Pk. 2345, Johnstone Creek

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

  

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

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

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

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

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

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

Peak 3000+, Southwest Ridge

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(above) Looking northeast from Peak 3000+.

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

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

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

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

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

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

(above) Looking northwest from Pk. 3000+

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

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

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

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

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

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

    It hath the primal eldest curse upon't—

   

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

(above) TR region, Johnstone Creek area

1. Pk. 3000+

2.  Inuksuk pass (see below)

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

4.  Pk. 2930 a slice o' the gneiss

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

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

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

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

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

inukshuk

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

Spring Bouldering

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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


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

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


(below, bottom) BSNC lands. 

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

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

Banner Creek Bouldering Getaway


the lovers were loving at the love-in

the music drifted down to the willows by the river

the rock it was solid and undercut—

     oh, leave it all and get off to the war

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

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

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

      now, off to the war, enough of this peace

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

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

  but when we awoke, the ground was too close—

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

no more capering with our seats next to the ground

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

away from this babbling brook of Forgetfulness—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

Windmills, Sunset, Pennies, midnight sun bouldering

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Inuruq (Pk. 1926)

(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 in early Spring

 if anyone is offended by the sharing of these secrets, please leave comments and i will discontinue this entire silliness immediately...

         the ishigak darted by, mounted on a little child's snow machine...  i was sitting in the sullen gloom of the Topkok shelter cabin two Sundays ago staring out the lighted frame of the window when i saw the ishigak go by, but only for a second...  as you can see from the picture of the shelter cabin (below, left), there was little snow that day, the temperature being far too warm for ice climbing, which was what i had come for (but at least the Iditarod Trail had hung in there— silky smooth sailing on snow machine, as a matter of fact, due to the miraculous meter of snowfall in mid-April)...   i ran outside the cabin to view the ishigak, but the little man had disappeared, no sound, no trace, no lingering exhaust...

        later, leaving the hut, i walked east for two or three miles down the beach, under the exfoliating cliffs...  the First Weep was non-existent, and the Second Weep, (top, looking east, with Tapkak Head in the setting sun) which Collins and I had epicked out on the year before, was a shaky-looking thing that did not inspire confidence

           it was warm in April, the tors in the distance poked out of emergent tundra like the cover of a Yes album,  but PARANOIA overtook me like a squall whenever I walked out into the open... Topkok had become like a mental illness to me...   i mean, just look at Phil and Ryan's spring Topkok story fro last year!

http://nomemisadventures.blogspot.com/2009/05/excellent-bear-tacular-madventure.html

why is Topkok so weird?  i think it's the quality of the wind, all circular and eddy-like and going-every-which way like the Z-waves on a cartoon TV screen... this must be due to some odd confluence of air masses...  if anybody understands the winds of Tapkak, please leave comments...  but really, the deal is, the place is a psychic node, a crackling network point for the Earth's psycho-electromagnetism....

(above)  February 2009 iteration of Topkok 2nd Weep, Ian climbing, 30 below... 
(below) the same climb two Sundays ago, April 18, 2010, with hanging bells, like a Hung Jury of Nome...  Ian was too damn chicken to solo the whole thing...

Here was a new one, not present in 2009:  it could only be the 1.5 Weep (above)...  I was scared even to touch it, with the birds singing in the air and the temps so warm...  this was a great personal failing, a complete let down of will and power, a sin, the sin of CLIMBING NOT...    nevertheless, these types of chicken-outs have a way of preserving oneself, so one can remain whole to climb the 1.5 Weep on another day, KOW, KOW...

 Normally, the First Weep  is a fun 60 foot solo on water ice (WI-1 or WI-2), but Spring had already melted it by two Sundays ago (above)...  the beta is, you climb the falls, then continue up steep willows and solo the south arete of the Ishigak, visible in the background as the lefthand skyline of the 100 ft. outcrop... there's good THWACKS on turf and hooks of frozen flake (M-1 or M-2) with at least the illusion of exposure, pretty good for all the trouble getting there, and the ocean gently tugs on your earlobes as you climb...

   this was the trip where i felt the rock of Tapkak for the first time, warm under the fingers...  always in the past the feel of the rock had only been transmitted to nervous system by the feel of the tools, the chrome molly and carbon fiber shaft,  always in the past you couldn't take your gloves off, so cold, so inhumanly unworldly ALLAPA!

   but now it was April,  the quartzite had hatched from its icy pupa...  i discovered ("discovered" only for myself, of course, all this data has been known by people for milleniums since before the whole bluff rose out of the sea for the second time, somewhere in the Pliocene) that the choss quality was highly variable...  in places, like in the picture (above), the degree of choss approached actual decent rock, almost so good that a drilled hole with a bolt in it might actually hold something, which is rare for the Seward Peninsula...  in the second zawn from the hut,  i bouldered in Scarpa Inviernos on beach boulders where the quartzite was gray and dimpled, and the cracks were true cracks and would have taken nuts marvelously...  elsewhere, the rockfall was so bad, it was like the Eiger Sanction, i huddled under that very bottom inside angle of the overhanging sea cliff where the rocks can't technically get you, scuttled along with  feet pressed right up against the cliff where the sea ice met the rock,  climbing the choice bits, lost in rock and turf and ice and thought, don't go there, they all say, don't go there, but of blogging, who can really say?

(Below) is a map of phoneme/land correspondences from the Norton Sound coast that have been propagated for some time...   I've had this map floating in my school files for a long time, but have no idea where it came from, or who made it.  Leave comments if you know.  And i do understand that climbing, and worse, spraying about a magical place, before you have actually done the research of the land stewardship is a rude and reckless act not to be condoned, but shouldn't these particular words be posted, do they not justify the desecration of the post?  

                                                
http://www.paulcolor.com/index.php#mi=2&pt=1&pi=10000&s=16&p=5&a=0&at=0

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.

Mud Mounds—part I

(below)  Same tooth, interestingly (the photo of Raina is reversed, I think.)  Her's went to the Tooth Fairy a couple of weeks ago.  Mine splintered into several pieces and fell into the snow last night at the Anvil mud mounds.   Both incidents occured within a two-week range;  this might, I think, qualify this dental coincidence as a 1.0 on the Synchronicity Scale, but that may be an exxageration.  

 

accident analysis:  the temperature had cooled down dramatically to about five above, so the mud had hardened since my glorious day in the Anvil mounds the previous Sunday (trespassing horribly, for which i confess and apologize)...  chisel was dull, penetration shallow...  as soon as I applied weight, left tool popped out... the apex of that cool Black Diamond adze (the triangular one that you can torque in so many different ways) slammed lower left incisor.     

synchronicity analysis:  periodic frequency of zone 2 physical injuries one every three years, on average,
to be noted that for Raina, this was no zone 2, merely the first tooth for the Fairy,
which may lower the synchronicity rating, but still, can we not call this coincidence at least a 1.0?

(and did i mention it was cold?  Lord God it was allapa!  Springtime in Alaska and it's Forty Below!  Wind blustering through at twenty to twenty five, spindrift spindrifting, Mikey and me blogganeering through sting and lash and frozen blood clumps, Left Hand of Darkness cold!  Allaparunga!  CLEM!!  CLEM!!!)

On Bouldering

   (below) Cabin Rock Crags (not Cabin Rock itself) in rime.  Drive up Teller to Cabin Rock (extremely disappointing in and of itself for bouldering potential), slog up hillside over a 1000 ft. to east, walk over the crest to scruffy hillside boulders and crags up to 40 ft. high, overlooking Penny River.  Land stewardship unknown to me at this time, but please leave comments if appropriate.

    Bouldering is the interstitial glue connecting the all too infrequent occurence of significant climbs in the Kigs.  In between the failures to get out of town, the failures with partners, the #%#@*&$$ snow-machine incidents, lies the wonderful bouldering experiences.

    What may not be realized is the miraculous access here in (region to remain unnamed for now) for BOULDERING, medium to low quality, but gloriously free, so many lost ridgelines with tors of metamorphic rock poking out of the top like vertebrae.

(below)  Sunset Boulders, Beginners Wall, Tuft Route.  Head out Teller Road to berry fields before you get to Penny, you see a crooked orange crag a short hike up the hillside to the right (north) of road.  Cool little M1 or 2 on exfoliated turf tufts.  Land stewardship unknown to me at this time, but please leave comments if appropriate.

Bouldering doesn't seem to sustain everyone.  Bouldering feels at times like reading fantasy or science fiction.  You creep out there and pretend you are really climbing.  You perch on little footholds a foot off the deck and imagine that those bryophytes under your heel are really the tops of trees in Yosemite.   Then you find a little turf mattress out of the wind and take a little nap listening to the wind howling over the top of the rock....

(below) Sunset Boulders, Orange Wall, Ian experimenting with figure-4 unsuccessfully. He is worried the metamorphic schist flake will catastrophically disengage.  Many of the local  bouldering gardens have a featured orange wall.  I don't know the name of the lichen.  Please leave comments if you know the classification of this orange species of lichen.  If you feel I have broached some common law by climbing on this formation, or especially if you have ethical problems with the spraying of geographical locations on a blog, you simply must leave comments stating your reasons, so that this entire blogging enterprise may be discontinued.  Thank you....

What were bouldering a social event?

Then I'd have arms a praying

And raising in supplication

And on their lips they'd be spraying

Of all the routes they would steal

We'd all have to get out on Friday

Right when the day is done

But bouldering ain't a social event

And I'm out here all alone... 

(below) Cabin Rock Crags-  M-bouldering paradise.  Made it up there one good day so far in February.  The ice in this picture is not the glaze ice I have referred to elsewhere as the "shellac";  in this picture we have rime.  It wouldn't hold your weight, but it came pretty close.  What caused the riming?  Wind.  Did I mention it was cold?

The last thing to comment "On Bouldering" is the Four-Seasonality of bouldering around Sitnasuaq. The summer bouldering can be fine at a time;  the winter bouldering can be superb when it ain't brrr.  The winter bouldering is the best.  Crunchy little torquing puzzles, moss, moss, cam, hook, lieback flake, ADZ!  Keep your heels down when you top out.  Fox!  Fox!  Cease bouldering and check for rabies?

Rocky Mountain Bluff.  Drive out Kougarak, before you get to Dorothy you pass a large foothill (Pk. 2374) on your right (east).  Could it be "Rocky Mountain" that rises above Rocky Mountain Creek?  (Leave comments if you know.)   A hundred foot bluff (1231) is visible.  Wouldn't touch it in the summer, but in the frozen Fall it becomes pickly-stickly and mossy-chossy.  In the picture is Earp in blue puffy soloing up the crumbling hideo-choss in some Fall of the later '00s.  Land stewardship unknown to me at this time, but please leave comments if appropriate.

none of this bouldering is of the least bit of importance, it is so far below V grade it is HIKING, but there is a reason that Alex Lowe's quotation has endured:  "The best climber in the world is the one having the most fun."