Winter Palimpsest

Welcome to the third and final post to employ "seasonal compositing," a chronology-folding algorithm used to resolve the substantial accumulations of BLOG LAG built up within the seasonal cycle of Kigsblog over several years. Like stars in a constellation, the images in this post may appear adjacent though situated at differing distances from the observer. Here are links to the inner transects: 

                             Fall Bouldering Interferometer

         Early Winter Superposition  

Outer Nick Band

 From the huge snow year of 2018, this flotsam dates back to the great days of the Nick Treinen era.

VIDEO: Wait for it... the awesome "Western Cwm" of Mt. Osborn (Ooquienuhk). 

VIDEO: Nick is skiing straight down V-boulder problems on King Mountain buried by the great snows of 2018.

Nice ski tour along the ridge north of King Mountain.

My driveway 2018

Mr. Nick

Near Pane of Freezing Rain

        Winter of 2022, Nome received the best shellacking I have seen in 22 years of living here. We emerged Christmas morning to discover that Whoville had been zambonied while we slept. Everything, the horizontal surfaces as well as the vertical, had been shrink-wrapped with a 2 to 3 centimeter veneer of prime verglas ice. The whole world had been transformed into one big ice climb. These life-as-ice-climb conditions lasted well into March and the whole town had to wear spikes. I spent many hours hanging out at the "Mud Mounds," the tailings piles at the base of Anvil Mountain that are worked and sculptured by giant machines in the summer months, and form an excellent ice climbing playground in the Fall and Winter that you can drive right into and use your car as a warming hut. In a year with the right conditions and the right diggings, the dirt cliffs make a good ice climbing surrogate where you can practice technique. But in a year that gets a good shellacking, like this previous winter, you could hardly design a better ice park. Good times with friends in the dim light of Winter.

Ben and Calvin are having fun up on King Mountain after the Great Freezing Rain Event of '21/'22

Ben on the Limestone Band at Anvil Mountain.
The finest shellac ever!

Ben down in the Anvil Mud Mounds on the 
"Crook Wall." This sliver of frozen mud glazed 
with ice became the go-to practice area for aspiring
mud climbers.

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VIDEO: Ben remains poised at top-out on Crook Wall. Mud Climbing is brutish. You swing your blunted tools hard as you can trying for penetration. But the introduction of the shellac made mud a more delicate game requiring sharpened tools and precise swings.

THE TALE OF THE TRANSIENT GORGE:  Neither my dog, Lucy

, nor the Miocene Canyon behind her were fated to live many days past this picture, taken in late Fall before the Christmas Ice. A tribute to Lucy, all-time Kigs-dog, we will save for some other caption. This one holds the crazy tale of the Miocene Mud Gorge that existed at the base of Anvil Mountain for a few days in October of 2021. The miners really wanted to dig up this hillside, even though it delves disturbingly close to the town's drinking water aquifer, and the city of course said yes. I walked up on Anvil in the Fall looking for some frozen mud to climb and found this freshly-dug gorge, still steaming with newly-exposed metamorphic rock and silt from the bowels of the earth. The walls were forty feet high in some places— a mud climbing treasure vault! Only problem was, the temperature was too warm that day. The bottom of this crumbling, sloughing, hideous gorge was no place to be. I longed to sink first tool and grapple with the ancient mud, and vowed to return with rope and rebar as soon as the temperature dipped, but a trip to California intervened. When finally I returned a week later, something felt off. The gorge had disappeared!  Filled in. I guess there must not have been any gold down there.

This alluring twenty foot piece of choss saw the light of the late Holocene for a few days before the same agents of the Anthropocene that had uncovered it with their gigantic machines returned to thrust it back into darkness. The choss waits underground. No animating force of mud climbers will ever visit it again.    

Mmm, fresh choss right out of the earth.. It's not even rock, not really, but for those few climbers
with a taste for the the Mud, this looks tasty. A steady dribble of
stone and mud fell from these walls the evening I was there and I dared not linger under them.

We take what's dead

And breathe life in

And move like knives

Through scars on land

Still untouched

No stain of hands

Caramelized

In a tilted light

No chain stays unbroken

All aims get forgotten

The weight of lead

On floors of sand

The idea reduced again

To outcome

No chain stays unbroken

All aims get forgotten 

 

                                        

                                                         The Kings of Convenience

Ring of Ayasayuk

And here in the layers of the palimpsest, we detect another ring of Ayasayuk, carbon dated to November, 2021. The quarry face, and the path of the flow, remained largely unchanged from the  year before  or the year before that.  Vince and I managed to make a complete ascent of the Diretissima this year, defined as a complete climb of the quarry face up the middle of it in some way from bottom to top, although the Fourth Tier was missing from our climb this year due to inadequate coverage. We sure wanted to get back out to the Cape after the freezing rain event to see how our climb was affected, but the ice itself made the snow-machining conditions weird, not to mention, the ice glued our snow-machines and everything else to the ground.

Looking up the Third Tier ice. This pitch weighs in at a formidable WI I. I was happy to sew it up because my climber mind has become rotted with paranoia and superfluous fear.

Looking down the Third Tier

Vince clawing at odd smear on Fourth Tier, the only ice to
present up there this year. In other rings of Ayasayuk,
the presentation on Fourth Tier ice has been spectacular.

 Fourth Tier Ayasayuk Quarry, November 2021. That actually represents a rather healthy crop of ice for a ring. 

New Friends Overlay

A poignant fact of living in Nome is: friends come, and friends go. The graph showing "Number of Climbing / Skiing Partners Available Per Year" shows a few spikes over the years— I've actually given names to these times when I had someone to climb with, the Mikey Era, the Joni Era, the Drew, the David, the Nick— but in between the spikes lay long, multi-year intervals of partnerless, lonely, solo endeavors. I am happy to say the last couple of years have brought  the biggest spike ever, an unprecedented influx of motivated skiers and climbers, cool people, with updated technology and skills, ready to do what it takes to get out there in the hills around Nome four seasons, and willing to investigate some of the more arcane sub-routines of Nome mountaineering such as mud climbing, dry tooling, snow-machine mountaineering, plus mandatory endless boilerplate. The next generation is here. I am so grateful for these new friends. The fat padder, the cowboy, the all-arounder from up the Steese, the home town kid— some have already cycled through and fled the odd, hot little town of Nome, while others remain. One more look at that graph will reveal that I, allapa, have lived through so many  Friends/No friends cycles that I am becometh the old dodger. I am doubly grateful to new friends for putting up with my wheezes, dithering, and Alaska Rang PTSD. I simply must purchase new skis with AT rig and tech bindings. Three-pin has gone to the dinosaurs.

The first of the "digging of the pit" series, this one in Buffalo Creek in January 2021 on a cold, beautiful day with good powder.

At center is Pk. 2162, the highest hill in the Eldorado / Flambeau drainages east of the Kougarak Road. In November of 2020, Keane organized a school-night  mass assault on this hill and led us on a fine ride through hill and trough country to reach this hill, Eldorado, my first time up this high point. Clouds, white-out, and darkness intervened between us and home. Our moving string of lights at time doubled back upon itself or went in circles, but all made it to school on time the next morning. 

Map of Pk. 2162. Perhaps it warrants inclusion on the"Foothills of the Kigluait" list.
Foothills of the Kigluait,  Also, this excellent foothill.

 Pk. 2162 dig

Buffalo Creek

Nugget Pass, looking north past Salmon Lake

Allapa and Sean in the big bowl halfway up the east side of Ooquienuhk (Mt. Osborn), April 2019.
I am grumpy because my brand new snow-machine sits befuddled and paralyzed down in the middle of Grand Central Valley. Everybody else got multiple runs— for instance, Sean and Keith skied a chute up above Sean there— but I only got this one run because I had to go down and continue to beat my dead horse. 

Close-up East Face of Ooquienuhk, April 2021. Friends ascended and skied slopes to left. I deviated from the skiers and climbed straight up to the Southeast Rib, but overheated in bog snow. A nap descended from the heavens and overwhelmed me at the spot from which this was taken. Phil Hofstetter and I did a route up the middle of the east face in 2004 that had a couple of pitches of water ice. 

The Sluicebox Couloir in the Northwest Cirque of Ooquienuhk, April 2021.

May 2022, Peak 2610 at Copper Creek

Newton Peak after the storm

Allapa at Nugget, Tigaraha in background

The Bluff at Mt. Distin, Snake River Valley, April 2021

Ben, Distin Bluff, snow pit

Distin Bluff detail. Eighty foot cliff.

Another trip to Glacial Lake thwarted by extreme cold, February 2021.
We dared not shut down our machines. This is looking across
to Peak Bering Air and Glacial Lake from the benches between
Stewart River and Sinuk River. Another layer of frostbite.

Mt. Brynteson and the Brynteson Ribs, March 2022.  Vince and I did an easy
three-pitch route on one of the ribs. 

Greg Stoddard Belt

Greg Stoddard represents the arch Telly Fiend, the patron saint of debaucherous ski trips. Every spring there is a pilgrimage, once the Teller Road has opened but the snow remains on the hillside in many white stripes, to the Grand Singtook, Peak 3870, to ski the Solar Sidewalk which is usually in prime condition by that time. Participants read like a who's who of Nome alpinism, a veritable Burning Man of Seward Peninsula alpinism. I went in 2021, but didn't get invited 2022, so I'm missing some orbits in the Greg Stoddard Belt. I've let my skills slip, and my ski gear is from the Stone Age. I just didn't have the ratings.   

Vince slogging in stiff wind up middle part of ridge on Singtook, May 2021. The snow was too parsimonious that year to invite skiing on the upper part of the mountain, but the lower mountain softened up by afternoon. 

Allapa on top of the Singtook once again, May 2021.
Have climbed this thing 25 times, maybe? Not counting the bails.

Lucy at twilight