Sampson Creek Boulders

(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....

Spring Bouldering

     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... 

Inuruq (Pk. 1926)

(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....