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

   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!

Pk. 3535, Crater Creek

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.

Foxy Peak

 (above)  There now, do you see it?  The real Fox (Kayuqtuq), hiding in the background.  Duh.  You might also notice the two route attempts on the decoy mountain standing in front of it, the foreground mountain which is pretending to be the higher one.  To think that I fell for this old trick ONCE AGAIN.  It's a standard trick of mountains everywhere, stand closer to the valley and you will appear to be taller than the mountains behind you.  The one in the back is the true high point of the region (as I've mentioned, one of the few possible "Four Thousanders" of the Kigluaik).  Now I've spent gallons of gas and layers of capillaries to climb this peak, and it wasn't even the right one!  Shall I self-flagellate over this nincompoop fiasco of wasted gasoline and hardened capillary?  Or shall I zen it out and simply state:  that's how it goes in the Kigs...

Back on the March attempt, Earp had been referring to the mountain as "Foxy," which I will do for this post, which sort of differentiates it from the true and highest Fox, which is different than when I was calling "Kayuqtuq" in an earlier post, all the better since mountains do and should have more than one name.

     (above) This is what stopped me on attempt #2 yesterday— a brazen summit pyramid of gneiss where an easy snow slope should have been.  I am no Francois Marsigny, I carried no rope, a child awaited in Nome, I was pledged to be conservative, boldness has been slowly leached from my psyche from too long a sojourn in the fleshpots of Nome...  plus, a host of sub-excuses... I retreated.  No first ascent, just another new bail.

      Both attempts employed a northern approach from the Crater Creek side. (Below) is an image looking off to the west from Foxy showing why I couldn't just traverse around left to the rounded south side.  Osborn, King of the Kigs, is the meta-sedimentary lump furthest to the right.  The intermediary lumps are the Grand Central Peaks around Gold Run Creek.  Kigluaik peaks, in general, are lumps from the south,  but Gustave Dore' nightmares from the north. 

This late April Sunday was a day of days, an all-time day, the miraculous snowfall had rendered the mountains smooth as silk, a meter thick blanket of equi-temperature aniu, you felt your boots not far from the terra firma of tundra and talus thus alleviating the avalanche fear, a light breeze kicked up lines of spindrift which caught the sunlight, convection fog from the Imruk Basin wreathed the lower peaklets in  white coiffure, chi oozed up from every pore of the mountains that day...

(below) Looking up the ridge.  Took me a long time to trust the snow, so I stuck to the crest.  It's probably only Class 3.  A few fun moves on turf with fine thwack!s.

The thing to realize here is that although the climbing was easy, everything was shrouded in fear on account of being so far from town ALONE.  Not exactly "you're gonna die" fear, rather, "you might have a humongous hassle" fear.  Maybe I'm paranoid, but the sky seems to weigh heavily when you're the only one under it.  At these moments, your machine morphs into a sentient being, and YOU LOVE YOUR SNOW MACHINE.  And I do love my Arctic Cat .570 Bearcat.  (above)  Here it is waiting like a loyal horse, with C-Togs 3, 4, and 5 in the background.

Kayuqtuq North Face

  

  (left) Earp on easy mixed at 30 below, an NB (new bail) on unnamed peak located on divide between Crater Creek and Fox Creek (for fancy's sake I refer to it here as Kayuqtuq), Monday of Iditarod week.  We turned around a pitch below the summit having done perhaps 1700 ft. of Class 4/5 snow and gneiss climbing— the crap gneiss, the brown, bloody stool-colored stuff.  In background of photo you can see the formations referred to elsewhere in this blog, also fancifully, as the "C-Togs."      


I was relieved to see consternation on the normally fearless Earp's face as we dismounted our machines (my new Bearcat and the redoubtable Polaris, Crusteo.)  It confirmed what I have never been able to verify but always felt:  that it's scarier than hell to be alone up a lonely valley in the high Kigs at 40 below.  I always harbor secret terror just to be there in the deep water...

(above)  Kayuqtuq (Pk. 4,000+) may qualify as one of the rare "Four Thousanders" of the Kigs.  Kayuqtuq means "Fox" (Vulpes Vulpes).


Crunchy stabby, dagger-and-go, dagger-and-go...  we certainly would have soloed but the slabs looked so loaded man, well hung and snow-white tan, so we hassled the rope between us, which slowed us horribly.  Beautiful, arighaa, bon, bon, but did I mention it was cold?  Yes, it most certainly was, sure is cold, yessir, man!, allapa!, F-word!

(above)  Pk. 3050+, south wall of Crater Creek on the drive in;  Crater Creek is a sort of parallel analogue to Grand Central Valley 10 miles south.  The peak in this photo appears to be a sort of translation of Grand Central's Crater Lake Mountain (Pk. 3147), very confusing since Crater Lake ain't at Crater Creek.  

(above)  The Third C-Tog (Pk. 2650+)   

       Definitely uncomfortable with the naming of things.  These are not the real names.  The names on this blog are just little contrivances my brain has had to come up to cope with the hours of slogging in solitude in the Kigs.  

     What do you do when you have come to know a geological feature as a distinct entity?  You're dangling from the thing all day, admiring its form, power-lounging on its tundra ledges, admiring the view, and, at times, talking to the thing, talking to stone itself—  at some point you invent a little cognomen to apply to this geological formation so that you might refer to it succinctly in your self conversations.  So the names in this blog in many cases are just widgets of one guy's brain and not meant to be taken seriously.    (BTW people, it was not Stan's fault that the spire in the Arrigetch got called Justice Spire.  He only climbed it...)  So, why continue something sure to offend?  Because it's just too much fun!  The Kigs are a landscape right out of an Ursula Leguin novel....

       If you know the true name of the mountain, please comment...

Descent.  

              Often, the scarlet "L" burns on my forehead, and I doubt our decision to bail from Kayuqtuq.  Other times I trust that our intuitive apparatus was working correctly at the time, that some hurt or extra suffering lay in wait among the folds of potentiality surrounding the last pitches to the summit.  Endless vacillation between these two poles. 

        For me at least, the vacillations have tended to settle upon the former pole, the Pole of Total Loserdom.  Those last moves WOULD HAVE BEEN glorious.  It was ONLY —35° F (with the wind at 20 knots and increasing as we neared the somewhat).  We bailed at the rock bands that guard the summit, 2 or 3 pitches more of casual mixed climbing.  Question marks lurked:  there was going to be frostbite....  I see a fearful sweaty little dad go scurrying back down to the security of his fuming machine.  

      Obviously, once again I was committing the logical error of equating my entire self worth with a moment's action.  Power is gushing from the breaches in my ego.  So last night I got out The Rock Warrior Way and began patching the patches of the patches so we can go up again next weekend.  Here's a link to Arno's site warriorsway.com