Moon Mountain Geopsychic Survey

Nick Treinen on Pk. 1781, Moon Mountains, Seward Peninsula

      Zooming back from the Moon Mountains down the Norton Sound coast on my spanking new SkiDoo Expedition Ace on the weekend following our conquest of Peak Grand Union, I felt confident in my new sled, the first example of a modern-style 4-stroke push-button machine I have ever ridden. Until, that is, I slammed head-on into the shimmering, invisible, outer envelope of a "phase-variation vortex" that lay in wait out there by the Cripple River mouth, sort of like an electromagnetic, tidal rip, causing my new machine to malfunction immediately, stop dead in its tracks, and stop working altogether. 

I was perturbed; you don't expect this kind of behavior from a brand new machine. The thing started again, it stopped again, it was confused, then stopped for good. In the old days, I raised the hood and might well have been able to fix the problem, but with the new push-button machines, all I could really do was contemplate my button.  Not until many months later would I finally discover the truth about the malfunction. Read this post until the end, because you won't find about this potential product hazard anywhere else but kigsblog.

Telly the Moons

    The gimmick was to find a viable approach to the fabled Moon Mountains. You hear a lot about the Moons because their name conjures shades of Edgar Allen Poe and Lunar Modules, but in fact, they're called the Moon Mountains mostly because of weird-looking tundra, or the lack thereof, basically an eroded pile of magic minerals where not much grows. However, the actual magic of the area comes not from the lunar color of the landscape but the geo-electromagnetic bends and folds that ebb and flow around this region of coast, which makes the Moon Mountains worthy of Poe after all, a spooky place. My Numinosity Scale Ratings showed the PHI to be out of control at certain moments, which I am now positive had something to do with the mysterious demise of my snow-machine.

Looking South

      How to access the Moon Mountains was Nick's gimmick, one he eventually cracked the following summer by packrafting to the Moon Mountains down the Sinuk River from the Teller Road bridge, and then walking the coastline back to Nome!     

       "Zer are no mountains zer vort climbink," (Anderl in The Eiger Sanction), but it seemed like easy pickings in the big snow year of 2018 to just blast into the Moons on snow-machine, scratch the Moon Mountain itch that everybody seems to get, ski around for a day, attain the high point, and fill out some NRE's (Numinosity Rating Estimate) to get an overall assessment of the PHI levels in the region.

Norton Sound coast between Nome and Woolley Lagoon. The Moon Mountains is the
gray patch towards the left. Looking at about thirty miles of coastline here.

Criteria for Sentience of Landscape

For a defined region of the Earth's surface, sentience may be supported by the presence of one or more of the following phenomena.

1. Geological discontinuity: a rift, upheaval, clash, or upwelling within the Earth's crust    

2. A rich human or animal history: artifacts, ancient crossroads of culture

3. Electromagnetic flux: mineral-caused, position or variation in the Earth's magnetosphere

4. A distinct landform: prominence, uniformity, analogue, definition of structure, nonentropy

PHI resonance is a by-product of these phenomena so is not included on the list of causes. PHI is also a system of measurement. PHI bears a relation to sentience as something like voltage does to electricity:  unit of measurement to elemental force.

Elevated PHI-resonance levels will usually be scaled when the phenomena mentioned in these criteria.

"Over the Mountains of the Moon, / Down the Valley of the Shadow...

       My own gimmick was the usual one, fabricated, as usual when there are is no real climbing to be had: the High-pointing Conceit. The plan was to conquer, nay, subdue the Moon Mountains by climbing to the highest elevation point. Nick agreed to this reductionist goal— but at least high-pointing provides a white man structure in a wilderness of choices. The Moon Mountains do not qualify as mountains, but as hills, and Pk. 1781 was not slated to be Piolet d'Or material.. We could easily have driven snow-machines to the top, but it is necessary to kill the engines in order to conduct geopsychic research, so we skied around on the excellent 2018 snow cover, and skied to the top of the Moons' high-point. Our PHIDs crackled with activity, but absent of the near-death experience associated with real, death-defying climbing, little of which exists in the central Moons, I was unable to achieve triangulation off the death attractor, and my Numinosity Scales went flat, despite Nick and I having a once-in-a-lifetime, beautiful day in a sacred, charged, and powerful place.

Ride, boldly ride," the Shade replied, / "If you seek for Eldorado!"

And what of the brand-new Expedition Ace? Well, I have a theory...

       The section of Norton Sound Coast where the Moon Mountains meet the sea, located between the mouth of the holy Sinuk River and Woolley Lagoon, is a confusing section of coast. At least for me—  when you live in Nome, you get used to thinking of the coast as a direct east-west line, but in fact, if you get about 15 miles down the beach west of Nome, the coast begins to imperceptibly curve to a northwest-southeast asymptote, but a Nomeite like me fails to notice, and still assumes they are heading due west. I mention this only because it relates to an understanding of what caused the CPU in my brand-new SkiDoo to suddenly malfunction. 

Picture a map of the Seward Peninsula coastline overlaid not with weather data, but energy data, specifically, electromagnetic energy, but calibrated down to the level of atomic event horizons, (we are hunting for the patterns that will prove synchronicity somewhere in the rubix cube of leptons, hadrons, and quarks) calibrated with a time exponent that I don't think has quite been discovered yet but will be any day. What do you see? The overlay resembles auroral activity, which is plasmic energy. Remember, it's out of phase with our normal definition of time since it's occurring at the event horizon level. Also, just as land and water structures exert a considerable influence over the weather patterns of the region, so the land and water exerts an influence over this out-of-phase energy map we are viewing. Back to the subtle curvature of this section of the Norton Sound coast:  it is this bending of the coast that makes it susceptible to tiny, almost infinitesimal rips in the fabric of the quantum foam that makes up our universe.

My snow-machine encountered one such geo-electromagnetic rip, as I was happily speeding along at excessive speeds heading home to Nome from the Moon Mountains that day. Muons, gluons, bosuns, gravitrons, God knows what other wave-particles, all started piling up somewhere in a very small dimension embedded within this dimension, a lot like a multiple-car pileup on the expressway at rush hour, causing a tiny variation in electromagnetic potential which was just barely enough to trip one of the micro-processors in the Central Processing Unit of the snow-machine existing in this physical universe, upsetting the programming in the CPU, some zeros getting changed to ones in the portion of its brain that handles automatic shutdowns, initiating weeks and weeks of frustrating malfunctions during which time my snow-machine was fated to leave me stranded multiple times, in several lonesome valleys, always promising full function at the beginning of the trip, and then growing confused and being unable to start once deep in the wilderness. 

Fortunately, after Nick and I returned double-riding to Cripple River on a subsequent day, and limped, dragged, and cajoled the thing back to Nome, never quite fathoming the nature of the malfunction in this modern, pushbutton-type machine, the good folks at SkiDoo bought my story. They replaced the Ace's brain that had been damaged by excessive PHI in the Moon Mountains with another brain, on warranty. 

Spoiledbysupercub's post about Moon Mountains in summer showing how they really look like the lunar surface 

The Siege of Peak Grand Union

Nick Treinen chilling at summit of Peak Grand Union (Pk. 4500+), March 31, 2019.

Scroll down for a reproduction of an article that appeared in Scree, the monthly publication of the Mountaineering Club of Alaska.              

  Never in Kigsblog history have so many bails been registered, nor resources squandered,for so nebulous a quarry as Peak Grand Union. Here are links that provide evidence of the drawn-out siege:

Zero For Seven on Peak Grand Union Pt. 1 

Zero For Seven on Peak Grand Union Pt. 2 

Zero For Nine on Peak Grand Union

Attempt Twelve on Grand Union

Nick, with skis stashed at col, heads for the long-awaited triumph

         The Kigs remained formless, an undifferentiated mass of bumps and ridges, until one summer when bean-counting, list-keeping, peakbaggers from Washington  came to the Seward Peninsula and showed the locals the way of the Marilyn. Now armed with a rudimentary knowledge of the laws of prominence, the Kigs could be devolved into a series of definable summits. Down the Vin Hoeman rabbit-hole I fell, doomed to take the easy walk-ups from the south instead of north walls and real routes.

Central Kigluait from North with Grand Union River drainages

          Peak 4500+, formerly a mere northwest shoulder of Mt. Osborn, emerged under the spotlight of prominence as the second highest summit in the range, a veritable “K2 of the Kigs,” except that it’s an easy walk-up from the south. It suddenly seemed desirable, and worthy of a grand name, “Peak Grand Union” because it’s the high point of the six-forked Grand Union River drainage to the north. The formula for climbing Grand Union would be: make many failed attempts over several years until a high snow year comes, snow-machine north 35 miles over Mosquito Pass, hang an east off the Cobblestone flats, and take advantage of the big snowpack to access the five-mile long “West Cwm of Osborn” from where Grand Union looked to be an easy, blue-square run from the the south.

Westernmost glacier in North America? Remnant? This is the Grand Union Glacier below Peak Grand Union in July of 2018.

Years of ridiculous shenanigans were eventually required for what should have been a simple bag. Twelve attempts spanned four years before Nick Treinan and I finally motored up the West Cwm of Osborn on April 2, 2018, and made the ascent of Grand Union. The reason for so many bails? Not difficulty, nor remoteness, nor weather— “GLUE of TOWN” was the reason. GLUE may be defined as a force which attracts a climber back toward town, tent, addiction, car, or relationship. GLUE costs an expedition time, energy, gear, and personnel by creating friction in every phase of its execution. Eventually a bail is precipitated, a bail founded not upon exigencies of the climb itself (weather, difficulty, fortitude,) but rather, to actions made before the climb ever started, the bumbling and dithering that took place under influence of GLUE.

Drew Maurer up the wrong cwm
on a Grand Union attempt

In Nome, partners phase in and out. Drew was a true GLUE Master, entangled in webs of Front Street chaos, his entropy and dissolution exceeding even mine, but he had an old snow-machine, and had skied the steeps on St. Lawrence Island. Drew was to form the first phase of Peak Grand Union expeditions. We were rumpled and disorganized. Nome retracted us time and again like the big GLUE POT it is. Expeditions never departed before 2 pm.  On our first attempt, we went up the wrong cwm of Osborn. On the second attempt, Drew became obsessed with penetration of the West Cwm proper by snow-machine, a feat he finally achieved through hideous effort in the bushes that I witnessed from the opposite wall of the valley, having been wise enough to leave my snow-machine below on the Cobblestone. We climbed the wrong mountain (Pt. 3800+) that day. A ground blizzard came on. We tried to leave, but the West Cwm had already closed around Drew’s machine like a phagocyte around a foreign particle. We abandoned the sorry thing in its sub-nivean pit and rode double all the way back home through raging sketch-weather on my trusty Bearcat. Third trip was a rescue mission wherein any Grand Union attempt was eclipsed by the Fitzcarraldian epic of digging Drew’s machine out of the Cwm. Fourth trip, we never made it out of Nome, languishing instead in the fleshpots of Nome, the mountain far away, with GLUE Index Levels at maximum.

David Panepinto in the West Cwm of Osborn

David formed the next phase of Grand Union attempts. A less entropic partner than Drew, it still wasn’t enough to overcome the friction of impedimenta. Our strategy was to camp on the Cobblestone and ski (David skiing on a splitboard) the five miles up the Cwm, obviating the need for snow-machine penetration. But a subtle interface of HOUSE GLUE and JOB GLUE retarded initial velocity on Friday night of our first attempt. On the second attempt, we stayed too long in the tent discussing Princess Bride which chain-reactioned a bail from near the summit later in the day, like Wiessner and Gombu high on K2. There were other bails. Never could the GLUE be cut. Peak Grand Union took on white whale status even though it had started out as a mere shoulder of Osborn.

Nick stops to scavenge

Known center of Kigs universe may lie down this drainage,
the West Fork of Grand Union

 

Finally, the Nick phase brought success on Grand Union. Nick had found a line in William Oquilluk’s People of the Kauwerak that seemed to indicate the known center of the Kigs universe was located on the flanks of Peak Grand Union at some kind of giant eagle feather, and so agreed to go on a snow-machine mountaineering trip in April, 2019. Something about Nick’s free spirit, unfettered by peak bagging epistemology and nomenclature, caused the GLUE to lift like clouds over Kigs, plus the huge winter snowpack that permitted snow-machine access to the West Cwm sans Drewlike epics. The last few hundred feet were a little too icy for skiing off the top. Nick tellied from near the top, and I lower down. On the summit, Nick asked me if I felt elation at our eventual success after so many attempts, but I had to explain that the whole Peak Grand Union thing was really just kind of a grim joke to ameliorate the giant carbon footprint I made over an insignificant bump on a ridge, though the peak does look nice from the north, and we did have a ton of fun, justification enough. Nick and I motored back to Nome, where the GLUE of TOWN drew us back in with its subtle but persistent gravity. 

Success came in 2018 because it was a high snow year. Unlike previous attempts, we were easily able
to access the West Cwm of Osborn by snow-machine, which made reaching Grand Union a snap.
The red arrow in this picture shows the high shoulder on the right that allowed us to creep into
the valley on machines. 

Looking along towards Osborn.  A lot of last great kigs-problems given away here. North Ridge of Osborn, plus look at that hourglass shaped ski run.. but it's an avalanche trap.

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.