there, not the Grand Union. The Grand Union Glacier, if there is, in fact, anything remaining of it, lies to the other side of the big wall in this picture.

      Interesting rock formations protrude from the summit ridge of Thirty Fifty-four.  Looked at from below, they promised mandatory fifth class moves on airy rock towers, in case of which is why we carried a rope and a few pitons.  But as per usual in the Kigs, the summit tower proved an easy walk-up from the south.  
      The rock on Thirty Fifty-four proved to be choss of the worse order. North of Osborn is an area of uplift where the three types of metamorphic rock in the Kigs are competing for attention, marble, schist, and gneiss, where the sedimentary bolus of Osborn has displaced the usual interfolding of schist and gneiss, creating unique "chevron" shapes of color on my "Amato-Miller Bedrock Geologic Map of the Kigulaik Mountains, 2004." I had been hoping for a chevron of good orthogneiss on Thirty-Fifty-Four, but all we found  was ghastly "coarse-grained pelitic paragneiss and schist... locally pervasively migmatized!"

(left) Looking northeast over the Kuzitrin flats.

     As for the climbing: you're dealing with a white tilted plane like a big tilted roof, down which you're looking through the V slot of your legs which is filled with dangling junk as you make the same crablike movements across the plane over and over for a very long time, and ice particles are tink, tink, tinkling slowly down the surface of the white plane making a sound somewhere between wind chimes and white noise, you're gripping your tool around the shaft just under the head, stabbing the whole pick forward into the styrofoam snow with your fists knuckle-forward so that you appear to be boxing the mountain as you stinkbug upward, copping a duck step wherever needed, yelling to your friend across the wall, "If Tyler were here he'd already be carvin' it down!"

(above) Descent from Pk. 3054

      From the top of Thirty-Fifty-Four, at last I caught a glimpse down into the fabled northern cirques of Osborn. If one has the gas, and conditions permit, it is possible for a Nomen to drive a snow-machine north on the Kougarak Road, round the Kigluaiks at their eastern tip around Mile 60, and then beeline it back to the west towards Mosquito Pass, enabling visits to the canyons north of Osborn along the way.  Alternately, one could visit the cirques by hiking over the pass from Grand Central, and then crossing some more passes.  Better yet, or perhaps not, hitch a ride on a helicopter that's going to that area anyway due to Graphite One.   
        Because I have always chickened out of making this trip, the northern cirques of Osborn have remained a mystery to me, a terra incognita of the Kigs.  Where lies terra incognita, there follows curiosity.  In April, I applied for and received a small Kigsblog Research Grant.  One of the stipulations was to find out more about the myterious NORTH SIDE of the Kigluaiks, beginning with the trip Max and I made to Pk. 3054.

 (above) I am trying not to drop my iPhone.

          The "Chevrons" north of Osborn were a deep, cold, fathomless nether-region. They were a breathing subconscious realm where dragons lay coiled.  Phil Westcott (of Slimedog Millionaire fame) had sent me some of the northside shots (seen below) he had taken with his super Dropabilly camera, and they revealed lurking giants with ice-coated, 2000 ft. north walls. But how does a road-system dirtbag penetrate all the way back in there to these cirques?
       Well, he doesn't. He starts researching it on the internet, right?

(left) North face of Pk. 4500+. A recent rewriting of Kigsblog Law regarding topographic prominence has changed the listing of this peak from a sub-peak of Osborn to its own independent Marilyn. This effectively renders it the second highest peak in the Kigs, a veritable K2 of the Seward Peninsula. My geologic map reveals it to be cut from the same medi-sedimentary choss as Osborn. One can only expect we are looking at death-marble of the most appalling order.

         Illumination of Kigs topography has occured for me in a distinctly south-to-north direction. My working kinesthetic familiarity with these mountains is like a climbing skin on a ski or the arrow of time, it slides in only one direction, which is a pity because the uplift is quite a sight more spectuacular when viewed in northern mode. The last few days I have been skittling over Google Earth, U.S.G.S. maps, iPhoto, and online geology papers (a research effort aided and abetted by a grotesque skin-flapping thumb injury incurred recently at the Windmill Boulders that is taking days to heal) trying to reason out more about the Kigs unilluminated north side.


(above) Northern aspect of Kigluaiks from northeast. Left to right, the four skyline summits are: Osborn, N. Peak Osborn, Pk. 4250+, Pk. 4500+. The namesake of this post, Pk. 3054, is a squat little knob atop a triangular snowfield sitting in front of and blending in to the choss of Osborn. This photo was ripped off from an awesome panoroma at Mansoor Saghafi's zoomable panorama of Kigs.

     Research into the north side surfaced two things. First, a new obssession to explore these canyons more deeply. Second, a brouhaha in the press:  controversy over newly discovered documents revealing gross mistakes in local geography and Nomenclature quoted by Kigsblog General Editor allapa. Indictment, subpoena, trial, and retraction, with the reputation of a famous scientist at stake, and Kigsblog turned against itself like an autoimmune disorder. Deep embarrassment, as well, before the four or five people in the world that might ever have noticed, ever have cared.

(above) Pk. 4500+ and Grand Union Glacier. Photo ripped off from Kauffman in the link given below.

       So here is my mistake that caused such a flap:  I referred to the Grand Central Glacier as the Grand Union Glacier. This geographical error made its way into the Nome Nugget following the reportage on the Accident in the Sluicebox a year ago, thus propagating the misnomer to the properly outraged masses.  Not sure how I came by the mistake: Wikipedia specifically says that the Grand Union Glacier is the "only remaining active glacier in Western Alaska" so maybe I assumed it had to be the small glacier I was already intimately familiar with and knew to be an active glacier (I fell in the bergschrund once!) located in the northeastern gyre of Osborn (oh King of Kigs) at the head of Grand Central. I should have noticed that "Grand Union Creek" was marked on the map, but I didn't get around to it until this post!

(above) Area comparison of Grand Union vs. Grand Central glaciers, 2010 Google Earth.

       Reasearching this post, I stumbled upon an online publication I had never viewed before. Here is the link that opened the can of worms:

  

LINK:
U.S.G.S. publication that exposed Kigsblog to a misappropriation suit. Scroll down for the part about the Seward peninsula. 

(above) Osborn from the west. This shot gives us another look at the peaks to the north of Osborn (left in the picture) recently declassified as independent peaks.

     The article linked above offers an overview of research and publications pertaining to glaciers on the Seward Peninsula. One truism I had already encountered, which seems to have been perpetrated by Dave Hopkins, the famous Beringia scientist, is that "three living glaciers" exist (or existed recently) in the Kigluaik Mountains, which always puzzled me: which three?  Where? I had my theories. Now, this newly-discovered link has substantiated them.

1. Grand Central Glacier  2. Grand Union Glacier 3. Phalarope Glacier  4.Thrush Glacier  5. Thompson Pass  6. Tigaraha  7. Thompson Creek  8.  East Fork Smith Creek  9.  Pass Creek

(above) EDITED: recent Holocene glaciations:  I'm not a glaciologist. I'm not really sure what the criteria are to determine TIME OF DEATH of a glacier. Something to do with mass balance. So all I have are questions.

1. Grand Central Glacier. Why, in 1973, does Hopkins decommission the Grand Central Glacier after looking at aerial photographs from 1950? I was standing on the thing the other day and it seemed, well, slightly glacial, or at least still to be steaming like a fresh Holocene turd from its recent glaciation. I have a feeling this glacier has been dying more slowly than most in the Kigs. It gets constantly fed by Mt. Osborn's little pet storm it keeps alive in the localized weather of the northeast cirque.   

2.  Grand Union Glacier on the Middle Fork of Grand Union Creek. Hopkins referenced this glacier as the "westernmost" active glacier in North America.  I haven't managed to get over to the Grand Union valleys yet, of which, I surmise, there are three.  Brooks, in 1901, stated there was a glacier in the East Fork of Grand Union, but this one was said "to no longer exist" by Hopkins in 1973. But which valley is Hopkins talking about when he references, as one of the three glaciers in the Kigluaiks, a glacier in "an unnamed tributary of the Pilgrim River adjacent to Grand Union Creek?" Did he mean the Phalarope Glacier? It does not make sense the Phalarope would be on an unnamed tributary, as Calkin's description would place it in a tributary named, of all things, Glacier Creek. Perhaps there is some confusion about the geography. I certainly contributed to the confusion by misappropriating the Grand Union Glacier's name in the Anchorage newspaper!

3. "Phalarope Glacier"(?) on Glacier Creek, referenced in USGS article as "7.6 km northwest of Thrush Glacier." I am not sure if I marked the right one on this map, but it makes sense there would be a glacier on Glacier Creek, right? 

4. "Thrush Glacier" referenced in USGS article. The location of this one I am sure of. This was one of my guesses for the "three glaciers of the Kigluaiks." Andy Sterns and I did three routes here in 2009. The encircling granite walls of Suluun form a huge weather hippodrome that feeds the tiny glacier tucked in the back.

5.  Mosquito Pass Glacier?  There is an odd, round declivity in the moraines at the base of the North Face of "Crater Lake Peak" where Jeff Collins and I climbed a couloir in the dead of Winter one year. I used to think it might be a glacial remnant, but just this evening, Ken Shapiro, hardcore snow-machine explorer but not a real geologist, ventured the opinion that this declivity is a "caldera." Hmm...  

6. Tigaraha Glacier?  Having climbed many times up and down the icy slopes directly under the north face of Tigaraha (remember: Tigaraha is mismarked on USGS maps), I would venture that there's not enough permanent ice left on this one to even qualify as a remnant. But the steam is still rising from its ablation.
7. Thompson Creek Glacier? If there's not a glacier there now, one must have passed through within the last half-Millenium. You can practically smell its recent passage coming off the Holocenic moraines that spill out into Grand Central.

8. Probable location of Smith Creek East Fork Glacier.  Henshaw and Parker referenced a living glacier in this cirque in 1913, but Hopkins stated it had dried up by the time of his 1973 field work. 
9. Pass Creek Henshaw and Parker said the glacier was in this drainage, before Hopkins determined they were talking about Smith Creek East Fork.

Or maybe, the next glaciologist to come along (and I would venture the Kigs are due for a glaciological check-up) will come to the conclusion that there are no remaining glaciers in the Kigluaik Mountains!

(left) Yet another look at Osborn, Northeast Face view, snapped in 2010 from a ledge on Kayuqtuq. 

OUTCOME OF KIGS-COURT TRIAL:  A counter-suit was filed against Hopkins, et al... on behalf of Kigsblog-allapa, also against Kigsblog-allapa, Judge Kigsblog-allapa presiding.  Namely, a claim was made that incomplete documentation of glaciers in the Kigluaiks and misleading conclusions made by Hopkins, et al... contributed to the misappropriations by said Kigsblog-allapa.  Settled out of court with no shame or guilt;  allapa is hereby relegated the civic responsibility of continuing to explore the hidden subconscious of the North Side, using no unfair advantage of technology that would trash the country. 

(above) Proposed graphite mining operation on North Side Kigluaik Mountains. Helicopters are in the air at the time of this writing. 

Link to Save Graphite Bay Facebook page.

       Blank space on the map, neurons with no dendrites, unilluminated canyons, a dark region of the KigsBrain visited only in forgotten dreams, animal migration-corridor nerve pathway haunted by people and spirits, unvisited cortical regions populated by two-thousand foot nordwands,  a chunk of TOTAL wilderness away from everything, precious, precious, TOTAL wilderness, an invaluable load of a very rare thing that should evaluate at the highest price we can possibly give it, untouched nature--  these are some of the things the Kigs North Side means to me, but it means a whole lot more to many other people. Since it has always been the full intention of Kigsblog to point attention to the theory of sentience for rock and earth, then it should be added that the fate of the Kigs North Side also means a lot to the mountains and the rivers and the estuaries, could they be represented.

(above) "Dragontooths, aka "Oro Grande Tors," from the northeast. Not sure about the origins of the name "Dragontooths."

      The author has made one bonafide trip to the Kigs North Side. In the summer of 2012, Andy Sterns and I spent two weeks in the Dragontooths, referred to elsewhere in this blog as the "Oro Grande Tors." A long fence of orthogneiss tors runs along the top of a ridge to the south of Oro Grande Creek. This ridge is what put the teeth in the Sawtooths, it dominates the view of the Kigs from the northwest.

       Each day Andy and I would schlep our rock gear up the three-thousand foot approach to bag another tor. Each day, as we mantled on to a new summit, we were rewarded with a stupendous view to the north out over the Imruk Basin--  the very lands sitting plum dab in the middle of Graphite One's target red rectangle in the image above.

(above) Dragontooths, "Nauloq Tor," third pitch of Caballero Blanco, II, 5.9. A pathogenic cell creeping its way into an otherwise healthy tissue.

       I now see that Andy and I were like cancer cells, functioning like a pre-cancer in this lobe of land. First, the climbers come creepy-crawly up the last bits of Earth that remain untouched by human hand. Then, industry and helicopters will soon follow, to suck out natural resources and transport them somewhere else so somebody can make money somewhere else. 

      It seemed so innocent, climbing those beautiful towers on a sunny day in the middle of bloody nowhere. How were we to know we were a portent of cancer?