Thompson Creek- Maniilaq Falls

Town was a glue, a terrible glue.  It sucked at our feet like muskeg and threatened to prevent our leaving.  Nome had turned into Sodom and Gomorrah due to Iditarod.  So we tore ourselves away and headed back up the Kougarak Road late on a Wednesday night, back into the white mountains.

Maniilaq Falls (WI 2)  in Thompson Creek was about a pitch long.  It felt odd to be whacking into actual BLUE ice in the Kigs in winter;  usually these cold mountains are able to produce only alpine ice.  Our waterfall must be fed by a little tarn above it. 

There was a disturbing hole at the top of the falls in which we belayed, the obvious source of the frightening detritus we had seen at the bottom.  You can see the hanging crown face of whatever bizarre thing it was that released in the picture, below.  

Thompson Creek is a cool little cwm walled off by the north face of "False Tigaraha," an area where the pluton comes into contact with the schist;  Maniilaq was our mysterious name bestowed upon the blob we climbed on the east wall of Thompson Creek.  Many new ice blobs have been sighted this winter due to low snowfall.     

out of the cone of Hells Angel roaring

into the silence of the whackety whack and wind

 how temporary your hair in this temple of nothing

so precious your mud flows for only now

i don't want anything to move

nothing in this place must change

i tip-toe around the frowns on all your faces

we are all become the prophet on the stick

he said to make hot water bottles before you go

don't go back to town, you are not wanted there

and this is how every snow-machine mountaineering trip must end

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   

Ayasayuk Iterations

i take full responsibility for trespassing.   

Below is a comparison.  The upper picture is from 2 weeks ago, year 2010, and the lower one is from, uh, 2002 perhaps.  It is a quarry:  the idea here is that humans must keep blasting the climbs out of existence so that they only exist any longer in the mind's eye.  Am I to be prosecuted?  What cliff, i say,  what ice?  

I so apologize for putting this person in there, this image seemed to give the best resolution of the ice:  the longish thinnish looking one in the center of photo was a pitch of WI 3+ with a short pillar section.  First Iteration Right.

Circa 2002.  First Iteration Right is at center of the photo.  It was as ephemeral as it was ephemeral.
       In Fall of 2001 or thereabouts, Mikey Lean and I drove out there after school and I got up the pitch.  Up top, I made a sitting belay on a frozen pool anchored to equalized willow tips.  Down in the darkness, Mikey thrashed and struggled and panted.  With a blood-curdling scream, she exploded off a little overhanging bulge.  I was pulled from my stance and skated on my butt toward the edge which I found myself suddenly looking down.  Mikey appeared to be cratering, but it was only her headlamp off her helmet.  I glanced back and the tiny ropes of the willow branches were completely taut as Mikey dangled in space, rotating like Dr. Jonathan Hemlock.
        The lefthand flows in the picture were easier.  I remember various climbs of these spaced over a few years, (before quarrying resumed to build the new port of Nome,) some solo, some with partners, including Paul LaBolle, longtime Nomen, who reports making an early ascent of the Cape Nome ice somewhere in the haze of the eighties or nineties.  Was Paul's the first ascent?  Did Paul climb an earlier iteration? (He couldn't remember if the climbs had changed from when he first climbed it.)  Even when the blasting started up again, the lefthand flows continued to exist a few years after the center pillar was destroyed.
       Like the year O A.D., the appellation "First Iteration" is relevant only to one person's personal reference,   there were undoubtedly earlier iterations of the cliff / aquifer system which only the old-timers remember.  It's just my little thingy:  if I come upon evidence of earlier iterations, I'm going to have to assign them negative ordinals.

  Unidentified climber on some random smear of Ayasayuk ice nestled in the folds and faults of space and time and slices of preCambrian orthogneiss.  We are used to the ice morphing and changing with each year, but the stone?

The mysterious Pig Man

Distin Bluff Mixed

 Bluff  (Pt. 1,129)  in front of (southwest) of Mt. Distin 

     Collins and I went back to Twin Mt. for the M3 that had been denied us due to the freezing off of our derrieres related in an earlier post, but by the time we got back on a Sunday morning, a chinook had sprung, and we couldn't cross the Snake like we had the first time.   So we thumbed our noisy hideous mobiles on down the Glacier Creek Road to that old standby, Distin Bluff, a quartzite ridge of some geological sort lying southwest of Mt. Distin.  

     A conundrum fell upon us:  whether to utilize the brutally-heavy climbing equipment we had lugged up from our machines to the base of the cliff, or simply boulder around like sprightly little spirits.  We had learned from previous frostbite:  Ropes stayed inside the pack.  Axes, helmet, and crampons came out.

     Did I mention it was cold?  Well, yes.  Lunatic cold.  Pure undiluted Allapa.  However, these little south-facing cliffs have a pleasant way of providing little sunny safe havens where you can hang out under the warm mothering influence of the stone.

     Later, Jeff and I ran west a klik over to Silver Creek to check if there was ice, and, Saints Preserve Us!, there was.  We soloed Grade I, pretending we were big shots.  Thwack went the dinner-plates.  

Earp starting M-1 solo, Distin

   Next week (the mental murk of February sometime),  a miraculous email:  from an experienced alpinist, living in Nome, with tools, jonesing to go climbing.  More than just an abstraction- it was Earp.
     We saddled up my ponies, .570 Bearcat and good old .340 Polaris.  Town had been a complicated escape.  We roared off with my note to Kristine reading: 1. Glacial Lake  2. Mt. Distin, back by tomorrow at 11:00, will G-Spot you my love.  Always put tomorrow for your return time even though you will be dead by then-  better than having THEM come for you.  KOW
     Did I mention it was cold that day?   Yes.  Bitterly.  Allapa.   Little orthoscopic knives penetrated my swaddling face masks.  It was only regular allapa on the way out there, —15° F, a breeze out of the north at 5 to 15.  The incredibly tough Earp was game to continue on into the Kigs, so we thundered past Mt. Distin, down into the spreading plains of the Stewart River, west across the sprawl of the Sinuk (upon whose totally bare ice  I lucked out unscathed for the 22.3 x 10^5 time in my life, getting thrown from my horse on a spin-out.  Need studs.)

      But when we got to Glacial Lake, something mystical occurred.  I certainly can't explain it, you hadda be there.  The cold... just.. dropped.  The temps went to minus forty, fifty, sixty, who knows?  The wind freshened to a very steady 25.  It went from regular allapa to super-mega-amundo allapa, like the tune of the cold modulating from sub-Arctic to Arctic, with inhuman arpeggios.  Only the inexplicable warmth of the snow-machining bubble kept us alive.  
     There was no question of climbing the gneiss face (Peak 2740, "Glacial Lake Peak") we had come to bag that rose majestically in front of us.  There was no question of turning off the machines.  "So?" screamed Earp over the murderous wind, "Time to get out of here!" It must have had something to do with the fact that Glacial Lake is an orographic pressure valve between the Imruk Basin and the Norton Sound, and that the colder flow sinks to the bottom.
     We returned to Distin and had a splendid day on the Bluff, not thinking for a few hours about our fortunes actively deteriorating in town.

 

    Whack of frozen turf not quite the same as whack of water ice, but both vibrations are equally reassuring when you are thirty feet or more, yes, she's thirty feet or more.   A torque into the monolithic here, a hook of frozen flake there, she's telling herself, try not to care, try not to care.  This sideways foot is all I have, scuttle on by, scuttle on by....

   We do not fool ourselves that this activity is any more pointless than creating big toxic sludge ponds to obtain the yellow metal.

Mt. Osborne Pilgrimmage

Mt. Osborne, 4704-- last saturday, Chris Miller (aka "the dentist") and I attempted Osborne-  this photo shows our high point, plus the definitive summit of the mountain-  if you are thinking of attempting Osborne and you care about which tor is the true summit, study the picture carefully-  that's about 3500 ft. of mountain there...

  here is the image savagely mangled the image by drawing the little lines of ascent i have made on the hill over the years, the ravages of ego...  the E. Face had some WI2 and M3 when Phil and I did it, 11 hours, i think--  and, i was up on that Northeast Ridge (the "4-20 Arete," 'cause i climbed it on 04-20-'06) for 7 hours tip-toeing around on alpine ice (Mikey Lean and I having nearly climbed the Northeast Ridge a month earlier in a 21 hour tour de force)...    

 confusion exists over the true summit of Osborne- the summit ridge is a long line of marble tors, running north-south, like a fence-  the mountain has been climbed many times in Nome's hundred-year history, but who was the first may never be known.... many locals say they have "climbed Osborne," when in fact they only reached the summit ridge, without bothering to ascend the alpha tor-  (but if they tell you someone has snow-machined up to the summit ridge, that's probably true...)

  the most massive of the summit tors looks like the highest in the picture, but it's not-  i call it the "Penultimate Pinnacle" which i ascended in 2001 with ropes and chocks, finding it to be about 5.6 on the south side  (Roman Dial may or may not have soloed in the '90s)--  thinking it to be the summit of Osborne, i was surprised to see, off to the north, one of the lumpier tors appearing to be about 10 ft. higher--  darkness was falling on a September evening, i had no time to traverse the  class 3 or 4 slopes over to this tor, so i retreated (and spent the night siwashing in Grand Central Valley under the northern lights next to a fire of beautiful california redwood, leftover timber from a mining ditch...)

finally made it over to the alpha tor with Nils Hahn a few years later, and have reached it several times since then, in alpine conditions (though never before March 21st, so there you go!  i have reason to believe Chris and mine would have been a FWA)-  you bypass the big tor (Penultimate) and work across  45° slopes-  the highest tor is not very craggy, with a few moves, Class 4 at best-  in winter conditions, a different story-  Chris and i were happy to be wearing the ropes, the slopes were perfectly icy, one mistake and you'd be off like a rocket-

in summer, most people can make it up to the high point without a rope, no problem-  who really cares which tor is the high point anyway?  one of these days i'll have to haul a transit up there, but even then, we're all out of here in a geological second, Osborne included...

Twin Mountain, Sunday, January 17

despite the one cool climb, the Brynteson trip the weekend before was a big failure—  my original intention had been to reach a climbing destination directly across the Snake Valley at Twin Mountain, but chickened out of crossing the river willows on snow-machine— the Brynteson chutes and aretes i narrated were a consolation prize, my fourth time up there, they are fun cliffs in winter mon, drive all the way to north side of hill before dismounting and ascending.

(right) N. Twin Mountain cliffs at sunset,
Snake River Valley, showing big chunks of avalanche set off by Graham on January 17

We started up the snow-covered turf ramp left of center, left of the orange-lichen wall-  there was an awkward move around a willow lump-  Chris and I rappelled from a snow-filled alcove above-  it was chill factor 55 below, and we didn't have our act together-  Chris's ATC burned a frozen brand into his belly....

(normally i would consider it a degredation to spew such spray, such shameless i-Beta, but the Snake River Valley is already well degraded IMHO, so what does it matter?)

next weekend on the 17th of January, i returned with a secret weapon:  an actual, human, climbing partner, the indefatigable Chris Miller, primed and ready, mounted on top of a big yellow Ski-Doo, with his poor feet jammed into Phil Hofstetter's too-small snappy red Koflach climbing boots.  off we roared, me on the new smooth-riding .570 Bearcat.

the cold:  the fabulous cold.  did i mention yet it was cold?  well, it was.  it was cold.   allapa.  allaparunga.  Clem, Clem!  i am cold.  these boots, they don't work!   the wind was blowing 20 over the ridgetops, with an ambient well below zero, twenty, twenty-five below that day, with the wind at twenty mph, Art Davidson baby.  much too cold for technical climbing with ropes, but we were choosing to do it anyway.

Twin Mountain cliffs came up fast this time when Chris gunned the hog across Snake River, with a minimum of willow-shredding. foolishly, we had not donned harnesses before the ride and froze our fingers doing so.  as i started up the icy snow slope towards the cliff, last week's avalanche was far from my mind, when

  

    click!

i should have been expecting it.  the slope cracked neatly and ran exactly a centimeter and stopped.  it was nothing, slope angle wasn't maybe over 31°,  but i was gasping anyway, having a very heart attack, stricken, white, panic-attacking;  Chris,  saw Ian acting weird further up the slope and thought nothing of it, dude's always acting that way-  

but that click, that mechanical click, all the heinous snow slopes all those years we've crouched on with our ears to the surface waiting for that very clicking sound, all the friends we've lost, Tom, Johnny, Alex, Randy, Nemo, how is anyone supposed to know?  the accrued resonance of fear built up over years in Alaska had me cursing and sputtering most vilely

(left)  quartzite is metamorphosed sandstone:  this kind in Snake River is pure choss.  but in winter, it meshes with its bryophytic symbiotes, freezes solid, and you get good Cobra thunks, just like real ice!  the living climbing wall...


as we were getting into lead-climbing mode on the quartzite cliff, lo and behold, along came Earp on a borrowed snow-machine! and now here she was coming up the slope!  now, here is an individual who can fully appreciate irrational fear of a snow slope!, for i had seen Joni's picture of the big one she had ridden at Turnagain Pass—  

sure enough, when she reached a point, right where the slope gradient kicks back to exactly 35°—

whompf!

she had my same reaction, stricken, white, gasping.

(right)  choss-  i came back the following weekend by myself and soloed a bunch of stuff-  i gave each route i did a very serious name, and various ratings in several different languages, but i forgot it all...

as i'm banging in pins like fury on ground where on another day i have soloed, lo and behold, from down below came a roaring over the wind:   Jeff and Graham a-straddle their dreadful SkiDoos, stalking our cliff.  they were off their machines and up to the cliff in seconds.  i tried to hear what they were saying but i was hanging onto the tips of willows and snow-kneeing over a rather troublesome little drop-off (with some good protection from a Bugaboo, i might add)

i was too far away to hear the click , but i heard the 

                          BOOM!! 

Graham, the tiger, had sunk his claws into a fairly huge 38° raft and set if off, maybe 30' x 90' x 16".   large blocks of snow slipped and slithered down the slope before coming to rest in a hissing pile-up of fragments.  i couldn't see from my perch, but apparently Earp had to do the RFYL!

one by one, we bugged out.  Chris and I made it out last and epicked in the darkness on our machines.   we emerged from the whole ordeal NOT unscathed... we ended the day sitting in hot baths discussing our frostbite over the phone.

Avalanche on Mt. Brynteson

there it is, you can see a horizontal, white line left of center low on the mountain but above the willows- that's the crown face left by the avalanche two Sundays ago on January 10-  I was on my way down from a very fun very cold solo on the cliffs above, when I cavalierly began plunge-stepping down the convex face of a mid-mountain cornice created in a lee-slope deposition zone...

it was maybe 300' x 60' x 16" with me on top of the slab treadmilling the whole raft underneath me (fortunately i had been facing inwards with cobras drawn)-  the trigger made such a a gentle, audible, beautiful, gradual, resonating

                                                               whompf!...

noise, like a long row of playing cards going down underneath the floor-  i instinctively pedalled upwards as the horizontal fracture shot propagated before my very eyes and i now found myself climbing on a moving plane of snow-   i don't know how far i slid along with the mass trying to mantle onto the top of its crown-- when it came to rest after a short amount of slding, i was lucky to be perched on an unbroken plate of snow- probably a good thing i kept climbing up through the downward motion-  the ensuing rush was well worth the consternation of those few seconds-  mark, this avalanche ranked next to nothing by Chugach or Alaska Range standards, but still, this occasion marks my first true avalanche experience on the Sewie Peninsula, and was certainly sufficient to increase the heartbeat a bit...

the event over-shadowed the other highlight of the day, an enjoyable highball / solo type thing, a fun fun job of climbing on the quartzite arete visible in the rear of the photo- call the line i did M-3 with a picturesque top-out onto the north summit of Brynteson, done in extraordinarily cold conditions, sub-zero with stiff winds out of the north- moss sticks, stemming, overhangs, cams, surprisingly good climbing for a big blop of CHOSS....



here's John Brynteson, one of the 3 Lucky Swedes

punfaruq, M-6

mere bouldering: to climb in Nome is to boulder, on a day to day basing getting so much more movement over stone than in Fairbanks, where your heart lies— it helps to have imagination, it doesn't hurt with medication, wear a helmet because to boulder in Nome is to cope with some pretty

unnerving spring-loaded looseness staring you down the nose— you're longing to be in the heart of the Kigs again, but the glue of town has sucked you in, you've managed
only

to

escape to the Sunset Boulders but what a glorious boon that you suddenly find yourself perched on suspended moss clouds in a closing window of sunlight, cares forgotten in the

unaccustomed focus of jesus christ this is suddenly real, but now a Cobra has whacked home into that little package of water that surrounds the tubors in the soil of the turf and you know now it's going to be alright, though you're surprisingly 35 ft. off the deck and rising, sudden, all of time is sudden now as you realize your head has cleared and

Monday can be faced with equanimity, this mere bouldering has cleared out your head, and now for some lowball traverses, dangling like Stevie Haston over fat pads of snow, and now your positive clearances have come skating off the rounded holds in a great explosion, a massive 12 inch fall and your arm may be broken, the nausea of shock, you're rolling around on the frozen bare tundra suddenly suddenly realizing the chill fak is 35 below, get on your snow machine and ride, this is what you came for, punfaruq, bows low, M-6

Crater Creek Scrambles

Above, the "Second C-Tog," the second peak on the left after you turn the corner going up the South Fork of Crater Creek. "C-Tog" is a reference to Amato and Miller's "Bedrock Geologic Map of the Kigluaik Mountains" (NMSU, 2004) and refers to the "preCambrian Thompson Creek Orthogneiss," the pluton which forms the spine of the Kigluait. Somewhere in the whitish slabby area to the right of the indistinct buttress in the center of the photo, I pretended to be Norman Clyde on a warm June evening in 2009, wandering up 5th class slabs and cracks, arriving at the summit just before impending rain. As usual, I've no way of knowing if the peak had been climbed previously.

To the right is the same C-Tog as above, C-Tog 2, but taken from further down the valley. The prow on the rightlooks to be, what?, 4 full pitches, maybe 800 ft. As with so many teeth in the 'Tooths," the south side (the back side in this photo) is much less precipitous than the wall here on the north side. So why not have climbed the prow? Lack of partners, cursed lack of partners, coupled with unwillingness to rope solo(all that rappeling and jugging over the fields of death flake, all that solitude weighing down like the sky.) Besides, Norman Clydeing it is just so much fun.

Above, we have the "First C-Tog," the first peak on the left after you turn the corner going up the South Fork of Crater Creek. It is home to another Norman Clyde route I soloed in June of 2008. Looking at this photo now, my sabotaged memory has no recollection of where the route went. I see myself vegging out on beautiful bryophyte ledges for many minutes at a time. Body remembers a 5.6 friction slab on a patch of plain, old-fashioned granite as good as Tuolumne. I remember looking down between my legs at the slabs tumbling away and the adjacent angles of air, thinking, maybe this climb actually is transcending mere bouldering. I remember doing a few moves where I imagined Norman himself might have balked. Yet, the nature of the terrain would have permitted him to scramble around with a fair amount of ease, his dignity intact.

Weighty dome of solitude sky

He breaks alone into solitary crying

He cannot remember that line from Thucydides

Curtains of rain hang from the summits

Salmon Lake is on most maps. The C-Tog Towers on the may be on Bering Straits Native Corporation land, but more likely on BLM, and it is rather rude that I'm not sure and too lazy to find out. Perhaps the heinous responsibility of internet posting, the sheer weight of the many thousands of you that are reading this AT THIS MOMENT, will drive me to find out the stewardship of the Crater Creek granite, and edit accordingly.

Crater Creek is a more straight-forward walk-in than its parallel cousin 5 miles south, Grand Central Valley. At one point a few miles in from the road, the left arm of Crater (unnamed valley?) and the right arm of Grand Central (Gold Run Creek) reach out and almost touch, separated by one slender Class 2 pass. If one were to actually visit this place, one would need to be extremely respectful of the people who have cabins on the Kougarak Road. Like, basically, I'm saying, even though I'm posting this detailed information on the worldwide web, well, like, um, don't really go here, dude, we're all going to ruin it and piss off the landowners, we will be as infections to the beautiful organism of the mountains . So, like, I really need to quit going to the Kigs and so should you.

Me, Mr. McRae, below left, and ex-principal Mr. White on the right, looking west up the southwest fork of Crater Creek, the First and Second C-Togs to the left. Can you see the wind, blessedly blowing the bugs away? Look how happy Carl looks! The burden of Nome Elementary freshly lifted from his shoulders, and replaced by my dead guy daddy's old Kelty Tioga, big blue summertime stretching ahead, the day standing still in photographs.

The "Steely Focus" Buttress, IV, 5.9

July basecamp was on these moraines. Many thanks to Bering Air for choppering us right to this spot. Around the corner to the right (south), hidden out of the picture, the barest nub of a glacier can still found-- is this one of Kaufman's 3 living glaciers in the Kigluaik?

Such a wonder to have someone out there to talk with, for once. Andy and I chatted ceaselessly. At one point, Andy remarked: "Boy, it sure takes a steely focus in your home life to keep climbing all the time." L.A.F.S. (Love At First Sight Syndrome, a resonance phenomenon) was immediately recognizable with the utterance of the phrase "steely focus" as soon as Andy spoke the words. At that precise moment, it became our nom de jour, and the inevitable name of the climb that was about to follow.

Here is Andy perching at the top of Pitch 1. Andy had spotted the line the day after our harrowing ascent of the Sulu Tor. The next morning we had hiked to a spot at the very locus of the entire cirque. We had stood on a hump and slowly whirled around, watching the walls for where to climb next. The Steely Focus Buttress had appeared to be an area of possible lesser choss among the pure choss fields.

The first pitch was indeed more igneous than metamorphic, which felt pleasant after all the terror of the preceding days. It felt a bit like Toe Jam at J-Tree for one moment. The sun heated the rock. The healing vibrations of warm granite began to repair our damaged bodies.

The routefinding presented a type of aesthetic dilemma: whether to grovel up the green bryophytic strips which overlay the more solid rock, or jam and stinkbug out on more elegant flakes which were not, in any way, not the least bit, attached to the main wall.

In the winter you sink a pick in the moss clouds, but in summer you clutch at them with starfish hands. Despite the green strips, the Steely Focus had a few nice moves in its 7 pitches. Each pitch ran consistently at 5.7 or harder (and this 5.7, of course, was rendered desperate by the choss and the crumble, felt more like 5.9.) A very cool roof, some delicate crack, classic belay ledges, very nearly but not quite a wall ambiance, lots of pro (none of it worth a DAMN but the pins!), many different route options, an extremely cool top-out at the rim, I believe it might possibly be the first route of its kind in the Kigluaik, unless you count the Chimneys of Tiresias.

Descent, on the other hand, sucked big as we tried to glissade in rock shoes. We were deep inside an amazing horrific exfoliating chasm (definition of "chasm": a fault or gully which runs continuously from the top of Suluun to the base, which might provide either ascent, descent, or egress) the 4th chasm from the left when looking from basecamp. We gave up glissading and banged in pins; they are still there but you'll never be able to reach them because there will never be as much snow during summer as there was last July of 2009 when Andy and I gamboled about there.

Here is a topo from Ian's little yellow book. Silly- but we were bored in the tent. There was definitely some 5.9 in there somewhere. There are a hundred different ways you could go. I always seem to choose the easy way. But it's death, mate, don't go.....

Once more, the secret location of Suluun, which, I believe, is on BLM land, under a outdoor recreational designation, i am sure...