Blowhole of the Mind

Peak 2740, Glacial Lake Peak, with Nick. We descended via a fine butt glissade down the gully in the middle.

        In April of 2018, I received a grant from kigsblog to continue my research into Mental Process, enough to fund another trip to the Kigluait, the mountains north of Nome. Glacial Lake was our destination, a known energy node, the perfect place to gather electromagnetic data on PHI fluctuation, not only to expand upon the theories of Tononi, but also demonstrate that lithosphere itself is able to carry a non-negligible PHI resonance. Nick, of course, was keen to put on the PHI-SI headsets and blast out to to Glacial Lake on high-powered snow-machines for a day of fun. 

We followed the Teller Road from Nome, then cut across to Glacial Lake.

       The significant PHI event came not as expected at our destination, the Glacial Lake constriction, but on the way there, in the unnamed drainage west of Glacial Lake. We snow-machined into a sudden PHI-current that flowed from this valley. I immediately became disoriented, but kept my thumb on the throttle of my machine so as to keep my data register on a steady axis. Nick did the same, but we soon became separated, and I began to drive in widening circles across the firm snow in an effort to locate Nick within the psychic anomaly. Visibility was excellent on a fine day, but it seemed that Nick had disappeared into thin air. Calmly I backtracked by following our own snow-machine trails, but immediately fell prey to Heffalump Syndrome: I kept on discovering my own tracks, kept returning to the time and place I had started, no matter how hard I tried to escape. 
       I had lost Nick in the mountains to a Pocket Universe, a kind of temporary side universe that happened to be slicing through that valley during the time/space region we were. A Blowhole of the Mind, if you will.

Nick heading up Pk. 2740 towards the gneiss ribs.

          As landforms funnel and amplify the power of focussed wind, so do they to PHI. The PHI wind, however, is more mercurial than atmosphere. Where and when Mind is dispersed through Causality, Mind is just as likely to stop as start, which is one of the doggone things that makes my research into Mental Process so difficult, and renders it so far below the event horizon of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle as to be total and complete bunkum.
          After twenty minutes, PHI levels subsided. Nick and I phased back into a co-universe, and I heard the reassuring sound of his snow-machine in my universe once again. We proceeded toward Glacial Lake, still two miles away, me with an agenda, Nick, to see what he could see, I presume. I cannot really know what another is thinking. Nor can I be sure it wasn't me, and not Nick, that had slipped into the parallel universe.

The naming game is an uncomfortable game, but I propose "Peak Bering Air" for this one, Pk. 2780, located west of Glacial Lake. Does not there need to be a Peak Bering Air in the Kigs? These are the bowls where Nick and I saw the fresh heli-skiers tracks. Ben, the awesome pilot, told me (as we flew past it) that he and and his brother Russell had climbed this mountain one summer.

         Our structure was founded upon intent to "bag" Pk. 2780, a rather lumpen mountain that runs along the west side of Glacial Lake. But when we arrived, we saw sinusoidal ski tracks in the bowls where we intended to slog up. Human sign, now there's something you don't see often in the middle of the Kigs! Bering Air and associates must have heli-skied the mountain the week before. (Check out this cool video) This discovery, the merest sign of human impact, significantly altered the calibrations on our headsets, rendering further data collection useless. Resonance of Mental Process through stone creates an extremely weak signal. Detection requires an empty set of mountains, psychic silence, a pure, unsullied wilderness. We had accounted for the noxious presence of ourselves and our machines, but now the settings were off. 
       Suddenly, the peak on the other side of the valley looked more attractive, so we motored across the frozen lake to climb that one instead. 

Another look at Pk. 2780 from the summit of Pk. 2740, April 14, 2018

       My memory console dropped down some history with the new peak, Peak 2740, indexed under the not-very-snazzy name of Glacial Lake Peak. The first time I tried to bag Glacial Lake Peak, solo, in 2005, I fell prey to a nap on a ledge in the warm April sun, only halfway up the mountain. Tired from teaching. But the file contained surprising affect bandwidth, no doubt from the encounter I had on the way up with a sexy porcupine. 
       Climbing with ice tools in hand, enjoying easy mixed ground, I turned a corner and found myself face to face with a wolverine! The log shows an adrenalin rush. Soon, however, the pixels resolved, and I realized it was a porcupine, lazing on a ledge in the Spring sun, as I was soon to do. She lay there, quills against the rock wall, and flashed me a Mona Lisa smile, a blatant come hither look. Quickly, I climbed on, only to be stopped higher up by the nap.
       The next failed climbing attempt on Glacial Lake Peak came the following year. Earp and I machined into the Kigs on a day so cold, so completely allapa, that we were too afraid to shut the machines off when we got there. Again, however, the Memory File is coded with strong affect, the reason being that as we crossed the Sinuk River on the way to Glacial Lake via the Stewart River, I took my most harrowing snow-machine wipeout ever. It was the early days of Super Smooth Andy G., an Arctic Cat .570 Bearcat, and I had not learned that if you give it gas on bare ice, the back end of the machine shoots out from under you in a rotary motion. Off the machine I went, sliding across the Sinuk River ice like a curling stone. Inertia kept me going for some time. I was spinning across the ice, looking up at the sky. Super Smooth Andy was somewhere nearby, also still traveling, unmanned. At one point we bumped against each other and I pushed the big Bearcat gently away. Earp saw the whole thing from the bank of the river, but it was too cold right then to dwell upon the horror of it, and I seemed to be unscathed.
          The presence of such strong memory markers associated with Glacial Lake Peak adventures leads me to believe the mountain may be manifesting a detectable Mental Resonance signal. Essentially, if you include the mountain within your trip structure, the defined piece of scarp establishes itself at the locus of a vortex of causation which manifests at various distributed points in your life, like a magnet generating patterns in a field of iron filings, increasing the chance things will happen somewhere, like wipeouts and porcupines.     

Looking northwest from base of Pk. 2740. Let this caption be a PEEMARK. There is a rather spectacular tor in this picture, center top, on top of the ridge, that eye soloed one summer. About sixty feet, 5.6. I call it Red Tip, because it has one. So, yeah, MARK! Lift leg, squirt, smells ever so faintly of toxic masculinity. 

            Though a failure in terms of science, the third attempt on Glacial Lake Peak proved a successful peak bag. Didn't take longer than an hour or two from the machines. I felt vaguely sheepish as Nick, wearing light boots and shorts, scrambled up the spine of the rock buttress while I, kitted out in double boots, crampons, axes, helmet, and big pack, kick-stepped up steep snow alongside the rock. He was the Californian now, and I had become the guy in Freedom Of the Hills that we used to ridicule, the Seattle guy who had overpacked for his weekend trip to the Cascades.
       One could construct a harder mixed climb somewhere on the orthogneiss ribs of Glacial Lake Peak. We romped up gullies and ribs, dipping into the rocks as needed. On the summit, our PHI-SI headsets crackled to life as we gazed out over the entire range. The butt glissade back down to the bottom goes down as a classic.

Suluun is only a dark smudge on the horizon, but you can see clearly see the Sulu Tor poking up there, slightly left of dead center. Osborn on horizon to right. Looking over the Pinarut peaks. Wilson (mostly) and I skied the gable in the foreground  last year. Mark!

          Now all we have to do is take the data back to the lab, and hope it provides more evidence that will supply the missing factor in my equations.  Of course I cannot post the equations here at this time. Any oversimplified explanation is doomed to degenerate into incoherent spew, but here goes anyway.
        As Einstein took the velocity of light to be a constant, so this theory takes the magnitude of consciousness to be a constant. Any system assumed to manifest consciousness is assumed to have a magnitude of 1.0 PHI. The basic unit of consciousness is your consciousness. Occam's Razor, right? The move is counterintuitive, as I'm sure you imagine the magnitude of your own tremendous consciousness to be greatly elevated over that of others, or a beetle, or a stone. Yet, when each consciousness-system is assumed to be equivalent, the mathematical description of consciousness (using a graphic analogy) elongates into a continuous strand which diminishes down to the diameter of the Planck length, and then reverses polarity past the blackhole/whitehole horizon. Potential for Mind, if not its kinetic expression (such as a synchronicity, precognition, social media network, or the thoughts in the neural network of a chimpanzee), is expressed at any infinitely-small point in the Universe. The denominator gets cranked down to the size of the event horizon of each white hole/black hole system.
       I'm still having a few problems resolving some anomalies in the data. Science must be observable, predictable, repeatable. Mind is elusive in these respects. However, continued research in the Kigluait will provide more data which may fill in the gaps. Please leave comments to provide your support, or to bring up anything I missed. 

Looking west down the spine of the Kigs from Glacial Lake Peak to the Singtook.

On Flight

(left) Russell, Andy, and Robinson, Oro Grande Expedition, July 2012, 18SA.   Andy wide-grinning because he just skipped over three days of brutal backpacking.  Russell is probably wishing he could stay in the Oro Grande with us. 

Riverboat of Charon ride
Take me to the other side
Across the river of air
In the eye of the dragonfly.

     There is only ONE way to get into the Kigs in summer;  take the helicopter with Bering Air.  Period, case closed, end of discussion.  Slog Ratio:  zero.   If such a statement seems like a violation of the hippy, "Anti-Internal Combustion" code, consider that Bering Air is a family-run business and the Rowes are just, well, incredibly cool.  Ben and Russell exude the competence that nervous climbers look for in a ferryman.  Even more, they manage to maintain this bird-of-prey coolness without dwelling in that remote ethosphere, out of reach of us land-dwellers, where seems to be the plane of so many bad-ass aviators.  Local.  Not like a corporation...  We flew right over Russell's yurt on the way to Mosquito Pass.  It is always good luck when your pilot is pointing at mountains and discussing things he's done in the range as you are flying in.  

 

(above)  Suluun, the Dorsal Fin. (Picture from chief Kigsblog geologist Amato.)  In 2009, Ben Rowe landed Andy Sterns and me in the moraines of this mysterious chunk of gneiss, located deep in the heart of the range behind Glacial Lake.  There might, I am not sure, be a stub of still-living glacier tucked in the back pocket of this cirque.

    It is 2007.  I walk in for an attempt on Suluun by myself, the back way, via Glacial Lake by way of the Teller Road.  I think I'm being really cagey and clever because I have talked Bering Air into ferrying a sack of climbing hardware into the famous helicopter-supported, Salmon-counting camp at the outlet to Glacial Lake, for free.  But my plan has backfired because it requires me to hike the entire 5-mile length of the V-shaped Glacial Lake to retrieve the gear, and back to my camp at the head of the lake in a day, and the Lake is proving to be the most torturous, bushwacky, bearanoid, gnat-infested soakfest I have ever carried two ropes and wall gear through in the Kigs.
     So I am finally pulling in to the Salmon-counting camp, after hours of beaver-thrash and willow yarding.  The camp is getting no nearer very fast, but that's the way it's been.  The gnats, endemic to Glacial Lake I suspect, are impervious to DEET and like to get stuck in a beard.  I've already been out in the wild for three days, the first night getting repeatedly awakened by a senile musk-ox outside my tent at the animal crossroads where I stupidly camped, so that as I pull up to the camp, I look crazed—  more than usual.  The young woman working at the camp looks wary as I retrieve my weary sack of heavy gear from the kitchen tent and prepare to commence slogging rapidly away from that place, to flee all human contact and hie to the misery of Glacial Lake.  And that is moment when....
            We hear it...   whop, whop, whop....   like an angel of heaven, it is the ferryman himself, Russell Rowe, dropping from the sky, coming to switch out personnel at the camp.  He touches down out in the swamp.  Before the rotors have stopped turning, I am bounding across the tussocks.  I'm pretty sure I know him from town...
        "Hi Russell!  I'll give you my second-born child if you'll just give my a ride back to the other end of the lake."
       Now, I am NOT expecting him to say yes.  Back when I worked for the Park Service, before you could even ride the helicopter you had to take nine or ten classes and pass three or four tests.  A helicopter is not just a snow-machine, it can't just pick up hitch-hikers, it's a very serious and formidable piece of technology.
       "Other end of the lake?  I suppose we can probably do that..."
         I look down and see my entire morning's hike reversing before my eyes in three minutes:  there's that rainforest of alders, there's the raised hummock where I tried to have lunch in the flies, there's where I fell in...
        Russell seems reluctant to leave Glacial Lake this time, too.  With a sigh, he mounts his trusted whirligig and is gone.  Surreal... like a transporter beam.  Then silence. 

Boatman, boatman
Fly real low
There's nothing down there 
But the ice and snow

Fly through the air
Don't have a care
Town is so small
Don't care at all...

Take me there
World behind
River boat of Charon
To the other side...

Oro Grande Tors

 

(above) Peemarking system for Oro Grande peaks.  We climbed at Tors 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 12. Following is a recap of one of my most successful rockclimbing trips ever to the Kigluaiks, with Andy Sterns from Fairbanks, July 7—15, 2012.  Russell Rowe flew us in with Bering Air in one of their beautiful red Robinson helicopters—  my praise for this classy local outfit is so boundless, it will require its own post. We hiked out over Mosquito Pass in 2 1/2 days. 
Tor 1:  Pk. 3595, (high point of ridge) climbed on day 1, Mathes Crest (III, 5.9)
Tor 2:  "West Scruffy Tor," East Arete (II, 5.4), climbed on day 5
Tor 3:  "East Scruffy Tor," West Arete (II, 5.7), climbed on day 5
Tor 4:  Stanage Tor Area,  Stanage (II, 5.7) and Eddie Munster Tor (I, 5.7), climbed on day 4
Tor 5:  Pk. 3350+, the "NaulogTor," Caballo Blanco (II, 5.9)***, climbed on day 2
Tor 12:  Pk. 3275(?), West Arete, (II, 5.2), climbed on day 6  
DISCLAIMER for map and images:  These maps suck. The whole thing is silly, a Narcissus Loop against a pool of mountains.  This data is the result of errors and disorientation. Andy and I made up almost all the names of peaks and tors for our own convenience during the trip, and I have kept to those blurts for this article. The pictures were taken with paper cameras.  They are offered here only for the sake of PEE-MARKING.  For Kigsgeeks only.

     Awash in joy, but we didn't know it at the time.  Huge drafts of EARTH ENERGY rose from the Imruk Basin and broke like a wave-cloud over the nearest ridge to the south, which happened to be the sawtoothed ridge upon which Andy Sterns and I were topping out out on the highest tooth, marked as Pk. 3595 on the map, on the first day of a weeklong trip to the Oro Grande drainage, Saturday, July 7, 4SA.  We did not detect this ENERGY with our senses;  we were not aware of the ENERGY at the time.  Any analysis of this ENERGY would necessarily require more time, effort, and intelligence than we had then— or now, for that matter.   The only fact I have relating to this EARTH ENERGY is that Andy and I did indeed extract several lifetimes of  joy from our climbing trip to the Oro Grande in July, 5SA, leading me to believe that the mental and physical health benefits we enjoyed for weeks after the trip must have been due, in part, to the increased doses of EARTH ENERGY we received each day we made the brutal 3000 ft. approach up to the ridgecrest to bag another tor.

(above) NauloqTor, Caballo Blanco, pitch 3.  Tor 5, day 2.  The Nauloq, named for the presumptuous way this white shaft of granite thrusts above brown gneiss buttresses, was the nicest specimen captured in our bag of tors.  The third pitch provided an honest-to-god Yosemite 5.9 pitch (as opposed to the usual Kigs 5.9 rating which is really only 5.7 bumped up for choss factor), complete with some nice offwidth at the top. (below)

(left) 
NauloqTor (Pk. 3350+).  Caballo Blanco follows a crack system towards the righthand edge for two pitches.

(below) A view of the quality first pitch of Caballo Blanco.

  What, exactly, is EARTH ENERGY, one asks, eyes rolling...  But there is a rule that Kigsblog must stick to the climbing.  I had advertised the Oro Grande trip to Andy, who would be required to pay the hefty air miles to get to Nome from Fairbanks, as "a ridge studded with one-pitch tors," but the pleasantly-surprising reality turned out to be that the Oro Grande tors are more like "two to five-pitch" tors, on some very nice pre-Cambrian Orthogneiss that, I am told by expert Geospewers from UAF, might just as well be referred to as "granite".  From the north, this ridge really puts the sawtooths in "Sawtooths";  the Oro Grande tors bear an uncanny resemblance to the tooth pattern on a conventional bowsaw.  While it might seem silly to go to such great lengths of trouble--  planes, helicopters, huge approaches, mounds of gear, over-application of bug dope to skin, all the things required for Kigsaneering-- to climb a few individual teeth barely rising up from a bow-saw, it is also true that each tor presented its own unique climbing challenge, and each tor felt plenty committing as we perched and waggled from tenuous eyries, high above the Seward Peninsula, with the spooky Imruk breathing into our souls like a sleeping dragon.

(left) Andy commencing the "High Exposure" traverse on pitch 3 of Stanage Tor, an inspired 5.6 lead that spiraled around the exposed summit of the tower over rounded, hideo-chossic holds.








(below) Stanage Tor, pitch 1.  

(above) Stanage from west.  There's a fantastic-looking pitch of steep, thin crack around the corner on the south face.  We doubted our ability to free-climb it in acceptable style, and so walked around the corner to climb three fine, shortish pitches on the 200 ft. turd pictured above.  

(above) Stanage from east.  Stanage is the dark pillar lowest in line, so nicknamed because its brown gneiss reminded us of its eponymous sandstone crag in Britain (a place neither Andy or I have ever climbed.)

   The organizing force of NONENTROPIC MENTAL PROCESS was busily at work permeating the very molecules of the mafic minerals on which we climbed.  The land was thinking, and our neuro and physio networks were engaged in a dialogue with the thinking patterns of the land itself.   Living material is far more liable to difference (change) than non-living material; nevertheless, non-living material such as  the cliffs of Pk. 3595 Tor is still subject to NONENTROPIC MENTAL PROCESS, however slightly from our frame of temporal reference, and our neural networks, (speaking for Andy I'm sure!) transformed by the shamanic practice of rigorous climbing in a wilderness setting, were vibrating in resonance with the electromagnetic backdrop of the solid matter in the our localized space/time region. 

      

(left) Ian enjoying the fundalicius 5.7 pitch 2 of "Mathes Crest" (III, 5.9) on "3595 Tor," the highest elevation on the Oro Grande ridge, and our first day's objective.  We managed to get a satisfying 6-pitch climb out of a series of continuous buttresses, essentially the south face and east arete of Pk. 3595.

(above) First two pitches of "Mathes Crest" climb chewed-up books towards  right.

(above) Manky 5.9 overhang on first pitch of "Mathes Crest."  On our first day of climbing I wanted to impress Andy, who had been commendably assuming the lead all through the allapa, freezing-ass days of Winter when the medium was ice and dry tools;  now that we were back on Californian terrain,  pure joy freed me from the chains of doubt and I mantled  onto a dessicated chickenhead.

(below) Looking down on the rest of pitch 1 at Andy following.

(above) Ian topping out on east summit tor of Pk. 3595, pitch 3.  What followed was a pitch of easy, fun, hand traversing and horizontal arete hiking that in our wildest dreams reminded us of the Mathes Crest at Tuolumne.

(above)  Author leading pitch 5.  We were rewarded with this bonus 5.8 wall of stellar overhangs rising out of grassy ledges that led to the true summit of Pk. 3595.  At the high point we found an Army Corps of Engineers "VABM" marker embedded in the summit rock, plus an ancient sledge hammer;  turns out there was a sneaky Class 3 / 4 scrambling route up the north side of the tor!

(right) Pk. 3595 is the peak on the left as viewed from the west on an attempt in April, 2011;  I retreated due to a purple leg, Yukon Jack, and the No Sketch Partner Law.  Not all of these sawtooths are very toothy on their northern sides:  this is a complete reversal of the normal Kigluaik configuration where the north side is the cliffy side and the south side the gentle slope.  Up until the moment Andy and I mantled onto the summit, I was unsure if we had chosen the same peak as the one in this picture.

   It was pooling out in the Imruk Basin, slowly pooling... Thought is influenced by gravitation (postholing in the spring crust has proved) and the consciousness patterns came sinking gradually sinking down like electromagnetic sediment into the vast bowl of brackish  water... Now it was billowing back upwards in great auroral blooms, the breeze freshened over the spires...  and NOW the impulse wave came washing over the tiny figures lashed to the prow of the summit rocks.  One of the figures is dangling, trying to retract a pair of cams;  the other is sitting befuddled with a rope locked tight in his hand, hopelessly trying to figure out the mystery of double-rope technique.  Nothing special appears to be happening.  The weather shines hot and sunny.  Alles ist im Ordnung. The tiny climbers go about their business.

      But this moment is a very pivot of their lives in time/space...  in that moment, lives are exchanged, some die, others pop in...  the contour lines of the climbers' personal power, the fabric of their ongoing creation, suddenly bunch upwards in the shape of a mountain to accommodate the immensity of this moment distorting the causal fabric of their lives, as they stem painfully inside corners between the Volkswagon glue-ins, rolling dice with the people they've left behind.

(left) Andy on summit slab pitch of East ScruffTor, an immaculate 5.2 pitch— for one moment, as golden and casual as Lembert Dome.

(right) Andy crunching symbiote on our second climb of the fourth day, the "East ScruffyTor" via its "West Arete" (two pitches, a bit of 5.7).  Visible in the background is the sunlit base of our first route of the day, the "West ScruffyTor," via its "East Arete" (two pitches, 5.4).  Both of the twin Scruffies were treated as hobnail boot, summit baggy, Sierra Club-style climbs, and offered occasional spasms of good climbing in between inclined fields of vegetated choss, with beauty off the scale.



       Mornings come stiff as a board, then more flexible with breakfast.  By the time we reach the nude sunbathing slabs at the highest water-bottle fill, we can already see just across the way to the mini-Emporer Face of Mt. Osborne, sedimentary King of the Kigs, Pk. 4704.  Maybe it is one of the days we had gear stashed at the top, or maybe we are toting the rack, rope and water all the way up.  The only thing that gets me up that immense approach each day is ONE-FOOT-IN-FRONT-OF-THE-OTHER TECHNIQUE—  the simple technique of just not looking any further ahead than the next step.  Like Dave Johnston wrote of Foraker's Sultana Ridge, "I'm just a slope jumar."
    The reward was always worth it, a nice little tower or two of granite sporting some real Grade A pitches on stone so fine in most places you could sell pieces of it as healing trinkets on Telegraph.  Cams snapped neatly into cracks so falsely-secure you only had to back up and equalize once.  On top of tiny pinnacles we found only the puzzle of the descent, often something we didn't think about until too late, then the strangely macabre game of building the most cheapskate anchor possible.  Stagger back into camp 17 hours later, hallucinating, repeat cycle, awash in joy, bathing in CHI.

(above)  The pitch that got away.  Rain was coming soon and we knew we should stop and climb this nice section of rock in the picture for the fun of it, but we opted instead for summit glory, and scrambled further upwards for the impending West Arete of Pk. 3275, which we figured from the look of the thing from our camp to the south was a committing arcing, 3-pitch knifedge up a Roman helmet of granite.  The reality was another Sierra Club R.C.S. outing, a ridge with a pretty mellow north side, a long line of ladies holding up their dresses.  I could smell previous ascents of this rather prominent summit;  there looked to be nice hiking terrain leading up to the peak from Windy Cove down on the busy marketplace of the Imruk Basin.  A fine outing, but we shoulda climbed this picture. 

(above) An enjoyable section of climbing on the West Arete of Pk. 3275 (II, 5.2).  I must admit to virtually making up this peak elevation due to inadequate map skills;  I think everybody does this in the Kigs, there's a kind of poetry to the two-digit numbers.  Thirty-two, Seventy-five.  Thirty-three, Sixty-seven.  Thirty-eight, seventy.  Two-Six, Two-Six...   

(above) Transitioning to the green, West Arete of Pk. 3275.  This is called a Monty Python shot:  Andy appears to be simulating  climbing on flat ground.  You get this problem a lot in the Kigs with climbing shots taken from the belay.  In fact, Andy's feet are still perched at the top of a steep slab and the grass is slick with rain.  Andy is happy for the rope at that position, though we are just about to shed the rope for a dash to the top before the deluge.

    The pluton at the heart of the Kigs, the swelling gneiss dome itself, the 35 mile slab of meta-igneous rock the gold miners simply called bedrock— insect climbers scuttle on the protruding bone ends sticking from the tops of the 3,000 ft. ridges.
    The minerals that compose this pluton, the molecules in the minerals, the constituents of the nuclei in the molecules, quarks, leptons, tie the missing pieces together with string dimensions inaccessible to the human brain alone, throw in nonentropic, periodic patterns of organization within this quantum soup... 
      You get the whole blob of the Kigs acting like a huge magnet, a lodestone slightly distorting the electromagnetic backdrop of this region of time / space / matter, displacing the normal even flow of time/space ever so slightly.  The mountain interfacing with the quantum foam....
      The electromagnetic energy bodies extending from the creepy-crawly insect climbers (auras) flutter momentarily like haloes in faerie wind.  Andy is saying something but his words are lost on the echoing walls.  My hands are too painful and scabbed to notice the acquisition of CHI in the synaptic spaces where my being interfaces with the quantum foam, my brain is too dulled with fatigue to notice the revitalization of my life force.  Left my Klif bar at the bottom.

(above and right) Scenes from day 4 on Eddie Munster Tor.

     My neuro-transmitters had been mangled that morning slogging up the talus with a pack.  After fifteen hours on the go, both Andy and I had gone past that familiar point where extraneous speech is avoided, we went about our business in a dull, dehydrated stupor.  Some weird exchange had taken place down in my nervous tissue colonies, where the cells brush past each other in the hallways exchanging silent information like Deadheads crammed into a show restlessly circulating: no Seretonin to be had was the word on the street, so those crazy little guys were dredging it up anyway from the endorphins instead, and the result was a completely altered state in which I could seemingly view streams of code flashing by in the Matrix of the nature surrounding us, except that it wasn't digital, it was absolutely analogic, parallel streams of electromagnetic information waving around like strata would do in a million-year time-lapse.  The land enjoyed us as we surfed its wavecrests.  Andy and I were just too tired at the time to care about any of this....

(above) The 3000 ft. approach, West Face of Osborne visible in background.

(below) Some of the best July foot-skiing ever!

(above) Kigluaik Mountains Organism anatomical chart showing helicopter landing zone / basecamp and the hiking route over Mosquito Pass in red, and the Kougarak Road in yellow.  

(above) Looking south up the Mosquito Pass corridor from the Cobblestone River.  "He is deep in d' plak-tow..." as they say on Planet Vulcan.  Bugs, packs, sore muscles, long way to go, absurd beauty levels, all the traditional accompaniments of Alaskan summertime suffering.  

           Copernicus, sun.  Columbus, spherical Earth.  Einstein, space-time.  (Buddha, transcendence, Jesus, love).  

        What's the next epiphany?  It will be simple, graspable by scientist and layman alike.  We will utter, "Why didn't we see it until now?"  It will only be proven with big math, but the principle proportion (think E=mc^2) will seem obvious, as in, we're looking at it right now in the pixels of the Matrix.

    If everything is thinking, then the mountains are thinking.  Syncronicities and intuition is proof.  Coincidences are nodal points where mental process is evidenced by collateral streams of causation producing difference on multi-layered levels of similar organization.  And who knows intuition like those who have grappled with teetering mountains?

      What is Mind?

The "Steely Focus" Buttress, IV, 5.9

July basecamp was on these moraines. Many thanks to Bering Air for choppering us right to this spot. Around the corner to the right (south), hidden out of the picture, the barest nub of a glacier can still found-- is this one of Kaufman's 3 living glaciers in the Kigluaik?

Such a wonder to have someone out there to talk with, for once. Andy and I chatted ceaselessly. At one point, Andy remarked: "Boy, it sure takes a steely focus in your home life to keep climbing all the time." L.A.F.S. (Love At First Sight Syndrome, a resonance phenomenon) was immediately recognizable with the utterance of the phrase "steely focus" as soon as Andy spoke the words. At that precise moment, it became our nom de jour, and the inevitable name of the climb that was about to follow.

Here is Andy perching at the top of Pitch 1. Andy had spotted the line the day after our harrowing ascent of the Sulu Tor. The next morning we had hiked to a spot at the very locus of the entire cirque. We had stood on a hump and slowly whirled around, watching the walls for where to climb next. The Steely Focus Buttress had appeared to be an area of possible lesser choss among the pure choss fields.

The first pitch was indeed more igneous than metamorphic, which felt pleasant after all the terror of the preceding days. It felt a bit like Toe Jam at J-Tree for one moment. The sun heated the rock. The healing vibrations of warm granite began to repair our damaged bodies.

The routefinding presented a type of aesthetic dilemma: whether to grovel up the green bryophytic strips which overlay the more solid rock, or jam and stinkbug out on more elegant flakes which were not, in any way, not the least bit, attached to the main wall.

In the winter you sink a pick in the moss clouds, but in summer you clutch at them with starfish hands. Despite the green strips, the Steely Focus had a few nice moves in its 7 pitches. Each pitch ran consistently at 5.7 or harder (and this 5.7, of course, was rendered desperate by the choss and the crumble, felt more like 5.9.) A very cool roof, some delicate crack, classic belay ledges, very nearly but not quite a wall ambiance, lots of pro (none of it worth a DAMN but the pins!), many different route options, an extremely cool top-out at the rim, I believe it might possibly be the first route of its kind in the Kigluaik, unless you count the Chimneys of Tiresias.

Descent, on the other hand, sucked big as we tried to glissade in rock shoes. We were deep inside an amazing horrific exfoliating chasm (definition of "chasm": a fault or gully which runs continuously from the top of Suluun to the base, which might provide either ascent, descent, or egress) the 4th chasm from the left when looking from basecamp. We gave up glissading and banged in pins; they are still there but you'll never be able to reach them because there will never be as much snow during summer as there was last July of 2009 when Andy and I gamboled about there.

Here is a topo from Ian's little yellow book. Silly- but we were bored in the tent. There was definitely some 5.9 in there somewhere. There are a hundred different ways you could go. I always seem to choose the easy way. But it's death, mate, don't go.....

Once more, the secret location of Suluun, which, I believe, is on BLM land, under a outdoor recreational designation, i am sure...