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| Sam Cross on Sam's Arete (V0), White Alice |
BLOGLAG: Today's kigs-post is a seasonal composite covering the preceding three summer seasons of bouldering around Sitnasuaq, Alaska. The panes are aligned in seasonal conjunction with the summer bouldering I will do this afternoon when done blogging, which allows for a BLOGLAG of 0 — 3 years.
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| Ben with hands in pockets on Kauruŋa ("I Reached Into Something") (V0), Pennies |
The next phase of Nome bouldering has begun. The new generation is here. Hard-pulling, pad-toting V-badasses have been sighted in the choss gardens of Nome. A dramatic spike in bouldering standards has recently occurred. The crusty era of Ian bouldering in obscurity (henceforth known as the V-Minus era) is coming to a close, and an exciting new cast of Nomegrown locals is sending the evolution of Nome bouldering forward. Today's kigs-post examines Nome bouldering evolution from past through unfolding present.
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| Ben and Brayden glory-training at north end of Sunset |
Long ago, when the coast of Norton Sound looked much different than it does today, Paniptchuk, a Paleolithic hunter and shaman, climbed the rocks at Ayasayuk in his caribou mukluks, not for the purpose of finding eggs, or to show off his strength, or to gain a vantage point, but simply to have fun climbing rock. Thus began the first phase of Nome bouldering.
The second phase of Nome bouldering was initiated during the big gold rush days in 1902 when Franklin Johnson, a penurious mining engineer washed out of the Technicum in Dresden, Germany, brought cutting-edge climbing techniques to the choss fields of Nome, Alaska. Johnson had climbed the Elbsandstein with Rudolph Fehrmann, and came to the Nome diggings with an early-adopter's understanding of bouldering's essence: not a sub-sport of climbing, but an end in itself, the very klettern an sich. Johnson is the guy who's done your Nome boulder problem before you. You, who claim first ascent of that choss pile! Johnson sent that thing in aught-nine, over a hundred years ago.
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| Vince preening in the Balustrade Tors, Ohquienuhk, Kigluait |
World War II marks the next phase of bouldering activity in Nome. Above town, on Anvil Mountain, the Signal Corps boys and the Artillery Detachment guys were bored out of their minds waiting for enemy ships to appear on the Norton Sound horizon. They must have taken to bouldering in their spare time. No record of their climbing exists, but I can infer from the denudement of loose holds from the Anvil Mt. choss that the World War II guys were pulling down hard.
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| Brooks pre-loading the heel-hook at the pullover of Srik-Srik (V1), Supertramps |
Not much is known about Nome bouldering evolution in the next phase after world war two. During the eighties and nineties, a few teachers from the High School practiced climbing on Nome choss. Were there disciples of Gill among them? The concept of bouldering as a separate discipline did not gain traction in the USA until the sixties. Nome, due to its remoteness from the Lower 48, is always subject to lengthy meme-lags. It makes sense that modern bouldering was slow to make its way to Nome. Certainly, the standards of difficulty set by Franklin Johnson in the nineteen-aughts was not matched until my arrival to Nome in 2000, which is perfectly appropriate, as Johnson is entirely a fictitious character.
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| Vince on Qunmuktuq ("It Went Up") (V0), Rock Slide, Windy Creek, Kigluait. |
My first years in Nome were the candy shop days. I raced from choss pile to choss pile, sampling the sweetest sequences. All it took was to sight an exposed rock from the car, pull over, walk over there, and the rock would unfold to reveal a new pop-up bouldering area. I imagined I was the discoverer of these riches. I adopted an acquisitional stance, like a colonizing force. I deliberately left chalk marks in deep wilderness so others might see I had climbed there, knowing the rain would wash the chalk away. I fed my ego, then transcended it. I sucked up earth power and grew strong. I was humbled by ridiculous levels of beauty. I learned that mosquito repellent lowers the coefficient of friction on fingertips. I figured out which rock piles were the good ones. I hid from the locals. I got so elevated that even a pile of eroding dirt seemed like a very interesting boulder. In winter the drifted snow provided shock-absorbing pads for explosive dry-tooling falls. I continued to explore. I got more climbing on a daily basis in Nome than I ever had gotten in Fairbanks. I was alone.
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| Allapa third classing Tipliluktuq ("He Has Food Around His Mouth") (V-), Pennies |
I pretended each new bouldering area was a little mountain range unto itself. I followed the three-phase progression laid out by Mummery in 1895: easy way first, then ridges, then faces, then aesthetic lines, only later to be followed by contrivances of elimination. I never went the same way twice. I adopted a grid-bouldering mentality and wall-papered the boulders with routes.
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| Allapa posed over the abyss on Tiŋitnak ("Don't Fly Away") (V-), Pennies |
Eventually, I settled on long, low-ball, endurance-traverses. The boulders of Nome lend themselves well to the low-ball, as they squat low to the tundra, with the interesting moves near the bottom. I circumnavigated the whole clump of boulders in one go without touching the ground, essentially climbing a girdle traverse, like I had seen done back in Berkeley with Nat's Traverse on Mortar Rock.
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| On a cold winter day, Ben solos Tuqsruk ("Entry Tunnel") (V-) at Engstrom's |
My proudest enduro-traverse sends: the Borehole Traverse on the Lower Fence at Windmills (V2); the Alley Traverse (V2), the Limestone Band Traverse (V2), Stairs Wall Traverse (V1), the Cone Mandrel Girdle (V1), and the Vise Girdle (V1), on Anvil Mountain; Clump Central Traverse (V1) at the Penny Boulders; many iterations of the Rec Center rock wall down and back. I've done all the moves on the Upper Fence at Windmills but haven't linked them in a single push. Many more projects are close to being linked. So far, the idea of the low-ball traverse doesn't seem to have caught on with the kids of the new generation.
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| At the Windmills |
Parameters of the Low-ball Traverse:
• The rail may be defined as the top, horizontal, line of jug holds.
• The rail is not to be used as a hold unless the distance between the ground to the rail is less than half the height of the climber. In other words, climber's waist must not rise above the rail.
• Traverse has a start-point and end-point, and must be completed in one push, no falls, no touching the ground. Points are gained on a low-ball the lower you go.
• Exemptions will be granted directly by kigsblog, and these eliminates withdrawn, if you're dealing with an Aaron Ralston hand-chop situation, total body crushage, spine-breaker landing zone, nebulous choss decision, or general V-suckage at bouldering.
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| Brooks trusting death marble at Lost Creek |
Operating in a vacuum, far from the climbing mainstream for many years, my bouldering standards drifted downward. I began to imagine that 5.6 was actually 5.10. I didn't realize my frog of climbing ability was slowly boiling. Whenever I traveled outside of Alaska to a real climbing area, my suckage would reveal itself, and slap me in the face.
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| Vince climbing mixed at the Windmills |
Back in the day when I climbed often in Yosemite, my onsight limit was 5.10c. Thus, I came to Nome in possession of a measuring stick, a firm knowledge of what constitutes a 5.10c— the exact difficulty level where I grease off. Using this stick as a metric, based on an estimate of 1600 bouldering sessions made in the Nome choss-gardens over 25 years, often with dry tools in hand, I give claim once again, as I have given before, to the following PEEMARK, as stated below:
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| Ben put in bolts for top-roping atop this wall at Sunset |
PEEMARK: I do hereby claim first ascent of obvious bouldering problems, sequences, variations, eliminates, high-balls*, low-balls, mantles, dry tools, of a difficulty level of 5.10c (V1) (M5) or easier, in the road-accessible Nome Area.**
*I hit most of the highballs, but chickened out of a few. The new generation, with their Sketch Pads, have been cleaning these up.
**Excepting the problems which may have been climbed by Franklin Johnson between 1902—1914.
LIFTING LEG!
MARK!!
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| Brook hang-dogs Kivitkaa ("It Is Stained") 5.8, Pennies |
The pee-mark is nonsense, of course. For any finite patch of choss, an infinite number of boulder problems exists. Is my boulder problem the same as your boulder problem? The Uncertainty Principle states we cannot know the movement and location of a boulder problem at the same time. "Bouldering is silly," someone posted on Mountain Post. Sixteen-hundred visits to the boulders equals a lot of lifting leg, but no claim can be made over the movements and contortions.
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| Allapa at the Rock Slide, Kigluait |
I waited for the bouldering explosion of the nineties to show its face in Nome, Alaska. Rock-climbers did cycle through Nome, but they were into trad and alpine. I was looking for someone exuding the dadaist silliness that lies at the heart of bouldering. Early on a guy posted a bouldering problem on some website, but when I hiked up on Anvil Mountain to examine the problem, it looked dinky. Somewhere around 2008, homeboy Dustin Madden went away to college, and when he returned after a few years, called me up to go bouldering. We went to the Windmill Boulders, newly accessible now that they weren't aligned with the shooting range. I observed Dustin lowering himself into a cave of musk-ox poop for a sit-start. This is the first time, I thought, I've been bouldering with another person in Nome. But Dustin moved away. Once again, I was alone in the steppes of Beringia, wondering where the boulderers were.
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| Ben and Brayden on the Qupimannik, ("Split Egg"), Singtook. Unlike the other photos, which all depict metamorphic choss, this one shows igneous granite. |
About three years ago, emergence: poof! A bouldering scene cropped up in Nome. The cultural lag-time that delays a behavior from reaching rural Alaska had finally been spanned. Just like that I found myself among the hella-strong schist-crimpers of the new generation, a group comprised of nome-growns, twenty-somethings home from college, thirty-somethings moved to Nome and starting families just as I had twenty-five years earlier, and just about any climber that gets off the plane, now, will have experience of bouldering, unlike the old days.
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| The bouldering scene at Lost Creek |
Where were you climbers when I was jonesing for partners? The overdue arrival of the new generation has coincided with a great falling off of my own bouldering powers. Mental and physical issues have regressed me to the same level of climbing I had already achieved on my third day of climbing, as a beginner 47 years ago. With gnarled hands I gesticulate at boulder problems, suggesting I've sent them in the past, but there is doubt among the young pad people, because I can no longer put money where mouth is, and just lace-up and fire off the crimpy little problems. I never kept track of the problems I sent. I didn't keep a log on 8a.nu. I didn't take enough pictures. All the bouldering I did has liquified into an ooze of memory, like melted stone.
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| Vince on the 9-11 Wall, Limestone Band, Anvil Mountain |
The first pad to appear in Nome happened at the Windmill Boulders, like a Borg Cube coming out of hyperspace. Folded into a giant rectangle on Vince's back,its right angles stood out in sharp contrast to the curves and flows of nature. I was worried a shareholder would drive by and see the Borg Cube moving up the hillside and take it as another sign of hegemony. You will be absorbed, says the pad.
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| Silas working on Piyuma ("I will if I'm Able"), Lost Creek |
The pad marks the next phase of Nome Bouldering Evolution. The pad allows the kids to go higher and harder as they run it out above the puffy picnic blanket. Around the picnic blankety, a psychic buoyant bubble forms. Each body that slaps the mat brings a hit of dopamine. This could be the one you're thinking when it's your turn. But while they are doping out their V7's, I traverse on jugs around the corner, away from the pad community, back into the pre-padless solitude of the lonely V-Minus Era. I am not pad-worthy. And anyway, I am only six inches off the ground.
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| Allapa training for mixed in the rock gym, Rec Center Wall |
Boulderers of Nome boulder in oblivion. I have badgered a few for route names, and V-ratings, but efforts to record first ascents have fizzled. Some innate quality of Nome choss prevents the refinement of a given set of moves into a single, coherent problem. Since I cannot therefore post a list of bouldering ticks, I'll just say something about a few of the boulderers themselves.
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| Brayden Bahnke |
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| Ben Cross |
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| Vince Villella |
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| Brooks exploring the bouldering at Kuzitrin Tors |
As a boomer that predates both pad and gym, I can't fully comprehend the new generation's problems. Today's boulderers select hold sequences from the choss field as if the holds sported colored tape, but I can't distinguish the sequence from the choss. Shifting Baseline Effect means the new generation's problems don't even come in the right sizes anymore for me to be able to do them. The kids look at the boulders through new dimensionalities of possibility. I wonder if a similar evolution of bouldering is taking place on the other side of the Strait, in the Seward Peninsula's mirror universe over on the Chukotka Peninsula?
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| Allapa on Saunaaġa ("He's Got Arthritis") (V-), Penny Crags |
All these years, I often wondered if bouldering in Nome was even worth mentioning. So frightful is the choss level, I figured I might be hallucinating thinking the climbing was any good. But now I've seen the new gen pebble-wrestlers having a good time on Nome's schist and marble. My original hunch, that all of Beringia constitutes a vast bouldering wasteland of potential, has been verified.
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| Token author shot at White Alice |
The isolation of each choss garden from other choss gardens lends distinction to each climbing area. If the rocks lay all together in one vast trove, like, say, Grapefruit Rocks in Fairbanks, the aesthetic wouldn't be the same, but the choss gardens of Beringia lie scattered far apart. Each metamorphic clump of rocks was baked according to a slightly different geological recipe. Discovering new bouldering areas is like looking for gold nuggets. The choss gardens lie hidden down in the folds of the terrain, from Nome to Bilibino, waiting to feel the tread of sticky rubber..
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| Vince on Qipualaruaq ("The Flame"), an unsent problem at the Rock Slide, Windy Creek, Kigluait |
My own personal bouldering evolution has degenerated to a new level of feebleness I call "geriatric bouldering." My body has developed so many health issues that my bouldering has become merely a PT response to those issues. Gone are the days of gunning for high achievement. Bouldering has become yoga. I move over stone for periods of time, taking the therapeutic body-positions the stone has to offer. I am an old man standing on the ground flexing his body against the cliff, moaning softly.
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| Ben at the V2 portion of Borehole Traverse (V2), Windmills |
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