The Case For Tigaraha

This article is from the July 2011 Scree, the magazine of the Mountaineering Club of Alaska. 

The author engaged with 5.8 crux of the East Arete route where it climbs up to gain the "Sidewalk".

The Case For Tigaraha

            Most maps of the Seward Peninsula give three names for single mountains in the Kigluaik Range, north of Nome.  "Mt. Osborne" (4714) gets to have a name because it's the highest. The  "Singatook"(3870) gets to have a name because people have always used it for a landmark.  The third mountain is "Tigaraha."  Why does Tigaraha get to have a name? 

            Not knowing what I know now, I set off one summertime in the early two-thousands to find out.  The map showed "Tigaraha Mountain" to be within four miles of the Kougarak Road, so it seemed the simplest form of research to simply drive there and climb it. The mountain proved little more than a long, brown, ridge. The highest bump on the ridge (identified on the map as 3207) did sport a 15 ft. summit block necessitating a 5.4 move hoedadding fingers in rhizoid clumps over yawning choss slabs.  Other than this one move, the climb had been a Class 2 walk-up.                  

            As I pulled onto the summit, my attention was immediately grabbed by a new prize revealing itself to the west:  a great, granite-looking spike, eight-hundred feet high, a veritable mini-Arrigetch.  Aarigaa! But why did this lumpish ridge on which I was standing get to have a name, and that splendid mountain over there didn't?

Descending Class 4 slopes towards the south face
of Grand Tig. This is the crossing from the Sinuk
drainage to the Windy drainage approach .
 A rappel might be necessary from the point where
this picture was taken.

Back in town, I voiced my suspicions to those in the know.  They glanced away, gruff, non-committal, muttering.  Finally, I asked my friend Francis, an original King Island speaker of Inupiaq, about his knowledge of the Qaweraq word, "Tigaraha." 

            "Tigara," repeated Francis, giving me the finger.  Not the middle one, but his forefinger:  "Tigara," he said again.   A Qaweraq dictionary I had found  spelled the word this way, T-i-g-a-r-a, but due to inupiaq vowel-sounds and prosody in the second syllable, Francis' (King Island being similar to Qaweraq) pronunciation came out sounding like "teeg-aha-rah"— precisely how R.H. Sargent, in the 1912 U.S.G.S. survey, chose to spell it.  This, then, is my main piece of evidence:  Francis holding his finger aloft. "Tigaraha," meaning "forefinger," could only apply to the obvious insignitor located on the divide between the Sinuk and Windy river drainages, not the long, slug-shaped ridge between Sinuk and Buffalo drainages, as indicated on most maps. 

Mikey Lean approaching Tigaraha from the Sinuk side

            Regardless of appellation, the new mountain needed climbing, whether or not it had been before.  Around Mile 28.5 on the Kougarak Road there is a cut-bank gravel pit on the west side of the road; this has always proved a good place to stash vehicles and begin the excellent nine-mile hike west towards Mosquito Pass.  So began my Tigaraha years;  many a partner was lured from Nome to the towers, only to be crushed under the absurdly high, hiking-to-climbing ratio, leaving me alone  once again.  

  

East Arete of Grand Tig from the base of
East Tig. The Sidewalk is
the more horizontal part of the arete, and
is quite easy. The vertical part has
a 5.7 crack to gain the summit.

  




 The Sinuk River approach generally provides the quickest access to the peak from the Kougarak Road. From the Sinuk headwaters, scramble up  

Class 3 slopes to the crest between the Sinuk and Windy drainages, getting as close as you can to the point on the ridge where you would start climbing the East Tig tower, but then drop down via Class 4 cliffs, or a rappel, into an often snowy gully from which you can make your way over to the Notch between the West Tig and the Grand Tig, and climb Tigaraha from the Notch via the classic West Arete (II, 5.4).

      I highly recommend the alternate Windy Creek approach for overall ease. Windy Creek has the most awesome bouldering basecamp in the Kigs at the century-old landslide that spans the valley. From the valley floor, climb up to the Notch between the West Tig and the Grand Tig via the glaciated valley between Tigaraha and Falcon Killer Pk., taking the steep tundra chutes on the left that lead to the Notch.

  

Tigaraha climbing routes. The Notch Gully from the North is descendable in rock shoes by rappelling from snow
bollards. If the gully is not snowed up, it's a real trash pile, sometimes an ice climb.

            Tigaraha might wellhave been named after the bird finger, as the mountain consists of a main finger with two knuckles on either side, which I call the East Tig and the West Tig. Where you want to start the mega-classic regular route, the Northwest Arete of the Grand Tig (5.5), is the big Notch between the Grand Tig and the West Tig.  This Notch can be reached from the east basecamp (Sinuk River drainage) via a 500 ft., sometimes-icy couloir festooned with hanging pianos, but it is usually preferable (if you are on the east side) to labor up Class 3 and 4 slopes and cross to the other side (to Windy Creek side) in order to traverse around the upper slopes of the mountain, and reach the Notch from the sunny south. You can cross the crest to the north or south of the mountain, but both options present tricky scrambling;  once again, the kinder approach is from Windy Creek up Class 3/4 slopes.  These things I determined through much laborious bumbling.

Mylon Schield belaying Pitch 1, "Chimneys
of Tiresias"

            The Northwest Arete of Tigaraha (5.5, II) must surely betheclassic rock route of the Seward Peninsula.  Usually the plutonic rock of the Kigluaiks is patchy, horrendous, rust-colored gneiss, but this 4-pitch friction ramp in the sky is a patch of Tuolumne.  Solo it, and spare yourself the hernia of carrying a rope all the way in there, though bring your rock shoes.  A handful of nuts would do for the regular route;  a great deal more gear is recommended for the other routes on Tigaraha. (Racking rule for the Kigs:  three equalized pieces equals one reliable piece. Also:  pitons are the only damn thing that work.)  Downclimb pitches back to the Notch.  The first time I climbed the Northwest Arete, I found a single yellowed sling knotted behind a flake, low down.  I got that sixth sense that people had climbed the mountain before. So, who's got information?  I know you're reading this! 

Looking up at Tiresias route,
 Notch Gully, and Mylon

                  

            Until my encounter with the Crater Creek gneiss years later, I considered Tigaraha the closest granitic rock to the road.  The spectacular West Tig tower succumbed to an A1 rope-solo siege, two pitches out of the Notch. The first pitch could be freed at 5.10, otherwise the West Tig could be climbed by moderate, unprotected slabs on the south.  I hooked up with Kotzebue spider Lahka Peacock for a spectacular knife-edge cruise over the East Tig and Grand Tig (5.9, IV).  Another time I tried to rope-solo a "wall" route up the north face of the Grand Tig from the Sinuk side, but ended up in the choss-ridden "Chimneys of Tiresias" (5.8, III).  And days were spent on the quality, one-pitch "Fab Four Tors." 

Looking west at Kigs. Kougarak Road corridor is in the foreground.

1.  Tigaraha   2. False Tigaraha   3.  Mt. Osborn

Which peak would you name "Finger"?

            Talking with a skiing buddy just the other day, I was struck by a phrase he used: "...in there by Tigaraha..." The phrase was inserted without hesitation into a stream of conversation, and we both flashed in our minds on the same image of a finger-like peak.  After a while in Nome, this is how it gets to be;  the denotation of "Tigahara" defaults to the peak out by Windy Creek.

1.  Mile 28.5 Kougarak Road

2.  East Basecamp, Sinuk headwaters

3.  Tigaraha (Pk. 3400+ ?) (64°56'17.14" N / 165° 21'52.32" W)

4. West Basecamp at ancient rockslide, Windy Creek

5.  Mosquito Pass corridor

6.  Pk. 3207, high point of "False Tigaraha"

7.  Grand Central Valley

8. "False Tigaraha" (nee "Tigaraha Mountain") (Pt. 3200+) (64°55'39.9 N / 165°18'13.0" W)

Mikey with West Tig in background

Sargent was tired that day. It was late, and the snow was about to fly, and the USGS Survey agent was impatient to get back to the fleshpots of Nome. He just didn't want to walk very far from the railroad tracks that day, so he simply estimated how many ridges and valleys to the west the spire of Tigaraha lay, and called it good on the map. He finalized the quadrangle the next day, rolled the map into a tube, and set off for Seattle on the next available steamer. 

False Tigaraha

The White Stripes Of Summer

Top of Buffalo Creek, looking west to Pt. 3270

Due to a BLOG LAG of exactly one year, Kigsblog is currently "lapping itself." Now it's time to blog about the white stripes I skied a year ago, but they greatly resemble the white stripes I am skiing now. A resonant frequency is created in the seasonal blog amplitude between action and writing about action. A stroboscopic merging of the two streams is throwing off bright spokes of snow that blind my eyes and burn my skin, and all point to a central conclusion: this is a WARNING TALE of climate change. Skiing never used to happen in June in the Kigluaik Mountains. Now it seems a periodic occurrence.

Pilgrim Springs area, heading for Crystal Kingdom

Looking north across the Kuzitrin

             MAY 27, 2018. The first stripe came on the heels of school in the form of the "Solar Sidewalk." So christened by Otis, the Solar Sidewalk is a strip of snow that winds down the Singtook (which is Peak 3870, the western bulwark of the Kigluai Mountains, the most often climbed peak in the range) and earns its name by often lingering well into June when the Teller Road is open, after most of the other snow stripes have vanished. This makes the Solar Sidewalk the ideal location for the annual Greg Stoddard Springtime Memorial Yahoo Ski Field Trip, a hallowed rite of passage that ought to be on the tick list of any Nome Fun Hog. In a good year, the Sidewalk is continuously skiable from summit to car without skis ever touching tundra.
        As it was for 2018. The participants were Otis Stoddard, Luke Stoddard, and me, Deke Stoddard, along with Rattler, my good dog. We drove west on the Teller Road and the Singtook drew  closer. Soon we could see the mountain wore a gauzy veil of wind, and we knew that buffeting was in store for us that day, but at least there was plenty of snow cover upon which to ski after the blizzards of 2019.

Snows of 2019, Nome, Alaska

 After the usual rituals, which include offerings, thanks, apologies, and justifications for white men being out there at all in the Woolley Lagoon are, we skinned to the top of the mountain in a wind so savage that rocks were blowing horizontally through the air. On the summit, looming indistinctly through whiteout, we discerned ginormous, egg shaped pods of rime ice. They had formed around the radio transmitter antennae that one sees on top of 3870. The pressure of the wind actually forces the little H2O molecules straight from a vaporous phase into a solid phase, bypassing liquid completely. Each rime pod was the size of a mansion, a giant thing that had formed from a smaller thing, like VGER in the first Star Trek movie.  Ominous.
        Though the run down the west ridge might not have mustered an"extreme," it nevertheless required skills. The firn snow on the summit ridge was scalloped with rime peanuts as we carved between granite outcrops with a low hum of wind underlying everything, then down past the fabled 3870 lake into the fun middle part of the descent where you make S-turns down an 80 ft. wide couloir in snow that is usually friendly if it has been heated up by the day or rained on, then punch a couple of turns around a narrow isthmus of boulders at the bottom of the couloir and start the schuss down the lower slopes, preserving speed to make it to the car. The day provided a Stoddard that the three of us will remember for all time.

Stoddard Bros 2018

Radio Tower 3870 summit          

Rime lord

VGER

MAY 27, 2019     In blog time, a single scroll. In real time, another year rolled over. Once again, it is time for the Greg Stoddard Memorial Yahoo Ski Field Trip to Thirty-Eight Seventy. Otis, Luke, and me have re-manifested, along with new hotshot, Zeke, and, breaking the gender barrier, Daisy Stoddard, plus our special guest stars and local heroes the Hoog boys fresh off a classic ascent of McKinley's West Buttress, all of us heading out the Teller Road in two cars, listening to Phish and following the star of  the arch telemark fiend, while the white stripes go flashing by on all sides in parallel waveforms. The familiar landmarks fall by the wayside. We cross the holy Sinuk. We pass through the disorienting Bus Vortex at the top of the hill, and cross Livingston Creek, whose Lethian properties dissolve any remaining tendrils of GLUE binding us to town. We emerge into a new, western kingdom of the Kigluait, with my discarded chrysalis steaming on the road behind us.
           All the Stoddards this year are either young, extremely fit, or both, except for me. No one seems any longer to exemplify the spirit of sybaritic impairment and moral decline that marked the original Yahoo Expedition to 3870 in the presence of the Arch Fiend. I have forgotten my skins, but fortunately, the spring firn is firm enough for walking, and the Stoddards only have to wait forty-five minutes at the summit for my arrival, whereupon they clap on their Euro skis and launch straight down the west face, not the west ridge, because there are copious amounts of snow once again this year and rains have made the snow rather slow and soggy and it is clearly the year to ski the face.
I get out on the face in my beat tellies and duct-taped Terminators but am afraid to throw a turn on the steepness, so I traverse north on edges to where it's a few degrees less steep and I am free to start hucking huge sets of sine wave turns while the others wait below at the lake for the old man to catch up again.    
        I can remember decades ago standing in a group of young badass friends waiting for the old man to catch up. How beautiful are life's processes that have put me back in the old man position. White stripes of the present and white stripes of the past are both perhaps present in white stripes future. Only the patterns hold, even as the details are polished away in a defective memory. It's all a blur. Hail to the spirits, and hail to the white stripes of summer. (Greg, if you are reading this, I'm really not sure why you were chosen. I think it's like one of those mundane little expedition jokes that people keep repeating over and over,  but now I may have blogged into permanence...)

Stoddards, 2019. This is the only picture I took.
The rest were taken by Otis. Thank you, Otis.

Upper Singtook, June 2019

Middle section - fun couloir

Start of upper west ridge, Woolley Lagoon on horizon

While they party on the summit

Here cometh an aged mountaineer

Warm bare ground of apres ski in stripe time.
The recent eskimo bros ascent of the West Butt. is
a milestone in Western Alaska climbing.
Their ascent reminds me of the Sourdoughs, just
a pair of Alaskans getting it done, with a very
rad ski to boot. Will this new generation swarm out
 over the greater ranges and bring
their skills back home to Qaweraq?

 The superposition of wave states has my mind greatly interfered. THEN and NOW are superimposed on the oscilloscope of consciousness as I procrastinate this very blogpost by getting out into the gullies instead of staying in and writing. I drive my buggy across the three roads of life through the wavy white stripes of this year's harvest, bobble-headed for the line of the day, when I should be at home slowly carving away all this excess verbiage. I must escape this BLOGLOCK and make it to the hot, sunny mountains that wait outside this cyberspace, but the white stripes of summer must first be rendered by stream of consciousness, into which there is no other choice but to lapse. I must complete this post before I can leave for the mountains again...

The Construct, Buffalo Creek, diagonal at center. Only 1500 ft., great for earnyourturns skiing

         Buffalo Creek, June.  Following the summer threshold of the Stoddard ritual comes the Buffalo Creek phase: big days up at Nugget Pass on the Kougarak Road, multiple zooming day trips with friends or alone with dog, speed up that Kougarak Road like Neal Cassidy or even Fred Beckey at the helm of his pink T-Bird, pull over on the shoulder by the moose signs and wallow in the glue of the car a while, then slam that door and break glue, load skis on your back or on your feet, and head up Deep Creek to vanish into the very earth of the mountain itself. Bands of parallel snow crackle all around as you ascend. A minor pass dumps you a couple hundred feet down into a brown canyon where legendary ski runs come down the wall in bars of white like paint runs, Sister Turner, the Construct, others, all manifestations of an algorithmic code that forms the Matrix.
         Such a great glitter of stripes, the memory is almost solid white, the sequence lost, and now is random. Can a damaged brain remember any details at all?  Only the pattern which repeats...I remember good times with Otis, discovering new tors at the top of Deep Creek I never knew existed, shooting half pipes over giant sags of snow collapsing into the creek, bouldering on gneiss in Scarpa Terminators. I remember a solo camping trip in which I demotivated on continuing down into the Thompson Creek Cirque and contracted a sunburn lying around the tent so bad the tattoos lasted the rest of the summer. Half the trips to Buffalo Creek, overall, must be conducted in some degree of whiteout. Was 2018 year we skied in complete nothingness with Robin and Daisy and Luigi and the Construct got its name, but only theoretically because we could never be sure what we really skied? Do you think that's air you're breathing? But that event was outside the purview of this article, because Buffalo was white that day, and this is about Buffalo's stripes.

Otis, Rattler, and Tor

Above Deep Creek

Rattler, Tazlinas

Deep Creek is the approach of choice to Buffalo Creek

North Side Bowls, Pilgrim Springs Road. Just days before the road to Pilgrim Hot Springs had to be closed because every yahoo in town gummed them up by having entirely too much fun out there, Otis had the brilliant idea that the road to the Hot Springs might provide fabulous access to the mysterious and sought-after north side of the Kigs. Otis seemed to have a preexisting relationship with a few of the north-facing bowls you see to the left of the road as you're driving in  to the springs. He told me the names of these bowls and I was intrigued, because to name a feature in the mountains you have to have the feature whisper its own true name to you in the old language, spoken when the mountains were new in the Distant Time, and I never knew Otis had that skill. I will need to check in with him on some of these names.
          We met a pilgrim out there on the road, one of these types of hot spring seekers who was just feeling his way towards the hot pool in a tiny car, without a whole lot of information to guide him, and only a vague awareness of where he was. "How far is it? Am I going the right direction?" He had heard there was a hot springs out here somewhere and was just following the other birds. "They'll have to close the road soon if they're letting these types in," I remarked presciently to Otis. We felt somewhat superior to the tourist because we were parking our car before the springs and heading off toward the bowls on some fat white stripes we were riding.
            Summer had advanced, snow had receded, and stripe navigation was complex. The trick is to stop differentiating between snow and tundra, and just churn ahead over tussocks, through willows, and across creeks, leaving your skis on as if they were giant hiking boots. Instead of swirling snowflakes, clouds of mosquitoes came at us. Instead of hypothermia, heat exhaustion. Otis and I assembled a set of meaningful ups and downs that took us across ribs and bowls. It was art: a pastiche of turns, threaded rocks, skinny snow isthmuses to link patches, swoops, forks, stripes... I was disappointed not to bag any high-value northside summits, but the summit is not the point, it's how you put together the stripes.

3 Mile Hot Springs Road

Spider Bowl, Crystal Canyon, ?

Looking northeast

Cool

Blowhole of the Mind

Peak 2740, Glacial Lake Peak, with Nick. We descended via a fine butt glissade down the gully in the middle.

        In April of 2018, I received a grant from kigsblog to continue my research into Mental Process, enough to fund another trip to the Kigluait, the mountains north of Nome. Glacial Lake was our destination, a known energy node, the perfect place to gather electromagnetic data on PHI fluctuation, not only to expand upon the theories of Tononi, but also demonstrate that lithosphere itself is able to carry a non-negligible PHI resonance. Nick, of course, was keen to put on the PHI-SI headsets and blast out to to Glacial Lake on high-powered snow-machines for a day of fun. 

We followed the Teller Road from Nome, then cut across to Glacial Lake.

       The significant PHI event came not as expected at our destination, the Glacial Lake constriction, but on the way there, in the unnamed drainage west of Glacial Lake. We snow-machined into a sudden PHI-current that flowed from this valley. I immediately became disoriented, but kept my thumb on the throttle of my machine so as to keep my data register on a steady axis. Nick did the same, but we soon became separated, and I began to drive in widening circles across the firm snow in an effort to locate Nick within the psychic anomaly. Visibility was excellent on a fine day, but it seemed that Nick had disappeared into thin air. Calmly I backtracked by following our own snow-machine trails, but immediately fell prey to Heffalump Syndrome: I kept on discovering my own tracks, kept returning to the time and place I had started, no matter how hard I tried to escape. 
       I had lost Nick in the mountains to a Pocket Universe, a kind of temporary side universe that happened to be slicing through that valley during the time/space region we were. A Blowhole of the Mind, if you will.

Nick heading up Pk. 2740 towards the gneiss ribs.

          As landforms funnel and amplify the power of focussed wind, so do they to PHI. The PHI wind, however, is more mercurial than atmosphere. Where and when Mind is dispersed through Causality, Mind is just as likely to stop as start, which is one of the doggone things that makes my research into Mental Process so difficult, and renders it so far below the event horizon of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle as to be total and complete bunkum.
          After twenty minutes, PHI levels subsided. Nick and I phased back into a co-universe, and I heard the reassuring sound of his snow-machine in my universe once again. We proceeded toward Glacial Lake, still two miles away, me with an agenda, Nick, to see what he could see, I presume. I cannot really know what another is thinking. Nor can I be sure it wasn't me, and not Nick, that had slipped into the parallel universe.

The naming game is an uncomfortable game, but I propose "Peak Bering Air" for this one, Pk. 2780, located west of Glacial Lake. Does not there need to be a Peak Bering Air in the Kigs? These are the bowls where Nick and I saw the fresh heli-skiers tracks. Ben, the awesome pilot, told me (as we flew past it) that he and and his brother Russell had climbed this mountain one summer.

         Our structure was founded upon intent to "bag" Pk. 2780, a rather lumpen mountain that runs along the west side of Glacial Lake. But when we arrived, we saw sinusoidal ski tracks in the bowls where we intended to slog up. Human sign, now there's something you don't see often in the middle of the Kigs! Bering Air and associates must have heli-skied the mountain the week before. (Check out this cool video) This discovery, the merest sign of human impact, significantly altered the calibrations on our headsets, rendering further data collection useless. Resonance of Mental Process through stone creates an extremely weak signal. Detection requires an empty set of mountains, psychic silence, a pure, unsullied wilderness. We had accounted for the noxious presence of ourselves and our machines, but now the settings were off. 
       Suddenly, the peak on the other side of the valley looked more attractive, so we motored across the frozen lake to climb that one instead. 

Another look at Pk. 2780 from the summit of Pk. 2740, April 14, 2018

       My memory console dropped down some history with the new peak, Peak 2740, indexed under the not-very-snazzy name of Glacial Lake Peak. The first time I tried to bag Glacial Lake Peak, solo, in 2005, I fell prey to a nap on a ledge in the warm April sun, only halfway up the mountain. Tired from teaching. But the file contained surprising affect bandwidth, no doubt from the encounter I had on the way up with a sexy porcupine. 
       Climbing with ice tools in hand, enjoying easy mixed ground, I turned a corner and found myself face to face with a wolverine! The log shows an adrenalin rush. Soon, however, the pixels resolved, and I realized it was a porcupine, lazing on a ledge in the Spring sun, as I was soon to do. She lay there, quills against the rock wall, and flashed me a Mona Lisa smile, a blatant come hither look. Quickly, I climbed on, only to be stopped higher up by the nap.
       The next failed climbing attempt on Glacial Lake Peak came the following year. Earp and I machined into the Kigs on a day so cold, so completely allapa, that we were too afraid to shut the machines off when we got there. Again, however, the Memory File is coded with strong affect, the reason being that as we crossed the Sinuk River on the way to Glacial Lake via the Stewart River, I took my most harrowing snow-machine wipeout ever. It was the early days of Super Smooth Andy G., an Arctic Cat .570 Bearcat, and I had not learned that if you give it gas on bare ice, the back end of the machine shoots out from under you in a rotary motion. Off the machine I went, sliding across the Sinuk River ice like a curling stone. Inertia kept me going for some time. I was spinning across the ice, looking up at the sky. Super Smooth Andy was somewhere nearby, also still traveling, unmanned. At one point we bumped against each other and I pushed the big Bearcat gently away. Earp saw the whole thing from the bank of the river, but it was too cold right then to dwell upon the horror of it, and I seemed to be unscathed.
          The presence of such strong memory markers associated with Glacial Lake Peak adventures leads me to believe the mountain may be manifesting a detectable Mental Resonance signal. Essentially, if you include the mountain within your trip structure, the defined piece of scarp establishes itself at the locus of a vortex of causation which manifests at various distributed points in your life, like a magnet generating patterns in a field of iron filings, increasing the chance things will happen somewhere, like wipeouts and porcupines.     

Looking northwest from base of Pk. 2740. Let this caption be a PEEMARK. There is a rather spectacular tor in this picture, center top, on top of the ridge, that eye soloed one summer. About sixty feet, 5.6. I call it Red Tip, because it has one. So, yeah, MARK! Lift leg, squirt, smells ever so faintly of toxic masculinity. 

            Though a failure in terms of science, the third attempt on Glacial Lake Peak proved a successful peak bag. Didn't take longer than an hour or two from the machines. I felt vaguely sheepish as Nick, wearing light boots and shorts, scrambled up the spine of the rock buttress while I, kitted out in double boots, crampons, axes, helmet, and big pack, kick-stepped up steep snow alongside the rock. He was the Californian now, and I had become the guy in Freedom Of the Hills that we used to ridicule, the Seattle guy who had overpacked for his weekend trip to the Cascades.
       One could construct a harder mixed climb somewhere on the orthogneiss ribs of Glacial Lake Peak. We romped up gullies and ribs, dipping into the rocks as needed. On the summit, our PHI-SI headsets crackled to life as we gazed out over the entire range. The butt glissade back down to the bottom goes down as a classic.

Suluun is only a dark smudge on the horizon, but you can see clearly see the Sulu Tor poking up there, slightly left of dead center. Osborn on horizon to right. Looking over the Pinarut peaks. Wilson (mostly) and I skied the gable in the foreground  last year. Mark!

          Now all we have to do is take the data back to the lab, and hope it provides more evidence that will supply the missing factor in my equations.  Of course I cannot post the equations here at this time. Any oversimplified explanation is doomed to degenerate into incoherent spew, but here goes anyway.
        As Einstein took the velocity of light to be a constant, so this theory takes the magnitude of consciousness to be a constant. Any system assumed to manifest consciousness is assumed to have a magnitude of 1.0 PHI. The basic unit of consciousness is your consciousness. Occam's Razor, right? The move is counterintuitive, as I'm sure you imagine the magnitude of your own tremendous consciousness to be greatly elevated over that of others, or a beetle, or a stone. Yet, when each consciousness-system is assumed to be equivalent, the mathematical description of consciousness (using a graphic analogy) elongates into a continuous strand which diminishes down to the diameter of the Planck length, and then reverses polarity past the blackhole/whitehole horizon. Potential for Mind, if not its kinetic expression (such as a synchronicity, precognition, social media network, or the thoughts in the neural network of a chimpanzee), is expressed at any infinitely-small point in the Universe. The denominator gets cranked down to the size of the event horizon of each white hole/black hole system.
       I'm still having a few problems resolving some anomalies in the data. Science must be observable, predictable, repeatable. Mind is elusive in these respects. However, continued research in the Kigluait will provide more data which may fill in the gaps. Please leave comments to provide your support, or to bring up anything I missed. 

Looking west down the spine of the Kigs from Glacial Lake Peak to the Singtook.