Bouldering 2012

Raina McRae photo

(above) Windmill Boulders on a numbing October day in 2012.

          
           Bouldering constitutes the matrix in which Kigs climbs are embedded.  A "real" climb gets a post if it protrudes in any way from the ordinary substance of everyday bouldering.  Packed tightly in between goal-oriented trips to the mountains lies any number of forgotten trips to local boulders, crags, scrags, scarps, frozen slag heaps, gravel mounds, pressure ridges, quarries, seawalls, rooves, dredges, tailings piles, all the trash in between, which, if the imagination is vivid enough,  provide more than a bare minimum of vertical terrain upon which to execute continuous kundalini-producing climbing moves.

(above) Nate and Raina on the Class 3 approach to Sunset Rocks, Norton Sound to the south, November 2012.

      More than any Alaskan town I can think of, Nome has bouldering close to town.  Within the radius of a casual trip from home, one finds the innocuous, but satisfying and unpatrolled klettergartens of Anvil Mountain, King Mountain, Banner Ridge (Windmills), Sunset Rocks, Penny Boulders, Penny Crags, Engstrom's Mountain, (Sitnasuak, Bering Straits, BLM, and I don't know what else lands!!) endless little lumps, mudcliffs, junkpiles, decaying cliffs composed of all  three geologic categories of ROCK and all possible combinations in between (with perhaps too heavy a proliferation of "metamorphic").  Pick a dark smudge on the tundra from the road, and chances are it's the tip of an iceberg;  hike over to it and the ground drops away revealing grottoes, hollows, overhangs...  gradual testing reveals the problems to be solid enough to support bodyweight (at some humidities, laugh out loud) lifetimes of climbing, if the imagination is vivid enough.

Phil Westcott photo.

(above) King Mountain, October 2012.
  
          Many climbers step off the plane.  But how many climbers that stay in town stay climbers?   Hunting draws off many.  Skiing has sucked off more than a few.  Dog teams keep able partners glued to their compounds.  Lack of alpine skills hinders some.  The sheer burden and misery of truly getting out in the Kigluait—  you know, the valid argument that the spanking you get isn't really worth the climbing you get—  kills off most.  Unless the climber steps off the plane equipped with a distracted, ADHD-mind that can wander the steppes aimlessly happily swarming over any lump of vertical ground like an ant crawling over a lump of sugar, enjoying the moves, the sheer joy of moving over stone, close to town, in pointless pursuit of imaginary problems far away from the high Kigluaiks where it really counts, he or she will not remain active as a climber, for it is the BOULDERING that gets one through on a weekly basis in Nome.

Phil Westcott

(above) Fake off-width, King Mountain, October 2012.

      Estimated percent days on which an outdoor wilderness bouldering event or climbing event occurred in 2012, for me personally:  48%.  Not bad for a post-hernia year.  Endless rock-shoe trips to the Sunsets and Pennies, one awesome day combination dry tool / rock shoeing up the entirety of Engstrom's Mountain in clear autumn breeze, plenty of King Mountain both with ropes and without, a week or two of clandestine mud-mounding in the tailings piles, and numerous trips to the Windmill Boulders chinked in between the other days.  "Been getting out in the country?"  Well, no, been bearhugging the tarry timbers of this old mining truss, been violently blowing out Cobra hooks off rounded schist with my ass already touching the ground, been playing with little sticks of carbon fiber looking for all the world like a two-year old, been taking naps inside the grassy chimneys, but no, haven't really escaped the event horizon of THE GLUE OF TOWN for weeks.

(above) Windmill Boulders, 5.9 section of Borehole Traverse (V0), September 2010.  First ever video on Kigsblog, thanks to Mikey Lean.

    Brain function necessary for kinaesthetic repetition of specific climbing moves generates electromagnetic energy body patterns which are particularly conducive to promoting the perceptual functions of intuition and other transpersonal intelligences.  Bouldering, through repetition of climbing moves, generates its corresponding electromagnetic energy body, hence a degree of psycho-spiritual interface, which in turn profoundly alters the chemistry and culture of the cells that constitute the climbers organism (cheap adrenalin rushes being one of the more concrete examples of this alteration ), the effects of which linger well after the climbing has ceased, due to the magnetization of the causation vectors within the GLUE OF TOWN having been permanently altered by the climbing that took place in the past proximity of the time/space continuum.

(above) Sunset Rocks, "Beginners Wall," M3, Fall 2010.

       The contrast between the banal details of one's life, and the quick and sudden reality of a sketch highball 15 ft. off the deck out in the middle of nowhere, with femur-crunching flakes aimed at your own legs your only hold.  Drove out from town looking for a workout, and now you're sketched out 15 ft. up on soggy, saturated schist flakes feeling like Largo in The Only Blasphemy, but all too soon you're walking back through your own front door into artificial light, and your life-partner is saying something but you can't yet make out what she is saying...

Raina McRae photo

(above) The Windmills have cracks!  Left Ski Track, a schist jam that goes on for many ones of feet.

       Johnson never let on to the other miners when he left the camps to go "Perry-Smithing," what he called his secret climbing trips to the low rocks that abounded in the hills around the Nome diggings.  It was just too peculiar an activity:  jamming your body parts into unstable rock and heaving yourself around like a ballet gymnast.  They might think it too, uh, well, feminine somehow, though they'd all seen him do it more than once when a good stack presented itself.
     One fine, Fall evening, Johnson was drinking deep with the boys up on Anvil Crick, and he staggered out of the canvas tent to confront the deep velvet of a summer night, with everything gone purpley, and the air cooled down making the bugs drop, and Johnson headed on up Anvil Mountain under the midnight sun, with the Anvil itself at the top of the mountain square in his sights.
     When he got up to the Anvil thirty minutes later, Johnson threw himself at the outcrop for all he was worth.  He flew as if up a ladder up the big holds of the south face, used a hand crack to downclimb the north side, and then forced himself to hand jam up the "hanging over" crack on the western, horn side of the Anvil, because Oliver would have made him do so if he were there.  For a moment, looking down with only jagged rocks for a landing, Johnson felt his stomach about to involuntarily relieve itself of his dinner, but again he thought of Perry Smith:  "Nur ein vier!" he would have scoffed.  Johnson made the last move and again stood on the summit, admiring the view of the Sawtooths to the north.  He descended, and spent the next hour clinging to various facets and fissures of the rock.
       Someday in the future, Johnson mused to himself, some joe will repeat my "executions" on these rocks tonight, and wonder if they have ever been climbed before...

(above) Windmill Boulders on Banner Ridge looking south, Nome in the distance, Kigsblog photography staff in foreground, October 2012.  

"All zis hiking is great, but ven vill ve get to ze real climbing? "   John Salathe

          The great of danger of bouldering is softness in the head.  When I get back on a top rope or rappel, I am seized with abject fear—  fear of gear!  Every trauma, mishap, or near miss I have incurred in years of climbing rises before my eyes.  Again, I have to go through the process of rationalizing away the adrenalarms flashing in the fear circuitry, Amygdala!,  Amygdala!, the gear cannot be trusted!  Takes me two or three days of honest roped climbing to work through the fear, every time.  Only then do I realize the extent to which Bouldering has caused parts my climbing brain to atrophy.

(left)  "Mud mounding" on frozen tailings.  Saturated by fall rains, they freeze to the consistency of ice.  A brutish form of surrogate ice climbing is created, probably toxic as well, but often stimulating.



On wilderness bouldering... 

Kigsblog is hereby pronounced guilty of Kigsmongering, and of exerting upon the Earth's remaining wilderness index a negative influence by publishing pictures and information which illuminate these areas of the map hitherto dark.  There is really no excuse for such blatant narcissism.  Soon the BLM lands of the Kigs will be overrun with swarming hordes of bright-jacketed hippies on self-directed quests to find themselves and altered states of reality.  In my defense, I can only offer the lame explanation that writing about the Kigs is a lot of fun. 

(left) Windmills, the Courtyard, unfinished problem.  Haven't heaved the old sack up that last move yet.

(above) Sunset Boulders, "Panfaruq," M5.




   Thanks to Bering Straits, Sitnasak, B.L.M, and Ken who lives at Mile 14....  I don't how it works, but it seems a modern-day miracle that one should go unnoticed (thereby being allowed by proxy) to gambol across one of the last pristine ecosystems left in the country, climbing peaks up and down for nothing, with no great hassle of permits nor proliferation of brown signs with white painted letters pointing the way.  No great squawking of land-ownership pundits is heard;  no agency ever quite gets it together to tame these rolling tundra cragbarrens, and the land goes on basically just sitting there unaware of humans most of the time, which is how it should be, in this hippy's irrelevant opinion.

(above)  Phil Westcot on the Delaminate, King Mountain, September 2012.

     When the hordes of super climbers come invading Nome from the east and from across the Bering Straits, the fate of turf-bouldering in the urban areas of the Seward Peninsula will be thrown into jeopardy.  The Windmills, for instance, have excellent turf traverses early in the season before they are buried by the snow, if you are willing to slide your lower legs down under the bottom overhangs between the rock and ground, which doesn't risk death-by-crushing quite as much once the temperatures are cold and the rock is frozen to a safe level of cohesiveness;  you're pretty much having to yard across on arms swinging tricky, precise swings while locked off. However, I have noticed that even one dry-tooling trip across the west Borehole Traverse denudes the key moss clouds on this rock to a significant extent—  I can only imagine that legions of silly-mixed boulderers would remove every last vestige of turf, rendering the tools truly dry for decades to come. 
      How absurdly lucky the boulderers that came before and the ones here now...  before we have to try and control it all, tie her with fences, drag her down... 

(left) Oro Grande, July 2012.  There are climbs, and there is all the climbing in between.  Bouldering is the matrix, the source code of the climbing that occurs on the heights. 

 

Dorothy Falls

       Analogy for Interior Alaskan ice climbers:
  
Fairbanks, Alaska is to Dragonfly Falls
as 
Nome, Alaska is to Dorothy Falls. 

       The analogy holds, though Dorothy be not half Dragonfly.  Dorothy is where climbers are generally referred when the question is asked: "Is there any ice climbing round Nome?," though what the climber finds after hiking up the wonderful Dorothy Creek is only a paltry, rounded, 20 ft. blob of blue ice, WI 2 at best.
         I had climbed there many a time in the past, but not since the inception of Kigsblog in 2009, when Nate Skains and I spontaneously decided to motor out to mile 24 Kougarak Road on Saturday a week ago.  Since Kigsblog has never posted on the topic of Dorothy Creek, here arises the opportunity to "poo poo" this "popular" ice climbing area, just as a Fairbanks hardman might poo-poo Dragonfly for being the popular destination of weekend noobs, with a parking lot full of cars and young people in shiny new Gore-Tex, when the real climbing lies hidden deeper inside the canyons labyrinths, or up in the highest mountains.

       Nate and I developed exoskeleton as we ran laps up and down.  Dorothy Falls drip-streamed blue and wet, with the temperature well below zero;  water drip-dropped copiously from the surface of the ice as we climbed, then flash-froze onto our creaking Gore-Tex suits.  Our soft, warm bodies became encased inside a hardened, jointed, translucent shell, the memory of our warm-blooded, mammalian selves sealed over by cold, insectile sensibility— with the need for stealth and constant movement to keep from freezing immobile.  I was destined to ride home in Nate's Jeep still wearing my crampons frozen onto my  feet by the exoskeleton. 

       Cleaning out cobwebs in the brain pathways that light up with ice climbing... cobwebs accumulate rapidly while you were away on the rock... Had to rediscover that weight-shift, "monkey hang" thing in the hips where you stick your tushy out into space behind you even though your brain does not wish to stick your tushy out, only then does the absurd little system of opposed spikes on your toes and hands dig in to the ice correctly...   Death-knuckling of the shafts (due to the primordial fear of being surrounded by a steep walls with no purchase or friction whatsoever) gradually began to subside, and it was relearned that you barely have to hold on to the shafts at all.  Soon, I was bored at Dorothy Falls, a good sign...  We soloed many laps, trying to get the feeling back of movement over ice, enjoying the bonus adrenalin rush that comes each time you make the Zone 2 pullover at the top.

       The real fun comes on the mixed highballing problems to the right or left of the icefall that climb over the 20 ft., circular, marble wall that forms the Falls amphitheater:  steep little ramps and corners tufted with frozen dabs of turf necessitating stemming and pull-overs that are not without mental stimulation owing to the consequences of a mistake.  One M-5 move from last Saturday stands in my memory:  frontpoints precisely stemmed out on crystals in a nicely formed corner, you lean out and sink a big fatty in an overhanging, overflowing, overgrowing blob of turf, and without hesitation at 16 ft. you lean  your full weight back on the rig and yard up. 

       Johnson was hungry that Fall.  A man just gets tired of ptarmigan, that's all.  He was stuck out at Dorothy with everything iced up, no early season snow, the days short and dark, Nome looking very far away, and no company at the cabins except for Mr. Wiggins, and wasn't he a barrel of fun?

         One good thing:  the Company had set him up with some fine gear to use that season.  He particularly enjoyed the custom creeper / snowshoe rig he had engineered from all the truck:  right now, in this cold drought of a December, he was only using the creepers.

         After breakfast one morning around Christmas, Johnson went for his walk up the Creek, walking right out on the creek ice which was blue and bulging with suppressed flow.  As usual, he continued all the way up the drainage (which, Johnson had to admit, was not seeing the kind of color they had come to expect from it in years past) until he reached the waterfall, a charmed little spot that just made a hell of a swimming hole on a hot summer day.

       Now, Johnson, as you know a student of Eckenstein, Fehrmann, and Perry-Smith from his time at the Technicum in Saxony, as you might predict had on prior occasions executed a few moves of technical rock-climbing on the limestone walls at the swimming hole.   This Fall he had fashioned sharp and wicked hooks for his hands with a clever harness system, and with the excellent creepers on his feet intended to climb the ice of Dorothy Falls itself.

      But his efforts were over in a few seconds.  Johnson found his hooks and creepers bit the soft, pliable ice almost effortlessly.  A few kicks, and he had surmounted the steep bit in the creek.  Dorothy Falls had not been worth, as they used to say, "leaving the whiskey bar."  Johnson felt a bit embarrassed about his little divertimento--  it had taken him the better part of a day to fashion the gear.  No need to tell anybody about this one....  

       Beta:  find Dorothy Creek on the map, somewhere around Mile 20 something Kougarak Road.   Cross Nome River which is braided in this area, crossing can be problematic but usually not.  Head west up Dorothy Creek drainage at a red cabin visible from road.  Falls is a mile or two up the drainage.  If summertime and bearanoid, walk up on hillside above the drainage to the left (south) and easily drop back down into drainage at Dorothy Falls amphitheatre.  If not bearanoid, enjoy walk up the creek, about anybody can do it.  If creek is frozen, definitely wear crampons, the hike is almost always interesting and really fun and never deep enough to truly drown.  When Nate and I hiked it last Saturday there sure was a ton of overflow building the creek up.  A great place for beginning ice climbers, never hurts to bring a rope and some screws.