On AKLAT

I now step / into the wild

      Five miles west of the Sinuk River bridge, the Teller Road reaches the top of a steep grade where it crests the first set of bluffs west of the Sinuk River.  A mile to the north of the road at this point, a white bus is starkly visible against open tundra. There is just something about an abandoned bus in the wilderness. A wilderness bus is like Lazarus's spaceship in the original Star Trek-- one expects one's own deranged alter-ego to appear in a burst of trombones from out of the time portal. 

     This particular bus marks the beginning of a well-known four-wheeler trail that follows bluffs and swamps for 11 miles all the way to Glacial Lake.  After about 2 or 3 miles north down the trail (walking from the Teller Road) you reach a set of  marble scarps facing southeast over the Sinuk like dormer windows, a line of orange, pink, and green cliffs that appear to bear some adequate 90 ft. lines in a few places.  Andy and I had reached this place in July, suffering and hallucinating in the 19th hour of epic staggering through soaking rain south on the four-wheeler trail from the inner brushes of Glacial Lake down the four-wheeler trail (soon to be picked up at 2 in the morning on the lonely Teller Road by an eastbound Kutuk.)  

    On Sunday, I returned to this place, alone for want of a partner. A beautiful plateau presented itself from out of July's memory, with a squat, clump of not-s0-bad greenschist boulders leading over to the dormer window marble scarps (the name-assigning lobe of the brain already referring to them as the Supertramp buttresses in honor of the bus.)  I bouldered a bit on the schist for a while,  rubbed my skin cells all over the rock, and urinated under a .10b overhang in a great, single patch of urine onto the tundra.  I proceeded along to the marble cliffs and was excited to find them unusually copious.  I put my shotgun down on a promontory and scampered along the cliffs heading northeast.

    Alas, the bouldering was never to be that day.  As I was shoeing up, a family of 4 aklat(ch) hoved into view, a mother and 3 juveniles, a veritable herd.  Despite previsualizations all morning not to do so, I freaked out, and began to claw my way raggedly downwind along the face of the cliffs, making a few panicked forays up onto class 5 slabs in search of a certain ledge where a human could go but an aklaq couldn't.  A pitiful display of fear witnessed only by a blog, of all things....  As I turned the corner of one of the splendid marble buttresses, three more large animals popped up directly in front of me, 20 ft. away:   a family of Golden Eagles!  My heartbeat shot up even further!   They were extremely well-mannered, as Eagles usually are, and didn't even flinch as I soloed obnoxiously above their nest, dribbling flecks of Cretaceous marble down.  As well were the aklat:  I continued to hide in my cliffs, poking my head up now and then, pretending to be a frightenened mouse and climbing around on rock that feels more like limestone, but when the mother aklaq reached the greenschist boulders and smelled the pee, run get out of here she yelled to the children, and they took off tearing through the willows in the opposite direction. I was left feeling vaguely let down, even persecuted.  Were humans really so foul?

First Ascent of the Sulu Tor

   Picture of:  Summit tower on Dorsal Fin-shaped granitic cluster pictured in previous post,     Southeast Arete, 2 pitches, 5.9, climbed by Andy Sterns and me last July, 2009.  If you look really hard at this picture you can see Andy getting on rappel at the belay station. 

   A syncronicity perhaps over the 1.0 limit occurred shortly after this picture was taken. There was this death flake on the first pitch, you see, somewhere between a refrigerator and a piano, the kind of thing where you're pulling down 5.10 moves to avoid the 5.6 jug holds staring

you in the face. I used a zoom thingy to make a picture of it:  

It looks like nothing here, but the leaning flake in center frame was cantilevered, barely glued, bulging with menace, ready to annihilate Andy at the slightest wrong touch. Is this what an IED feels like? Potential entropic energy is higher when one is climbing around such a horrid piece of death choss;  where there is increased potential entropy, there is increased potential for mental process, which manifests in such phenomena as syncronicity, presentiments, and horrifying near misses

.

   But this syncronicity portended no such horribility. It was simply this:  when we pulled the ropes after the last rappel, the cords miraculously made it back to the ground- all except for the very tail end of one, which by chance neatly half-hitched itself around, you guessed it— the death flake!  We yarded on it from a safe perch, and down the locus of potentiality came, trundling with frightening BOOMs into the vast boulder chute of Second Chasm Gully.  The thing shall not trouble the second ascent, in the unlikely event there ever comes one, but what does it matter?  Even bigger death flakes wait higher on the second pitch, several stacked, rickety refrigerators not attached to the wall at all, and you actually have to step out on the top one and just trust them.                                                  

I feel ghastly about this. I have used Photo Shop to trace a

 bloody red line on summit tower. I have forced myself across some sort of line I never thought I would cross. This is a mountain, a real piece of stone somewhere, and I am replicating facsimiles of it on the internet as if it were pornography. Only a deeply reaching insecurity could cause such propagation of recognition-seeking. 

Out of the choss of the Sulu Tor emerged some really good granite climbing, with decent pro all the way up, although due to the law of the Kigs that states it always takes 3 equalized pieces to equal one real point of protection you need 3 times as much pro as if the thing were in the Sierras.  The thing is probably about 230 ft. high. You could get away with one rope, but would have to pull some shenanigans. Fear, trembling, made mehappy we had two full-length ropes.

The photo to the right, taken from the Dorsal Fin's east summit (a class 4 pinnacle, climbed on an earlier attempt) shows another view of Sulu, the alpha tower of this formation, Suluun's alpha tower.  Lurking in the background to the right rises the West Summit, a scant 10 feet lower than the foreground tower.  Hard to tell in this photo, but the two towers are connected by a somewhat horrific granite knife-edge that Andy and I dared not cross when we reached the top of the West Summit on a different attempt days earlier. So we came back and ascended it from this side.

On Naming Mountains

Here's a remote, unnamed peak on the Glacial Lake / upper Cobblestone River divide that you want to climb. You carry an 80 lb. sack of climbing gear from the Kougarak Road for two brutal days across tussock and swamp, only to CHICKEN OUT at the base of the intimidating summit tor.

You do this again a year later from the other side (the one shown in this photo, the western, Glacial Lake side) and you can't even reach the summit tor, the mountain is so convoluted and riven with chasms, you CHICKEN OUT of the 8 pitches of soloing up and down over death choss that it would take just to get over to the summit tor.

At the end of the summer you do the 80 lb. pack thing again from the Kougarak Road, unaware you are compressing a disk in your lumbar region. You get 35 feet up the summit tor before CHICKENING OUT. The excuse is rain, but really it is the weight of so much solitude bearing down like someone is watching you. It was the age before the SPOT device, before that advancing technological boundary layer found its way into your pack...

Picture of:

The "Sulu Tor," third bail, Aug, 2008.

Equalized pins, self belay anchor are

visible. The gnawing solitude had me

standing in aiders on what would later

prove to be easy 5.8 . This is a close-up look

at the tower discernible as the

high point of the peak pictured above.

So, you've slid down its intestines, you've almost broken your leg a thousand time within its recesses, you've been dreaming of it and spraying all over Nome for a couple of years now about it, you have rendered yourself quite at the mountain's mercy, it has forced you to grow and overcome your own utter CHICKENSHITTEDNESS and you have festooned it with ironmongery- (you have even come back now with your partner Andy from Fairbanks, the weight of Kigs solitude suddenly lifted like a cover, and you actually summit the Sulu Tor, two satisfying pitches of 5.8 orthogneiss death choss in a fine setting.)

Picture of: Andy executing a Bridwell, Long and Westbay with the fore-

shortened Sulu Tor visible over his right shoulder, the day after we climbed it in July '09. We forgot to bring cameras on the ascent itself, assuring a successful climb.

So you've referred to this peak thousands of times now in conversation with other Nomens, backcountry Nomens, friends, partners: "Peak 3750+on the divide between Glacial Lake and Cobblestone River drainage," or "next to the 29 on the inch-to-a-mile USGS maps," or "Ever hear about a wall up by Glacial Lake that has a 25 second echo?" When you finally get there again, and you are crouching in the wet miserable tent at basecamp with Andy, the two of you employ only the simplest of terms between you to indicate the mountain above: "the peak," the "summit tor," the "project," the wall. You talk often with Andy of the need for a name for what you are climbing, the name for the climb. The words between the two of you eventually create a one-on-one correspondence between the mountain and those circuits in your's and Andy's brains that are thinking about the mountain. But the both of you are still lacking one certain word, one sequenced pattern of phonemes and symbols, that would easily and efficiently summon for each one of you the neural networks to form images of the mountain.

"What?"

"What?"

You cannot ever hear your partner, this is an axiom, a fact.

LANGUAGE IS THEREFORE USELESS!!

It can therefore also be logically concluded, that

WHEN THE ROPE COMES TIGHT, START CLIMBING...

This is Andy on the Sitamen Pinnacles section of the W. Ridge of a mountain that has no known linguistic antacedent; next he will turn around and through a sequence of obscene motions do a little mini-rappel down that choss gendarme...

A name is needed. A name is needed for the mountain. But you cannot justify this statement. There is no proof stating that a name is truly needed. You know only that you keep on finding yourself in situations where a term for this piece of the Earth's topography is required for quick and efficient communication.

There is more.... this mountain seems to have a personality. Sun, wind, rain, snow, sleet, cataclysmic collapse, avalanche, winter, summer, glacier, nothing, ROCK! All these transforms and entrained processes are happening on this mountain, though it be entropic, it be also prone to sudden surges of entropy. The mountains seems to be satisfying five of Gregory Bateson's Six Criteria of Mental Process. You're not hallucinating. After 20 hours on the go, you felt its presence. Dangling deep in its innards from one flexing Bugaboo, water oozing from your rock shoes, you heard the mountain speak its own name. Though there is no english equivalent, you vowed you would return to civilization and tell all those who care this name.

But when you get to town, you are prevented from uttering the name. Your ego is not sufficiently enlarged, your chakras are blocked, and the chi you gained among the granite runouts quickly bleeds away among the butting of the horns, the fanning of the tails. The paltriness of your achievements is revealed. Who are you to name a mountain?

Besides, you have now forgotten what the mountain said. You must go back....

Windy Creek

Looking northwards up Windy Creek:  left to right, the real Tigaraha, Falcon Murder Peak, and Turncorner Mountain, plus the ancient rockfall in the left foreground, one of the best bouldering and camping spots in the Kigs.  Kristine and I climbed the Class 4 ridge on Turncorner in a 13-hour epic one summer.

On Spray

   I am searching for a reason to justify this. There is absolutely no reason to assume that such sprayings are anything other than pure ego-driven narcissism. Blockage of the chakras has brought on an ego/super ego imbalance which Reason falsely assumes can be alleviated by seeking recognition from the herd.

 

    Does a mountain think? Does a mountain have awareness?  Every time you spray about a mountain you are layering on the units of logical typing and slightly increasing the mental process, or sentience IYW of that mountain, that soaring piece of stone and ice.  Stone, being a highly nonentropic substance itself, is not easily penetrated by the nonentropy of your sprayings, but the influence of the spray attractor over the mountain attractor accumulates over time, and too much spraying about climbing can affect the outcome of climb itself. Books, legends, blogs, braggadoccio, they can all influence the attractor that is layering onto the mountain and your climbing of it. This is why the hunter does not brag. This is why it is foolish to be doing this, this blogging of mountains, but one does not wish to be an old fogey got out of the new road cause you couldn't lend your hand.

   Sir Apple showed me a New Yorker cartoon.  Two dogs hanging out.  One says: "I had my own blog for a while, but I decided to go back to just pointless, incessant barking."