Fall Fell

Bouldering on the way up the south ridge of Peak 3260, "East Singtook"

Peak 3260  
     Blog-lag considerably swollen. Writing of Fall adventures from late Spring. In this post, more sacred secrets will be given away, this time the location of one of the best roadside fell runs on the Seward Peninsula: four miles of gradually ascending ridge to the summit of the East Singtook (Pk. 3260), with a surprise set of gneiss pinnacles in the middle section allowing the rare mineral of actual climbing. Also in this post: the mysteries of the Little Singtook's (Pk. 3653) North Face will be probed, as well as little turd-clumps of climbing so small and unstable they are destined not to stand into the next Millennium. 

Grand Singtook (Pk. 3870) and Little Singtook (Pk. 3653 - "Sintauyuq?") from East Singtook. This pair form a prominent landmark, which is probably why a name was bestowed upon them from days of yore.

Marianne in glue

        No doubt the GLUE of TOWN ran high that September weekend as two teachers drove west. No doubt the tack was high due to the responsibility of a new school year in session. With each unit of distance away from town, the GLUE retracted us backwards toward town an equal number of units. The extending filaments of GLUE did not start peeling off us until Nick and I had travelled twenty miles west on the Teller Road and crossed the Sinuk River. We began to forget about town, and about school, and the GLUE no longer asserted its influence upon our thoughts. We continued another ten miles west from the Sinuk and parked at Crete Creek to start our fell run up East Singtook.

A lightfoot lad raised in the Chugach

       A sentient but somnolent mist dissolved everything in and out, like a bad transporter beam. Nick could have lapped me several times, but kindly waited on the benches in the shivering wind. For me this was a mere peak bagging expedition, a statistical quest to stand on top of Pk. 3260, the "East Singtook." From the road, the ridge had always looked boring, a hike for tourists, with no climbing at all, which is why I had  skipped it all these long years, until-- the silly conceit of climbing every peak in the Kigs overtook my motivations like a disease and rendered me a mere hiker, not a climber. Now Pk. 3260 seemed desirable. But a surprise awaited in the crook of the south ridge that you can't see from the road.

Routes taken this Fall, 2017

Too cold to switch to rock shoes

      The pinnacles of Pt. 2875 suddenly popped up in the middle of the ridge! A hiker can easily side-hill around these outcrops, none of which really exceed six meters, but Nick began to navigate a little tightrope game through the pinnacles where you have to follow the exact crest of the ridge over the mini-Stegosaur's back of rock, and it was so fun to follow his heels doing all kinds of little boulder problems, both highball and low. Geologically, the rock had been granite before it was gneiss; cracks, knobs, and slabs emerged from the palimpsest of metamorphism. The ridge took us across 400 horizontal meters of cool little boulder problems, and out into the "you're going to be mangled" zone more than once. So our fell run contained this cool simulation of a real alpine rock climb. 

Fell running action

         Did I mention it was cold? Well, duh. There was to be no pleasant picnic in the sun that day. Vapors off Woolley Lagoon slapped into the Singtauyit slap after slap. The view kept pixellating into zones of grey before reloading the details between cloudbursts. A few of the most badass survivor mosquitoes tried to fly up between eddies of wind, then realized they were useless and activated their rescue beacons. Fall is the coldest season. Gloves, hats, and long johns are still buried under summer's gear, and cannot be found on a GLUE-stricken morning. Perhaps one lacks fatty tissues. The settings on one's bio-thermostat have not been recalibrated. Cold? Yes it was, alaapah.  

Evidence of uplift. In the background is the Singtook, adorned with its usual raiments of gale-force wind.

     Not only was the summit of Pk. 3260 another Marilyn notched in the silly, statistically-fabricated belt of a peak bagger, you could see lots more pointy Marilyns ripping clouds all up and down the range. Down the west ridge with airplane wing arms I followed Nick for an excellent downhill-running session. This led down to the saddle between the Grand Singtook and Little Singtook at the top of Crete Creek, the East Col, a place about which I had always been curious: would this pass go, or was it the usual Kigsian precipice to the north? Back in the two-thousand aughts, as a prelude to Nil's and my ascent of Grand Singtook's north face in 2003, I had invested significant amounts of time and energy to researching the question of this East Col, on several occasions hiking all the way around the Singtook from the west and getting terrifyingly lost in fog and furious wind. Back in the day, it took me forever to form a mental map of the confusing topography around the Singtauyit and I would wander like a dreamer in Wonderland, coming upon lost cirques full of ice and stone, with no real concept of how the hills and drainages fit together. 

Big league trundling action, looking down the north side of the Singtook South Col

    The pass looked like it would go to the north with some hideous Class 4 down-scrambling. I was happy that Nils and I had accessed the north face from several hundred feet higher and not gone down this unsavory chute. "Hello, is anyone down there?" I yelled, as if. We commenced trundling. Nick pried at enormous blocks with his runner's body like a shovel about to snap. We got on our backs and pushed with our legs, then popped upright, ran to the edge, and watched the explosions with the same sick fascination one watches crashes on youtube.

       There you have it. What value in all this verbiage? What right have I to chronicle a mere hike in the annals of a blog which is supposed to be about real climbing? Well, now you know the location of one of the finest roadside fell runs on the Seward Peninsula, that is something.

Singtooyit from the North. Grand Singtook in the center, Little Singtook to the right, and the East Singtook on the left barely poking up over a foreground peak. 

Granite Creek
      A splendid little fell-running community emerged out of the new school year. Nick bought a used Ford Bronco which served as an effective GLUE-cutting escape-mobile.  David joined us and we headed west on the Teller Road with GLUE filaments popping and peeling as we shed our psychological attachments on yet another freezing-ass, glorious weekend.

North Face of Little Singtook. Some of those white patches are ice. I went up partway and bouldered around.

      A movement was afoot to explore Granite Creek, around the corner to the northwest of the Singtook. For the fell runners, the fell run itself was a means to an end, but for this malnourished ice climber, the trip would be a chance to check out a new, north-facing cirque in the hope of finding Fall ice. Eighteen years in Nome has taught me not to get my hopes up, but Granite Creek seemed promising. With all my plotting and map-gazing to find north-facing cirques in the Kigs which are accessible in less than a day from the road, why had I never noticed Granite Creek before? The fell run would lead right up the drainage to the northwest face of Pk. 3260, which I have variously referred to elsewhere in this blog as the Little Singtook. Surely this cirque would yield a cornucopia of thick, blue, frozen waterfalls ripe for high-angle ice climbing.

Did I mention it was cold?

      In fact, it turned out I would be able to sink picks into ice, but there would be no satisfying "chunk," only an annoying metallic scraping and sparking as the pick penetrated through a thin shell of ice and sparked the rock beneath. There would be no runouts, no screws, no terror, no deep self-realization that comes with real ice climbing, only a few hurried moves over anemic verglas that had been disguised from below as real ice. But I could now check the box that said I had ice climbed that day. I could now return to town and tell them what a big-shot ice climber I was.  This was a few hundred feet above the tarn at the head of Granite Creek where a barely visible trickle of ice could be seen meandering its way across cliffs and talus. The ice did look as if it might grow with more autumnal freeze/thaw action, and I vowed to return the following weekend, but the GLUE was destined to rise up like a phagocyte and envelop my intention, thereby obviating it.

Da

Da

Da

Penny River Crags
          The next Fall weekend featured a trip out to a nameless blob of rock near the Penny River, with David. Only an aficionado of obscure bouldering could see any value in such a desiccated turd pile of twice-morphed schist, but I managed to talk David into the proposition that obscure bouldering was a type of DaDaist art form, which appealed to his avant-garde, culturally-refined nature, and he began to discern the emperors clothes that transformed a schist-pile into a jungle gym of fun. Besides, he was eager to play with his new crampons and ice axe, and quickly learned what a solid, reliable handhold was to be found in an axe sunken in frozen turf. We put up multiple major first ascents of numerous dry-tool problems including Taiguaq (Read It), Ayauppiak (Sun Dog), Suama (Fortitude), all of them so far into the V0— range of difficulty that their identity will soon fade, and their geologic structure erode.

Location of purported caldera

The Fox Creek Caldera Hoax
          Several years back, Mr. Collins and his cross-country team were developing the mountain running course destined to be the standard unit for all Kigluaik mountain runs in the future: Fox Creek. There he discovered a caldera, up at the very head of the west fork of Fox Creek. Our next, featured, Fall fell run chronicles an expedition to investigate this improbable geological feature. On a freezing-ass windy Saturday, a mass of fell runners consisting of doctors, lawyers, teachers, and dogs, headed up Fox, and hung a left at the sentient boulders, which are really donkeys that have been turned to stone through bad luck. A short series of moraines led to the caldera.

The fell running community of Nome

         A small tarn, a kettle lake, perhaps, lay at the center of a perfectly-round, glacial cirque. Any geologist will already know that our quest was absurd, a continuation of the DaDaist ethic that drove these Fall adventures. The point was all the fell running we did. I had heard theories of another caldera in the Kigluaik, this one located in the round cirque under Mosquito Pass Peak, as if the Kigs were a burbling bed of magma drizzled like salad dressing on top of a twice-subducted gneiss dome, with all the attendant glacial processes taking place on top of it.   

I had visited the caldera two summers before, when Lucy and I climbed up the hill above it.  This picture looks straight down into it, with Lucy napping on the edge of a fairly steep cliff.