kigsblog

Borehole Traverse, Windmills

2011-11-21T20:23:00.000-08:00

(above) East side of Lower Wall at Windmill Boulders (nee "Shooting Range boulders.")
1. Borehole. A small tunnel. Get horizontal and worm through tunnel, turn around and worm back, without touching the ground, for extra squeeze chimney workout before resuming the lowball traverse.
2. Borehole Exit. Enduro section. 5.9.
3. First Crux. 5.10a, until you locate the key holds, then the rating plummets to 5.6.
4. Second Crux. 5.10a. Some loose flakes, risk of crushing. Rating fluctuating wildly.
5. South Wall pull-around. 5.10c. For Lahka Peacock, it would be 5.6.

THE RULES: This is a low-ball traverse. Default to low. There is a fairly well-defined horizontal line running the length of the wall. In places, this horizontal demarcation truly is the top of the wall, other places it's like a mid-line. Your center of gravity must stay underneath this line. In places where the distance between this demarcation line and the ground is less than one bodylength, one may use holds located on the demarcation line. Also, if you feel you are imminently to be crushed by traversing too low, by all means, higher holds can be allowed. Otherwise, holds must be located below the line: in other words, you can't just hand-traverse the top of the cliff, except where the lowness of the cliff forces you to do so. In general, the quality of this bouldering problem comes from reverting as low to the ground as possible, chalkbag grazing the tundra, body vulnerable to complete crushage under tons of overhanging ""Chlorite rich, metaturbidite schist." Rules may be adjusted when the potential for body crushage comes into play.

The solidity of this metamorphic crap pile varies with the weather. The rock is only as strong as your mind tells you it is. Better in winter. The cliffs are directly lined up with the old shooting range. The moving of the shooting range with the coming of the rock creek mine came as a revelation: in the past, you'd never dare climb there, people were shooting night and day.

Absurd, blogging an obscure, utterly contrived, low-ball traverse. A token of modern silliness, replicating the minutia of experience through digital representations. Were it a true summit, the apex of a prominent geological swell, maybe, but this is nothing more than a man sitting, on the ground, mostly, his body half wedged under a rock, fondling its surface with arms raised in lonely supplication, grunting occasionally in sudden spasms of pointed but failed movement.

Years of work went into this bouldering problem. It was my proudest send of the summer. The Borehole required I venture into new frontiers of focus and persistence. Sending at your free-climbing limits allows no mind pollution, there can be no weight of self-negation. It becomes a matter of what Arno calls "plugging the power leaks" and giving the rock 100% of your Sharmic attention.

(above) East-facing side of the Lower Wall. No great challenges on this side of the Borehole circumnavigation, except for the "Scoop," the dark patch near the right side of the wall in this picture, a pretty cool overhang with flakes that rate only 2 on the death scale. In winter, this side of the wall takes on a wonderful character: that snow patch is a huge curling wave, the Scoop is an enclosed cave with dry-tooling challenges, and all that ugly turf becomes prime ice-climbing bouldering terrain, in the lee of the alapaa, alapaa, north wind.

Try, try, try try, try, try, try. Most falls are controlled, a few are not. Now you're pumped and done for the day. Each time you're charting out a body memory in your brain and muscles, neuron by neuron, the morphegenetic field strength of the climb increasing, the climb one degree closer to becoming a reality. Herein lies the workout: you're going to have to EXCEED the amount of effort you made the time before. "Sweet" is the word when you finally nail it.

(above) Andy, 14SA, on one of our mini-top ropes, the narrow south wall of the windmills. He happens to be poised near the third crux on the Borehole traverse.

WIRING a rock-climbing problem provides a classic experiment in Rupert Sheldrake's formative causation. Each new crux seems extraordinarily difficult when first encountered, yet, as the body memory of the moves needed to solve the problem are put into place, the difficulty rating seems to magically come down, which is absurd, of course; a problem's rating is meant to be objective. But there can be no objectivity until the morphic field has settled down, until enough climbers have ascended the problem to stabilize the rating. Now that I have solved the Borehole, it will seem easy. It's probably 5.6. V-5.6

(above) The "Courtyard Traverse," another not-so-low lowball at the Windmills.

The Borehole has yet to receive a complete dry-tooling send. If anything, the traverse takes on added value in Mixed mode.

M-Something

There is a notch between the rocks. Go there and wait.

See our house, down upon the plain.

Think about the blessings raining down like rain.

Rock is the thumb in my photograph.

Is this a Cobra I see before me, the handle toward my hand?

Like a key in the lock, the Cobra turned inside the rock.

I pendulumed to a fat side-pull;

I yarded through the broken backs.

Took the highway, the ground piled with snow,

The fall factor was low so just let it go

And trust the bite of steel on choss that's frozen fast,

Horizontal cam to a shaft,

Can't find a love that's built to last,

Into the Borehole where I rest in chimney stance,

Start the long traverse and stop all time,

A long time ago you were thinking about your mind,

But now you are only hunted.

Supertramp Buttresses Revisited

2011-11-04T17:51:00.000-07:00

(above) MagicBus of the Seward Peninsula visible from Teller Road around Mile 29. It belonged to a miner in the fifties. Geiger counters have clicked on the bluff nearby.

Every wilderness area in Alaska should have a bus. A good old, transit-style, schoolbus. There's something about the parabolic configuration of a bus placed upon barren tundra which focuses the SINH TALA constantly streaming through the Earth's pores like solar wind, causing an ever-so-slight time distortion within the walls of the bus.

(above) Kirk, Spock, security team, and Lazarus, ill-fated time-traveller, just prior to another cosmic energy wink— a rip in the fabric of space/time is about to occur within the walls of Lazarus' spaceship— "Arctic Tundra Magic Bus Phenomenon" is not unlike the time-distortion event depicted in the The Alternative Factor, though without dilithium crystals, the effect is greatly diluted.

It is never a good idea to sleep inside such buses. If the wilderness-traveler spends TOO LONG within the bus, a desynchronization between mind and society ("society" in this context being synonomous for the purposes of this blog with "GLUE of TOWN") occurs. The ensuing schismogenesis of awareness can be injurious to the mental health of the wilderness traveller, as in the famous case of Alexander Supertramp in the MagicBus over by Healy.

(above) Alexander Supertramp in front of Bus 142. A victim of Arctic Tundra Magic Bus Phenomenon. Like Lazarus, his doppelganger traveled from a parallel dimension through the time portal of the bus, cancelling out his life force. This is a possibility overlooked by Krakauer.

Visionary, or idiot?

magicbus1 magicbus2 magicbus3 directions to the

magicbus
In 1992, my friend Jeff spent a night at fifty below in that bus on Stampede Road, nine months previous to the Supertramp episode. He had committed the rookie boge of thinking that the bus, with all its connotations of urban homeostatic control, would provide a warmer bivvy than his own tent. I was in Fairbanks that same night; the cold metal of the bus transmitted live images across the Interior through the crackling air to my dreams showing my friend Jeff hovering like a reverse-fetus on the cusp of between life and death. But the coming years would prove Jeff difficult to freeze. Visionary, or idiot? If Lazarus crept up on Jeff that night in the bus, I have no doubt he, like Captain Kirk, wrestled his insane counterpart back into the other dimension, a 5.10 move Chris was unable to onsight. I still believe the emergent Fairbanks hardman skirted the same MagicBus Death Attractor that would eventually fell Alexander Supertramp.

(above) The MagicBoat at Grub Gulch, Goldbottom Creek, Old Glacier Creek Road. Incongruity with landscape seems to be a causative factor in Arctic Tundra Magic Bus Phenomenon. This boat may pose a potential trans-temporal rift.

Great loops of thought

Huge tangles of confusion

Dense thickets of epistemology

Fogs of unified awareness

A victim of my own tribe

They'll never find me here

(above) The white patches below the pin are two patches of chossorific marble, visible on the hillside from the Sinuk River Bridge though one can seldom discern whether they are cliffs, or just steep patches of barren bluff. They are, in fact, 80 ft. cliffs, though the choss factor lies over the threshold for any kind of safe climbing, these cliffs ooze instability like a victim of Seasonal Affective Disorder. The blue line marks an intermittent 4-wheel trail that leads from the MagicBus at Mile 29 Teller Road all the way in to Glacial Lake. (The pink line shows where Andy and I joined the trail after hiking around Glacial Lake; I wouldn't advise that.) The Supertramp Buttresses lie three or four miles down the trail. More recommendable is the schistizoid bouldering pile that lies just to the west.

(above) The 60 ft. friction slab, the only redeeming feature at these structures that I call, for some reason, "buttresses. Maybe the way they are built into the bluff like a sod house and seem to buttress up the hillside; also the reason why setting up a top-rope anchor at the top of these cliffs would require a network of rebar anchors sledged into the hillside, a technique I've not yet tried. This is the most crumbly hideous marble you ever saw in your life. However, the particular patch of slab shown in the photo above provides a touch of decent rock, with bail-out ledges onto merciful tundra at all times.

21SA-

For pure southside Kigswater, there is no drainage like the Sinuk. Is the Sinuk not the holy Ganges of Qaweraq? Huge rivulets of power course down this central hallway from Tigaraha to the sea.
Of course, the mystical Two-Six was strange-attracted to the micro-region shortly after his arrival on the Peninsula, so I found myself hiking in to the bus with him one early Summer day, with huge patches of snow aiding our progress along the top of the Sinuk bluff. Tricorder readings showed no paranormal activity around the bus, so we continued north down the bluff for several miles to the rocks, where Two-Six had hesitantly agreed to belay me on marble top-ropes, my third attempt to do so at this location.
But first, some warming-up on the schistozoid Tertiary meta-sedimentary.

(above) Schist outcrops by the side of trail. You branch off to the right (northeast) from here and contour around the hillside to get to the absolutely-worthless Alexander Supertramp buttresses.

(above and below) Srik-Srik. An odd sort of flake-pulling Gaston was required to pull the lip. These pictures are from a Fall of 2009 bouldering trip in the Supertramp schist gardens.

(above and below) Collins grappling with Srik-Srik. We carried climbing shoes that day, but never put them on.

(above) Iglaaq (Stranger), 21SA. The Aaron Ralston potential is high right there.

(above) Collins on Kiiraq (Corrugated), 2009.

The Supertramp schist is passably fine, the stuff of which dreamlike, wandering boulder sessions are made. The marble, on the other hand, is so bad that I could not devise a safe-enough belaying scenario to which Two-Six could be fairly subjected. This stone radiates paranoia; fractured, multi-ton columns sit poised on ledges, balanced on skinny pedestals. Patches of Grapefruit-quality limestone intrude, but at the Supertramp Buttresses these quality patches don't seem to link up in meaningful ways. Anchors were virtually non-existent at the top of the cliff; not even a bolt would do, being as the rock is only layers of flakes, like stacked shingles. Only a hardened, helmeted choss-junky should be allowed to belay under a pile of anaq this bad. Two-Six did not fit the bill; he is too valuable a personnel to be so wantonly crushed. He dozed in the sun while I climbed around, jeopardizing my life as hard as I dared on the friable rock.

(above) Aquila chrysaetos canadensis, August 2009.

I came out here to the Sinuk bluffs once, alone. I was trapped on the cliffs by a Grizzly herd, my shotgun far away. Trying not to freak, I was scrambling breathlessly like Ralph at the end of Lord of the Flies, when, BANG! I turned a corner and ran smack into a family of Golden Eagles. I thought they were turkeys at first hopping around on the tundra.

PeeMark: "Penny Crags" (Pk. 1460)

2011-11-02T15:18:00.000-07:00

(below) Kakkiviaq (Groove Under Nose), Penny Crags, Pk. 1460, June 2011.

"Pee Mark:"

1. Spraying; deposition of urine used by animals to identify territory.

2. A post which serves no other useful purpose than to identify that I have climbed at a certain location.

(below) Penny Crags from below, February, 2010.

Every single square meter of this hillside has been scratched and pawed thousands of times over, in countless trips, in all kinds of weather, both pick and sticky rubber, roped and soloing, the obvious lines led. Every move on this cliff is part of some larger link-up that has already been done. In this picture alone, thousands of routes are visible, each one with a name, rating, color, and category, including Quaqtuq (Splits Loose), Qupiruk (Cracking), and Ulburuq (Topples Over). Everything has been done here already. I hereby cybernetically declare this cliff to be saturated in urine...MARK!

....Unless, of course, the route is harder than 5.10c or M6, in which case, I was probably totally unable to get up it.

(above) Pk. 1460 with rainbow, September, 2010. The location of this PEEMARK is those little bumps near the end of the rainbow.

The act of naming poses the usual paradox... Some term for the choss pile was needed. I call the crags "Crags" because they perch at the top of a prominent, steep ridge, transcending the category of mere boulders; to a boulderer perching on folds of schist, thirty-five feet of exposure feels like more as the hillside drops to the Penny River. A crumble of stones that would constitute a forgotten scruff pile anywhere else, here on the Teller Road merits an appellation befitting nobler geology. If truth, the Crags are craggier than anything in fair Scotland; you really wouldn't want to wander off in the wrong direction from the Crags in a whiteout, something which is easy to do. You'd never make it back to Nome in time for the fleshpots.

(above) Kakkiavaq, June 2011. Photography by Two-Six.

21 SA— June, 2011. Vitamin D is shining. Two-Six has offered his skills for a photo-shoot. A breeze blows the bugs away. A fine day for hiking and bouldering.

I am not aware of who is the steward of the hill as we begin hiking. The rocks are hidden from the spot where you begin the hike at Cabin Rock. I often call them the "Cabin Rock Crags." In the parking lot (I don't know who is the steward of the parking lot) I hand my average camera over to Two-Six and instruct him, that when the time for climbing comes, he is to tilt the camera and crop out the ground in order to make the climbing look more real than it really is. Let this hereby stand also as a scent mark for Two-Six: MARK!

(above) Kivluktuq (Cuts Across)

(below) Topping out.

The nice thing about the Crags is you can get a little of the sacred eXposure. In places, solid holds off the ship's deck, a little of the dancing that refreshes, wisdom coursing like epinephrine. I remember lead climbing at least two of the main aretes, painstaking affairs, solid pitons nevertheless threatening to blow apart the whole crag with each blow of the hammer, sickness at any rating, 5.6. I remember dry-tooling with Andy and on-sighting an overhang on top-rope that must have been M-7. From my hospital bed in October (for a hospital bed is where I am writing NOW— this is the PRESENT TENSE of this PEEMARK narrative: laid low on Halloween '11 by inguinal hernia, writing from a horizontal position, recovering from surgery, floating on Percocet) I think of a recommendable off-width boulder problem located at the bottom of a prominent turf gully, (a gully that forms a great thirty feet of Class 4 alpine turf climbing in Winter conditions): I remember the best way to perform the offwidth move is an actual bit of Levitation-- looking at an Aaron Ralston of your entire leg-- or, if it's winter and you're on the ice tools, mantling onto the top of your tool which spans the crack nicely with a porch-swing pick/adze jam.

I hereby lift my leg on these digital representations of my memories...MARK!

(above) 1. Cabin Rock pass area, Mile 14(?) Teller Road

1.  "Cabin Rock," or "House Rock." "Chalet Rock," maybe, with cantilevered-bays and a big wooden porch for apres-ski. A good simulacrum of a house and a well-known landmark, but not much use as a bouldering rock.
2.  "Penny Boulders." A fun clump of marble, a quarter mile from the Teller Road, a sacred little place. Improbable but solid jugs on meta-sedimentary marble that took years for EOD to defuse, with a few classic highballs. My favorite bouldering area of all. I do not know the steward of this land. Driving east on the Teller Road, you come to the Pennies on the right a mile or two before the road starts climbing toward Cabin Rock pass.
3.  The Crags. A thousand foot hike up the hill above Cabin Rock. Art is required in plotting the correct trajectory across the contours of the hillside. Easy to get lost in low-visibility.
p  A great place to stash the car abomination. Turn left (south) at Cabin Rock pass on obvious gravel road that leads a short distance out of sight to gravel pit. The long ridge to the south is littered with marble outcrops fun to wander. Mark the time and date on your computer: I would like here and now to formally announce the deposition of urine upon legions of crags in this area that only half exist in my dreams... MARK!

(above) Cabin Rock itself in verglas, with Arctic Cat Bearcat and Wild Things Alpinista. Arctic Cat and Wild Things should both hereby pee upon this rock... MARK! I would recommend the Bearcat to anybody who's primarily interested in protecting their body against punishing rides, and the Alpinista to anyone wishing to protect their body against punishing loads, which I most certainly must do from now on. As previosuly noted, Cabin Rock as a bouldering destination is a bit disappointing.

(above) Looking southeast from Pk. 1460. Nome is partially visible through the saddle in the ridge, looking like a piece of snow lying on the ridge.

An interesting fact about Pk. 1460: it is visible from many parts of Nome. The angular ridge appears to poke up ominously behind the foreground hills. It is sometimes mistaken for Osborn, monarch of the Kigs, to the north. It is often mistaken for a mountain, instead of a hill, which is what it really is.

(above) Kakkiviaq. "The other way! Tilt it the other way, Two-Six!"

Here is some geology spray on the Penny Crags (as near as I can figure) from Bundtzen and others (1994):

CALCAREOUS METATURBIDITE SCHIST (light green to brownish weathered, usually banded, calcareous, micaceous, feldspathic schist typically containing calcite (15%) white mica (8%) chlorite(10%) inclusion charged feldspar (10%) QUARTZ (40%) and opaque minerals (27%)... thought to be gravitational with overlying (adjacent) unit and formed in same turbidite environment prior to regional metamorphism. Generally resistant and forms blocky outcrops at ridgecrests and in stream cuts.

Bundtzen and others pee on this rock as well... MARK!

Pk. 3390 and Pk. 3195, Blume Ck.

2011-09-28T23:49:00.000-07:00

15SA, Spring viewed from Fall...

(above) Lucy near summit of 3390, at the head of Blume Ck. She balked at the actual summit pinnacle, which required, in her mind at least, following me down the 5.5 down-climb in the picture; there's probably a way around this obstacle, but she never found it.
O.K., so maybe the 25 ft. summit pinnacle is only 10 ft. higher than Lucy's high point shown here. The rule is: you have to get to the very highest, most tippy-toppy point, or it doesn't count. Without this rule in place, climbing in the Kigs would legally be rendered "ridge-walking" rather than climbing.

June: summer stretched ahead. Serotonin flowed from springs that would never expire. The GLUE OF TOWN was effortlessly overcome. The requisite self-centeredness necessary for escape velocity was easily achieved, as Lucy rode strapped in the dog box on the back of Prolly, trusty 4-wheeler. Towards the western range we penetrated, that surreal terra incognita which is the visible part of the Kigluaitch from the village of Teller to the northwest, where no Kougarok Road crosses the Kigs with its urban hordes.
If people know any of the true names of particular mountains over by Canyon and Cobblestone, float them over these techno-mind waves, please, quyana.

(above) Summit pinnacle, Pk. 3390. One, Class 4 move perched over a respectable void at the summit of an otherwise boring ridge... Condition: foghead

Things feel strange to me in the Western Kigs. When you're at Salmon Lake over on the eastern side, Pacific Ocean feels far away, but here in the West, Woolley Lagoon is licking its foggy, windy head into the valleys at all times. The rock itself, a special blend of metamorphic stew, affects the psycho-electromagnetic nonentropy fields of this region in ways that cause time distortion and shamanic dimensional-interface.

(above) Prolly the 4-wheeler encamped for a few days at Feather River, haunted by the ghosts of her ancestors buried near this spot, the World War II junk-pile where they put everything under the ground when the war was over, Or SoI'mTold..

Set out with the Border Collie on her first trip to the real mountains. Trying to discover the best direct hiking route from Teller Road to Canyon Creek, stalking a hidden giant out in the cortical folds of inner Canyon Creek, a region about which I know nothing.
Conditon: foghead. Silks and wreaths of fog swirling tantalizingly around the shoulders, glimpses of eyes through the 3,000 ft. cloud ceiling. Beautiful, yet always that familiar, flat, oppressive feeling bearing down on thoughts and hopes, claustrogo, the weight of opacity, fog, mist, creating a dreamlike sensation, as if all of this were a scene from a Lost In Space episode.

(above) Pk. 3390, south ridge. This image weighs in on the side of the argument that the Kigluait are only hills. But what a fine fell run this ridge provided, up among the shifting heads of fog.
Deceptive argument, however... within this bland, low-resolution exterior lie hidden hollows of boulder-hole and northern drop-offs. In winter, this peak might pose a more formidable challenge even than Scotland.

This trip happened when summer was young and strong and stretching ahead like an endless road. This 15SA trip, it seems almost naive to say, as viewed from the charred wreckage of present Fall, was a fun trip. Lucy and I camped way up at the top of Blume Creek, right below the Class II pass that leads from Blume to Valpa Creek. I hiked/bouldered up both peaks at the head of the pass, Pk. 3390 (Blume?) and Pk. 3195 (Valpa?). Both walk-ups, no real radness, except for a very brief traverse through the summit rocks to get to the Class 4, 25 ft. summit pinnacle, complete with hanging choss Volkswagon registering proximate death-attractor metrics on certain loose-rock scales.

drift-bank foghead in the Alzheimer' eternal sunshine of the spotless mind,
bottomless breathing upward valley-draft through the strip-dancing wave,
saw the granitoid rumors vaporizing into reality for sure,
glimpsed pinnacles and towers through channels lined-up in the memory loss,
sing out if you see the granite!
there is a hidden lake beyond this picture (above and below), Pk. 3300,
the western lake where lie the hidden dragon vaults of the sacred sought-after igneous,
oh wondrous healing rock,
a western lake to fly to, fly to in the jingey-copters,
to plunder the hidden spoils of all the western range.

(above) Lucy in peril. In this picture, Lucy is actually arm-barring hard off that right paw. She has no footholds, her hind legs are paddling in space; it's a bottomless crevasse, with a 10 ft. drop down to a gravel creek bed. Notice the polite look on her face, one ear drooped: uh, Daddy, how about you doing that ice climbing thing you're always doing and CLIMB DOWN HERE AND GET ME! Indeed, I felt the need to fetch my long ax off my pack before making the rescue move, and also took the time to snap this picture while Lucy held the arm-bar.

(above) Camp at head of Blume Ck., June 2011. The snow made for great walking and glissading on the pass between Blume and Valpa-- ValpaBlume Pass. Hard to say if snow-machinable: could be a bit of a blow-over on the north side, who's ever gone over it? Here's a map (below) to jog your own fog.

Windmill Boulders "mini-top ropes"

2011-09-19T00:39:00.000-07:00

(above) Leaving Crater Creek, looking south, August, 2011.

5SA (5 Saturdays Ago)

Previously unreported from the motivation swarm of Andy's visit in August: fleeing Crater Creek like drowning rats we proceeded straight from 4-wheeler to a brief 15-minute coffee and a change of socks at my house in Icy View, and then it was on to the Windmills for "mini-top roping" for the rest of the day.

(below) Grappling with death by crushing in the "Lee Cave."

A stiff breeze was clipping along that day, and the air was ululating with the sound of turbines. Almost too windy to climb, except that we found a perfect little rock hollow in the lee of the southwest wind. Did I mention it was windy? But the grass in our green tundra meadow was sunny and still-- there's always one exact aspect where you can find this. This occasion was the very first time I ever actually set up a top-rope at the low-to-the-ground Windmill Boulders.

(above) Climbing out of a cave where I once got charged by a rabid fox. If you look closely on the hillside behind you can see turbines that came flying off their post during a powerful sequence of gusts last Spring-- I remember laying in my bed listening to the undertones. Now the poor windmill behind Andy's helmet in the picture just sits there like a fly with no wings.

(above) Mini-tope rope on "South Wall," the narrow beam end of the Windmill boulders (and one of the cruxes on the world-famous "Borehole Traverse.)

Though I felt a bit silly constructing top-ropes at a place that should by any definition remain strictly a bouldering area, our maneuvers that day brought one, distinct satisfaction for me. Have you ever had a particular high-ball bouldering problem, not that hard a one, necessarily, but a high-ball about which you were just not quite certain about that last move onto the top, just not quite certain? And you climbed up to that last leg-breaker move time and time again, and hung there chalking up over and over again compulsively, trying to visualize your way up that one last move? And you just never quite did it? Some primordial will to remain intact manifested itself, you justifiably invoked the "live to see another day" clause, but you would always remain curious about just how difficult that last move really was.
At the Windmills with Andy, I finally got my chance to satisfy my curiosity about just such a bouldering high-ball. See the image below.

(below) The wind doesn't blow in cyberspace.

In the picture above, Andy has surmounted the death-by-crushing overhang and is cruising on big holds. I have spent many a fine evening perching and pimping like Gilderoy Lockhart above the spot where Andy is posing, but never had I executed the folly of topping out. And no wonder! Turns out, on the very last move you mantle onto hideous little loose flakes, little ears of schist glued on by dirt and bryophyte. Casual 5.6 on top rope, but one could imagine getting the belly-sketch, were one soloing.
Thus, this experiment in intuition became a validation: that heeby-jeeby feeling I had always experienced at that spot, little glimpses of what it would feel like to get run over by a Toyota Highlander, had not just been a figment of my paranoia. Live to see another day.

(below) Windmill boulders, looking east, August, 2011, 5SA.

Distin Bluff Summer Rockclimbing

2011-08-23T19:40:00.000-07:00

and so castles made of sand fall in the sea, eventually...

(above) "Distin Bluff" (Pt. 1125), August 2011. 80 ft. at its highest places. Our first route went up the lefthand edge. More on Distin Bluff here. Anybody know the true name of this thing?

town was borg, we were assimilated, instantly the tentacles of digital technology began to snake into the cortical machinery behind our fragile auras; soon we had forgotten the awareness we had achieved in the mountains...

Andy kept a spark alive; his plane ticket for home wasn't for a day; obsessed he was; in the morning, lying among cables and wires, he had the will to rise and brew coffee; we were away before noon, mounted double bareback once again on the back of the Yamaha, Prolly, off to the "Distin Bluff" for chossaneering on abhorrent marble.

(above) "Pixuusiqiri" (sinner, wrong doer), (5.7).

never before had i visited this face with a friend during the time when the songbirds were singing, at least not with all the toys, though the place had known the whack of my Cobras well in the winter; Andy and I felt like tigers from our recent epic in the Kigs and wasted no time hopping onto a likely looking line-

oh lord, that Qaweraq marble, not so bad when frozen, but it can be FOUL when the tundra is green, oh hear me lord- a crack jam, some well-placed cam, a little duo-doit, i was starting to dance when someone shoved a half ton detached block of marble in my face-- its gang members surrounded me quickly-- next thing I knew they were all around, over me, to the side of me, as a last resort I had to start stepping on their heads just to get out of there.

(above) Andy Sterns on"Sivuubaruq" (fears the consequence), (5.10c), top-rope

yes! climbing at last, stuffing in pro, moving the rope out, finally, the real deal, and then somehow, I was standing on solid ground in the middle of the climb; i thought we had been safely on a cliff of rock, but somehow SOLID GROUND had snaked around and up from the spot where we had started and intruded into the middle of the first pitch; so i belayed in the middle of the cliff standing at the bottom- above us, the true line presented itself, out on a patch of Grapefruit limestone, but catastrophic bone-pulverizing collapse presented itself as well- so we finished on another diminutive patch of Grapefruit limestone; it was a pitch, cobbled together out of chiton dust and imagination.

(above) "Sivuubaruq"

for a second course, we set up a top-rope on the nicest looking bit of the cliff, anticipating hours of harmless fun, we settled in at the base; i was done after one turn- to have gone again would be like repeating North Twin once you had already climbed it; the very pores of the marble seemed to ooze menace, the shadow of the death attractor was never far, it was like trying to play Ringo with chalk marbles.

(above) Distin Bluff ledge

no marble tomb for Andy or me that day; purged, reamed-out, empty again, we returned via Glacier Creek Road to our electronic enclosures in the blinking port, and let the urgencies and exigencies of the things we had known for a moment to be really very small cover us over again.

(above) Distin Bluff in winter

to summarize: better in winter, stuck together one and all, when the whole creaking freaking tweaking edifice is not threatening to come down on top of you-- the place is really OK with a couple of good axes in your hands-

Third Tog, North Ridge, Slimedog Millionaire

2011-08-20T18:20:00.000-07:00

I'm fixing a hole where the rain gets in...

(above) "Third Tog" (Pk. 3150+), Crater Creek valley. North Ridge is the righthand skyline.

   1SA (1 Sunday ago)
   Andy Sterns and I slogged to Crater Creek for another attempt on the North Ridge of the "Third Tog". Boy, did we get Murphied: the days we were in the mountains, it rained, and the days we were out of the mountains, the sun shone, and shines still, as the GLUE OF TOWN holds me fast like a clam-digger with one boot stuck in the mud of Turnagain with the tide coming in. M.L.D.'s-- Murphy's Law derivatives-- always difficult pills to swallow. One endures the irony-burn of all the oh what a nice day!s with as much good cheer as one can muster.
   Though no SEND was obtained, we did some great pitches of sliming, despite the climb. Andy was a driving force in comparison with my natural laziness and exuded immense climbing drive every morning. Where my other Fairbanks friends poke fun at the choss topples in the Kigluaiks, Andy hallucinates routes are there. We pretended to establish a partial route on the biggest of the Togs, "Slimedog Millionaire," two pitches of ICKY super-slime over fairly nice rock at S-8 ("slime-eight") with a few "Scottish-free" moves.

(above) North side of Tog 3, Crater Creek. To see the approximate climbing line, you could click here. For an account of my rained-out solo attempt on the Tog last year (which I have foolishly reiterated this year), plus a discussion of Crater Creek hiking, you could click here.  The rock is granitic gneiss.

   On last week's attempt, Andy and I got about a third of the way up the ridge before severe SLIME necessitated a quick rappel back to the safety of the green slabs at the base, where Lucy the mountain dog was waiting for us, scampering on fourth class terrain.
   The whole route, we learned, is probably only four pitches. On many earlier trips to the mountain, my brain had perceived the Third Tog as a soaring Temple Crag fluted with multiple Moon Goddess Aretes, and had thusly persuaded Andy to "drain his tank" of mileage and come climbing in the Kigs. What we found there was more like a highly-degraded Aeolian Butte-- but what a gorgeous middle-of-nowhere in which to be climbing!

(above) The "human mules": Rick, Daniel, and Andy, with Lucy, pausing at glacial erratic, Crater Creek. Did I mention we were cold? Yes, assuredly so, everyone is soaking wet. A breeze is blowing. Alaaparut.

For the first time ever, we experimented with usage of human mules. The idea was to exploit unwitting locals by offering them a few pittances in exchange for carrying our prodigious kit to the base of the moraines. Rick and Daniel Anderson were easily gulled into leaving for Crater Creek immediately with 50 lb. packs on their backs, despite the rain; both father and son, I assured Andy beforehand, were "monster hikers," and they certainly proved true my claim. The idea was that mules would be cheaper than a helicopter with Bering Air, though the final result was mixed; we grew emotionally attached to our mules, and felt horrible to see them suffer in the wet brush on the way in, and strange about trying to make it a hired gig... yet, did the mules seem to enjoy their burdensome task? Next year, we'll all ride the helicopter, mule-brothers, how about it? Yee-Haw!

(above) Pitch 1, "Slimedog Millionaire."

   The first night was icky and cold; we awoke soggy-clothed in the morning with the tent in full-puddle. My ancient, utterly BEAT BIBLER was giving up the ghost, silly plastic pole-guide rings popping right and left, laminations delaminating, pinholes emerging like dripping stars, a ripping noise with every zip. After so many years of proud service-- stove fires in the Todd-Tex, the massively-rumbling horrors outside the yellow wall, boredom on the inside, novels, pee bottles, drifting snow, pressing my face into the wall all night, spiders, the porcupine I slept with one night-- the tent finally earned its true name on this last trip: ICKY WOODS.
   The next day we retrieved the gear that Rick and Daniel had helped us to cache, under pulses of rain-shower and a sky that shifted directions like a candle at a birthday party where all the kids are blowing at once from different directions. The following day we arose from our icky beds of gelatinous slime and ascended into mist, "just to have a look at the route." Many crack systems presented themselves; we chose an attractive one and started up. Good jams, plugging cams, slimy hands, what does it matter if you got good jams? But after a few fun moves, a squeeze chimney lubricated with Preparation-H raised a chafing conundrum: "Uh, Andy, I could aid this, but it would be so much more fun if only it were dry. I just know I would enjoy shoving my body through this painful, corrugated, cheese-shredder, if only it were dry." Rain was falling. The black squeeze glistened with Preparation-H.
   So we switched off our northwall brows, and whipped up a top rope, and had an absolute ball climbing in the 100% precipitation for the rest of the day. We left our gear and returned to Icky Woods. A patch of sun came out and set us to steaming. We dried our bags in the sun. Andy proclaimed our fortune had turned, the weather was now good.

(above) Andy descending Class 4 slabs. The buttress directly over his head is the proper route; we chose greener, path-of-least-resistance lines a little further to the right.

The next day, we went back up into chance of showers, "just to assess the slime-factor," but both of us knew it would probably be our one, big attempt-- we were sodden, and our calories were running out. Lucy, the Border Collie, on her first technical climbing expedition, proved perfectly cognizant of a dogs role in wall climbing; at the exact point where the 5th class commenced, she was happy to renounce her until-then constant obssession with following our every body movement, and retreat to the base like a good dog, with no blatant whimperings, nor attempts at mental manipulation at which this one-year old herding-dog excels.

(above and below) Pitch 1, "Slimedog Millionaire."

We decided to damn the aesthetics and just clutch up whatever route would get us through the slime-fields the easiest. A Class 4 approach pitch on wet grass led to some rock. I placed an El Cap's worth of gear in about 40 ft., then did a cool little move across a dihedral and belayed. The pictures show Andy following the cool little move across the dihedral.

   The dark clouds were engorging, the rain ceiling was coming down fast. Something happened to me for a moment; the old tiger came out. An arrogant Benowitzian impatience took hold; I sunk all ten fingernails into vertical dirt and spider-clawed up the next 5.7 hanging tundra pitch, without putting in ten-thousand pieces or wailing like an expectant father. Just as quickly, the tiger subsided back into loserdom and I felt fearful again. Why the almost angry burst? It was obvious to me that we would never complete this climb that day, we were soaked, we had no puffy coats, the wind was conjuring hypothermia, and the climbing was slime, only slime. I felt like returning to Icky Woods immediately and reading about hypothermic Bolsheviks in my book, "The People's Act of Love," by James Meeks.  YET, I knew that Andy, bless his heart, was down there at the belay, perfectly excited to forge upwards into the increasing rain of our decreasing interval, to do one more pitch, just for the "fun" of it.

(above) The upper pitches of Third Tog, North Ridge.

   I came to a large, ledgy area with a slime-fall coming down from above. The rain was like a foam, everywhere, over everything. The upper part of the route looked very doable. Murphy! It actually looked like fun, exposed climbing. This was the point where my woeful misjudgment of the climb became apparent. Hitherto I had held this climb of the Tog as a Jorasses-like north wall where hapless alpinists could potentially end up as frozen barnacles plastered to the headwall by cake-frosting, grimly visible from the green floor of the valley, forever out of reach. Now I view it is a fun climb on decent choss that one could do in a few hours. Must get back in there to solo it; or you!

(above) Rappelling off Slimedog Millionaire in the rain. Pitch 1 went where the rope is.

(below) Andy Sterns in the wet. Slime factor 7. Retreat. As always, Andy is radiating positive vibrations, even though he appears in this shot to be glowering.

Down at Icky Woods, Andy tuned a weather report on KNOM. "There is a 100% chance of rain today, 100% tonight, 100% tomorrow." Powerbar wrappers mucilaginously clung to the tent walls, which shook and spattered with wind and rain. Lucy curled stoically outside in a nest of mud, too young to ever have known the precedent of coming inside Icky Woods. We discussed our options. We had brought our gear down from the wall. The GLUE OF TOWN was oozing in through the cracks in our steely focus. We discussed relationships and what assholes we were.

In the end, it was decided that a full return to town was way too hideous a prospect: responsibilities and commitments would be waiting there to spring like hidden predators. We settled on the idea of hiking out to Earp's cabin the following morning with half the gear; we would hike a "Togathon" the following day, in and out of Crater Creek, sixteen miles, to retrieve the rest of the gear.

(above) Andy wading Crater Creek on our exodus, Thursday, August 11, 2011. Still a casual crossing, but I had never seen the water that high.

   Here is what my friend Diana Haecker wrote in the Nome Nugget, week of August 18, about the day that Andy and I chose to flee Icky Woods and the mountains:

   The unusually heavy downpour of rain last week made Thursday, August 11,
   the wettest day in almost seven years with a precipitation of 1.21 inches, reports
   the National Weather Service. This is in line with the trend of this wet summer
   of 2011, which already saw July being the seventh all-time wettest month in
   Nome's 105 years of weather data record keeping.

It sucked.

     Crater Creek had physically increased in length. We suffered. Allapa. We reached the 4-wheeler. The plan was for Lucy to run alongside the 4-wheeler for several miles; "I'll just perch up there on top of those bags," her eyes seemed to say, so we let her on. The Clampetts motored down the Kougarak Road towards the dry cabin.

(above) Salmon Lake

Earp's cabin had never felt so good. I'll never forget the smile of the dog, who had been sleeping out in the drink for days. But like an invisible gas, the GLUE OF TOWN seeped into the room. A phenomenon known as "Relationship Force" was exerting a strong current on Andy, as he had not seen his partner all summer. That meant we were hosed; I myself am tragically predisposed to succumb to the GLUE. It became a foregone conclusion: the next day, our party of three piled onto Prolly, the 4-wheeler, and motored back to the fleshpots of Nome.

(above) Tog 3 in Winter.

The "Togs" is my pet name for the metamorphic-granite structures that one encounters in the south fork of Crater Creek. These cliffs are not visible from the Kougarak Road, but unfold spectacularly when one turns the corner on the obviously-glaciated valley about six miles up. The name derives from a color-coded designation in the explanation of my geological map of the Kigs, "Bedrock Geologic Map of the Kigluaik Mountains...," by Amato and Miller. The good climbing rock in the Kigs shows up as pink on this map, and the explanation reads: "pre-Cambrian Thompson Creek OrthGneiss," from which "C-TOG" was derived, which Andy and shortened this trip to simply TOG.
I identify 7 separate Togs in the valley. This is a cusp area where the pluton is in contact with the schist; Crater Glacier must have come through during the last glaciation and sliced off the very edge of this plutonic uplift, leaving little fingernail clippings of granitic gneiss lying upright on the southeast wall of the valley. There's plenty of rock up there. The 7th Tog (Pk. 3950+?) is one of the highest peaks in the region; got to get out of this naming business, really, the true EarthSea names of things are locked inside the land. The Third is the largest of the Togs; the summit is pleasantly attainable on the Class 2 south side; try bouldering your way to the top on the northwest side via discontinuous I-can-imagine-it's-granite slabs interspersed with great fat-pad balconies made of hanging tundra.

(below) Crater Creek area. This is an old, rather sloppy map. Regarding the approach to the Togs, the verdict is in: it's easier to hike on the riverbed on the way in (but more bearonoid).

Pk. 3595, Oro Grande peaks

2011-05-31T17:32:00.000-07:00

... and a desperate DEATH MARCH of SCHOOL ensued during the month of May... blogganeering was OBLITERATED. I became a full-time editor of edgy 6th Grade Literature. KIGSBLOG lay dormant. (The weekends, however, held ACTION, fueled by Tyler's rage for the fine Spring skiing.)

While the blog slept, Spring emerged. But here, now, from this memory station at the beginning of big blue summertime, KIGSBLOG must fly back to where we left off: the unfinished post from April, concerning Ryan and Ian's errant voyage into the mystery lands of the Oro Grande by snowmachine, and the near-death experiences along the way...

(above) Basecamp in the Oro Grande, April 2011, looking north. Pk. 3595 at left edge of photo.

The GLUE OF TOWN was fierce. Like a cartoon character who has stepped in glue, Ryan labored against long sticky tendrils of causation that stretched, but never quite let him go. Great matters of life and death portended in all the signs, but neither he nor Ian recognized their significance in the present, blinded as they were by the sunny weather, firm snow, and desire to get into the remote and mysterious Canyon Creek. ...how was i to know that Ryan himself was in violation of the NO SKETCH PARTNER rule?
Pulling out of Crowley's gas, the first 30 seconds of the journey, Ian escaped the wheelchair only by the grace of God when the skid on his machine augured into a meter-deep furrow in the snow— a furrow dug by the very Snow Cat vehicle on board which that very morning he had ungraciously turned down an opportunity to ride. ...knowing NOW what i did not know THEN, this horrible flip from the machine appears to have been a nodal confluence point for several threads of causation forming a synchronicity attractor of significant magnitude: emotions, fractured friendships, reproduction, self-confrontation, all were to follow in the intervening weeks, with the nasty, near-miss accident, as so often happens, lurking in the matrix, exerting its own gravity... how do i get so lucky time and again? Thank you to Arctic Cat for designing the cockpit of the BEARCAT so the rider does a perfect 360° flip over the handlebars...
Admitting possible internal injuries, they continued; their collective will to get into the backcountry and go camping on the most beautiful snow-machine mountaineering weekend of the year became the MACHETE which sliced through every problem, every obstacle the GLUE could throw in their path, and soon they were roaring down the Teller Road like Wyatt and Billy in Easy Rider.

(above) Pk. 3595 viewed from adjacent peaklet to the west, looking northeast. A way led through slough-avalanche slopes to the main summit, but the NO SKETCH PARTNER rule forced a retreat. The NO SKETCH PARTNER rule states: always prioritize the needs of your partner ahead of your own ambitions. The terrain in the picture would probably have taken me three hours round-trip, but I had told Ryan I'd be back in one, as the GLUE OF TOWN seemed to be pulling at his ankles like a strong rip-tide. I pretended to be Rudi Matt in Banner in the Sky, forsaking the summit in consideration of others, but the truth was, I was nauseous from all the pain killers I had ingested the night before to treat my snow-machining injuries. in other words, hungover. How many John Barleycorn bails have my afternoons seen?
I would have done better to ascend from the Oro Grande directly to the notch just in front the summit in the photo, but the snowpack had been sort of crackling with chain-reaction, avalanchey noises that morning, so it didn't seem wise at the time to venture onto plus forty-degree slopes. By the end of the day, however, I had gained a bit of confidence in the snow, however, and was able to ignore the disconcerting crackle-echo noises.

(right) Bouldering on crumbly paragneiss halfway up Pk. 3595.
   Ryan came halfway up the route in his shoe pacs. We stopped at a nice ledge, and he took this picture. The Oro Grande tors on the crest of the ridge are composed of the good old "pre-Cambrian Thompson Creek Orthogneiss," but the rock on the way up seems to be more in the manner of "highly resistant, coarse-grained pelitic paragneiss and schist" (according to the Amato map).
   The snow slope in this area was criss-crossed with tracks from an AKLAQ freshly sprung from winter sleep. As evidenced by the tracks we saw, the bear had, at one point, had been getting rad just for fun, jumping and sliding repeatedly off a dangerous cornice.
   The tracks also told a story that explains why Seward Peninsula AKLAT are so wary of humans. No sooner had this poor AKLAQ emerged from its den, blinking in the morning sunlight, then it was beset upon by human predators. Ramon's party (see below) had seen the bear and high-marked up to the den. Then Ryan and I camped a half mile away. As we were setting up the tent, a Super Cub on skis swooped in and landed up by the den. The next morning, a young hunter from Nome came motoring breathlessly up to our camp inquiring about the very same bear. Man! The people are after you right from the get-go! No wonder the mothers teach their cubs to run at the very sight of us. Up among the very highest tors, I saw how the AKLAQ had outfoxed everybody by climbing a circuitous route into an obscure valley to the northwest.

(above) Isabel Pass, chance meeting with other snow-machiners between Glacial Lake drainage and the Oro Grande. Other people?! In the Kigs? Shows you how nice an April weekend it was. Here we see the redoubtable Ramon and his posse of snow-machining fiends telling us that we are lost. An astute reader will remember that Ryan and my destination was Canyon Creek. Ramon is explaining that the pass to Canyon Creek is not the one we are in; we needed to hang a left ten bumpy miles earlier. (see map, below) It was at this point that Ryan and I decided the Canyon Creek camping trip had turned into an Oro Grande camping trip.

(right) Region north of Glacial Lake
1. Glacial Lake
2. Isabel Pass. Dennis H. told me that was the name of this pass. Is that right?
3. Pk. 3595. I call it 'Oro Grande Peak' but that is my own appellation. This is merely the high point of a long, prominent ridge, but Pk. 3595 as a distinct entity seems to be quite prominent from all over the range.
4. Unnamed Pass. This, I am told, is the snow-machine shortcut to Canyon Creek

(above) Suluun, the Dorsal Fin, viewed from Oro Grande, looking southeast. One of the biggest chunks of granite (gneiss) in the Kigs. Andy and I climbed several routes there, including the left skyline: trip details here and here.

(above) Tor detail, Oro Grande peaks. Amato, my patron geologist for the Kigs, told me he climbed "all" of these peaks in the nineties, but was vague on details-- at least, those details not relating to the geologic.

(Above) Pk. 3595 (the one on the left) is merely the high point on a prominent, tor-studded ridge that forms the north side of the Oro Grande drainage, visible from village of Teller as a classic row of Sawtooths, hence, Kigluaik. Is this the namesake ridge of the entire range? This ridge, which I personally refer to as "the Oro Grande peaks," proved an exception to the rule that the north side of a ridge in the Kigluaiks will always be the precipitous side-- these tors poke out of the top of the ridge like true tors should, but there's not the usual fearsome drop-off on the north side.

(Above) View to the south from peaklet to the west of Pk. 3595. The little conceit of Kiganeering is to get to the top of something, so I put on crampons and labored, sweating Yukon Jack, to the ridgecrest. There might have been some Class 4. This picture was taken from the same spot as the one earlier showing the main peak.

Views from the DRIVE OUT of the mountains from Oro Grande via Mosquito Pass. (Above) we see the long wall of the West Face of Mt. Osborn (Pk. 4714), the mini-Emperor Face of the Kigluaik. I'm sure people have snow-machined up into the cirque, but what are the odds someone has climbed Osborn from this side? Not high....

(Below and bottom) Two views from the drive out of a hill I call "Turncorner Mountain" (Pk. 3250) because it is where you finally turn the corner to get to Mosquito Pass when slogging from the Kougarak Road. My sweetie Kristine and I climbed the lefthand ridge in a 13 hour epic (Class 4/5), years ago in the pre-Raina days.
somewhere we are still there

Distin Bluff Chicken Out

2011-04-05T00:54:00.000-07:00

(left) Distin Bluff (Pt. 1129), Saturday, April 2. The pixelization is due to blowing spindrift. I spent last Saturday huddled in relative warmth and sunlight against this hundred-foot cliff underneath great umbrellas of snow-streamers that blew out horizontally off its top.

The object of any April weekend is penetration into the "real mountains." Stopping partway in the foothills to play is a failure, a "chicken out," a mental turpitude stemming from an unwillingness to motor out into the deep water completely alone. It is the nature of the Kigluaiks that a 20-mile slog from the foothills from a busted machine is a doable thing without frostbite; on the other hand, a 35-mile slog from the inner mountains from a busted machine would be a HELL OF A SLOG, and the rescue party would probably intercept you before you ever reached Nome the next day. Then the locals would excoriate you mightily. Hitting your rescue beacon is practically unthinkable; one would most likely never be able to visit the mountains again, your machine would be stripped from your good name, and the headline would make page 1.
So, wherever I use the term "chicken out," substitute the words GOOD JUDGMENT. Last Saturday I saddled up for a solo penetration into Glacial Lake, my ego puffed with dreams of the blogganeering accomplishments I could engender there: a mixed route up the south face of the picturesque peak that rises from the northeast side of the lake. Years before I had tried this route and been defeated by post-education weariness halfway up when a violent nap overtook me in the warm winter sun. On a second attempt with Marshall Earp, we rang the CHICKEN OUT bell instantly upon arriving at Glacial Lake to find there a wind of such ungodly ALLAPA proportions that there was no question of shutting off our warm little machines. Without a word we had turned around and went back to Distin for fun and dry-tooling in the regular old SUB-Arctic at the end of the sixteen-mile Glacier Creek Road.

(below) Reruns of Joni bouldering on Distin Bluff last year.

And now for the CHICKEN OUT! I got to the pass at the end of Glacier Creek Road that leads to the Stewart River and on to the heart of the Kigs. How deep the snow was! Although Crusteo, my battle-scarred Polaris 340, was going good, he was pretty much submerged and streaming snow into my face, plus he was eating a lot of gas. Two deserted valleys separated me from Glacial Lake, and the mountains were all FUZZED OUT with that tell-tale WIND GAUZE. A Russian hard man would have continued on towards the goal. Too long in the flesh pots, I repeated the pattern from last year, and formed the bight-of-shame leading back towards Distin.

The game of 4-season bouldering seems to involve the capacity to hang out in little micro-climates out of the wind, behaving for all the world like tattooed, fat-pad Californians hanging out at the V11 all day, except without the chicks, plus you're alone and freezing to death. The least windy place is always at the top of the mountain, in a little nook pressed right up against the cliff. There you can hang out next to the radiant stone and listen to the mountains rage all around you. I was sad because I could see the whole sad sweep of time and I never let you know I cared about you. Then you climb up and down the cliff, sinking good sticks into turf, torquing and hooking the marble, stemming and mantling and swinging and daggering, occasionally finding yourself way off the deck in situations that pass instantly from the hedonism of bouldering into the cold, psychopathic indifference of alpinism. It's all in the kinaesthetic movement. You're looking for the Csikszentmihalyi moment, which you will never remember anyway, lost as it is in the eternal sunshine of the bouldering mind, but you will feel better for it all at work on Monday.

The coolest part of the day was stopping in the evening for a telly ski in Hatcher Pass quality powder in some nameless bowl among the wastes of the Snake River Valley (below). Life can be sweet, enjoy for all it's worth.

Nugget Pass Powder

2011-04-04T10:41:00.000-07:00

(left) Allapa at Nugget Pass area, Grand Central in background, Sunday, March 27. As I came even with Tyler, his celebrated time machine already drawn and aimed, I unconsciously broke out of parallel and into telly snob.

March Powder Storm

The FLUFF is on
There'll be no climbing today.

No perching, pasting and grunting,
Your hooks will stay in the pack,
No stemming and slamming your wallet
Into slabs that gain no purchase.
They'll be over there sucking down the lines
And I'll be there with them;
the FLUFF is on, and
There'll be no climbing today.

The silken sound of graupels
Swishing aside by the millions
Has got them in a kind of trance;
if my skin stays on
I'll be able to pet the monkey on my back,
He pops on at the bottom of the run,
Gets off at the top and hucks another one,
But they'll be no climbing today
For the FLUFF is on,
It's like skiing on a cloud.

The monkey came back at the bottom of the run, so
We climbed the mountain again;
Crazed with the powder,
The silk and sinuous sliding,
We never crossed each other's tracks,
The waves were all synchronized;
And none of us we
Battled the gravity,
No one offered fealty
For the FLUFF was on,
It was all just winging.

Someday we'll return to struggle,
Offer ourselves to the jaws of the mountain,
Instead of smooth over the sinuous curves;
We'll be clinching and closing with constrictions and praying
For the Lord to spare us one time;
But for now the FLUFF is on,
The stairs are all coated with vapor
Get boards for your feet and take to the machines,
Leave your Cobras for shovel and beacon,
There will be no climbing today.

(right) Skinning up. Erica and me, our trusty little machines looking like turds left behind in the snow. These are the hills east of the Kougarak Road. Tyler was instrumental in helping us achieve TOWN ESCAPE VELOCITY on a hungover morning that broke windy and gray in Nome, on a day when many a local outdoorsman failed to break through the low psyche, but a day that proved to be calm and transcendently beautiful in the mountains, the light unreal bright, with downy feathers all over everything.

Ascent of "Kayuqtuq" (Pk. 4000+?)

2011-03-23T00:40:00.000-07:00

Recent post attested to thwarted attempts on Peak 4000+ located on the divide between Crater Creek / Fox Creek here . Vowed to return to this insignificant hillock that my Christopher Robin imagination had transformed into a Chimborazo, a Cotopaxi, it had stolen my heart away, the Sentinel of the East End of the Kigs, a bookend paired with the Singtuq (Pk. 3870) way over on the West End, a bump become my albatross. Three attempts I had made on Kayuqtuq, defeated each time by my servitude and laziness. It was time to resort to the path of least resistance, which in the Kigs, is almost always the south side of the mountain.

Here is a pixellated figment of the mountain from the North, viewed from South Fork Crater Creek, March 2009. (below):

The moment Earp touched ground after ascent Osborn Sunday (see here for account), the GLUE OF TOWN began to exert a strong undertow on her machine. Perhaps "GLUE" is a misnomer; what I saw tearing away at Joni was a FORCE, manifesting from thirty-five miles away, a concatenation of cares and responsibilities exerting attraction from a distance. Soon, she was gone...

The GLUE was pulling at my machine in the direction of TOWN as well, but there was also a repulsive force emanating from town that caused me to turn, cold and soaked from the arduous climb, in the direction of wilderness. Soon, thanks once again to Earp, I was ensconced in the cabin at Salmon Lake with gear drying, like Clyde huddling alone at Glacier House, but with MAD Magazine instead of the Iliad for company.

The weather was banging fine, the conditions nearly perfect in the Kigluaik for mixed climbing. My thoughts turned to Kayuqtuq; not to be a crass peak-bagger or anything, but the peak had to be bagged. The next morning, basking on porch with Jack Aubrey coffee in hand, I was visited by an honest-to-God KAYUQTUQ:

(above) KAYUQTUQ (Vulpes v. alascensis) I named him Ray Guy. A good omen. The peak was in the bag.

However, before the old man could bag the peak, the old man needed a rest day from the GREAT THRASHING PUNISHMENT of bagging Osborn the day before. Rest day was used to reconnoiter a snow-machining route up Fox Creek. It took quite a bit of searching about on foot with the Iron Dog parked to find a way past a cornice at Fox Creek's bottleneck, about three miles in from road.

Once this bottleneck was negotiated, however, the overwhelming OBSCENITY OF THE SNOW-MACHINE became glaringly apparent. I was able to motor easily to the very base of Kayuqtuq's south slope. If I had crampons with me, I would have just climbed it on my rest day. I had snow-machined nearly to the top of my Chimborazo, my Cotopaxi.

(below) Summit pyramid KAYUQTUQ (Pk. 4000+) from north shoulder of mountain. My second attempt, solo, was thwarted when I chickened out of soloing this rather appealing-looking mixed ground. The drop-off to the right (northwest) is really quite fearsome.

(above) Summit, Kayuqtuq (Pk. 4000+) I have no reason to be sure of that elevation. I like to fancy it is one of two "four thousanders" in the Kigs, along with Osborn. I'll hazard a guess it has been climbed before, but I'll hazard a second that it was never climbed in a winter month either. The wind came in huge spurts that day, like waves of customers at a market; at the summit, it was perfectly calm.

(above) View towards southwest from summit of Kayuqtuq (Pk. 4000+) 1. "Turncorner Mountain" (Pk. 3200+) between Northstar Ck. and Windy Ck. Kristine and I climbed that big old righthand skyline one summer. 2. Tigaraha, with its three granitic summits. 3. Pk. 3213. 4. "Pen Tri Cwm" (Pk. 3650+), so called by Anchorage party. 5. Mosquito Pass area- routes to be had.
This type of panorama fondling and pee marking is shameless, utterly embarrassing, really quite fun, never gets old.

(above) Looking down East Ridge. Attempt number 1 with Earp last February ended up with us retreating from somewhere in this photo. We decided this peak wasn't anywhere near worth frostbite. Did I mention it was cold? Yes, very, ALLAPA!!, it was cold that day. Lots of nice mixed climbing on gneiss around here. If it were Scotland, there would be routes!

Mt. Osborn FWA

2011-03-21T00:18:00.000-07:00

(above) Osborn from the northeast. Traversing icy slopes to the right underneath the row of summit tors to get to Osborn's high point, you are traversing over the great sinister wall holler of the Northeast Face. The moves are not difficult, but you would not want to snag your bell-bottoms with your crampon points. The regular route on Osborn comes up from the left (southeast) and traverses the summit ridge; a rope can be of comfort on this summit ridge in alpine conditions.

(above) Northeast wall Osborn, March 2011. Earp demonstrated the climber inside her is still very much alive by gunning the throttle through a series of spiritual and situational green lights for all-out attempt on the Sluicebox Couloir. We roared into that dreadful cul de sac on March 13, Joni's birthday, with guns loaded, ready for fearsome struggle.

(above) Earp on 4th pitch of Sluicebox Couloir. Both of us had felt the sting of Osborn's northeast wall before. On another of Joni's birthdays in 2006, we had gotten halfway up the Sluicebox before a breeze sprang up on top, nearly drowning us down in the cleft with waves of spindrift. Joni had been nauseous the entire climb and able to speak only in low groans.

(above) Upper half of Sluicebox, March 13, 2011. But when we got to the wall last Sunday (supported on snow machine by Quinn, fresh from the ritual of pure madness known as the Nome-Golovin snow machine race) we instantly perceived that our route was anemic. Where there should have been an ice hose dribbling down the upper wall, there was only cold marble. Some elementary force of nature, probably the great South Wind event of February, had denuded the wall of its promised ice. Gone are the freezing-rain layers of Thanksgiving and New Year's, if they ever existed at all at this altitude, in this frozen cauldron. Compare this picture from a week ago with pictures of this wall from years earlier (below):

(above) Osborn from Grand Central. The Northeast Face, and the Grand Central Glacier at its foot, is around the corner to the right.

       Upon finding the Sluicebox NOT WORTH CLIMBING IN THESE CONDITIONS, the effect was like waking out of a deep trance. "What are we doing here, Earp? How did we get here?" We stood blinking in the bright sunlight. So focused had we been on the NORDWAND, now that we were released from years of servitude in the gulag, we didn't know what to do with ourselves.
       If the gold medal for valor was not to be our reward this time. I peeked in to my little black book for other nearby opportunities to conflate my sore and collapsed ego. How could I contrive some new frontier out of the mountain wilderness at my disposal?
       "I know, Earp- let's make the FWA (first winter ascent) of Mt. Osborn by the regular route." As far as I knew, the mountain had not had a proper ascent to the true summit during the calendar winter. Nor has it yet, by my reckoning, as you shall see, unless you count the leveling of an ice ax to the proper altitude an ascent. Joni was plenty psyched to climb Osborn, having never ascended the crown jewel of the Kigs in any season. Such contrivances as FWAs are generally poo-pooed as proper motivation to climb by the spiritual masters of true alpine wisdom, but a confused old dad like me finds they provide a structure of sorts upon which to pin decision-making, and energy resource allocation in a fatigued market. So we motored around the corner of Osborn, parked our iron dogs in the sun, and commenced slogging up the southeast rib.   Earp, breaking training from WEIO, was soon far ahead out of sight up the mountain.

(left) "Snakey Mt."(Pk. 2950+) and "Pen Tri Cwm" (Pk. 3600+) from the south fork Grand Central area. These are peaks in the very cool South Fork of Grand Central, you see them to the south as you're hiking up Oz. The pass to the right just out of the picture leads to the Windy drainage and is easy, though I've always been too chicken to MACHINE IT. The saddle to the left of Snakey leads to the Sinuk, but is probably Class 3 or 4, so it is best for those seeking passage to choose the Windy/Sinuk side of Snakey Mountain.
Years ago, Mikey and I slogged up the very ski-able backwards-S couloir on the lefthand mountain in the photo, which she later labelled as "Snakey" on a photo, which is how I have referred to it ever since. Tyler calls it the "Z-couloir. We are both in agreement that it represents the next great problem in Kigs descents— perhaps it's been hucked already. The two pitches on the summit arete were steep and icy and made me glad that Mikey and I had brought a cord. "Pen Tri Cwm" was a name bestowed upon the righthand peak by Todd et al in a Scree article, if I read it correctly, the name referring to its position at the head of three different valleys, Sinuk, Windy, and Grand Central. A cool name for this mountain, which maintains a rather managerial prominence over the entire corridor of the Sinuk when viewed from the mouth of the Sinuk river-- I wonder if there's an older name from the early fish camp days?

(above) Looking south from the summit of Osborn. Background peaks: Snakey, Tre Pene Cwm Idi, Tigaraha, Turncorner Mt., Mosquito Pass Mt. and a chunk of Osborn's seldom-visited West Wall in the foreground. The Hands-Full Factor was a bit high this time on Osborn's summit ridge-- the peak seems always to be embedded in a cold, upper stream, hands seem to stay inside gloves, cameras seem too imminently droppable to risk extracting from the pocket.

(above) Summit tors on Osborn (not the actual summit) taken on descent. These tors run like a fence along the top of Oz; you HAVE TO traverse all the way to the north to reach the highest one, which is only higher than the penultimate one by probably ten or fifteen feet. The Penultimate Tor, located at the southern end of the fence is the more spectacular formation; on one of my earlier attempts I mistook it for the high point and rope-soloed it, finding moves at about 5.6, but then had no more time to traverse for 25 minutes to the north to get to the one that looked highest. Roman may have soloed the Penultimate in the nineties while he was scientificaneering in Nome, but all is fog and uncertainty, it's hard to say. The North Tor is easier, Class 4, or maybe Class 5; I would say DON'T bring the rope in summer, but the thing can be useful snagging two people tied together by one when they are whizzing down the icy face in winter.

Earp had no love for the summit slopes and their bottomless chutes into wall holler; she suffered my intimacy with the summit tors, my fabricated little rules for proper conduct when claiming ascents of Osborn, the merciless icy wind, and the way I foodled around in the scree and bullet-hard ice, picking my way ever so slowly across easy ground. Many say they have climbed the Oz, some will tell of driving snow machines to the top-- but most, upon interrogation, reveal they merely reached the summit ridge, and do not deem the tors poking out the top of the mountain worthy of including in their definition of ascent.

The theme is contrivance as a motivator. Without the conventions of traditional ascent, one would be content to stop short of the summit and there would be no game to play, no reason to escape the GLUE OF TOWN in the first place, no harmony of line or palette, no winner of the Iditarod. And the rules need to be tailored to the particularities of a particular range. I therefore propose that an ascent in the Kigs only be counted if the very topmost tiny rock has been attained.

I stopped short literally one meter shy of the top of the tor. I raised my axe in the air, and it attained an altitude above sea level commensurate with the top of Osborn, 4714 feet. It was not difficulty that stopped me from the last move, though, God!, you hadda be careful there, a thing just skids right on down and doesn't stop from there. No, it was.... complexity, human complexity, I was paralyzed, transfixed, we had to get back home.

Therefore and hencefoth, Osborn awaits its FWA..

Kayuqtuq, third attempt

2011-03-10T18:06:00.000-08:00

Ecstatic Spring weekend clusterJoy in the eastern Kigs, basing out of Earp's Rock of Ages home for not yet retired educators at Salmon Lake, the weather almost flawless, 10 degrees, negligible wind, traveling conditions a plane of perfect vanilla cream-- but due to partner's rucksack succumbing to Fell-off-the-machine syndrome, partnerless again in the high cirques for attempt number 3 on the mountain that I was this time calling (for my own personal silly referential reasons) KAYUQ, (Pk. 4000+) short for KAYUQTUQ, inupiaq for "Fox", which seems fitting for this peak which is located and visible from road at the head of Fox Creek drainage, There are so many Fox Mountains already, who wants another? If anyone has any information as to old Qaweraq names for this hill, let it percolate through, but I suspect no bubbles of name have made it to the surface of the present as the peak is rather secluded and unassuming, though it may possibly be the second highest summit in the Kigs, and unclimbed to boot. (The U.S.G.S. maps I have seen smell a bit ambiguous as to its height. They smudge the lines the way R.E.M. smudges lyrics.)
If I have made this mountain sound like a brooding, inaccessible K2, it is not. First of all, this is the Kigs we are talking about, a range for which the paradox is insoluble whether they are mountains or mere hills. Second, KAYUQTUQ appears to be a walk up from the South from the Fox Creek drainage. Each of my three attempts from the more precipitous north side have been beaten back by the same factors: late starts, general disorganization, laziness, and chickenheartedness, which are not factors that would speak heavily for no one's technical difficulty other than my own. But I will be back, and each attempt on old KAYUQTUQ, the tenth C-Tog technically, builds fond memories and deepens my love for the mountain.

Three views of Pk. 4000+ from last weekend's trip, March 05, 2011:

(above) From up in the east cirque of KAYUQTUQ (Pk. 4000+), the very headwaters of Crater Creek. There's got to be a still-living nub of glacier in this cirque. The route I followed was intended to be the path of least resistance: up the broad couloir towards the left, then right along the easy back side of the south ridge. The bowl at the top of the couloir was loaded, however. There was evidence everywhere of recent and cataclysmic avalanching from the mighty storm two weeks previous, the tremendous south wind that had drifted everything around Nome in a weird and anomalous way and shut down town for three days.
My paranoia spiked up like a dust devil off the desert. The snowpack underfoot seemed to faintly echo with the sound of cellos. Up above on the ridge, the cornices could be seen blowing gauzy banners of transluscent, rainbowed spindrift; this gully was actively loading! A massive chicken-out ensued, and I turned around.

(above) From the southeast near Salmon Lake.

(above) From the south, looking up Fox Creek. Some dirtbag must have hiked up this mountain sometime. You, reader, give a call, sharpen up your crampons, let's go this weekend....

(above) Janet Balice and friends in Crater Creek. A dog team in Crater Creek! Completely and absolutely something I have not seen in ten or more trips through here. The irredoubtable DIBELS is in lead-cat position. This is DIBELS second appearance in this blog in Crater Creek. This team can cover some ground, let me tell you. They started out from Nome late on Friday night, slept cold in Earp's bombed-out, blown-out cabin at Salmon Lake, penetrated into Crater Creek on Saturday, and mushed back to Nome via Eldorado Creek on Sunday.

And now, another departure from the pure mineral indifference of mountain pictures... More dogs and humans superimposed on the snow, ice, and tundra: friends!

(above) Salmon Lake, looking south, Inuruq in background. Adhesion of TOWN GLUE is proportional for each individual in a party, meaning that, for a group to get out of town is no more or no less difficult than for one individual to get out of town. The GLUE was fierce as usual, tragedy and psychological complexity lurking behind every move. Ryan, Nikki, Carl, and me, already exhausted from the very trenches of public school education, headed out on the highway sometime near midnight. Somewhere in the night we passed Janet and Dibels, detained as well by the GLUE, evidently. We'll get to the comfy cabin and pass out, was the thought that kept each person driving all night, bumping over sastrugi for numb hours in pitch darkness.

But there was to be NO COMFY CABIN. Alai! The monstrous South Wind had blown out a window. The familiar contours of the cabin's interior were coated over with snow. The newly-installed drip stove had ripped apart in an avalanche. Condition: ICE STATION ZEBRA. Instead of gratefully flopping onto snoring cots, we were bailing ship for hours and hours, ferrying little loads of snow out the door with our brightly-colored shovels until the middle of the morning. Janet arrived expecting steaming mugs and warmth, and instead found people scurrying about grimly locked in struggle. Through dint of Ryan's huge exertions the following day, the cabin was resurrected. I could point to the epic of the cabin as the reason I didn't get up the mountain, But I know, to quote Jimmy Buffet, to avoid delusion, it's my own damn fault.

(above) Looking south from summit of Inuruq last Sunday. Icy. Loaded also, but windward-slope conditions still icy and good.

You better bring your buckets

We got some dreams to drain

I'll be at the bottom

I've been right here waiting so long

Just waiting so long

Writers Night

2011-02-26T00:45:00.000-08:00

(left) An earlier Iteration of the Ayasayuk ice, early '00s. The Grade III+ pillar where Mikey and I epic-ed is at center of photo.

Nome Arts Council held a WRITERS NIGHT last month in January, local authors getting together to read their original works inside the awesome vault of Old St. Joe's Church. Mine came out steaming like a fresh pile of ANAQ, it being the product of a weird eight hour blitz of most-likely abominable writing that occurred just prior to the reading. It was fun writing about Mikey, she is a type of badass of the positive attitude.

CAPE NOME

Mikey's going to come off. Any moment she's going to explode off the ice and be dangling in space in the wind and darkness. My job will be to hold her on a top rope and try not to go skating off the edge of the frozen waterfall when she goes. The rope will pendulum and saw through banks of overhanging icicles and shattered granitic gneiss.

It was hard, the move. I had done it on lead twenty minutes ago and peed my pants a little. But the really exhausting thing had been dealing with the pitons just below the crux. To bang the pitons in I had to cram my body into this cramped little alcove of stalactites and thrutch around trying to get a good hammer swing; the footing was bad, everything was horrible, the sun was going down, I was there for an hour making grunting noises and dropping things while Mikey sat below patiently holding the rope, her warmth sublimating away despite wearing both our big puffy coats. But the pins had been pump well spent; they had given me the security to commit to the Grade IV ice pillar above.

Then it was Mikey's turn to follow. As had I, she waged a titanic battle trying to get the pins out... Tap... Tap... Tap... Even though I couldn't see her from up top the pillar, I could picture her down there thirty feet below, all puffy coats, helmets, headlamp and bobbles, kicking, kicking, trying to get footing, all the while trying to pound out vise-gripped strips of metal using new modern ice-climbing tools that are so light they are named after sub-atomic minutae. Tap... Tap... Tap... went the Quarks for twenty-five minutes. Like any faithful dirtbag climber, Mikey was not going to leave without recovering the gear, she had been schooled to the point of paranoia, recover the gear, and now she couldn't hear me yelling to forget the gear, I'm freezing, just try to get up, even though it's too hard.

Finally, the tapping stopped. The rope moved a little. I knew Mikey was abandoning the pins and going for the crux. And it was then I knew she was going for a whipper.

(left and below) Mikey on top-rope, Left Flow-First Iteration, sometime in the early '00s. The left flow was always quite a bit easier than the center one. I soloed it on several occasions, which tells you just how easy it must have been, but no one else will ever know for sure because it was blasted into chunks and trucked away to exist as part of the new jetty at the Port of Nome, as well as other seawall structures within road's reach on the Seward Peninsula.

She isn't going to back off, you see. The climbing spirits flow through Mikey and have taken control. Her big mushing mittens are set in the wrist loops of her Quarks. With characteristic determination, she is gripping down on cold icy shafts and setting the tools in the vertical ice above. I know she is totally pumped from fussing with the pins in the alcove, but somehow I also know that nothing is going to stop Mikey from pitching herself at that crux like Don Quixote at the windmills. The quarks are rebounding off the ice. Prepare for impact.

I pat my anchor— a network of three willow branches knitted together with slings to equalize the forces. It should hold. But suddenly my anchor seems absurd. It's the "Help me Mr. Wizard moment." That vertiginuous feeling when your awareness scopes out to a point in space where you can view yourself against the wall, the veils of denial disintegrate, you realize you have done a silly childish thing and imperiled lives unnecessarily. What's Charlie going to think? What of my own spouse, Kristine? The light is gone. Mikey is emitting audible epithets over the breeze, terrible thrashings, ominous cussings, if her students could hear her now they would not recognize her. The rope moves up an inch or two. I'm sitting in a pool of slush trying to stamp out footholds.

The current of fear and sympathetic amygdala response running up and down the rope intensifies. An inhuman sound begins to rise over the wind, a moaning wail, the sound of an animal suffering horribly... catecholamines and fear receptors are triggering and firing, alarm is running up the rope like a current, MIkey has the screaming-barfies sensation in her hands, the wrist loops have cut off her circulation, her legs are starting to sewing-machine. Here it comes. With one hand off the rope, I fumble frantically with an ice screw. Maybe I can push it into something and lash more of myself to the cliff, but I drop the screw, my mitten is out on the runway preparing for take-off but I can't reach it. The sun is reduced to burning embers over the Bering Sea.

A scream. A perfect, Hollywood, girl scream, several seconds duration, with receding Doppler effect. Mikey is off. Sudden pressure. Rope stretch and rope twang.

And now I have been jerked right off my stance and pulled forward like a diving shortstop. I'm gliding smoothly across the frozen pool at the top of the waterfall. Somewhere I hear the crashing sound of ice, and a muffled squawk. I'm heading for the lip. Maybe I can grab those two gravestone-shaped chunks of gneiss there to stop from going over the edge. I don't feel too bad about my own injury or death, but I feel really really terrible about Mikey's...

Tough plants, those willows. No first person narrative from crumpled bodies. There's no way to dramatize what amounts in the end to a routine top-rope fall, but then again, this story was not about the fall. I came to a stop with my head looking down over the edge, the rope locked off twangy tight in the belay device. Now that I could see her, turns out Mikey really was dangling in space, like Kurz, Arachne, Jonathan Hemlock, her headlamp revealing tiny flakes of snow drifting down. We could actually hear each other now...

"I think I'm starting to get the hang of it!" yells Mikey.

__________________________________________________________________

(above) Mikey emerging from Osborn's Northeast Cirque (home to the largest little living glacier in the Kigluaik) and starting up the East Ridge. First we slogged up the broad couloir at the left end of Osborn's huge marble north face. Near the top, we took a side trip up a three-pitch, M4 variation, the top of which you can see behind Mikey.

MT. OSBORN

Have I sucked Mikey in over her hat again? Nobody else breaks into a grin when you ask them if they want to go suffer in the Kigluaik Range just to climb a mountain. What does Charlie think? I think Charlie is worried about his snow machine.

Mikey hates the snow machine. I hate the snow machine. But the snow machine is necessary to get to the high Kigs. We will have to suffer the snow machine, but we are both slightly in fear of the things, like dudes at a horse ranch. The proposal is to motor in to the north fork of Grand Central valley to the fabled north wall of Mt. Osborne and make an alpine ascent of the northeast ridge, then start the dreaded machines and motor back to Nome, all in one day.

In the morning I can't find my hat, which turns out to be on my head. The glue of town binding me to my life is so thick that I have to hack at it with the machete, damaging women and children on the way out the door, my awful Hog already roaring and fuming in the driveway. Mikey has been ready to go for hours. We arrive at Osborn by two in the afternoon. A yawning, brooding gloom comes over the sun as our machines enter the shadow of the north face of Osborn, a dark, enormous, marble amphitheatre located at the very swirl point of the cusp between weather basins, the mighty Imruk Basin to the north, the wise and omnipotent Pacific Ocean to the south. Osborn's wall is 2,500 ft. and draped with ice. Mikey and I take up the long axes and head up a low angle snow gully at the wall's left extremity. The snow is deep, and we have to plod using the insectile "upward posthole" trick.

(above) Has this couloir been skied? North Cirque Osborn, '06 or so. Once again, the naming problem: North Couloir?

(below) Mikey in the marble halls.

Hours pass. Mikey and I are having an utter blast. We are in the mountains, the sacred meta-sedimentary chunk of Osborn itself, and walls are all around. We are feeling so good we decide to bust out the rope and make a three-pitch variation up a rock band, mixed climbing up to M3. I place cams and Mikey takes them out. Our crampons bite ice and our tools hook limestone. We top out on the crest of the northeast ridge. It's not steep, but it's bullet hard, so we leave the rope on. All Alaska is at our feet now, you can make out Distin and White Alice thirty-five miles south. The summit of Osborn, a certain little rimed-up hump on the summit ridge above us, begins to look tantalizingly close. The snow has gone peach, but neither of us notices.
(left) Mikey at the belay on our mixed variation to the North Couloir. There was some real climbing, though the real climbing was still just practice for the real thing.

Again, the sudden moment of awareness, the snapping out of the aerobic trance. What the hell are we doing? I suddenly think. The sun is going down. The middle-of-nowhere quotient is fantastically high. And here's Mikey and me like the dazed children we already were questing upward for the top of the mountain. Epic. Why was it hidden to our perception until the last minute, why didn't I see the epic coming? We were having fun, I guess.
As often happens at sunset, the breeze has changed direction. We stop for a conference.
"Down?"
"That's what I was thinking."
"You got any water?"
"Almost nothing. Whaddya you got?"
"Nothing."

(above) Mikey near our high point on the East Ridge of Osborn, right about the time we snapped out of our climbing trance and realized we had continued too long. I returned the following year and soloed the ridge; it's the kind of thing where nothing is the least bit hard, but you wouldn't want to slip or you'd go for a high-speed pinball.

We have to make five rappels. Mikey is bonking. She is stumbling like a zomby, but it's OK because we're off the part of the mountain where a fall was going to result in a rapid sliding fall of up to 800 feet. In the gully, I start bonking too. It's a dehydration bonk, a severe one. We're both zombies, just the worst kind, speechless, listless, joyless, hollow shells. We have to rest for twenty minutes simply to gather enough energy to walk for five. Hallucinations set in, flashes and movements in the corner of the vision. It's the middle of the night now, and I have Mikey's headlamp, which doesn't seem fair, so I turn to give it back to her, but she is far, far up the mountain still— I have left her behind. Not necessarily for dead, but it makes me wonder. And now I am wracked with guilt, because I'm not going to wait for her. Because there is only thing in the world. There is only the thermos full of liquid H2O waiting for me at the machines.

We will arrive back in town at six-thirty in the morning, just as the concern calls are beginning. In the time it takes to get off the mountain and drive the machines forty-five miles back home in the icy cold, we will live several lifetimes, lifetimes full of suffering, nauseau, and pain. But now Mikey has arrived at the machines at last. And now we are all packed up, and the dreaded moment has arrived: it's time to pull the cord on the machine.

Mt. Distin, January 2011

2011-01-31T23:44:00.000-08:00

(above) Mt. Distin. The quintessential foothill of the Kigs taken from Grub Gulch."Distin Bluff" (Pt. 1129) is the little knob visible in the distance at the left edge of photo. Silver Creek is the little drainage coming in under the Bluff from the left. The boat in the foreground is like Hemingway's leopard; no one has explained what it was seeking at this altitude.

ICE REPORT; By New Year's, the Thanksgiving ice had dissipated into a thin film. Gone was the nouveau-art skirts of cellophane, only a single layer of seran wrap remained, not so much fun for climbing. But then, in early January, a refresh: there came a night of freezing rain. The snow draped on the hillsides had become saturated, then flash frozen. The white-covered world was once again become an ice climb.

The glue of town was viscous, VISCOUS! But we made it out...

(above) The Bluff, (Pt. 1129) Ryan, at the base of the bluff, between Silver Creek and Steep Creek, on the shores of Goldbottom. I wonder what the miners called this formation? We're about an hour's ride from town. Minutes earlier, coming down the icy slope above his left shoulder in the photograph, Ryan's machine briefly qualified as an uncontrolled projectile. On went my crampons upon leaving the machines, and my footing was happy for them. Ryan motored back to town to work one of his many jobs.

(above) Looking down Silver Creek. Believe it or not, that right-hand wall in the photo sports a tiny scampering little 60 ft. nothing dribble-climb of water ice. I was so jonesing for ice, I pounced on the scrap, like a Brit licking candy wrappers from the trash bags.

(above) Bluff, from high in Silver Creek. In the distance, Bear Mountain, over by Banner Creek, along with the ubiquitous lentiforms overhead in flying-saucer mode. I completed the trifecta of Silver Creek/Distin summit/Bluff by squeezing in a route on the Bluff at the end of the day, in darkness, to complete a damn-near perfect day in the mountains.

(above) Metamorphic clifflets at the very head of Silver Creek. Some fine mixed bouldering times up here, a new little place... It was right about here I realized I had stumbled upon a sacred day, a day to end all days, a day where you could have climbed anything in the Kigs had you had the good sense to get there in time... RAW power of Earth thickly eddying at the ground interface, the tricky moon literally emerging from out of the summit of Mt. Distin like an emerging egg-- the climbing is everywhere, everywhere is climbing, mostly daggers, piolet panne and poignard, and now the sublime crampon to the summit, with the supreme panorama of the Kigluaitch all bathed in sunset and mauve, for which my camera stopped functioning.

(above) approaching Distin summit, January 16, 2011. That's not really snow in the picture, it's pretty much a sheet of ice. Fifth time to the summit, I think, in addition to many more trips and peeing expeditions to this area.

(above) This silly map shows S: Snow machine, B: Bluff, and C: Cliffs at Silver Creek. As you can see, Distin is just a hill, but by making things very difficult for yourself by taking the hard way at every turn, and bouldering hard on every rock, and contorting and flexing and hooking as high off the ground as you dare at every opportunity, you can actually pretend like you are doing the real thing.

Thanksgiving Ice 2010

2010-12-20T21:51:00.000-08:00

A big freezing rain storm came, Thanksgiving 2010. Like Christo coating plastic wrap over everything, the QAWERAQ Peninsula was coated with several centimeters of clear, water ice, trowelled smooth by the usual horrendous wind combined with freezing cusps. Like a town emerging up through the surface of a skating rink, the two-dimensional plane of ice conforming skin-tightly to the three-dimensional surfaces... Schools shut down in Fairbanks, Anchorage, Seattle... No snow day here in Nome— at recess the kids launched huge standing glissades across the Zambonied playground. Routine hikes on the hillsides had morphed into Grade I alpine climbs. And the rocks!...

(above) King Mt. rocks, Sunday after Thanksgiving. The shellac was back! Holds frontpoints surprisingly well. Man, this is some tasty climbing, what better way to spend a Sunday than to cling to odd facets and angles of these metamorphics, basted with translucent climbing sauce and topped with snow whipped into a crusty froth. Little cracks and pockets stuffed with an extra centimeter or two of ice are especially crunchy. Now it's time to hang all your weight from one arm!

(right) Weak November light on King Mt. For every route I have topped, I have chickened out on four others. Frontpoints routinely explode from the verglas with great scrapings of metal. Four millimeters of the icy film bonded to the rock seems to be enough to support a front point or hooked tool, but the charm of climbing this film, stretched as it is beautifully over a bare face, quickly runs out when you are any distance above the landing, with tib/fib snapping devices strapped to your legs. As usual, the only tool placement you can really trust is a good solid thwack into a turf patch.

Hook picks or prosthetics. Torque the crack or broken back. Concentrate or frontpoint skate. Climb ice or Spot Device.

(above) Mud mounding action from early Spring 2010. The "mud mounds" are tailings piles left over from gold mining, dirt piles that freeze at certain humidities into the consistency of ice. They are worked over by gold miners with heavy machinery in the summertime, (all the more in 2010 due to the rising price of gold) become saturated by Fall rains, and freeze into icy dunes suitable for a blunt, barbaric form of ice climbing... and probably a toxic one as well.

(above) Tailings. Once again, this image is from a previous season, Spring of '09, and it is relevant to note that the dirt in this picture has been worked and reworked since then, so that the mounds in the picture are somewhat different than this year's mounds (of which I have no picture; the camera has been phasing out lately.)

(below) Chipped tooth in the Mounds.

It is perfectly possible to get one's "climbing ya-ya's" on tailings in winter. Out back of where I used to live in the legendary encampments on Happy Road in Fairbanks, an old mining pit was carved into the hillside of Ester Dome, and many a hippy friend was lured from the party up to the forested hillside to try mud climbing in a moonlit amphitheatre. When I got to Nome, it was like one vast mining pit, and I remembered the fun we had had on the tailings at Happy Road. Mud mounding is seldom without highballing: one never knows whether the impending fall will bring a harmless roll down steep mud, or a bone-splintering snaggy snapfest. The fine tailings are better; sparks fly from your tools when the tailings are coarse.

The mud mound's beauty lies in their transience. Like ice, the climbs are temporary, soon to be demolished by machines and resurrected in the form of new moufile:///Users/imcrae/Desktop/IMG_0668.JPGnds. I've been motoring out to the mounds frequently this month, in the thin crack of daylight between the end of work and sunset. Glazed and gleaming ever so faintly with the Thanksgiving shellac, the mounds lead inward to darkness like a corner of the desert. More on Mud Mounds

(above) The ice climbs at Ayasayuk in the early 2000s. Climbed with various partners over the years, and probably been climbed by others (Paul LaBolle among them)... These climbs have been blown to bits and are gone now... the pillar in the middle was a steep III or IV. Link to previous post on Ayasayuk

AYASAYUK is a secret spot out on the Norton Sound coast where great forces of nature clash together to shape the environment. There were giants in those days. A high running bluff with bedrock at its base terminates by the oceanside at Cape Nome, where the bluff has been blasted away in increments, leaving an impressive granitic face that grows higher every year. I never dare touch the poised tripwire-laden rubble pile until it is frozen up. Those guys that chew it out during the summer are bad-ass.

(Below) Ayasayuk, Saturday after Thanksgiving, 2010.

This year I kept getting shunted over to the left onto easier mud slopes. Often felt a vague sense of unease, probably due to looseness. Had a couple good direct pitches between several of the many roads, and several smatterings of wet water ice here and there. This is my Fifth Iteration of the cliff in my eleven years in Nome. Here are some pictures of earlier iterations.

(below) Last winter, December 2008.

(below) Somewhere around 2003.

Those were the days of fat ice. Before the giant came with his ANAUTAQ and chopped it all away. The Earth here has been battered; I'll bet the Earth was happy to find its new home in Shishamareff and Teller. All the preceding pictures were taken from the same spot on the Council Road; you can see the cliff growing bigger.

(above) Cliff detail, Ayasayuk, 2010. If you look very closely you can discern a few blobs of ice. It felt good to sink a pick in real, blue ice. Man, the lengths you gotta go just to get a little.

(above) Teller Road, Snake River bridge, December 2010. Christo also wrapped the roads for Thanksgiving. Even men with serious trucks expressed their trepidation. There was surely good ice in the Kigluaiks, but I just kept wussing out on the drive. One Sunday afternoon I went to the Sunset Rocks but walked the Teller Road from the Snake River to get to the rocks. The TINGMIURAQ on top of the sign had warned me not to drive any further.

People sometimes think that climbing ends with summer, or that climbing is only possible through organized efforts involving gear and ropes. But any thing, big or small, has routes on it. The chair where you are sitting has some good climbs on it, probably. Hence, climbing is always happening, at any time, at least to those of a bouldering mentality.

When everything is wrapped in cellophane, then everything becomes cellophane climbing. My tally for the Thanksgiving ice: 5 quick trips to the Mud Mounds, 3 trips up Anvil Mt. a trip to the Windmill boulders, a trip to Cape Nome, a trip to King Mt., a trip to the Sunset Rocks, and lots of trips without quite falling down. Climbing up and down obscure little circuits on moss and verglas, a little bit up here, a little bit down there, monkey hang off some turf, stretch the sacrum, go for it, hook the top, feeling fine....

Routes were done. I am reporting them. Let them now be worked by backhoe and explosive, front loader and sluicebox, until they are blasted away completely. It is Solstice now and a fine blizzard has buried the shellac under sastrugi curdles and whipped dollops. It is not comforting to know that the shellac will be down there all winter, under the snowpack, at the base of all things, waiting....

Slump & Consolation: Fall of 2010

2010-11-21T20:01:00.000-08:00

Cirro stratus over the Kigs on a Friday night in September from my doorstep in Icy View (left), right on time to create the illusion of Job one more time to cap off the school week, a week of fine Fall weather held prisoner prowling the playgrounds smelling out trouble before it happens, all the meanwhile huge arrangements being made for the forthcoming weekend expedition and asses being made of oneself in one's family, all for the sake of climbing in the Kigs, followed by Expedition Friday and the sudden inexplicable rising of huge barometric pressure changes at the 3,000 ft. level, wind rising, the Nomens hunkering down to only party, the agony of defeat. Is this what life is like in El Chalten?

This pattern has been manifesting for a year and a half: a precise and maddening enhosement, the weather bad when time is available, weather good when harnessed to responsibilities and the GLUE of town. I have been through slumps before in 32 year career, but this one has really settled in. What is implied by SLUMP is a failure to goal-achieve the BIG things. There is always bouldering in this Arctic bouldering paradise, there is perpetually climbing, almost every day come moves with a move of the pure isolation over a particular section of stone, almost every weekend comes with a GRATEFUL TO THE WIFE mountaineering adventure of a surprisingly high cast— but the thing that one lives for is the LARGE, the EXTENDED, the CAN'T FIND MY WAY BACK HOME of total commitment and wisdom-enhancing NO FEAR. And a summit. In this range, the tippy-top counts, it's part of the mathematical fun.

Nothing coming in a year and a half. Enhosement.

(above) Penny Boulders, crazy meta-sedimentary a mile or two north of Penny Bridge, looking south in this photo, Teller Road in background: homo traverse boulder and top of the orange lichen alpha clump of this group, the raptor tor, a fine klettergarten.

Searching for causes of mountaineering slump, I consider this blog, this VERY BLOG. There exists an exact correlation between start up of blog and beginning of slump. COULD THIS BLOGGING B.S. YOUR ARE READING NOW BE AFFECTING CLIMBING OUTCOMES? It's a proven fact (i jokes) that the nonentropy of minds participating in a mass consciousness structure (such as an internet site) can affect the probabilities of a climb. More concretely, maybe keeping a blog is messing up my climbing brain. The reintroduction of Ego after all that work to annihalate it!

Or, blame it on the GLUE of TOWN. Muir had Martinez; I have Nome. But this seems grossly unfair. For the time has come to reveal a truth. The slump is the result of an awakening. The slump is transcendence, a stage of enlightenment. The slump is the product of a slow awakening to the BEAUTY of the precious gifts of the GLUE? It is time to look through the skin of this conceit and view the heart of the concept, the truth behind this term, "GLUE" OF TOWN, and see what really lies therein...

so many blessings i cannot speak of them without the fragile flame of what they are blowing out like a candle: love, family, friends— don't speak of them for they are the truly sacred— spray of climbing, but spray not of the sacred, love, family and friends...

now the truth comes out: the GLUE of town is composed of these wonderful things,

these blessings... this quagmire, this nemesis, this THING I had reified into a Chimera, is in reality the very fabric of which life is made, everything that is good, respectable, likable, warm, and human, everything that I cannot describe because my subcription is to the gloom and doom... climbing is not important— it is the GLUE that truly feeds the spirit...

no wonder it takes such STEELY FOCUS to turn away from town

(above) Consolation: Penny Crags, from Penny Boulders, September 25, 2010. Denied the copious Chi-intakes of the high Kigs, a great bouldering day between storms can forestall the onset of the climbing demons...

into white, the sudden giving way

one foot is gonna be on ice today

and one foot on rock, and rock was my bottle,

look at that white creeping in.

well, let it cover over,

let the whole thing go down,

i'm tired of the spray,

let the machines resound,

once more into the iPodstream,

the roaring and the Kougarak,

heading into the Kigs today

with four bottles in eight socks.

the blog goes from tundra

into a blanket of snow,

now you've become an icecap

with your secrets below,

let go of summer,

it was overrated anyway,

the Cobras are out, and

now it's time to play

you crunchety-crunched,

you were stemming on rime,

don't push too hard,

ooh, that delicate spine!

the clouds were shrieking,

faith is absolute

live to see another day,

it's all turning to white.

(above) Rocky Mountain on the left, Pk. 2374, 100 ft. Bluff on the right, October 17, 2010. Consolation in the form of a slog up the main mountain, my third time up this hill. Too warm temps that day for the choss bluff.

(left) Earp starting up the Bluff in a previous, more frozen-up year than this one is shaping up to be.

(above) Tom's Cabin: rocks are visible as smudges up on the ridge. Upon closer inspection, they open up to reveal,surprising depths of bouldering. Not the Kigs, but a sweet Fall consolation.

(right) October 10, 2010 (10-10-'10! No wonder that day was such fine consolation), late afternoon, up at Tom's Cabin Rocks. Pictured are a pair of aretes I slimed up. Anything under 5.6, I probably slimed up that day, including top-outs on each of the surprisingly exposed pinnacles. However, the slime parameters were high that day, post extended Autumn rainfall, the lichen saturated to the point of mush. I know Graham and Jeff had slimed up a lot of these problems in previous years during their summer residence at the haunted cabin, and, for all I know, so did Tom, before them. Increased ectoplasmic readings in this gulch...
(above) The Discovery Goldfields, my ice hunting grounds on Sunday, November 7. No ice to be found, but the snow was the finest consolation imaginable, silky sibilant grain snow parting with a sigh over steel edge of touring ski, perfectly weight-supporting.

   TINMIURAQ (above)   What privilege to be an integrated part of a hillside for a day.

   And indeed, these are times of wretched SLUMP. The Kigs are but a distant memory, the Alaska Range so far away now I can no longer imagine facing those looming seracs. No throne have we sat upon for many a month. Only the gnarled clumps that cling to the ground, closer to home.
   Yet, zoom in, zoom in. These clumps contain fractal depths and thrones in their own right... flex and strain down in your tundra pit, hidden away from sight wrestling with rock puzzles... what difference be a move whether it is one foot up, or thousands of feet off the deck?

Bringing Out the Bucket

2010-11-05T20:23:00.000-07:00

This "Prindle Bucket" (above) stashed in the moraines at Crater Creek is an indication I am still in the game. I am a climber who has gear stashed in the mountains. My next attempt is imminent. I'm a player. To the question, "Been doin' any climbing lately?" I am able to answer in the strong affirmative, yes, how are you, as a matter of fact I AM climbing at this moment, simply by virtue of having a bunch of hardware and ropes in a 5-gallon bucket cached deep in the mountains (because my back is trashed and I have to double-carry everything these days.)

But now, September had come. The bucket was coming out. Summer rock climbing in the Kigs was coming to an end. The beginning of Loserdom once more....

   Saturday, September 17... Town had ravaged me... Too many proboscises had been reamed into my chakras...I had completely lost the plot... a chance opening of circumstances allowed escape from the glue, the terrible GLUE of TOWN, the glue that requires such shameful and embarrassing self-absorption to overcome, to simply get out and do some climbing.
   Yukon Jack acted counterintuitively as a stimulant, and got me out of Nome on Friday night. But then, hours later, mounted on a four-wheeler with no high beam in pitch darkness out by Salmon Lake, one mile from my destination after a long ride on a long Friday evening, I drove straight into a large herd of Muskox on the road.
   OOMINGMAK!! Drat! I had only been wanting to get to the cabin and collapse in my bag. Now I would have to bull my way through this crowd of head-butters like a Polaris Centaur. Again I would wear the hat of wildlife harasser.
   One calf did not grasp the concept of get outta the road. His mom, like Jim Otto, squarely in my headlights. I rode in tight, quick circles, advancing forwards in incremental loops, my little bobble head swivelling, waiting for the awful contact with the great skull-plate coming out of the darkness. It took 25 minutes to sweep the herd slowly off, and certainly constituted the most perilous moment of the whole trip. I was grateful to finally fall asleep in the utter serenity and peace of the most grateful cabin at Salmon Lake... (below)

   Ostensibly, this bucket trip would also be a rematch with the lumpen heap of Pk. 3535, scene of my fog and ennui the week before. And indeed, the day dawned beautiful, one of those not-quite-freezing Autumn days suspended in time, but the familiar Kigsborne ennui of hiking up a hill and calling it a climb persisted, like vestigial fog on a sunny day.
   I followed my trail along the bluffs on the south side of Crater Creek. AKLAQ was all around, including the polite brown one that Janet, Carl and I had met a week earlier. But the Aklaitch were fat with fish and berries; situation non-stressful. I dozed and power-lounged on tussoks, captivated by the thrumming humming marvel of the Kigs... That weird thing happened, where the mountains cease to be inert stone, and reveal themselves to be sentient presences, ever communicating.... no way to translate it.

   The climbing day slipped away. I had been defeated (for the umpteenth time) by the debilitating power drains of town, coupled with my own foolish inability to patch them.
   As consolation, I went for a hike (above) up the upper east fork of Crater Creek, a valley I'd never seen before. Up some high moraines until I could see around the corner, lusting for a view of the hidden north face of Pk. 3325— it proved to be another of those brown facades on the clash zone between the schist and pluton, reminiscent of False Tigaraha: not worth climbing, unless some ice drip were to drip it on down, which looked entirely possible, north-facing cauldron like it is... A stupendous view down the length of the entire upper Crater Creek canyon— but I had forgotten the camera down at the bucket. You'll just have to slog up there yourself.

Pk. 3535, Crater Creek

2010-10-09T15:53:00.000-07:00

Pk. 3535 at the head of Crater Creek. I walked up most of the South ridge which slants upwards to the right in the picture.

Some lameness has crept in here. It brings to mind the unresolved question of: what is the lower limit of blogworthiness? The latest is now I have failed to climb a Class 2 hill. I have launched two Alaskan expeditions intending to achieve success on this walk-up, and been denied. Shall I then take up valuable room in cyberspace to report this embarassment? These are questions for the new age; there is not yet an accumulated body of wisdom to help me decide.
But why not blog? Let me detail every firing of a neuron, I shall recreate my brain on a worldwide web in conjunction with all of yours'. The fog which follows is only an indication of my interior mental environment.

Pk. 3535 as it appeared the day I went up it, September 5, 2010.

Fog over mountain

Fog over mind

Soon we will be mantling

Up into the sunshine

The top of the fog is an ocean

And the sky will be blue

We'll climb to the top of this island

If we can only make it through...

(left) View, or lack thereof, western slopes of Pk. 3535 from halfway up South Ridge.

(right) Claustrogo... A form of madness begins to set in after a day mountain climbing in the fog. The dissonance created when Equilibrioception is robbed of its visual component creates a mild anxiety, a hybrid of claustrophobia and vertigo: I call it Claustrogo! Something to dwell on as one stumbles upward through fog... (More on Claustrogo) At a shoulder, the ridge changed direction; I could sense it in the organelles of my vestibular system. The wind intensified. The fog was really howling now! The promised sunshine might still lie above, but this mountain was having trouble getting it up. Come to think of it, the clouds had gone gray; the September sun was getting low. A vision of Peronto's weather map from Friday flashed into my head, all green zones and whorling Ls, along with the thought that here was come the next storm.

Another section of weary plodding up ahead vanished into the mist. I knew it wasn't far to the top now... But a type of boredom had hold of me. My mind had sprung power leaks. CHI hissed out of me and vaporized in the air like breath. What worth this boring lump of a mountain? my mind reasoned, perhaps justifiably. I was happy to turn around and head down. There were interesting granite cliffs on the way. I could huddle close to the rock in the fog and pretend to be in Tuolumne. Pk. 3535 differs on Amato's geology map from the other peaks in the Crater Creek cirque (the C-Togs and Kayuktuqs and whatnot) by virtue of being true, unmorphed granite, as opposed to the highly metamorphic gneiss.

(above) DIBELS, Mr. White, Janet.

The miraculous, super-nice thing about the trip was getting to be in the company of friends and loved ones-- I hiked in with Carl, Janet, and DIBLS, we made it all the way to the First C-Tog and had a great night in the wind and rain. Curious how Carl seems to have his own relationship with Crater Creek, how he repeatedly gets sucked into this vortex. On the way in, we had Encounter #1 with a big, brown, very polite AKLAQ (Janet's first on the Seward, which seems a miracle, given how often she is found in the brush) who ran up a side hill to let us pass. We would see more of him later.

(above) Google Earth, Pk. 3535, and hike up Crater Creek.

Here is one of my own personal hidden secret sequestered meaningless little rule for naming peaks: whichever drainage is primarily responsible for opening up the view so that the peak comes into view, that drainage becomes the eponymous name of the peak. For instance, "Fox Peak" is highly visible from one certain spot on the Kougarak Road where it crosses Fox Creek (when you are looking straight up Fox Creek), hence, the name Fox, even though the mountain in character seems more a denizen of Crater Creek on its northern side. According to this rule, Pk. 3535 would become Crater Mountain, because it lies at the exact head of Crater Creek, and is what you see looking up the valley from the road. It's still rather a lump. And these are just little reductionist fancies I entertain as I slog painfully and interminably over tussocks and through willows.

Return to the Oliver Perry Smith boulders

2010-09-06T21:51:00.000-07:00

(above) Nome-Council Road, looking west. Hike to the marble bands in the picture, walk west along the ridgeline for several miles until you reach a small, fairly paltry set of boulders— the Oliver Perry Smith boulders.

Bill the ferry man had gotten drunk and Johnson found himself stranded again, alone, on the far side of the Channel. There was nothing for it but siwash once again and make the two-day trudge back to Council. He would take the back way, of course. It wasn't the first time.

Johnson rather enjoyed these siwashes, truth be told. His legs covered the miles, his mind was free to roam. Johnson was always known around the diggings as a man who would rather walk miles than ride a mule. A structural engineer by training, he had come from Europe to build bridges, but had soon run afoul of the Council City and Solomon River Railroad Company, and was reduced to a grunt, mucking his living here and there between the two town sites.

(above) The marble band. About 55 ft... extremely can't-dependable MEGA-CHOSS. Some fun highball boulders if you've got the stomach for rock that may crumble and clash into chalk dust any moment.

Johnson came muck-a-lucking along the wagon way in gumboots. He had almost got up to Big Hoorah, was just pulling into view of the encampment, when he saw old Lehnhart ahead on the hill, mucking away at something. Suddenly, Johnson remembered: 'Lehnart— the money I owe 'im!'

Johnson veered off to the west immediately, intending to circumvent his creditor in the willows, but soon found himself ascending a steep draw even further to the west, and topping out on the crest of a high ridge, which he began following, somewhat mindlessly, I might add, further and further west. Johnson ambled along, happy as can be, rifle in his hand.

(above) Looking east along the ridge. What fine FELL WALKING there is on the Seward Peninsula! World class.... It out-Scotlands Scotland.

It was a detour that Johnson sometimes liked to make, especially on trips where he was alone. It took him well out of his way for getting back to Council, but Johnson nursed a secret... a hidden passion that none of his pards would understand: he liked the rocks. Climbing them, that is.

It was like ballet. Old Perry Smith had showed him back in the Dresden days, back in their days at the Technische Hochschule, down by the river on the Elbsandstein. The ways of crimping and torquing the body into the rock, the silent challenge of a rock tower, the strange sort of focus that fell over a man... 'or woman, for that matter,' thought Johnson, remembering Rand's girl that day long ago when they went the wrong way on the Grosser Wehlturm, missing out on placing the schwarze kamin. Oliver flunked out of school because they went climbing that day. But Ollie never stayed flunked for long.'

(above) Oliver. Rather an interesting piece of metamorphic something-or-other. Crazy little mini-dikes that look friable but don't quite break when you finger-crank down on them. Oliver is one of the only worthwhile boulders in the whole obscure clump of boulders.

Old Perry Smith... he would never have done something like mucking for gold, thought Johnson. He would have scoffed at the gold. He would have said something absurd like, "Sport is Panacea!" just to show how damned clever he was, and then...
raced ahead to launch up the rocks, the rocks that were at last hoving into Johnson's view.

(above) OPS boulders looking west. Insignificant little scuds of metamorphic: NOT a destination bouldering area, but a favorite of the miner Johnson's.

But when he got to the boulders, Johnson was momentarily too fatigued to climb. His body sagged down against the big overhanging boulder he fondly called "Oliver," and a deep sigh wheezed out of him as he slumped into the soft cushion of the blueberry tundra. He got out his biscuits, tipped out a hit of the aquavit, measured out his tobacco. He noticed all of a sudden a little bird's nest perched on a foothold at eye level. He tried to remember if it had been there last time he was sitting here. The clouds looked like they had been painted against the blue. Johnson sighed the contented sigh of a man without a care in the world.

(above) Oliver. A fine picnic spot, with shelter from the rain. Note gun for size.

The miner daydreamed. Johnson got to thinking about Germany again. Every Saturday they went to the rocks. They had not questioned the why? They climbed, as Oliver often reminded them, for the ding an sich...

On impulse, with spastic grace, Johnson heaved himself to his feet. The crusty miner faced the rock, and his body seemed to loosen. Delicately, he attached each one of his four limbs to the overhanging rock. His fingers latched on tiny sills. Both his rubber boots cut loose from their footholds, causing his body to swing into space. His blackened fingers darted out and caught a lichen-covered hold to the side. .

(above) Oliver east face. This shot is SO posed. This was the first time I ever remembered to bring my glasses so I could play around with the 10-second self-timer on the camera. I'm pretty sure I sent this problem years ago when I was there with Nils Hahn, but I chickened out of doing it last Sunday.

Johnson flailed. No way he was getting over this overhang. So instead he inched around the boulder, playing the quergang game Ferhmann used to play where you don't let your feet touch the ground or it's like a death fall, and see if you can make it all the way around the boulder without resting.

'Oliver would have sent,' thought Johnson. It was always like that in the Tech tagen, Oliver going up over the beetling hangs, while the rest of them played the traversing game lower down, close to the ground.

(above) Uluraq. Another experiment with the self-timer. There is something inherently narcissistic about a self timer; such a thing seems unsavory. The small piece of stone in this picture is perhaps the least flaky slice in the Oliver Perry Smiths, a fractured sliver fallen off the mother rock, and shaped like an ulu. Note the new toy helmet, the Petzl Elios III.

Johnson played on the rocks until he noticed the sun going down over the Sawtooths and a chill drawing down on the air like a curtain, at which he forgot all about his musings and hastened back in the direction of the Roadhouse, where his friends would be waiting, Lehnart be damned... and he just might get a few ptarmigan on the way back...

(above) High ridge paralleling Nome-Council Road on the west where the road begins to climb over Skookum Pass in the Mile fifties, Fall of 2009. Those are the forgettable Oliver Perry Smith boulders in profile on the top- at least that is my own private little fanciful name I carry around for them in the quick of my own little mind.

Johnson is the person who has climbed this boulder problem before you. Maybe he is a hunter in the Neolithic, but in that case, how do you define a mountain over time?

When you are tempted to post on the internet and claim the FA of a climb on the Seward Peninsula, consider Johnson (who might have lived to go with Allen Carpe on Logan had he not succumbed to the flu in '18), who surely climbed it before you, though his exploits be forgotten.

Third C-Tog North Buttress attempt

2010-08-10T03:44:00.000-07:00

(left) The objective: North Buttress of the "Third C-Tog," the righthand skyline, last week on the July/August cusp. I went in to Crater Creek thinking the route was 5 pitches; I came out realizing it was probably twice that. Base to summit we're looking at about 2,000 ft. in the picture; the route itself might be 1,600 ft. I got one pitch up and BAILED. I could justifiably blame my retreat on the rainy weather, but deep inside, I know the bail was due to my chronic, deep-rooted failure of will. (I count COMMON SENSE as a factor in this chronic failing!) In fact, the weather was so-so during the six days of my trip, constantly threatening, but never precipitating all that much, fine, of course, for the approach days, deteriorating markedly on potential launch days. In 2009 I bouldered my way to the summit via intermittent cliffs and 4th Class turf on the northwest side of the mountain, but the mountain still needs a truly technical ascent. From the back (south) side, the third Tog is a Class 2 walk-up.

The critters: First, the 'Skox (OOMINGMAK) on the hike in, imperiously dominating the right of way (left), then the AKLAQ hanging around our camp the first night (above). He was a young male, and appeared to be nothing more than intensely curious about humans, as if he hadn't quite been paying attention to his mother's lessons and now needed to make up for his inattention in school by studying us closely in real life. He just couldn't get enough of us; he showed off for a while with prodigious swimming feats in a nearby lake, then climbed up class 3 slopes and scree just so he kick back on a high ledge and study us for an hour or two, all the while giving off an air of youthful carefree abandon. I had persuaded Rick Anderson to hike in with me for the first night. After years hiking alone in the Kigs, both Rick and I are a bit jaded on being prey animals all the time. I was so deeply grateful to Rick for being there as we stood by our tents with guns drawn, rendering the whole thing a lighthearted situation.

It was awful lonely bidding goodbye to Rick the next morning. I moved my basecamp up, and was destined to spend the next few days in hyper-aware solitude twitching with constant Bearanoia, both in sleep and wakefulness. Never did see another AKLAQ, but they saw me. They dominated my thoughts completely; but this is the last I shall mention of them for now....

(above) The route: A very pathetic act, here... I went for the Photoshop and drew the little red line EVEN THOUGH I have not yet completed the route. Has the Internet freed us from the penalties for such a transgression? This is the age of transparency. I spent days scoping the route through my shiny new binoculars, and it was SO MUCH FUN drawing the little red line. The crooked arrow points up the anus to a tremendous, sinuous, CHASM that penetrates the heart of the mountain like an intestine.

(above) The foot: these are the initial cliffs of the north buttress. The green parts are generally pretty easy climbing, but in a good drizzle, the green can be utterly treacherous, promising good footholds, but with suddenly variable coefficients of friction. I'm still learning the art of Kigluaik route finding; it's difficult not to let a route default into a GREEN LINE of least resistance. The actual route here needs to go over the overhangs visible on the left.

(above) Proof of climbing. My new Beal rope hanging down 4th and 5th class slopes. This is kind of embarrassing. It might look like one could just SOLO ropeless, and one certainly could, and yet, when one is there, it all feels vaguely treacherous, especially with a scottish mist in the air. In fact, there was a little 5.5 on this pitch; it provided a fine shakedown, no Gri-Gri, just using knots for rope-solo technique. Kigluaik GNEISS is so preposterously fractured that climbing is like that old Mousetrap game: one false move, one twitch, one spasm, and one risks unleashing catastrophic rockfall. Rope soloing makes for such ridiculously slow climbing on this kind of ground that one longs for winter, when it is all frozen in place.

(above) KAYUQTUQ (Fox), Pk. 3950(?), on the divide between Crater Creek and Fox Creek, in essence, the Sixth Tog, and possibly the second highest summit in the Kigs besides the mighty Osborne, which stands nearby to the southwest... I personally don't have access to a map which gives me a reliable altitude for this hill. It pops into view from the Kougarak Road around Fox Creek at Salmon Lake. KAYUQTUQ is only a little sobriquet I have applied in order to track the thing in my cluttered head. If it has a name, could somebody please emerge forth with it?

Kayuqtuq is included in this post by way of a RETRACTION. For, I have already sprayblogged about this mountain in other posts, including the following post last April... Fox and Foxy ...which came after the second of two fun attempts on the mountain's north face the previous winter. In the April post, I revealed myself to be completely befuddled as to which was the true summit. The photograph above, taken from Tog 3, shows which is the true summit, and myself to have been an idiot last April. I shall not feel embarrassed, these types of befuddlements are de rigueur in the convoluted Kigs. I still have not actually summited this mountain. Somebody must have... yes?

(above) The Breach:  the preCambrian Thompson Creek OrthoGneiss has these features I call

   CHASMS...
.... one might simply refer to them as "gullies," but this term lacks the onomatopoeic grandeur of the former word to adequately describe these grand hidden canyons, formed along fault lines within the pluton that act as enormous debris chutes that shed the run-off as the mountain thrusts higher through the lithosphere over time.
   The best climbing of this trip occured after I coiled the ropes for the day, and peeked my head around the corner into this mother of all chasms, the very Breach itself. Chasms often have very good rock, because they contain actual granite that was on the inside of the pluton and didn't get cooked into gneiss. The Breach was no exception. I bouldered upwards on the sidewalls of the chasm for hundreds of feet, losing myself in the continuous movement of granite climbing, sometimes looking down to find myself over that palpable limit where you suddenly say, who are you kidding, this isn't bouldering, it's free soloing... A chasm is, however, a very very very terrible place to be for long, a hanging house of giant beartraps, an enormous playground slide littered with multi-ton boulders, NOT a place you take the boy scouts on the geology tour, a place where the foulest words you could utter are "SEISMIC ACTIVITY..."

(above) The bouldering spot: disgorged from the very maw of the Breach above, it's the Breach Boulders. Some SWEET lines! Friction, layback, offwidth, highballs... Very nice stone... the creek babbles among cobblestones... can't say much for the landings. Worth carrying the shoes for if you venture up Crater Creek....

(above) The Corner: Togs 1, 2, and 3, looking west. The C-togs are not seen from the Kougarak Road, they are AROUND THE CORNER of this T-shaped, obviously glaciated canyon. The first miles of the hike are rather botanical, until you get up on the old moraines in the corner area. I have not yet located any nub of a still-living glacier in Crater Creek, but one may be hiding at the top of the valley.

(above) Togs 1 and 2: looking northeast. Fourth-classed a fun route on Tog 2 in '08 up the right hand side of the main buttress in this picture.

(above) Togs 1 and 2 again, this time looking south. After due consideration, I decided these were two independent structures. Geologically, the C-Togs seem to be the very striking edge of the pluton where it is poking up through the mantle of schist, like a Humpback whale snout breaking up through sea ice. You can pretty much see where the tattered edge of the schist (the sea ice) is riding up on the summit of the granite mountain (the whale's snout).

Why "C-Tog"? What the hell is a C-Tog? Please remember that for all matters geological pertaining to the Kigluait, I regard my ultimate authority to be Amato & Miller's "Bedrock Geologic Map of the Kigluaik Mountains, Seward Peninsula, Alaska, 2004." It's rather like my bible. On the map, the C-Togs appear as little fingernails of pink pressed up against a big zone of brownish-green schist, with a little code that says the pink is pCtog. The map key tells us this is "preCambrian Thompson Creek Orthogneiss." That's the shit! In the absence of any other names, that's what I call the peaks of Crater Creek South Fork...

(above) C-Tog 3 and 4, looking southeast. The little red line shows a very silly but very fun bouldering/scramble excursion I soloed in 2009. (link to silly related post: Crater Creek Scrambles, featuring Carl White ) The yellow line is the north buttress that was the main topic of this post. The outcome of this climb is still very much pending, though it looks like the rains of August may be dampening further prospects for now.

   If Norman Clyde had had Photoshop, would he have been able to resist drawing in the little red and yellow lines?

   Crater Creek is a fantastic place once you get up there. It's as good as any National Park. It's the epicenter of Nome climbing, which ain't saying much, brother, let me tell you, but it's a better hike any day than Grand Central Valley to the south, where the masses go...

   HIKING ADVICE: I would recommend the south side of Crater Creek Valley (left as you're looking up Crater Creek from the Kougarak Road.) There's a bluff paralleling and slightly elevated above the river to the south; if you keep strictly to that bluff, that should keep you out of bushwhacking trouble. When you reach the beginnings of the moraines (a deep unnamed drainage joins in from the left, or south) it is time to cross Crater Creek and swing wide to the right (north) as you travel left around the Corner. Don't be too tempted to cut the corner on the inside (southwest), it gorges out into some less pleasant, rocky hiking.
   As for the parking on the road... man, I just don't know, lots of camps and private property, good luck, don't piss anyone off, camp on the shoulder of the road, get permission from someone, figure out something unobtrusive... I like to park a quarter mile or so south of Crater Creek bridge, and then angle northeast towards the hiking bluff.

Sampson Creek Boulders

2010-08-09T02:39:00.000-07:00

(left) Sampson Creek boulders visible from the Kougarak Road- as i pulled up to park on the shoulder of the Kougarak Road during the rains of July, just to the north of what must be the most dangerous ramp on the entire road, i was informed by a fellow named Ken who came motoring out to greet me that this— he gestured toward this hill- was Sitnasuak Corporation...

phase one, JOY OF DISCOVERY Nome rockclimbing, when you are getting to know all the roadside crags thinking you are the first, you are going to be the Fred Beckey of this obscure little rock clump (not understanding that ishigaitch, the little people, have been cragging here since the Distant Time, not to mention probable instances of visiting climbers to Nome through its 100-year history, and undoubtedly the centuries before...)

typically, it goes like this: from one of the four highways the climber espies a dark rock sticking up from the tundra fields, maybe only ten feet worth by the looks of it, but let's go check it out... after a short hike through blueberries the climber gets to the rock and discovers that in addition to the 10 feet of vertical seen from the road, another 15 feet of vertical was hidden behind a fold of tundra, the result being a fairly sweet little 25-foot crag, with scattered dudes of 10-foot boulders, which will, from here on in, provide year-round bouldering— hooking, camming, and moss in the winter, marble and schist in the summer

but now, after 10 years of frequent 4-season bouldering, "phase one JOY OF DISCOVERY rockclimbing in Nome" is drawing to a close for me; i've climbed out all my favorite spots (up to the .10c level, of course- plenty left for the V2 crowds of the future)... which is why i was so happy, several weeks ago during the rains of July, to be exploring a brand new set of boulders, ones i had never noticed before despite how many passes, a new slant of sunlight driving by one day, a chance sighting of a rock hitherto camoflagued as bush: potential JOY OF DISCOVERY and new fresh meat boulder takings...

(above) A pair of Mew Gulls (Larus Canus) i think, help me out here... the first issue with a new crag is always: RAPTORS: where's the nest? whadda we got this year? a serene and welcoming eagle? a stressed and strafing falcon? a pair of ravens with marital troubles? but as i approached the Samson Creek boulders, i was surprised to see a pair of gulls on sentry (no, they weren't jaegers or terns)- they put up almost no resistance to my intrusion... i'm not sure they even had a nest up there.... they flew away, i never saw them again...

(above) Delilah's, a one-move 5.6 offwidth, which you will know is an oxymoron if you are student of climbing, offered here as a sarcastic comment upon the general paucity of this area for any worthwhile bouldering... The score for Sampson Creek Boulders: ZILCH... one star, not the next Cloggy, NO COLOR IN THE PAN, not worth a return visit, of which i was relieved to inform Ken when he came motoring out to my car once again as i was leaving...

(above) Pk. 3922 ("Aapa") in the distant Grand Central region framed through a "hole in the wall" at Sampson Creek boulders. i'm assuming the boulders in these pictures are meta-sedimentary MARBLE, they had these awful white plates that broke at a touch, maybe this stuff:

PLATEY MARBLE (light to medium gray, medium to coarse grained, with grains 0.25 to 1 mm, heavily weathered, marble composed largely of 85% calcite and subordinate amounts of quartz anhedra (5%), tremolite (3%), locally diopside in disequilibrium (1%), and white mica (8%). Platy nature caused by thin interbeds of white mica-chlorite lenses and wisps usually less than 1 cm thick. Frequently isoclinically folded and sheared along fold axes. Less resistant than [other marbles] due to white mica content and folded nature, which produce broken, sheared outcrops and rubble.) (Bundtzen et al. 1994)

but i am SO NOT SURE what kind of stone it was... i departed Sampson Creek early, and returned to the "plagioclase porphyroblasts" of the Windmill Boulders to work on the proj., mildly depressed because of the rains of July, though little did i suspect, my fortunes were soon to change in the greater mountains....

Mt. Warren (Pk. 3300+) via Fox/Warren Creek

2010-07-23T01:08:00.000-07:00

Days of rain and self-pity at Salmon Lake (above, looking north), folded up between the mountains, the lake, the fog, and the DELUSION that I AM THE CENTER OF THE UNIVERSE. On the third day I left the cabin, with a compass and a map of the Fox Creek area downloaded on a very feeble short-term memory, and headed east into the hills, having decided to provide my little summit-grubbing ego with a tiny nub of consolation: a peak lying on the divide between Warren Creek (a tributary of Fox Creek which drains into Salmon Lake) and the Southeast Fork of Crater Creek: Peak 3300+.

Looking up Warren Creek (above)... Madness quickly set in, claustrophobia. Locked in a cell of fog all day, the brain is receiving inputs from four of the senses that the mountains are all around, but no fifth sense, no visual. You can feel the mountains like a phantom limb. It's disorienting, like Neo and Morpheus standing in the construct. The obligatory Grizzly dissolved into and out of the view for a moment, precipitating much irrational fear and unnecessary detouring.

Several miles in from the Kougarak Road, the slopes began to rise, up and up. Vapors, nothingness, sensory deprivation. Onset of hallucinations. Voices. I had had too much caffineated GU. The compass was constantly in play. Fortunately, the terrain was matching the feeble brain download. The summit of Pk. 3300+ (or Warren Mt., as I had started to call it) finally appeared through the fog (left). As is usual with Kigluaik summits, the north side dropped off into chasms, while the south side provided a Class II walk up.

This is supposed to be a picture of the fearsome drop off to the north (right), but as you can see, the image is nothing more than fuzzy shapes on a sheet. Standing there, you could feel the space beneath your feet registering as a tingle in the solar plexus region (where lie the sensitive organelles in the electromagnetic energy body that register the sense of vertigo) but without the corresponding visuals, the feeling lacked adrenal punch.

This, then, is the theme: a mountain, and a sensibility, truncated by fog. Follow the lines in this picture of Mt. Warren from the north (above), taken on a subsequent gear-ferrying trip up Crater Creek. Extrapolate where the apex of Warren Mt. must be. Thus, our mind throws a veil over the peaks of our enlightenment. Nothing has changed much for a week. Reality shrouded. Sanity diffused. Motivation muted. Tarps dripping. Poor American: his belly is full, but he still finds something to complain about...

Windmills, by Raina

2010-07-08T01:37:00.000-07:00

Overall psyched about this post because it marks the debut of MOUNTAIN PHOTOGRAPHY BY RAINA MCRAE. Age six, relationship daughter. She actually had to dangle from holds with one hand and wield the camera like a veritable Jim Thornburg to get these shots. Time of shoot was about 10 p.m. last month around solstice. Night sweet as can be, with a breeze to blow the bugs, and the 'Skox herd lurking nearby.

(below) The "jut" on Courtyard traverse, .10c

Something completely tedious and boring (like bouldering) is rendered interesting by handicapping oneself in a variety of ways (both on and off the field) thus increasing the challenge. For instance, the low-ball traverse rule: you cannot use holds that are on the top edge of the boulder. In the picture above I may seem to be violating this rule, but I am allowed those holds on a technicality, namely, the .10c rule: once the problem is harder than .10c I will need to begin removing handicaps to make it .10c again because that is the hardest I can climb.

Therefore, all my hardest boulder problems shall henceforth be rated 10c.

(above) Awning. This sloping pull-over problem I have almost topped, but not quite. Wish I were allowed the desecration of a Fat Pad for the distasteful landing in the center of the Courtyard that a blow-out from the last move would bring.

(below) Scoop traverse, 5.8. Killer M-5 ice tool pendjy-swing move in winter, from where the Scoop gets its name: in deep snows, always a classic little wind-sculpted scoop formed at the top of an enormous drift, out of the wind, with dreamy convex landings (when not rock hard from wind), and fun moss sticks.

(left) BoreHole Overhang, 5.6. or what have you. This move is actually just a tiny bit off the deck. I was trying to get Raina to convey a sense of exposure, but all the photo conveys is a sense of age. The move is part of the overall Bore Hole Traverse, my current "proj", constituted by the low-ball circumnavigation of the entire lower wall at the Windmills. Rating coming in at — .10c, of course. The windmills have a surprising number of crack moves here and there.

(above) Hamlet. This was Raina's favorite pic, and she wanted it included. This little mouse is a survivor. Like Diemberger on K2, Hamlet narrowly avoided the SNAKE. He'll never know how closely he touched the void. He was the best climber, cranking Separate Reality moves upside down on the roof of the cage, and this is what saved him.

At the start of summer, my student Kaitlin showed up at the door with 4 fat adult mice to feed to "Speedy", our class snake, who is currently residing in my bathroom at home with the hot shower on at my summer spa for arctic pythons. Kids from all over Nome bring their rodents to us. Mom and Dad say we have to get rid of them. Raina has learned to successfully petition me to take one mouse out of ever fodder as a pet, just for one night. Hamlet was the clear choice.

The first three victims were dispatched without great ceremony, BAM!, squeak!, gulp. Hamlet, the fourth, went into Raina's room, and that night slept in golden chambers. He entertained us with his cheer, good disposition, and hard climbing. He was a hit with the neighborhood children, pawed and fondled by all with no complaint or bite on his part.

Raina left the house the next day. I whipped out Hamlet by the tail and carried him towards the big cage where the python was waiting for him, coiled, ready. And then I was overtaken. Suddenly, profoundly... Every unit of KARMA I had accumulated from every living MOUSE I had ever thrown to this MONSTER suddenly burst forth from my chakras in one agglomerated spasm. I fell to the floor, weeping. "Oh, my offense is rank, I stinks to heaven!" I wept for 20 minutes. I cursed Hamlet hysterically and hurled him back in his feeding cage: "I CAN'T DO IT!" He was just a mouse, but he was so cool, he had a life, I had known him from an earlier incarnation.

We took Hamlet to Animal House, the awesome Nome pet store, where Chrystie was kind enough to take him in. A sign was posted on his cage proclaiming him the Kurt Diemberger of mice. He eventually went to the home of another wonderful, kind, child of Nome, Alaska, where I'm sure he is bouldering on the walls of his cage.

Pk. 2345, Johnstone Creek

2010-06-16T01:30:00.000-07:00

..saw this tor (left) on the hike out... was hoping to redeem myself for the "insufficient fifth class" foul I had received on the trip thus far... i bounded up the thousand-foot slope expecting a summit tor with mandatory 5.8, but it turned out the tor wasn't a tor at all, but more of a scarp, built into the hillside like a sod house... the back side required little more than class II moves to reach the top. .

The west side of the tor, however, sported some precipice action... bouldered this 25 ft. route (right) to the summit of 2345.. warm, sunny day... curious little falling away sensation when you finally hang back into the air... thoughts in the head clean up desktop... tune in the head clarifies.... ear pressure changes white noise as assemblage point of energy body shifts... but it was only for a moment...

(above) A 2 m. chunk of white marble near the top of Pk. 2345. One sees these white rocks scattered everywhere around the Seward Peninsula. Have you ever mistaken one for a patch of snow? People will knowingly pronounce it to be quartz, but I believe the correct answer is marble.

The 2345 Tor I climbed, iamprettydarnsuresortof, was granitic gneiss... in other words, the pluton, a piece of the bedrock poking up through the shell of schist... Pk. 2345 is one of many triple clashing zones where the three dominant geologies of the Kigluaiks coexist in one place: the granite, the schist, and the marble.

The Amato/Miller map seems to refer to this spot as a "strike and dip of foliation" and gives a "trend of stretching lineation." Studying these geological hieroglyphics, which I am not fully equipped to understand, led me to believe the map was saying 2345 Tor was formed by a slippage along a fault line, like laying two books together and then sliding one up an inch... the tor is the part of the one book that's sticking out...

Too bad it wasn't the dream climb I came for... very recommendable as a hiker's summit... high meadows, soft tundra beds with flowers, a bit of decent rock awaiting more routes, falcons soaring nearby...

Here is the view looking south (above) from Pk. 2345, which is the arc of the panorama I left out in the tragedy constituted by the previous post to this one... I just haven't come to know this part of the range well, yet... the apical mountain there in the very back, furthest south in the picture, is the great Singtook, Pk. 3870, the western sentinel, battering ram of southwest storms, the ship's prow, lead Tooth, third highest in the range, trickster, beacon, the Mt. Washington of the Seward Peninsula.

Peak 3000+, Southwest Ridge

2010-06-14T16:28:00.000-07:00

WHY AM I COMMITTING THE WRONG I'M ABOUT TO COMMIT? I've become a stamp collector with a little album. I have used Photoshop to type little numbers on the mountains, which I shall now categorize, classify, number, name, shuffle, and dote over. Even more absurdly, they're only the Kigs, barely even big enough to qualify as mountains, mere dunes, really.

Answer: I'M HAVING SO MUCH FUN DOING IT. There is something about the Internet, with all that consciousness pulsating through each keystroke, that is blowing away my lifelong writer's block. Every unit of suppressed spray accumulated over years is coming bursting out, accompanied by features formerly poo-pooed, such as maps, pictures, and route descriptions of climbs which are not even climbs at all, but firmly belong in the category of hikes, such as today's feature. Blame it on the utter transparency of the Matrix. Couple this giddy loss of cyber-inhibition with the giddy fun of hiking and climbing in the Kigluaiks, and click!, you have these transgressions. I invoke the Alex Lowe theorem: FUN is the measure of the climber.

"...Go out and have entirely too much fun..." Doug Buchanan

(above) Pk. 3000+, one of the high points on the divide running west from Glacial Lake. Class II. It was a hike-up. I got a funny feeling it has been ascended before. My first foray of the summer into the high Kigluaiks, the well-springs of power, chi, prana, sinh tala in Athabaskan.

(above) The ridge took about an hour. "The best climber in the world is the one having the most fun." It was so much fun last week to simply be hiking up a little mountain, not surfing around my own event horizon on a death-pile.

(above) Looking east around the bend of upper Johnstone Creek canyon. Pk. 3000+ in background.

MY EXCUSE for LAMENESS, for not seeking out a pocket of true, TECHnical climbing: this was an exploratory trip.

Never had I properly explored the western side of the Kigs, it was time to do so. The goal was to find a southern approach into the Kigs from the Teller Road into Canyon Creek, where lurks granite. The GLUE of town was attached to my ass like a stretchy tendril, so I couldn't stay in there long enough—3 days, 2 nights— to do justice to my explorations. The resistance of the GLUE was greatly increased by my extreme and irrational BEARONOIA, though once I got out there with my cannon slung over shoulder and madly singing, I saw literally no critters at all the entire three days.

So, what follows, simply because it's so much fun, is a little panoramic indulgence. To a true Kigs enthusiast it would prove irresistable and might help mediate the disgust you should feel at this public disrobement of beauty. It should also remind you somewhat of a dog trotting in circles peeing in various places systematically and with great enthusiasm. Do dogs not have fun when they do this? And is not FUN the justification for today?

Thanks to "Bedrock Geologic Map of the Kigluaik Mountains," by Jeff Amato and Elizabeth Miller. I am butchering the geology.

(above) View looking east from summit of Pk. 3000+.

1. Tigaraha. Means "finger" in Inupiaq. I've climbed it by at least 3 different routes, with Mikey and Lahka, but don't know who made the first ascent. Gneiss.

2. Pk. 3367. Visible from many places. A landmark. Cobblestone headwaters. Deserves a name. I've always called it "Three Gables" ("Tikilik" maybe?). Climbed it solo one Iditarod on a mystical snow-machining day. No idea about the first ascent. Schist.

3. One of the Grand Central or Crater Creek peaks. It's probably Fox (Kayuqtuq), poking up from behind. Currently stalking this one. Gneiss and schist clashing zone.

4. [i think] One of the Grand Central peaks that form the right side of Grand Central, Pk. 3190. I always call it the "Mother." ("Aana"). Snow-climbed it one spring via machine. Schist, as are the next two.

5. A little Grand Central peak, 3290 [i think]. I always call it "the Child" ("Uiviilaq"). Skiied with Tyler and Keith one year.

6. Tallest Grand Central Peak besides Osborn, Pk. 3922. The "Father" ("Aapa"). Cramponed up with Phil on a very cold January day.

7. Mt. Osborn, Pk. 4714, King of the Kigs. First ascent unknown, at least to me. Do not leave comments reminding that it does not matter, we know this. Maybe it was Osborn first climbed Osborn? Probably a hunter from Beringia. It's only a rolling, flowing lump in the mantle. My understanding is that Osborn is a giant chunk of "meta-sedimentary" marble riding up on the pluton.

(above) Looking northeast from Peak 3000+.

7. Osborn, with [probably] unclimbed west face.

8. Pk. 2490. Just north from Glacial Lake on the right.

9. Pk. 3320. I mean the peak down below the little red "9".

10. The north peaks of Osborn. (one on right higher.)

11. Suluun, the Dorsal Fin. Andy and I did 3 routes there. 8, 9, and 11 are a line of the orthogneiss, pink on Jeff's map.

12. East terminus of a line of jagged peaks visible from Teller. Are they the "Sawtooths"?

(above) Looking northwest from Pk. 3000+

12. I've heard them called the "Dragontooths" and the "Oro Grande". "Sawtooths" works. Ascents by Amato. A ridge studded with granite tors.

13. Pk. 3700+ over by Falls Creek. I would like to know more about this area.

14. Pk. 3300+. Granite. I suspect it of having non-hideous rock climbing.

15. The mysterious 3850+. One of the higher elevations in the range.

16. Canyon Creek. MUCH more searching for real climbing to be done.

O, my offense is rank, it smells to heaven...

It hath the primal eldest curse upon't—

And yet, here's one more. A sign of aging, plus extreme self-centeredness, plus lack of job.

(above) TR region, Johnstone Creek area

1. Pk. 3000+

2. Inuksuk pass (see below)

3. "Johnstone/Right Fork Pass" I had good walking on snow fields, probably a doable snow-machine ride in winter if there were not cornices..."

4. Pk. 2930 a slice o' the gneiss

5. Pk. 2710 couple of hour backpacker's climb, I didn't get to it.

6. Another way to get over to Canyon Creek. I'd wager it's machinable.

7. Pk. 2345 I climbed a little 5.7 on the summit tor; this is a classic hike.

8. My bearanoid campsite, out of the way of the main corridor.

(above) inuksugait Strange to be surrounded by homunculi in the lonely mountains. Here is a link about rock piles that took seconds to find:

inukshuk

...and so there ain't nothing more to write about, and I am rotten glad of it, because if I'd a knowed what a trouble it was to make a book I wouldn't a tackled it, and I ain't a-going to no more

Spring Bouldering

2010-06-09T17:21:00.000-07:00

Have continued to languish in the River of Forgetfulness: warm, golden, syruppy, midnight-sun BOULDERING sessions around Nome, the high Kigs but a distant memory. Post school-year lapse is to blame; every year it takes me at a week to recover from the end days of school. I am too exhausted in the first days of vacation to do anything other than slump. Any grade-school teacher will understand.

How could an expedition to the remote hills be mounted at such a time? This is a time for merriment, music, parties, and the crucial, often underestimated, human-bonding. That the weather has been fine through these days of peace and love has only exacerbated my guilt at failing to extricate from the glue of town. But the BOULDERING, nightly BOULDERING... that is what gets a climber through.

(below) Old picture of Mylon Schield on a (granitic) gneiss boulder at the Sinuk headwaters. This is BLM land, so you can actually sort of talk about it without fear of impending ethical thunder clap. From Nome, getting to the gneiss (ohjustcallitgranite) generally requires a day of hiking.

Came to Nome 10 years ago expecting the end of climbing. After all, western Alaska is flat, like Bethel. Oh well, we'll make a lot of money and go to Denali in the summer and get out of Nome as soon as possible. But then, from the plane, as we flew low coming into town, we immediately noticed lots of little dark smudges on the tundra down there.

Turns out that each of these smudges houses a little rock garden. Life in Nome is like this: you just espy the tip of an outcrop from a conveniently-placed road, hike over to the outcrop, and more often than not, the view from the road had been concealing a little extra 15 feet of rock. Am I just hard up, and out of touch? Or is there not nice bouldering in these little Nome klettergartens? And they are endless, BTW, thousands of them poke up across the wastes of Beringia, you could grab a pair of axes and just boulder your way back across the land bridge...

(above) The featured Raptor this Spring at Sunset Rocks is a family of Gyrfalcons. Look closely at the photo above and you can see Mom directly above the nest, which is perched on a little nose sticking out. Mom is concerned about a menacing little simian scurrying around the base of the rock.

The calendar on my wall translates this month as "Time of Year When You Encounter Lots of Critters At the Boulders." Rock Gardens are natural gathering points. Every time you approach the rocks, the chance of an encounter hangs potent in the air. What will IT be, in just a moment, when I crest this rock, waiting on the other side, its peaceful grazing suddenly disturbed?
   In the later years of my life, living here in Nome, I have morphed into a type of person that my California environmentalist Hippy upbringing demands I revile: I have become a wildlife harrasser. I don't mean to be... Some of these guys just get so, well, territorial. Take the old Musk-Ox bull up at the Windmills the other day. He startled my colleague Andrew so badly that the tiny human dropped his backpack and ran; then, the beast refused to relinquish the pack back to Andrew's care, but instead sat there snorting and stomping his hooves over it, for all the world an old Cassius Clay befuddled from the years of head-butting and quite out of it... an old man being an asshole just for the sake of being an asshole.
   I don't mean to harrass. But I've encountered too many of these old fellows. Obviously, Musk Ox are extremely intelligent, especially in the social domain. Look in their eyes and it's like, mammal-to-mammal here!— this isn't harrassment. I am lobbying for my right to occupy part of this rock, that is all. I understand that this guy is working with a different set of criteria, but really, we can work it out, there is no reason we cannot share this rock.
   Am I anthropomorphizing? Am I attributing this ungulate human tendencies he does not possess? Or am I legitimately negotiating a niche out here in the wilderness like any other animal? They get so officious, sometimes it's hard not to mount 5.7 rock directly over their heads and laud it over them a bit like a chattering monkey safe in his tree. But I sing them songs too, for balance. (Musk Ox do NOT appreciate the lycan high registers of the human voice, but seem to tolerate low growls on the order of Tom Waits.) These very behaviors, though questionable, led to the return of Andrew's pack.
   The alacrity with which Musk Ox (relatives of sheep and goats) adapt to these negotiations leads me to believe that they do not feel particularly harassed. After a while, they forget all about you, and then THERE YOU ARE bouldering amidst herds of Musk Ox thinking, too bad the bouldering mentality does not more readily encourage the bringing of a camera...
   But they would be horrified in California. I would be villified and cited. How hath the redneck taken root? Who placed MAN at the center of things? But, in the deeper programming, the Californian inside me retains some unassailable primacy. My rule is, always give the critters their required space. Respect nests. And if you even remotely suspect you might truly be creating a negative impact, then you must perform the difficult but sometimes necessary act of NOT CLIMBING.

(above) Chris Miller crimping the Bore Hole traverse at the Windmills. The rock is some crazy half-baked schist. Often looks like death-by-crushing and probably very well is. Nome climbers should follow the "3 points of attachment" rule.

(below) Looking up orange wall (every crag must have an orange wall) at Angstroms Rocks. This is an 80 feet chunk of meta-sedimentary marble next to the Kougarak Road, way fun to climb, but friable as chalk! The featured Raptor is Golden Eagles; their nest is visible directly to the right of Mikey Lean, who is battling the nice 5.10a Angstroms Orange on a crisp Fall day. Photo by Phil.

Out at Angstroms the other night... sated on the Lotus fruit of limestone climbing... CHI oozing liberally up through the pores of the hillside, the air alive with buzzing and chirping and whirring of wings... plenty of scare and dare, breath or death, trust or dust, the ground was 30 feet down and I didn't even care, mantels and pockets and it was all there... Flexibility and strength were soaking up into my limbs like water returning to the sponge. Winter was so long and cold. It's all an abstraction now, a 30 second commercial in the mind. Now, back to our main feature, big blue summertime and warm rock under the hands...
When all at once— LARGE MAMMAL IN THE CORNER OF MY EYE! Fight or flight! Flee! Hide! screams Brain. So I did hide, up on the limestone. I don't care what they say, bears can't do 5.8 or higher... So I'm out of breath, heart pounding, freaking out in a totally unnecessary fashion, and the whole time my brain was processing the visual data from what I had seen... very poor visual data, I have to add, my old eyes have gone very bad. The animal had been a good quarter mile away. So my brain is sort of Photoshopping the image, and lo and behold, the latent image emerged not of BEAR, but of WOLF. The audio kicked in, and I realized I had been listening to the wolf howling for several minutes without realizing it. So, back to the limestone (marble) for a long, sweet night of bouldering.

(below, bottom) BSNC lands.

At every indent I am bumping my head against the problem, the problem of posting descriptions of sacred places on the internet, of all places. I have manufactured various rationalizations and justifications for the act, but the act still has an unsettling feel to it, the fear permeates each keystroke.

Worse yet, the problem of seeming to encourage climbing rocks on shareholders' lands. It's sort of embarrassing to be a climber these days; we are the final scourge of the west, the scavengers who pick the remains from whatever the cowboys, explorers, and businessmen failed to ravish. Never spray. It is petrifying to be doing so. But I'm not out there shooting anything....

Banner Creek Bouldering Getaway

the lovers were loving at the love-in

the music drifted down to the willows by the river

the rock it was solid and undercut—

oh, leave it all and get off to the war

we lay sprawled on the grass, the sun glinted off riffles,

her voice was a tickle just this side of a dream...

one more try and we'll have unlocked this sequence—

now, off to the war, enough of this peace

the nap hung heavy on our eyelids, the breeze blew away the bugs,

i had convinced myself we were where we ought to be...

but when we awoke, the ground was too close—

so, it's off to the war, before we get used to this

no more capering with our seats next to the ground

off to the glittering kingdoms, to be in peril in the air

away from this babbling brook of Forgetfulness—

now, off to the mountains, to the war...

Singatook- Gregg Stoddard Memorial Springtime Yahoo Field Trip to 3870, year 2010

2010-05-22T17:03:00.000-07:00

(below) View from top of Solar sidewalk at 3200 level, looking south down the upper part of Singtook. Woolley Lagoon indiscernible in distance. Keith Conger about to drop off the edge in search of dropped gear.

MAY 09, 2010: GREG STODDARD MEMORIAL SPRINGTIME YAHOO FIELD TRIP TO 3870 was a great success! Keith and Ian summited the Singtook once again to commemorate the man who brought us together as friends so many years ago, the arch telly fiend, Stoddard. Though he left Nome for the big city, the spirit of our original trip propagates forward, compelling us each spring to make the pilgrimmage to the sacred mountain.

(below) Singatook from the Teller Road, 17 miles distant. Singtuq? Sinughaiq? Sinaillaq? Somebody help me! How do you say it? Leave comments... Francis Alvanna says "Sing-took!" kind of like that, so that's what I'm going with. It is almost universally referred to by the people of Nome as "3870".

The Singtook... the Mt. Washington of the Seward Peninsula... possibly the most climbed peak in the Kigluaiks... receives the full brunt of any weather coming in from southwest... like any mountain invested with mental process by interaction with humans, the Singtook is a type of psychic private property.. people have lived at Woolley Lagoon for a long time, climbers must choose their spiritual windows with care, or otherwise are required to show their asshole license... hence, our permit for the Greg Stoddard SpringtimeYahoo Field trip to 3870...

(below) Keith Conger at the start of the Solar Sidewalk, the classic ski tour up and down the Singatook, usually of four or five hours duration. A fine Greg Stoddard lies ahead.

(above) Keith skinning up the via media part of the Solar Sidewalk...this is the fun part on the way down, a black diamond due to the potential for smashbody on the perfect Cretaceous granite.

(below) Via alta part of Sidewalk, summit hump of 3870 in background. On other Greg Stoddards, Keith, who can be a mighty sick huckster, has hucked the center of that face in the background. On the 2010 Stoddard trip he launched from the saddle to the right of summit, while I crept to a blue square lower down.

(above) LOVE these hills!... 'v lost count of how many times i been (sic) on this summit... probably equal to the number of times 'v failed to reach this summit!

(below) Apres ski... we didn't get any good pictures of the descent because of it was ALL ACTION! Like any good Greg Stoddard, we skied right up to the car.

   If you go to the Singtook, it's good to sort of ask permission of the mountain, and maybe the locals too, if you can park your car on the Teller Road. I'm not really sure what I'm talking about, but it seems like wise advice for anywhere you go.

   Farewell, GREG STODDARD MEMORIAL YAHOO FIELD TRIP TO 3870, year 2010. So this was our yearly pilgrimmage to a sacred mountain. It's always nice to bag the summit. Have you ever seen it wreathed in lenticulars? Monsters! Greg Stoddard is probably batting about 50% when it comes to reaching the summit. I believe this year makes two or three in a row.

   Skiing is so louche, so hedonistic— I mean, anyone can go WITH gravity. That is why I state, Stoddard is a fiend, the arch demon of telemarks.

   It is time to return to the fight UPWARDS against earth's gravity.

Windmills, Sunset, Pennies, midnight sun bouldering

2010-05-22T15:58:00.000-07:00

River Lethe bouldering under the midnight sun on work days,
for days and days, for what seems like weeks and weeks
(the days are bright/and filled with pain
enclose me in your gentle rain)

Metamorphic nightmare leaning choss piles with sky ladders of big jugs
(I've spent years gradually testing them)
climb smoothly though,
it's never pleasant dangling supine under tons of meta-sedimentary,
this is playing with guns that are loaded,
this is some very brittle bones

I shall climb in the Kiguaik no more
there is no need of venturing up the Kougarak Road
we can wonder here, by the sea, amongst these outcrop gardens
befuddled with the lotus fruit of crack and crimp, air and dangle,

finch, longspur, sparrow, wren,
(the home team, the ravens and ptarmigan,
trying to protest their rights for staying the winter)
entire landscape humming in and out, oscillation

the day of pain and yawning drops out of sight,
here is the hole, hole, thumbs down, jug, jug, dangle that requires all of your attention
here is a mantle onto a glued flake
here is the best damn boulder problem you ever expected
down in the thrustle of chirp, reep, whoo-oo--oo, keep, keep

chi is oozing out the pores of the earth into the pores of my skin

i have forgotten all about the silent peaks
summits still encrusted with snow
repulsing every attempt

wonder here, for now, by the sea, pulling down,
soon it will be morning and the streams of humans will begin...

Inuruq (Pk. 1926)

2010-05-13T18:23:00.000-07:00

(below) Journalist and ski ace Tyler Rhodes descending into Tolkienesque murk, two Sundays ago, north slopes of"Inuruq" Mountain. He got lacerations in his P-Tex. Crater Creek and Pilgrim River lurk in the mist.

          Here's an analogy that might make sense to any Supertopian: Supertopo Salmon Lake is to the Kigluaik Mountains, as Bishop is to the Sierras. It's a horrifying analogy if you really think about it. Salmon Lake is on the road, you see, the Kougarak Road, and so may have involuntarily invited just such a fate, looking one trans-Siberian highway forward in time...

         This blog takes responsibility for crimes against the Earth. This reportage of climbs is nothing more than another unit of encroachment upon the wilderness. Just by posting Tyler in front of this grey curtain, I have destroyed the pristine wilderness veiled behind it. These were unknown places; now there exists a little more known...
       And why these crimes, what justification for a Kigsblog?   Let us be honest, brothers and sisters: Ego, and the mammalian need for recognition. A European craving for exploration, and the bringing home of another conquered wilderness to the homeboys at the Explorers Club in the father land. The same reason there sits a bust of Amundsen on Front Street. Coupled with an inability to stop the thing because it's actually SO MUCH FUN doing it, so WRITE ON!!..

        But another reason to blog, perhaps, is to preserve worthy languages. When I asked Earp (...Earp's Salmon Lake cabin is to me, what Glacier House was to Norman Clyde...) what was the name of the funny, little, incongruous mountain at the north end of Salmon Lake?, she replied: "Inuruq."

(below) Inuruq. The map is not the territory.

     I asked Marie Saclamana, who teaches Inupiaq in the classroom next to Mr. McRae's 4th grade, how she would translate "inuruq."   This kind of question can be super tough; it's a bit like transferring a file from an Apple to a PC.
    I had figured the word— inuruq— was constructed out of the Inupiaq noun and suffix combo:

inuq (person)    + tuq (he, she, or it is doing) = inuruq

    What Marie forced up (translation works using approximations...) "person who has had an accident." This actually makes a whole lot of sense, if you know this mountain— it has a conspicuous landslide on the front (north) face, a real MASSIVE one, which, rumor has it, was witnessed by people from Salmon Lake sometime in the last century. Inuruq looks like a little person who has vomited away the front part of their torso, and held the whole load in cupped hands around their waist level. You can see it across Salmon Lake from Interstate 395... I mean, er, the Kougarak Road....

Someone undoubtedly knows much more about this mountain's name than I have come up with here. The Todd party reported the mountain's name as Coho in an edition of Scree. Please comment. One problem with blogging that keeps jamming my foot a little further into my mouth, is that I keep writing about things which I have only partially researched. But if one waits until the research is complete, one would never post! Is is supposed to be Inuraq?

(above) Not an image of Inuruq- rather, this is another hill off the Kougarak Road further south showing the avalanche conditions of 3 Sundays ago. The crown face on the left, foreground hill is probably 800 ft. wide and 1 meter deep. If you search closer, there are other slides.

A question that has long plagued me: is there real avalanche danger on the Seward Peninsula, or am I just over-paranoid? The day Tyler and I tried to ski Inuruq was grey and rainy. The summit was sheathed in spring blizzard which we were unwilling to penetrate. Worst of all, the AVALANCHE PARANOIA light was lit on our mental dashboards as we kept encountering sketchy-feeling snowpack in the deposition zones, as well as recent slides, plus rain, and warmth. It was reassuring for me to see that Tyler was not without paranoia. We eventually took off skis and began booting up the bare tundra of the northeast ridgeline, before getting shut down. Back to the machines, back to the truck and trailer at Nugget Pass, back to town, grind, sleep deficit, paperwork, kitty litter, and kids, the flow of kids, pushing like ocean at the bulwarks....