Thirty-Three Sixty-Seven

Author posing on precipice, main summit of 3367 behind.

        If the Kigs are indeed mountains, then "Thirty-Three Sixty-Seven" is one of the range's great peaks.

       First of all, that number— 3367— while not a prime, the prime factorization includes 3, 7, and 37. My sense is that this figure had to be a close estimate by any of several U.S.G.S. surveyors from the earlier part of the century with a predilection for interesting numbers, probably bored with assigning 4-digit elevations to various Beringian prominences. The theory of bored surveyors might explain why the elevations alone in the Kigs are often sufficiently euphonious to stand alone as names. 
       With this theory in mind, I regret suggesting the Inupiaq name "Pingaroot" for Pk. 3367. At the time I came up with this name (or,  rather, when the mountain whispered its true name to me, which might loosely translate into English as "Three Gables") I was caught up in the Kigsblogian "Reverse the Trend" Movement, an effort to reverse the historical trend of assigning place names of European derivation to geographical features of Alaska. My regret comes from the conviction that the name "Thirty-Three Sixty-Seven" is a hard one to beat.
       Thirty-Three Sixty-Seven really sticks up from many places in the range, undoubtedly why the U.S. Army Map Service chose to install a survey station mark on the summit in 1949.  From the Cobblestone Valley to the north, attractive rock routes await a first ascent on granitic gneiss. The gullies that drop to the south, along the moderately steep mountain wall that extends from Pk. 3367 to Pk. 3213, are excellent for skiing, and highly approachable by snow-machine. Thirty-Three Sixty-Seven is a peak that a mountaineer might return to again and again.
         Three trips to 3367 I have made, the last two times accompanied by badass downhill skiers, both of whom I deprived the summit of 3367 by misdirecting them to the wrong gable of the mountain's three gables, repeating the same misdirection twice in separate years. This Spring it was Wilson, about to graduate from High School and leave for the greater ranges (to whom I facetiously said on the summit, gesturing to the entire Kigluaik Range, "All this is your's...") Back in the spring of 2011, the victim of my poor directional sense was Tyler, whose fine photographs of the trip I have finally, only now, been able to pilfer off Facebook, and which feature prominently on this post, without his permission. (Thank you, Tyler Rhodes) The moral of the story is that it's rather hard to distinguish which peak is actually 3367 from the bottom of the nameless valley to the south, so FOLLOW THE MAP closely.

Central Kigs from Teller Road:
A. Pk. 3367  B. Mt. Osborn  C. Mosquito Pass Peak
D.   Pen Tri Cwm  E. Tigaraha  F.   SaGuiq

Pk. 3367 from the north

Location of PK. 3367, Pingaroot, Three Gables Mountain

Iditarod week, March 2004. 
       FOLLOW THE MAP was all I had my first time to Thirty-Three Sixty-Seven. A thick, fat, hungover FOG obscured the morning. Alone, I drove for three hours through 100-yard visibility into the Kigs, in terrible fear of the zero visibility, and of my first ever snow-machine, a Polaris .340 that would eventually earn the name "Crusteo" which I had purchased from Morgan's Sales and Service just the year before. This was to be the snow-machine trip where I passed from beginner to intermediate, but first I had to get there. 
       Every single one of the 35 miles into the peak was permeated with a strong, palpable sense of DREAD, of wanting to turn around. The claustrophobia of fog creates madness, a dream of incubi pushing on your chest, a prison sentence, an anxiety attack that won't cease. Every single half-mile I stopped the machine, fished map and compass out of parka pocket, and carefully correlated the base of hills and mountains where they disappeared into the clouds with their counterparts on the map. Just a little further. Squiggles on the map were tiny injections of reality into a vast fog bank of unreality. In this way I tremulously made my way up the Snake River, across the Stewart, and through Silver Creek Pass.

         Arriving after several hours at a main river recognizable as the Sinuk, I so wanted to turn back, even though the Sinuk meant I was close to Peak 3367, my destination. If my calculations were correct, I had reached the Kigs"deep water", past the point of return where self-rescue becomes a hassle involving an all-night ski, frostbite, aircraft, and panicked friends in Nome, and this in the turn-of-the-millennium days before we all carried panic buttons with us. Wilderness is a sense as much as anything, and getting to the Sinuk always feels like traveling past the continental shelf where the water all of a sudden gets colder as it gets deeper, or like the abyss hoving into view beneath your feet while climbing, a sense of: Shit Just Got Real.

Tyler's calendar shot, author with Soul Powders on board, hiking up Pk. 3367

"She's just waiting for the summertime when the weather's fine.
She could hitch a ride out of town and so far away 

From that low down, good for nothing, mistake-making fool
With excuses like 'Baby, that was a long time ago,'
But that's just a euphemism 

If you want the truth he was out of control,
But a short time's a long time 

When your mind just won't let go..."

       Is this how Kristine felt? The new mother remained behind in our house on Fourth Avenue with our brand new, two month-old daughter, Raina. My mind was further fogged by the disequilibrium of the new father, a mental residues from confusion and miscommunication. 

       The only machete that allowed me to chop through the GLUE that day was Jack Johnson's new album, On and On, playing strong on the mental soundtrack in my head in those days before headphones. Just when the FOG seemed too dense to continue, little trickles of Hawaiian sunshine would trickle through Just a little further. For weeks, Jack had been most effective in rocking colicky baby Raina to sleep in my arms while simultaneously keeping me the exhausted dad awake and standing upright, and now Jack was powering me as I paddled out the back to my appointment with 3367. 

But somehow I know it won't be the same

Somehow I know it will never be the same 

Looking northwest from 3367. The granite mass of
Suluun is visible on skyline

         I arrived at a hilly place I calculated to be the root of the beanstalk where it disappeared into cloud. It was Peak 3367, but I was not certain.  
       But surely today cannot really be a climbing day! The FOG pressed down, a terminal illness, an inescapable responsibility, a bad romance. Behind the fog, the spatial yawn of remote wilderness. Driving a snow-machine is quite a different thing than shutting the thing off for hours and hours, leaving the complicated hunk of metal to frost up while you climb into bad weather wearing increasingly soggy underwear. Today's trip is just a snow-machining exercise, right? Time to turn around and head back for the Wet Buns contest in Nome. 
          But then, a sign from the heavens... Through the muffle of FOG blanket, I heard the clear sound of an airplane several hundred feet above. Think about all the times when you're sitting in the plane and the mountains look like islands in a sea of vapor.
          Thirty-Three Sixty-Seven is easy from the south. I don't think crampons were even needed. And sure enough, precisely at the 2900 foot level, I mantled right out of the fog onto the cloud ceiling. I paused for a moment, mid-mantle— my legs remained submersed in gauzy cloud, but my torso had broken through into the sun. The caterpillar sheds its skin.
       Only the highest of the Kigs three-thousanders formed islands in the sky, from the main island of Mt. Osborn a short way across, all the way over to the Singtook at the western tip of the archipelago. I wanted to walk across the FOG and inhabit each and every island. 
         But you get no photographs... The climb took place before the invention of photography. All you get is this confusing description of the internal and external landscape as experienced by one guy's subjective consciousness.

Couloir between Pt. 3050+ and Pt. 3200+ 

 Pt. 3050+ couloir

April 2011
     The first time to Pk. 3367, FOG, dampening my sensibilities, had forced me to concentrate, to overcome the A.D.D. that usually runs rampant in my brain, and so conversely provided me with a more accurate map of the outside world than I would have had otherwise. Justification for medication?
      But the second time, when I went back to 3367 with Tyler Rhodes seven years later for a ski descent, the day was bright, the visibility excellent. When we arrived at the base of the mountain, I assumed the mental map I carried in my head matched reality, and started up the wrong place.  We ended up atop Pt. 3050+, the penultimate gable of "Three Gables Mountain", the next bump to the west of the main summit. Tyler craved ski more than summit, so on we clapped them, and swooped down. 
       Even more rad was the couloir we skied later that afternoon on Pt. 2550+, a peaklet a couple of miles to the west of 3367.  We easily machined to the col at the very top of the valley (a valley for which some type of name would be handy, leave comments if you know) where it dumps over into the Glacial Lake cirque. Little hope exists that a snow-machiner might continue down the other side without ending up tangled wreckage and body parts strewn over rocks. 
       We parked machines at the col and skinned up some peaks to the south. On that day I was riding Tyler's "Soul Powders," his rather chattery tele skis he had abandoned long ago for the European rig. I was proud, for once, to keep up with Tyler for a whole run. Normally, I would have had to don crampons and down climb what he skied.

Looking west from west summit of 3367.  This picture was taken
in 2011 by Tyler, but shows the peak that Wilson  and I skied off of  recently in 2017.

April 2017

       Six years after the route-finding error with Tyler, having failed to register the event as a learning opportunity, I sent young Wilson up the same wrong part of the mountain, denying him the main summit of 3367 as Tyler before. Like Tyler, however, Wilson seemed less concerned with which was the highest bump on the ridge than which was the best line of huck.  The Nome-grown, incipient badass carved down a face through steep little channels formed between many sharp rocks, while I hobbled down from the top on boot ski, old and brittle. We met up with Leonard and Lupe at the bottom and all zoomed up the valley for more fun and boarding in the High Kigs, before commencing the long ride home via Silver Creek Pass and Snake River Valley.

Mr. McRae's class skiing with the Ski Ku, April 2017.

      Many of the images used in this post were pirated off Tyler's Facebook. Thank you Tyler, let's go back. Here at Kigsblog, an image is considered nothing more than "blog seed," necessary only for the orthogenesis of text, and never a means to its own end. So it is an honor to have excellent photos from someone who knows what they are doing. 

Aftermath of the Sluicebox

(above) Tyler Rhodes, northeast cirque of Oz behind him in shadow, Saturday, May 4, 2013, 3SA.

     CHICKEN SOUP saturated Andy's brain.  A complication from surgery following a compound fracture of both tib-fibs on both legs, the SOUP leaked out of the long bones into his circulatory system, and the fat cells worked their way up into his brain where they globbed up something awful, impeding all functions but the autonomic.  Now, Andy lay PROPPED up in the ICU at Alaska Regional Hospital in Anchorage, staring vacantly like Paul Pritchard in the The Totem Pole.  A group of "coma-hags" gathered around the bedside, including Andy's beatific mom and dad up from the states, Saint Ned, mushers, climbers, and the stricken Sir Apple.
            It had been a week since the Accident in the Sluicebox.   The idea was to awaken Andy with the proper stimulation, but so far nothing had worked.  People crackled Mojo Bar wrappers in his ears, a sound which Ned aptly described as "the soundtrack to trips with Andy," a sound which in times of exhaustion in the mountains had even begun to annoy me, but which now I longed to hear again.  We waved strong coffee under his nose.  Someone placed a rope in Andy's hand which his friends tugged on forlornly.  Jewish jokes were read.  We told blatant lies, hoping the outrage would shock Andy out of his coma.  Finally, Sir Apple grabbed the rope, and took the lead, and did what no one else had thus far had the chutzpah to do, but maybe were thinking about:   he leapt up on the hospital bed, like the troll that he is, and began to pull on Andy's short hairs...  twisting, twisting, until the corners of Andy's lips pulled back in a frightening grimace.  
          But it was only a pain reflex... Nothing.  We slumped back into the corners of the ICU room as the extremely nice nurses at Alaska Regional entered the room for the umpteenth time that day...

(left)  Allapa gives the What-4? in front of the Sluicebox on the return trip.  We logged a fine run for a blue-square skier like me on the blue-square slope behind.

        Upon my return to Sitnasuaq following the trip to Andy, a week of self-imposed gloom-and-doom followed.  I hid alone in my house for two weeks while my family dwelled far away in the Magic Kingdom.  Everyone assured me that Andy is a mature and seasoned alpinist with his own personal Jones for the Kigs, that he knew exactly what he was doing when he undertook the Sluicebox, that we made decisions based on calculated risks such as the kind that all alpinists have to make sooner or later, and that therefore the sense of guilt and responsibility that had propelled me like an infinite battery during the hours of the rescue, and of which eternal residues will always remain in my memory--  just what the hell drew Andy and me to be in that marble dungeon in the first place?--  was invalid.  But I could take no satisfaction from it, and we were all worried to death about Andy.

       Lovers and friends oozed out of the woodwork, all on a pilgrimmage for Andy.  People strange-attracted that hadn't seen each other in years, mushers from Andy's Iditarod years, mysterious women, Alaska's climbing legends, trail-runners, wilderness skiers, pipeline-walkers, a nurse on duty in Andy's unit that had been crushed years ago by a falling Grade IV ice climb, multiple visitors from Fairbanks.  Vast linkages of email strings connected everyone exchanging information and vital signs, plus many people Andy'd never known yet caught up in few degrees of separation.  I never realized the magnitude of the Andy attractor until now.  I never realized how little I knew about him, one of those unsung-hero types out there just doing it, despite all the strings of GLUE all over everything.  Godamned rock.
(above) Big marble tower on North Ridge of Osborn.  Tyler traversed this way, but there was no way to get around this tower.  Remote Northwest Ridge Osborn in background, Pk. 3900 on right.  I have officially lost interest in Kigluaik marble.

      Inside the tubules of his brain, Andy's leukocytes whittled at the CHICKEN SOUP.  I pictured them like little Pac-men gobbling up bone-marrow fat cells, scraping it off the capillary walls.  But so slowly!   As the days of Spring went by, and the snows of May descended upon Alaska, Andy lay in the hospital in Anchorage, his myriad friends and admirers checking in on him.  The doctors had said that if Andy only made steady progress (as the Pac-Men gobbled the SOUP), Andy would have a positive prognosis.   And steady progress is what he showed.  At some point, the coma-hags reached a consensus that there was no more coma, though emergence is more a cusp than any kind of fine line, which proved a paradox for the betting pool of the black-minded, dirtbag climbers.  Andy was back!     

             Fresh Spring powder blanketed the Kigs.  Super Smooth Andy G the .570 Bearcat was parked at the end of the road at the big wide area around Mile 28, waiting for action.  Kristine and Raina were due to return on the jet from the Magic Kingdom.  It was time to come out of hiding, stop moping around, and rescind my resignation from the mountains.  It was time to go skiing in the Kigs with Tyler.

(above)  Sluicebox Couloir on Northeast Face of Mt. Osborn (Pk. 4714), May 4, 2013.  Skinning up the hill for some telly-skiing, I turned and saw this view;  instantly I stopped, and for many minutes leaning on my ski poles became engrossed in a visualization of the epic with Andy two weeks before.  I realized that the big red X I put on the previous blogpost to show the site of the accident had been placed too high.  Does this look more like it, Andy?  This image also shows the anchor points for the four horrendo rappels we made, with Andy scootching and sliding down steep snow in great pain.

      "I'm skinning up the drag marks!" commented Tyler as we zig-zagged up the slopes below the big marble face of Osborn.  We did indeed find a sizable pile of gear at the top of the hill, at the base of the wall, at the lefthand base of the Sluicebox snow fan, right where the angle had finally leveled off and we abandoned the ropes and commenced true dragging.   Tyler probably noticed me cowering like a scared child, I couldn't wait to get out of there, out from under that permanent shadow and back into the sunshine, that big ugly wall of marble was going to shoot a projectile at me any moment,  I couldn't conduct a proper search, there's probably gear up there still.   It was kind of Tyler to put up so patiently with my bumbling.

(above)  East facing slopes of the North Ridge of Oz:  Tyler skied another badass line at the center of the photo;  I side-slipped and skied the firm snow from a saddle at the extreme right of photo.  Notice hideous marble tower on North Ridge.

       Absorbed in meditation on the Sluicebox from up on the sunny slopes pictured above, I realized all I knew about the accident two weeks before was a theory, pieced together from clues:  the two-hundred pound rock lying directly on top of the rope above highly compacted snow;  the feeling of the rock (the "Dementor") passing close by my position at the base of the 4th pitch, followed by the avalanche a predictable number of seconds later;  the incoherent bights of slack stacked between Andy on me on the running belay, an unfortunate consequence of simul-climbing on easy alpine ground;  Andy theorizing in between gasps of pain during our night of bodily PROPPING in the tent that he had not felt pain in his legs until he hit the bottom of the rope, and that he had never actually seen the rock come down;  plus, was the rope clipped into the Arrow or not when I downclimbed to Andy, and was it the Arrow at all?    

         But my mind was unreliable.  Things I had pounded out as sure truth in the blogpost immediately following the incident were, I saw now, not how it must have been.  The waters of Lethe wash over my position constantly like Zodiac Falls stalking climbers on the third pitch. The Pac-Men need to gobble the remainder of the SOUP from Andy's faculties so he can help me piece together the mystery so's I can escape from this OCD paradox continuum of the Sluicebox.

(above) View from North Ridge Oz looking east over Grand Central, Saturday, May 4, 2013.

    It did not help my already pitiful skiing that I had two right skis and only three edges between them.  Tyler, on the other hand, set off horizontally to the south on the ridge, seeking to drop into one of the steep chutes that I personally would have viewed as an ice climb.  We might have wanted the snow a little softer.  I threw sickening, wobbling turns down the fall line, bringing the skis desperately around to a horrible, chattering, side-slipping position.  Down came Tyler out of the icy afternoon shadows carving the beautiful mountainside with a few mighty sinusoidals.  The GLUE OF TOWN exerted its gravitational influence even at that distance and began to easily suck us back into town.  We mounted our HOGS and flew out of there, back to the trucks,  back down the highway to the fleshpots of Nome. 

(left)  Ian and Andy in the wet, Tog 3, Crater Creek, 2011.

      As of this writing, Andy is recovering as fast as Lieutenant Uhura does after the Communication Officer's mind is "wiped" clean by Nomad, aka Tonru.  Andy's motha has been stalwart.  The CHICKEN SOUP continues to resolve in the tangled wiring of Andy's brain via the blessed leukocytes.  The SPINNING BEACH BALL OF DEATH that is becometh the cursor of his mind is starting to flicker off, indicating systems are being restored to functionality.  The whole living blob of cooperating protoplasmic systems that constitutes Andy Sterns is back to being merely a man in painful rehab from two busted legs.  

        So so looking forward to meeting up with you again;  I'm still like we were in the tent, not yet fully believing we're out, out of a strange eddy in the sea of consciousness where the sound of voices are heard on the other side of temporal walls, the dopamine has gone completely out of the basal ganglia, time only comes in a series of flashes from a door opening and closing, the pain in the leg is like a fire burning away in the cabin through the night, the ineluctable modality of the audible minus the sequencing is all I can remember, it's all perfectly casual, in the place beyond fear.

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....

Topkok Ice

       Tyler Rhodes took this aerial photo (below) a few weeks ago during Iditarod (March 2010).   It's a section of sea cliffs on the Norton Sound coast about 60 miles east of Nome down the Iditarod Trail, called Topkok.  The mass of ice in the photo I call the "Second Weep."  I was supposed to go there last Sunday but woke up too hungover and sleep-deprived to make the journey.  So what follows is a summation of 3 climbing trips to this spiritually-charged region that occurred the previous winter (2009), during which I managed to climb the WI 3 mass of ice in the photo.  These trips were not without adventure.  I don't know whether this was a first ascent or not;  if you have climbed the ice in this photo, could you please leave a comment?  

                     

       There is a huge need to be vague here.  These are sacred lands.  I am just an obnoxious climber/blogger driven by my own post-European ego to report about the climbing I did there.  I don't pretend to be blogging about Topkok for any other reason than to prop up my own faltering sense of self worth and insecurity-driven need for recognition.  The roots of this place go deep into the Earth, and it is an obvious ethical transgression to be speaking of it, much less posting pictures of it on the Internet.  I am sorry to be succumbing to this ridiculous need to TALK about climbing Topkok.  One should just climb Topkok and shut up about it.....

             

       Allapa on the Second Weep (above and below).  We're looking at one pitch of WI 3 here, fat and casual, except that the ice was exceptionally dinner-platey due to the fabulously cold temperatures.  This ice lies about 4 miles from the Topkok Shelter Cabin.  We walked, though if the sea ice is solidly accreted, one could drive.  Along the way we soloed a lesser falls, the "First Weep," which lies about two miles from the cabin.

       Did I mention it was cold?  Yes, I'm sure I did already, butOMG, you have no idea, really.  Look at the puffiness of my coat in these photos.  Below zero.  Way, way below zero.  It is fatally, horrendously, unimaginably cold in this photo, Antarctica, zero Kelvin, deep space nine,  allapa, allapa, move or freeze, lordy, sure is cold, what more is there to say? 

                      

       Trip number one was in January.  Collins and I made an initial reconnaissance of the cliffs and soloed the First Weep (of which I have no pictures;  it ain't much, WI 1), and walked far enough east down the beach to discover the Second Weep, for which we had no time.  One interesting thing was this amazing coating of verglas on the beach boulders:  about 8 inches of wonderful marine ice that made for really fun bouldering (below).  When we got back to the machines, Collins' Ski-Doo wouldn't start and we had a total and complete epic;  as he pulled his cord hundreds of times, I watched Jeff's spirit gradually get sucked away into his machine like a drunk's spirit getting sucked into any emptying whiskey bottle.  If the Topkok cabin had not been there, we might not have made it, that's how cold it was.   Yessir, sure was cold, yep.... 

                          

       The second trip (February?) we climbed the main business, the Second Weep.  This was absolutely the coldest of the 3 trips, the kind of cold that can kill you fast, 25 below at least with a stiff breeze.  Collins belayed in his puffy coat and had to eskimo dance vigorously to keep from dying.  I put in screw anchors at the top and yo-yoed back down on my 120 meter Sterling Duetto so Jeff could follow the pitch.  On this, his first real ice climb, he was clinging to the last steep part and overgripping his tools, when I heard:

       "I'm going to pass out now..."

       "NO!  You can't pass out now!  Get your weight onto this rope NOW!"

       You see, if he passed out before weighting the rope, I wasn't going to be able to lower him due to friction in the system, and if he was going to pass out up at the top of the pitch, I wasn't going to be able to get up there and rescue him before we were both become popsicles.  It was cold, you see, allapa, deadly cold, I'm not kidding.  We managed to get Jeff lowered off the climb and pull the ropes and get out of there, leaving the two screws at the top.  All in all, Jeff hung super tough for this baptism by fire and ice;  there are kinder ways to be introduced to ice climbing than a 14 hour Topkok trip.

       The third trip I did to Topkok was solo.  I spent the day bouldering around.  I saw numerous turf climbing lines waiting to be ascended.  If Topkok were the Seward Highway instead of the Seward Peninsula it would have lots of killer turf lines, but it's not, thankfully.  The rock presents a real hodgepodge of geologies, quartzite seeming to be the predominant blend, mega-choss, of course, like every other piece of rock on the Peninsula.  Miles upon miles of sea cliffs stretch away down the coast, haunted by Ishigaitch, the little people, though I have never seen one.  Topkok is just a spooky place.  The shelter cabin is another of those terrestrial acupuncture nodes, a surreal portal into other dimensions like the wardrobe in the Narnia books.  

   Before making the ride to Topkok from Nome, you have to learn about the "Blow Hole," which is this crazy wind funnel between Topkok Head and Solomon.  The Blow Hole is why the shelter cabin is there in the first place.   If the weather report says "high winds between Nome and Golovin," you have good reason to fear.