Crater Creek Walls

Ben Cross and Brayden Bahnke free soloing first ascent of Tog One apron

BLOGLAG—15 months.

    Spin the previous post, in which Ben and I bailed from cold clammy walls in Crater Creek, forward one year. Now it's early summer 2023. In this new climate, in which Nome has become Southeast Alaska, the only summer month to ever hold rainless days is June. So Ben, Brayden, and I are going back to Crater Creek a June later, to try the crack system on the north side of Tog One. Ben and Brayden, the new generation of Nomegrown climbers, have been up to great things in the preceding year, maturity coming to fruition. Ben grappled with the Harvard Route on Huntington, and Brayden has been pulling down at Grapefruit Rock in Fairbanks. Personally, as a climber, I am greatly reduced. I have backslid down the levels of difficulty. I have slid back to a level of skill correlating with my second week of climbing in high school. The final evolution of a lifetime of climbing, turns out, is a beginner shaking with vertigo. I am happy to accompany the rope guns of Nome. I am along for the ride, not yet quite like old Fred Beckey waiting in the tent at basecamp. 

Good parking pullout on southeast side of road to stash car in summer. 

       Instead of parking at the bridge and posthole-wacking up Lower Crater Creek, we drive north another mile on the Kougarak Road and take the Grouse Creek approach, which joins in to the main valley of Crater Creek higher up, at the moraines. Although this shortcut has one hideous moment where you bushwack down from Grouse Creek Pass into upper Crater Creek valley (it's even more hideous going back up on the way out), this approach to Upper Crater Creek is recommended.

Pitch 2

    I have eyed the crack system on Tog One for years, even fondled the holds on the first pitch. I have often found myself resting on boulders in Crater Creek, paralyzed with extreme fatigue brought on by carrying massive backpacks full of climbing gear I seldom used, studying the crack system on Tog 1 for hours. It seemed to peter out into a band of white rock.

This old box camera shot of Tog One is all I got. The red line shows approximate line of
our (unnamed) route. (5.9, two pitches) The yellow line shows Ben and Brayden's solo. 

       Ben leads up the first pitch. And what to say of the protection? A general rule for climbing on "Pre-Cambrian Thompson Creek Orthogneiss" (pc-TOG) is to equalize three pieces of mank which will count as one point of protection on lead. This tells you something about the integrity of the stone in the Kigs. When I follow, the pitch feels harder than I thought it would, maybe 5.9.  

For reasons of weight, double rope is the way to go in the Kigs

        "Crack system" is perhaps a misnomer. The crack climbing on Tog One presents more like low-angle slab— smear, jam, edge, layback, smear.  This is due to the reality that there is no solid "wall" of rock when it comes to the TOG. Rather, a wall is composed of fractured, disconnected flakes, like a wall of stacked boxes, with little cracks between the boxes. "Crack system" implies a traceable continuity of cracks occurring within a relatively monolithic section of rock.

     Ben leads the second pitch, as fun as the first pitch, another 5.9, I suppose. Most memorable on the second pitch is a loose stone, weighing maybe one stone, protruding from the crack, in a place where no other holds are available, so you have to carefully insert a toe jam just under the death stone and step up on it without a lot of flapping or spasm. As I move past the stone, I hate to think of how Ben and Brayden had executed this delicate move above me while I waited below on the ledge, my soft, trusting cranium pointed upward.

"Perhaps 'crack system' is a misnomer."

            Three specks on a wall in Crater Creek— at last, playing with ropes and gear, instead of merely bouldering. We gazed upward at the third pitch. The crack system petered out into a wide band of pale, shitty orthogneiss. Climbable, but hideous. I prepared myself for the psychological duress of getting dragged up the pitch by youngsters too inexperienced to realize how full-sketch the kigs-rock was.

        But Ben surprised me by agreeing we should just bail from that point. We prepared to rappel off.  It was then I saw Ben had the right stuff to make it in the Kigs. In the long haul, kiganeering is about managing your probabilities, always choosing the route that will improve your probability of avoiding death or enmanglement. THERE WILL BE BAILS. We bailed off and called it a modern route, even though it did not continue up to the rather nebulous summit of Tog One. 

Looking up the "Apron" as Ben starts up. In the background, the profile of the excellent
"Slimedog Millionnaire" (5.9, ten pitches) on Tog Three. 

       That evening, Ben and Brayden free soloed up the low-angle buttress to the left of Tog One. We had been lolling about the base wandering if the Kigs had any true friction routes, and if maybe you could put one up on this buttress. I declined soloing along with them, acquiring chicken-shit points, which doesn't matter now that Kigsblog has revoked my Real Climbers Certificate. After they returned to camp, I pressed them for details, ratings. They mumbled there might have been a 5.7 move or two.

        These two guys are my new heroes. I hope they continue the technical climbing trend in the Kigluaiks. Someday soon they will be driving in their expensive pick-up trucks to Mosquito Pass looking for crack systems that don't peter out into death-choss. They hardly spray-post at all, and they never get their cameras out, which I think is so cool. However, this means that all my pictures are of them. So, to make up for this imbalance, we close with three pictures of the author, bouldering in the Kigs, each one of them savagely retro-posed— I climbed these things back in the day (with the possible exception of the tor in the middle, the face of which Vince climbed, but which I climbed by a different line), but I didn't climb them in the picture, so they're fake. 

The Rockslide in Windy Creek

Gneiss tor on the Balustrade Tors, SE Ridge of Ooquienuhk (Mt. Osborn)

Balustrade Tors, Ooquienuhk 

The High Slog Ratio of the pre-Road Era

(Left to right): East Tig, Grand Tigaraha, West Tig, John, Paul, George, and Ringo. The Fab Four appear
to be clumped together in this shot, like Mick Jagger's "four-headed monster." 

BLOGLAG: almost two years. Blog-lag has ballooned exponentially. In order to keep to keep the seasonal revolutions in chronological sequence, fall, winter, spring, summer, (red, white, green, brown) I am forced now to chronicle events occurred in ancient history— almost two years ago. It was the early stages of a revolution taking place in Nome rock-climbing. A new wave of strong climbers, including several actual Nome-grown locals, was beginning to push the standards far past whatever this old has-been climber had ever been able to accomplish. Ben was completely shed off High School at Nome-Beltz and had taken a NOLS course which he had financed with his own earnings. At the same time, I was lamenting the loss of my powers due to age, and was happy to be going to the mountains with an authentic young gun from the village. 

The Erratic located at the headwaters of the Sinuk River

 A summer job impended for Ben so we went to the Kigs early season, two trips in late May and early June. Here lies the pompatice of failure for both trips: 1. Expend too much energy wallowing in snow on the hike in. 2. Subtract energy from the actual climbing when you finally get there. True equation, for me at least, but even Ben admitted he was tired by the time we reached the actual rocks after lifetimes of post-hole-packing.

Ben on the John Tor

SLOG RATIO = Number of miles hiked on the approach divided by number of pitches climbed. A high slog ratio means too much approach. A low slog ratio means lots of climbing with very little approach. Crags close to the road will have a slog ratio equal to less than one. Belaying from the car constitutes a slog ratio of nearly zero. For the purposes of this post, our first trip into Crater Creek had nine miles of brutal slogging over half a pitch of wretched climbing for an absolutely dismal slog ratio of 18, and our second trip had eight miles of backpacking over two pitches of chess climbing for an appalling slog ratio of 4. Doing climbs with slog ratios as high as these elicits questions such as: Are you crazy bro? Fly to Vegas, take bus to Red Rocks.    

Ben on Paul

       "You can't see the walls of Crater Creek until you turn the corner eight miles up there." Weak sauce of the Mind to get us up eight miles of occasional bushwacking over collapsible snow. We provided proof that mental energy exhibits measurable mass. For, if you emptied your mind, like Kwai Chang Kaine upon the rice paper, the Spring snow crust would support your weight. But if you entertained thoughts that invariably creep into one's mind unbidden— the glue of town, the stove you left on,  the bursting of a blister on your heel— you'd suddenly find yourself post-holing, one leg stabbed up to your crotch in the snow, and a freaking enormous pack full of ropes and hardware bearing down, the mass of which, obviously, can be tossed aside in this proof, as the mass of your pack was the same before and after your thoughts took on the extra weight of mind that made the snow crust collapse.

Kigluaik Mountains showing the two sites featured in this post. Tigaraha is mismarked.
Real Tigaraha is over by the Fab Four.

     The Togs of Crater Creek are denotations on my "Miller-Amato Geological Map of the Kigluaik Mountains." Next to little fingernails of pink located in the West Fork of Crater Creek is the stamp, "pC-Tog", which stands for "preCambrian Thompson Creek Orthogneiss." "Orthogneiss" is a fancy name for total choss that once was, and still mainly is, granite. By my count there are seven distinct Togs leading up the west fork culminating in Tog 7, which is the big unnamed peak at the head of the valley, Peak 3800+. Of course, there are different ways to delineate "one tog unit" of a wall. Tog 3 is the best tog, sporting the classic Slimedog Millionaire, (IV, 5.9). Ben and I came a-slogging in the early Spring of 2022 with an attractive crack system on the First Tog in mind. 

West Fork of Crater Creek, May 30, 2022. The first three togs are visible on the left.

          A day of wet slogging brought us to a camp in boulderfields. When  we got to the base of the route the next day, the north-facing cliff rose straight up out of a steep snowfield. Moats between cliff and snow guarded access. A cold clammy film of moisture seemed to coat the rock. The dread of vertigo that had plagued my golden years of climbing gnawed just outside the periphery of my vision. Both Ben and I had envisioned summer rock climbing on warm rock. This was not that. Stoke sagged. Mojo faltered. Ben led up most of a pitch, put in an anchor, yo-yoed back down, and we spent the rest of our time top-roping around, practice climbing on our little slab area. Ben was kind about accommodating my disability. I accrued another chicken-out to my name. It doesn't matter. They've long since rescinded my climbers license.  

Tog 1

     A week later, Ben and I repeated the process, having learned nothing from Crater Creek the week before. We post-holed into the Sinuk and I accrued a second chicken-out. This post carries an overarching message: don't be too eager, in a year of high snow and cool Spring temperatures, to get into the Kigs for summer rock climbing.   

Ben fooling around on unclimbed wide on George Tor.

    "Fab Four Tors" is my pet name for the four, prominent, eighty-foot tors poking from the crest north of Tigaraha. (At this point, let us take a moment to remind the kigs-reader:  Tigaraha, "The Index Finger," remains mismarked on most maps.  Real Tigaraha is the unmistakeable, fingerlike projection located one valley over to the west from the map's False Tigaraha.) Viewing the Fab Four from the east, left to right, they are John, Paul, George, and Ringo, plus a fifth tiny tor that can only be George Martin, or perhaps Mal Evans. Prior to going there with Ben in 2022, I had already bagged all four tors on various trips over the last two decades. George was the hardest. A tricky 5.9 lead on the east face led to the mop top. Ringo went via a steep 5.9 lead on the north. John and Paul are easier. I used to routinely solo the great songwriting duo on any number of trips over the years. I was hopeful Ben and I could finish the route Mikey Lean and I had started but not finished years ago, the North Arete of the West Tig. As the previous weekend at Crater Creek, Ben and I ended up thwarted by too many miles of post-holing, as well as the ongoing decomposition of Ian's climber mind.

Looking up North Arete of West Tig.

    The Spring of '22 was during the final quell before the Kigs-road. Even now, as I write this in '24, I don't know the name by which the graphite road will be called. It was the old days. It was still a fucking wilderness out there. On a Friday night, Ben and I parked the car in the familiar quarry at Mile 29 and began to beat tundra due west with big climber packs on our backs. This was the milk run to Mosquito Pass in the old days, eight miles of tussocks, slush crossings, horrendous mosquitoes, and river crossings, which I suffered many, many times, and I would suffer again if it would take the road away. We took a north up the upper Sinuk drainage, hoping to get to the good camp at the Erratic. But we got dragged down prematurely by our 30 kilo packs. 

Big hill to get up to the tiny tors

     The north cirque of Tigaraha (which most likely doesn't possess enough glacier anymore to constitute a glacier) was a nightmare the next morning. Endless interminable snow-fields led up the giant slope to the tiny tors at the top of the hill. If you entertained one, errant thought, BOOM, you found yourself post-holed to the crotch. When finally we dragged ourselves to the top, I was too pooped to evince much raw psyche for climbing. Even Ben admitted to a level of approach fatigue, to some measurable diminishment of climbing psyche due to the wide lake of postholes we had crossed. A sad but common tale in the Kigs back in those days BTR (Before The Road) when the slog ratios were, appallingly, in the eights, meaning eight miles of slogging to reach one piddling little pitch of climbing .

Closer to town, the new wave of Nome boulders, Ben and Braden, were pulling 
down hard at the Sunset Rocks in 2022.

      We roped up. Ben led a pitch up John tor, then Paul tor. I marveled that I had routinely soloed this great song-writing duo during my days of decade past. It was only 5.6. But now, a victim of WACHD (Wasting Aging Climber's Head Disease), I did not feel relaxed on the rock, even though the rock of the Fab Four Tors is some of the best granitic gneiss on the Seward Peninsula... which is not saying much, as the whole of Beringia appears to be a wasteland of metamorphic choss. Late afternoon brought chills, scud, and breeziness. There was some of that cold damp film upon the rock again. The old man, (me), was doddering about the tors indecisively, muttering, thinking about that scene in Deep Play where Silvo Karo decides to go in for coffee instead of climbing. Ben wandered the tors, perhaps similarly stupefied, I'm not sure, in wonderment of the rock sculpture. We had screwed the pooch, again. There would be no notable first ascent of the North Arete of West Tig. For me, another chicken-out would be checked in my registry. As always, it was grand beyond description to be in the mountains, in the High Kigs, among the topples of gneiss and schist, with mighty Oquienuhk the Snow-capped hanging tall just right over there, with Ben, excellent human being that he is. It was time for him to go to work. So we headed down. 

Ben, Braden, Vince, and others are putting up harder problems than I ever did, taking Nome
rock climbing to new levels. Here are Ben and Braden at Windmills.

Four Peaks Showcase

Cloud dapples West Face of Pen Tri Cwm (Pk. 3600+), the first of our four showcase peaks in this post. The orogeny of the Kigs can be read in the clash between the layers: meta-sedimentary paragneiss on top catching a ride on a cudgel of meta-igneous orthogneiss busting up from underneath through a brown lith of schist. The Anchorage guys of '96 climbed and named Pen Tri Cwm (from Welsh, "Facing Three Valleys") and piled a big cairn on top. Allapa and Phil Hofstetter climbed it around '03 on a drunken Autumn weekend in which we forgot our coats and slept in the open with one side accumulating snow. This soaring chunk of choss dominates the Sinuk drainage.  

Blog-lag:  2.3 years  (new Kigsblog maximum)

       The testosterone dropped. The fire in the belly cooled. Too many chicken-outs accrued. My climbing license got revoked in Kigs-court. It was the beginning of my Great Decline, the one Bachar tried to climb his way through. But my throbber of life realization had not fully loaded as of the summer of 2020, the time of the trip in this post. 

        The GLUE OF TOWN thickened. Bearanoia held me fast. The Kigs lay far away. My dog had gotten mauled by mosquitoes. I dreaded being out there in the veldt, alone, with that Timothy Treadwell feeling. The current wave of skiers and climbers here in Nome at the time of this writing had not yet arrived in Nome. I called up Rick.

        "Vertigo," he admitted. "I don't want to go on the steep stuff. But I'd be happy to go for a hike."

    Little did I understand, it was the same vertigo that was even then twining its fibers through my own nervous system. I decided to violate the Prime Directive. I agreed to a mere hiking trip. I would allow myself to be reduced to backpacker level, a Colin Fletcher charlatan. But just to hedge my shame, I hid crampons, helmets, Cobras, TC Pros, and chalk-bags in my backpack. fancying I could creep away and solo a major new route of the Kigs like some kind of choss Henry Barber.  

"Johnson suppressed a giggle each time he passed the fallen steam-shovel. Leaving it up on the High Line in the Fall had been McPherson's idea. Truth was, they had all been drunk. Things were falling apart late in the season. They had left things where they lay to get to the last train. Johnson's last look at the steam shovel showed it standing tall in direct alignment with a major gully on the hillside above. Es wird night schafft thought Johnson, but kept it to himself. The shovel looked so pathetic now, like a sad, swatted insect, sad and pathetic, like the whole Wild Goose Pipeline operation." 

            My metabolism had slowed without my knowing it. I kept on eating prodigiously. I wondered why I was so weak at the boulders. I no longer seemed able to crank 5.10. "Write it off to age," I guessed. Later, weighing sacks for another trip, I stepped on the scale. I wasn't weak. I was fat! My father warned me this precise boiling of the frog would happen. But I hadn't fully figured out the riddle as I embarked with Rick, and two more friends, on that expedition in the summer of 2020.

Hang a left up the West Fork of Grand Central and this peak, Peak 3050+, draws the eye. "Siutik" (A Pair of Ears) has a nice Distant Time vibe, though I've had difficulty hearing the name being whispered by this one. The deep cleft between the ears forms a prominent snaking couloir that Mikey Lean and I boot-packed, and down-boot-packed, in the early two-thousands. The last two pitches to the summit felt exposed after the deep confines of the couloir. Who will be the first to ski the Z-Couloir? 

The Z-Couloir on Siutik

        I found myself matched against three gazelles. Rick had hiked the Pacific Crest Trail in a faster time than Eric Ryback himself. Connor is an unsung legend who runs miles on the lonely Kougarak Road all seasons. Maisie was competing in cross-country at Whitman.

        I pulled both hamstring muscles badly in the first thirty feet of walking. My pack was festooned with superfluous climbing gear. The muck underfoot was thick in Grand Central. No overarching climbing goal loomed like a beacon. 

North Ridge of Pen Tri Cwm, looking west from West Fork Grand Central. The pass between Grand Central and Windy is all the way to the right in this photo. We detected elevated levels of PHI energy at the pass, indicating it is most likely a long-used travel corridor.

     Not many passes cross the eighty mile spine of the Kigluait Mountains. The north side of the range tends to be a hideous drop-off. Mosquito Pass is the only pass with a name on the map. The Class 2 pass connecting Windy Creek to the West Fork of Grand Central counts as one of the major passes of the Kigs. Peaks have whispered their names to me before, but no passes have ever done so. Can the lost Iñupiaq name of a natural feature be derived from clues in the landscape? 

    Once before, in residence at the Crater Lake Institute, I had skied over the Windy/Grand Central pass. To  I looked forward to hiking it in summer. But already, my legs were shot. I couldn't keep up with the others. I was old and overweight. If I had been solo, I would have declared Day 2 a rest day. But I was harnessed to a group of Thru-Hikers, two of whom were older than I!

  

"Falcon Killer" is our third showcase peak. Its allure only holds when viewed from the north from upper Windy, as in this photo. From the other side it presents as merely a series of tors on a ridge. There's no hint of this fearsome precipice lurking on the north. I soloed each of these tors one marvelous summer day. The high point was a fifty-foot 5.6 solo. At the crux, a Peregrine Falcon tried to murder me. (story here) I don't like it when people name mountains after their personal experiences. Still, I took to calling it "Falcon Murderer Peak. " Kigs-law required me to translate the name to Iñupiaq, which results in Kirgavik Inuaqti. All these syllables have proved unwieldy. Perhaps shortening it to Kirgavik— "Falcon"— would be appropriate. On several occasions with various partners I have visited the lower buttresses and done some one-pitch routes on rock that varied from "decent granite" to "death choss." The bird-shaped white scar in the middle of the face is one godawful scar. Only choss lovers need apply.

     If there is to be a PCT of the Kigs, then upper Windy Creek should be part of it. Ancient lateral moraines offer wide parkways good for walking. An ancient rock-slide crossing the whole valley is re-vegetated into a bouldering paradise. The "Two Hundred Year Old Rockfall" is the primo spot to be in these mountains. 

     On Day 2, Connor and Maisie came about into the GLUE and ran for town. Rick and I continued in the direction of Mosquito Pass. We were going to traverse the whole range into Glacial Lake and hike out to the Teller Road.

    "I can't do it," I regretted to inform Rick. "My legs are shot." 

    Or was I trying to hot-henry Rick? So we would stop hiking, and I could do some climbing? Sadly, no— my legs were actually shot. A rest day at Mosquito Pass Wall was in order. We hiked a few hundred feet up some moraines from Mosquito Pass and made camp by a tarn in the caldera.

Our fourth showcase peak is Peak 2911. There must be a name floating out there, but I have not yet encountered it. I refer to it simply as "Mosquito Pass Wall." The red arrow shows the "Hidden Couloir" climbed by Collins and me on a day so frigid that I still thank the snow-machine gods for allowing our machines to start when the climb was done. Probably the Graphite Road will go right by this scarp. There will be a tourist pull-out complete with port-a-potty where we will be able to get out and view the mountain. A climbing guidebook will list many routes visible in this picture. Dark, shadowy, and foreboding, even on a sunny day, this cirque has a gothic feel that will make people want to get back in their car and drive on. 

This is the "Apron" of Mosquito Pass Wall. The East Ridge there is a fine Class 2 jaunt to the summit of Peak 2911.

    It's not actually a caldera. It's just a very round glacial cirque. The Mosquito Pass Wall gets photographed often enough that it has become the iconic scarp of the Kigs. Rick and I spent a nice day there exploring. 

    Years ago, on a fantabulously cold day in mid-Winter, Collins and I did a nice Scottish couloir hidden in the bowels of this wall. The couloir was about ten feet wide and ten feet deep. I placed a little pro on the sides as we simul-climbed, stemming on the sides and kicking steps in the hard-packed snow. Suddenly, I realized this couloir was not ten feet deep. It was probably over a hundred feet deep. It was a "chasm," a common feature in the Kigs, a deep slot traveling into the mountain. completely plugged with snow. We were suspended by snow over a giant crack. I wanted to investigate this theory on the 2020 trip, but I was too lazy to scramble back up there. 

The map for this post shows our four showcase peaks, plus the hiking route done by Rick and Allapa over four days in the Summer of '22. It is officially a source of shame that none of these peaks were directly grappled with. These mountains were merely observed from the valley floor. I was in violation of the Prime Directive, Thou Shalt Climb. Only through controversial legislation in Kigs-court was I even allowed to make this post. It is worth noting that Sinuk to Grand Central and Buffalo to Grand Central are a no-go for a backpacker or snow-machiner. 

"The Flame," one of the choicer selections
at the Two Hundred Year Old Rockfall.

Author, looking up Windy Creek, with Pen Tri Cwm in background

Winter Palimpsest

Welcome to the third and final post to employ "seasonal compositing," a chronology-folding algorithm used to resolve the substantial accumulations of BLOG LAG built up within the seasonal cycle of Kigsblog over several years. Like stars in a constellation, the images in this post may appear adjacent though situated at differing distances from the observer. Here are links to the inner transects: 

                             Fall Bouldering Interferometer

         Early Winter Superposition  

Outer Nick Band

 From the huge snow year of 2018, this flotsam dates back to the great days of the Nick Treinen era.

VIDEO: Wait for it... the awesome "Western Cwm" of Mt. Osborn (Ooquienuhk). 

VIDEO: Nick is skiing straight down V-boulder problems on King Mountain buried by the great snows of 2018.

Nice ski tour along the ridge north of King Mountain.

My driveway 2018

Mr. Nick

Near Pane of Freezing Rain

        Winter of 2022, Nome received the best shellacking I have seen in 22 years of living here. We emerged Christmas morning to discover that Whoville had been zambonied while we slept. Everything, the horizontal surfaces as well as the vertical, had been shrink-wrapped with a 2 to 3 centimeter veneer of prime verglas ice. The whole world had been transformed into one big ice climb. These life-as-ice-climb conditions lasted well into March and the whole town had to wear spikes. I spent many hours hanging out at the "Mud Mounds," the tailings piles at the base of Anvil Mountain that are worked and sculptured by giant machines in the summer months, and form an excellent ice climbing playground in the Fall and Winter that you can drive right into and use your car as a warming hut. In a year with the right conditions and the right diggings, the dirt cliffs make a good ice climbing surrogate where you can practice technique. But in a year that gets a good shellacking, like this previous winter, you could hardly design a better ice park. Good times with friends in the dim light of Winter.

Ben and Calvin are having fun up on King Mountain after the Great Freezing Rain Event of '21/'22

Ben on the Limestone Band at Anvil Mountain.
The finest shellac ever!

Ben down in the Anvil Mud Mounds on the 
"Crook Wall." This sliver of frozen mud glazed 
with ice became the go-to practice area for aspiring
mud climbers.

s

VIDEO: Ben remains poised at top-out on Crook Wall. Mud Climbing is brutish. You swing your blunted tools hard as you can trying for penetration. But the introduction of the shellac made mud a more delicate game requiring sharpened tools and precise swings.

THE TALE OF THE TRANSIENT GORGE:  Neither my dog, Lucy

, nor the Miocene Canyon behind her were fated to live many days past this picture, taken in late Fall before the Christmas Ice. A tribute to Lucy, all-time Kigs-dog, we will save for some other caption. This one holds the crazy tale of the Miocene Mud Gorge that existed at the base of Anvil Mountain for a few days in October of 2021. The miners really wanted to dig up this hillside, even though it delves disturbingly close to the town's drinking water aquifer, and the city of course said yes. I walked up on Anvil in the Fall looking for some frozen mud to climb and found this freshly-dug gorge, still steaming with newly-exposed metamorphic rock and silt from the bowels of the earth. The walls were forty feet high in some places— a mud climbing treasure vault! Only problem was, the temperature was too warm that day. The bottom of this crumbling, sloughing, hideous gorge was no place to be. I longed to sink first tool and grapple with the ancient mud, and vowed to return with rope and rebar as soon as the temperature dipped, but a trip to California intervened. When finally I returned a week later, something felt off. The gorge had disappeared!  Filled in. I guess there must not have been any gold down there.

This alluring twenty foot piece of choss saw the light of the late Holocene for a few days before the same agents of the Anthropocene that had uncovered it with their gigantic machines returned to thrust it back into darkness. The choss waits underground. No animating force of mud climbers will ever visit it again.    

Mmm, fresh choss right out of the earth.. It's not even rock, not really, but for those few climbers
with a taste for the the Mud, this looks tasty. A steady dribble of
stone and mud fell from these walls the evening I was there and I dared not linger under them.

We take what's dead

And breathe life in

And move like knives

Through scars on land

Still untouched

No stain of hands

Caramelized

In a tilted light

No chain stays unbroken

All aims get forgotten

The weight of lead

On floors of sand

The idea reduced again

To outcome

No chain stays unbroken

All aims get forgotten 

 

                                        

                                                         The Kings of Convenience

Ring of Ayasayuk

And here in the layers of the palimpsest, we detect another ring of Ayasayuk, carbon dated to November, 2021. The quarry face, and the path of the flow, remained largely unchanged from the  year before  or the year before that.  Vince and I managed to make a complete ascent of the Diretissima this year, defined as a complete climb of the quarry face up the middle of it in some way from bottom to top, although the Fourth Tier was missing from our climb this year due to inadequate coverage. We sure wanted to get back out to the Cape after the freezing rain event to see how our climb was affected, but the ice itself made the snow-machining conditions weird, not to mention, the ice glued our snow-machines and everything else to the ground.

Looking up the Third Tier ice. This pitch weighs in at a formidable WI I. I was happy to sew it up because my climber mind has become rotted with paranoia and superfluous fear.

Looking down the Third Tier

Vince clawing at odd smear on Fourth Tier, the only ice to
present up there this year. In other rings of Ayasayuk,
the presentation on Fourth Tier ice has been spectacular.

 Fourth Tier Ayasayuk Quarry, November 2021. That actually represents a rather healthy crop of ice for a ring. 

New Friends Overlay

A poignant fact of living in Nome is: friends come, and friends go. The graph showing "Number of Climbing / Skiing Partners Available Per Year" shows a few spikes over the years— I've actually given names to these times when I had someone to climb with, the Mikey Era, the Joni Era, the Drew, the David, the Nick— but in between the spikes lay long, multi-year intervals of partnerless, lonely, solo endeavors. I am happy to say the last couple of years have brought  the biggest spike ever, an unprecedented influx of motivated skiers and climbers, cool people, with updated technology and skills, ready to do what it takes to get out there in the hills around Nome four seasons, and willing to investigate some of the more arcane sub-routines of Nome mountaineering such as mud climbing, dry tooling, snow-machine mountaineering, plus mandatory endless boilerplate. The next generation is here. I am so grateful for these new friends. The fat padder, the cowboy, the all-arounder from up the Steese, the home town kid— some have already cycled through and fled the odd, hot little town of Nome, while others remain. One more look at that graph will reveal that I, allapa, have lived through so many  Friends/No friends cycles that I am becometh the old dodger. I am doubly grateful to new friends for putting up with my wheezes, dithering, and Alaska Rang PTSD. I simply must purchase new skis with AT rig and tech bindings. Three-pin has gone to the dinosaurs.

The first of the "digging of the pit" series, this one in Buffalo Creek in January 2021 on a cold, beautiful day with good powder.

At center is Pk. 2162, the highest hill in the Eldorado / Flambeau drainages east of the Kougarak Road. In November of 2020, Keane organized a school-night  mass assault on this hill and led us on a fine ride through hill and trough country to reach this hill, Eldorado, my first time up this high point. Clouds, white-out, and darkness intervened between us and home. Our moving string of lights at time doubled back upon itself or went in circles, but all made it to school on time the next morning. 

Map of Pk. 2162. Perhaps it warrants inclusion on the"Foothills of the Kigluait" list.
Foothills of the Kigluait,  Also, this excellent foothill.

 Pk. 2162 dig

Buffalo Creek

Nugget Pass, looking north past Salmon Lake

Allapa and Sean in the big bowl halfway up the east side of Ooquienuhk (Mt. Osborn), April 2019.
I am grumpy because my brand new snow-machine sits befuddled and paralyzed down in the middle of Grand Central Valley. Everybody else got multiple runs— for instance, Sean and Keith skied a chute up above Sean there— but I only got this one run because I had to go down and continue to beat my dead horse. 

Close-up East Face of Ooquienuhk, April 2021. Friends ascended and skied slopes to left. I deviated from the skiers and climbed straight up to the Southeast Rib, but overheated in bog snow. A nap descended from the heavens and overwhelmed me at the spot from which this was taken. Phil Hofstetter and I did a route up the middle of the east face in 2004 that had a couple of pitches of water ice. 

The Sluicebox Couloir in the Northwest Cirque of Ooquienuhk, April 2021.

May 2022, Peak 2610 at Copper Creek

Newton Peak after the storm

Allapa at Nugget, Tigaraha in background

The Bluff at Mt. Distin, Snake River Valley, April 2021

Ben, Distin Bluff, snow pit

Distin Bluff detail. Eighty foot cliff.

Another trip to Glacial Lake thwarted by extreme cold, February 2021.
We dared not shut down our machines. This is looking across
to Peak Bering Air and Glacial Lake from the benches between
Stewart River and Sinuk River. Another layer of frostbite.

Mt. Brynteson and the Brynteson Ribs, March 2022.  Vince and I did an easy
three-pitch route on one of the ribs. 

Greg Stoddard Belt

Greg Stoddard represents the arch Telly Fiend, the patron saint of debaucherous ski trips. Every spring there is a pilgrimage, once the Teller Road has opened but the snow remains on the hillside in many white stripes, to the Grand Singtook, Peak 3870, to ski the Solar Sidewalk which is usually in prime condition by that time. Participants read like a who's who of Nome alpinism, a veritable Burning Man of Seward Peninsula alpinism. I went in 2021, but didn't get invited 2022, so I'm missing some orbits in the Greg Stoddard Belt. I've let my skills slip, and my ski gear is from the Stone Age. I just didn't have the ratings.   

Vince slogging in stiff wind up middle part of ridge on Singtook, May 2021. The snow was too parsimonious that year to invite skiing on the upper part of the mountain, but the lower mountain softened up by afternoon. 

Allapa on top of the Singtook once again, May 2021.
Have climbed this thing 25 times, maybe? Not counting the bails.

Lucy at twilight