The White Stripes Of Summer

Top of Buffalo Creek, looking west to Pt. 3270

Due to a BLOG LAG of exactly one year, Kigsblog is currently "lapping itself." Now it's time to blog about the white stripes I skied a year ago, but they greatly resemble the white stripes I am skiing now. A resonant frequency is created in the seasonal blog amplitude between action and writing about action. A stroboscopic merging of the two streams is throwing off bright spokes of snow that blind my eyes and burn my skin, and all point to a central conclusion: this is a WARNING TALE of climate change. Skiing never used to happen in June in the Kigluaik Mountains. Now it seems a periodic occurrence.

Pilgrim Springs area, heading for Crystal Kingdom

Looking north across the Kuzitrin

             MAY 27, 2018. The first stripe came on the heels of school in the form of the "Solar Sidewalk." So christened by Otis, the Solar Sidewalk is a strip of snow that winds down the Singtook (which is Peak 3870, the western bulwark of the Kigluai Mountains, the most often climbed peak in the range) and earns its name by often lingering well into June when the Teller Road is open, after most of the other snow stripes have vanished. This makes the Solar Sidewalk the ideal location for the annual Greg Stoddard Springtime Memorial Yahoo Ski Field Trip, a hallowed rite of passage that ought to be on the tick list of any Nome Fun Hog. In a good year, the Sidewalk is continuously skiable from summit to car without skis ever touching tundra.
        As it was for 2018. The participants were Otis Stoddard, Luke Stoddard, and me, Deke Stoddard, along with Rattler, my good dog. We drove west on the Teller Road and the Singtook drew  closer. Soon we could see the mountain wore a gauzy veil of wind, and we knew that buffeting was in store for us that day, but at least there was plenty of snow cover upon which to ski after the blizzards of 2019.

Snows of 2019, Nome, Alaska

 After the usual rituals, which include offerings, thanks, apologies, and justifications for white men being out there at all in the Woolley Lagoon are, we skinned to the top of the mountain in a wind so savage that rocks were blowing horizontally through the air. On the summit, looming indistinctly through whiteout, we discerned ginormous, egg shaped pods of rime ice. They had formed around the radio transmitter antennae that one sees on top of 3870. The pressure of the wind actually forces the little H2O molecules straight from a vaporous phase into a solid phase, bypassing liquid completely. Each rime pod was the size of a mansion, a giant thing that had formed from a smaller thing, like VGER in the first Star Trek movie.  Ominous.
        Though the run down the west ridge might not have mustered an"extreme," it nevertheless required skills. The firn snow on the summit ridge was scalloped with rime peanuts as we carved between granite outcrops with a low hum of wind underlying everything, then down past the fabled 3870 lake into the fun middle part of the descent where you make S-turns down an 80 ft. wide couloir in snow that is usually friendly if it has been heated up by the day or rained on, then punch a couple of turns around a narrow isthmus of boulders at the bottom of the couloir and start the schuss down the lower slopes, preserving speed to make it to the car. The day provided a Stoddard that the three of us will remember for all time.

Stoddard Bros 2018

Radio Tower 3870 summit          

Rime lord

VGER

MAY 27, 2019     In blog time, a single scroll. In real time, another year rolled over. Once again, it is time for the Greg Stoddard Memorial Yahoo Ski Field Trip to Thirty-Eight Seventy. Otis, Luke, and me have re-manifested, along with new hotshot, Zeke, and, breaking the gender barrier, Daisy Stoddard, plus our special guest stars and local heroes the Hoog boys fresh off a classic ascent of McKinley's West Buttress, all of us heading out the Teller Road in two cars, listening to Phish and following the star of  the arch telemark fiend, while the white stripes go flashing by on all sides in parallel waveforms. The familiar landmarks fall by the wayside. We cross the holy Sinuk. We pass through the disorienting Bus Vortex at the top of the hill, and cross Livingston Creek, whose Lethian properties dissolve any remaining tendrils of GLUE binding us to town. We emerge into a new, western kingdom of the Kigluait, with my discarded chrysalis steaming on the road behind us.
           All the Stoddards this year are either young, extremely fit, or both, except for me. No one seems any longer to exemplify the spirit of sybaritic impairment and moral decline that marked the original Yahoo Expedition to 3870 in the presence of the Arch Fiend. I have forgotten my skins, but fortunately, the spring firn is firm enough for walking, and the Stoddards only have to wait forty-five minutes at the summit for my arrival, whereupon they clap on their Euro skis and launch straight down the west face, not the west ridge, because there are copious amounts of snow once again this year and rains have made the snow rather slow and soggy and it is clearly the year to ski the face.
I get out on the face in my beat tellies and duct-taped Terminators but am afraid to throw a turn on the steepness, so I traverse north on edges to where it's a few degrees less steep and I am free to start hucking huge sets of sine wave turns while the others wait below at the lake for the old man to catch up again.    
        I can remember decades ago standing in a group of young badass friends waiting for the old man to catch up. How beautiful are life's processes that have put me back in the old man position. White stripes of the present and white stripes of the past are both perhaps present in white stripes future. Only the patterns hold, even as the details are polished away in a defective memory. It's all a blur. Hail to the spirits, and hail to the white stripes of summer. (Greg, if you are reading this, I'm really not sure why you were chosen. I think it's like one of those mundane little expedition jokes that people keep repeating over and over,  but now I may have blogged into permanence...)

Stoddards, 2019. This is the only picture I took.
The rest were taken by Otis. Thank you, Otis.

Upper Singtook, June 2019

Middle section - fun couloir

Start of upper west ridge, Woolley Lagoon on horizon

While they party on the summit

Here cometh an aged mountaineer

Warm bare ground of apres ski in stripe time.
The recent eskimo bros ascent of the West Butt. is
a milestone in Western Alaska climbing.
Their ascent reminds me of the Sourdoughs, just
a pair of Alaskans getting it done, with a very
rad ski to boot. Will this new generation swarm out
 over the greater ranges and bring
their skills back home to Qaweraq?

 The superposition of wave states has my mind greatly interfered. THEN and NOW are superimposed on the oscilloscope of consciousness as I procrastinate this very blogpost by getting out into the gullies instead of staying in and writing. I drive my buggy across the three roads of life through the wavy white stripes of this year's harvest, bobble-headed for the line of the day, when I should be at home slowly carving away all this excess verbiage. I must escape this BLOGLOCK and make it to the hot, sunny mountains that wait outside this cyberspace, but the white stripes of summer must first be rendered by stream of consciousness, into which there is no other choice but to lapse. I must complete this post before I can leave for the mountains again...

The Construct, Buffalo Creek, diagonal at center. Only 1500 ft., great for earnyourturns skiing

         Buffalo Creek, June.  Following the summer threshold of the Stoddard ritual comes the Buffalo Creek phase: big days up at Nugget Pass on the Kougarak Road, multiple zooming day trips with friends or alone with dog, speed up that Kougarak Road like Neal Cassidy or even Fred Beckey at the helm of his pink T-Bird, pull over on the shoulder by the moose signs and wallow in the glue of the car a while, then slam that door and break glue, load skis on your back or on your feet, and head up Deep Creek to vanish into the very earth of the mountain itself. Bands of parallel snow crackle all around as you ascend. A minor pass dumps you a couple hundred feet down into a brown canyon where legendary ski runs come down the wall in bars of white like paint runs, Sister Turner, the Construct, others, all manifestations of an algorithmic code that forms the Matrix.
         Such a great glitter of stripes, the memory is almost solid white, the sequence lost, and now is random. Can a damaged brain remember any details at all?  Only the pattern which repeats...I remember good times with Otis, discovering new tors at the top of Deep Creek I never knew existed, shooting half pipes over giant sags of snow collapsing into the creek, bouldering on gneiss in Scarpa Terminators. I remember a solo camping trip in which I demotivated on continuing down into the Thompson Creek Cirque and contracted a sunburn lying around the tent so bad the tattoos lasted the rest of the summer. Half the trips to Buffalo Creek, overall, must be conducted in some degree of whiteout. Was 2018 year we skied in complete nothingness with Robin and Daisy and Luigi and the Construct got its name, but only theoretically because we could never be sure what we really skied? Do you think that's air you're breathing? But that event was outside the purview of this article, because Buffalo was white that day, and this is about Buffalo's stripes.

Otis, Rattler, and Tor

Above Deep Creek

Rattler, Tazlinas

Deep Creek is the approach of choice to Buffalo Creek

North Side Bowls, Pilgrim Springs Road. Just days before the road to Pilgrim Hot Springs had to be closed because every yahoo in town gummed them up by having entirely too much fun out there, Otis had the brilliant idea that the road to the Hot Springs might provide fabulous access to the mysterious and sought-after north side of the Kigs. Otis seemed to have a preexisting relationship with a few of the north-facing bowls you see to the left of the road as you're driving in  to the springs. He told me the names of these bowls and I was intrigued, because to name a feature in the mountains you have to have the feature whisper its own true name to you in the old language, spoken when the mountains were new in the Distant Time, and I never knew Otis had that skill. I will need to check in with him on some of these names.
          We met a pilgrim out there on the road, one of these types of hot spring seekers who was just feeling his way towards the hot pool in a tiny car, without a whole lot of information to guide him, and only a vague awareness of where he was. "How far is it? Am I going the right direction?" He had heard there was a hot springs out here somewhere and was just following the other birds. "They'll have to close the road soon if they're letting these types in," I remarked presciently to Otis. We felt somewhat superior to the tourist because we were parking our car before the springs and heading off toward the bowls on some fat white stripes we were riding.
            Summer had advanced, snow had receded, and stripe navigation was complex. The trick is to stop differentiating between snow and tundra, and just churn ahead over tussocks, through willows, and across creeks, leaving your skis on as if they were giant hiking boots. Instead of swirling snowflakes, clouds of mosquitoes came at us. Instead of hypothermia, heat exhaustion. Otis and I assembled a set of meaningful ups and downs that took us across ribs and bowls. It was art: a pastiche of turns, threaded rocks, skinny snow isthmuses to link patches, swoops, forks, stripes... I was disappointed not to bag any high-value northside summits, but the summit is not the point, it's how you put together the stripes.

3 Mile Hot Springs Road

Spider Bowl, Crystal Canyon, ?

Looking northeast

Cool