Ring of Ayasayuk

Fourth Tier ice, November 2016

BLOG-LAG tremendous. The Kigsblog-year is in danger of lapping itself. It's almost time to return to Ayasayuk for the new ice climbing year. This is an update for the last two.

Quarry face, November 2016

       The idea was to blog the iterations of the quarry as it develops over the years, adding to the layers of information like successive tree rings each December when the rivulets freeze into ice, when all the ice climbers in town drive 15 miles out to the point of land with their ice tools brandished, intent on grappling the ice and frozen stone dust that glues the hanging rubble to the quarry face. Each new year brings a subtle deviation in the layout of the cliff. Or sometimes a not so subtle deviation— during the years of the Shishmareff seawall project, the entire cliff was blasted away into infinity several times, hence the iterations, but there is always a path of least resistance for water to find its way down, and so there is always some kind of thin, wandering ribbon of ice to climb, even a pillar or two, if the gods of the quarry have been kind to ice climbers that year. For the hardcore Valdez climber it would all be weak sauce, but this is roadside ice climbing in Nome, let us be thankful for any helping of that.

Quarry face, 2017

      With only minor variations in the last three or four years, the iteration has remained the same. This tree ring represents climbing adventures from the last two years, as I did not manage an Ayasayuk post last year. Each year, the game is to follow a Direct route up the entire cliff, bottom to top, incorporating as much ice as possible. Lamefully, I haven't successfully completed a Direct since three years ago with James.

Third Tier ice, 2016

    The First Tier presents only steep hiking, a chance to test the bite of your crampons in the frozen stone dust of a new day. The crux is crossing the road, the boundary of trespassing, trying not to be glimpsed by cars as you leave the road and launch directly up the quarry face— this is uncool, to climb here, and I will be cited for this blogpost. You soon come to the wide access road at the top of the First Tier. Solariums have been installed at the top from which to view the surrounding amphitheater. If you think about it, the cliff at Ayasayuk represents a 430 feet tall void left by the earthly removal of the bluff once known as Ayasayuq. But what does not remain remains a place of power to this day.

Third Tier, 2016

     More fields of hanging stone dust lead up the Second Tier. The motions involved with climbing the dust mimic those of true alpine climbing. Sometimes blobs of real water ice seep from the Second Tier, but not for the last two years, so you just kick your way up great buttresses of steep, hard dirt. The consequences of a wee slip from the dust slabs are not just a mimic of alpine climbing, however, but the real thing: possible enmanglement.

David on his first ice climb, 2017

       The Third Tier is the main business, the highest of the tiers, a pitch and a half of climbing up to the next access road. The weeps and seeps have followed variable patterns the last few years, but the usual Direct route has gone up a not-very-steep mud runnel with a ribbon of water ice at the back. The runnel pools out at the top and vanishes right into the stone dust. To complete the Third Tier the climber is forced out onto the hanging dirt fields, easy terrain, but palpably creepy, and studded with rip-raps of gneiss that look like they were arrested in motion mid-roll. Typically, I solo up to the frozen pool halfway up, where I file  for a petition of chicken-out, and downclimb. Three years ago, James and I made it up the Third Tier: we draped the rope across fins of frozen stone dust, pretending it was pro.

Random Access Flow, 2017

     They shaved away the Third Tier until the face of the quarry was about level with the the top of the bluff. However, a few more little rises remained in the bluff profile, unshaved, so a few more access roads went in, creating the Fourth Tier, a 50-foot cliff situated in a little network of roads at the  top of the quarry. This road network pools up with Fall rain in unpredictable ways to create a head-dispatching system for all the frozen flow below. With a minimum of treachery, tope ropes can be set up for practice on Grade 2-ish and 3-ish water ice, and there's often"childrens ice climbing area" with perfect soft landings in billows of drifted snow.

From the archives: 2003

     It's all coming down on you

    There's nothing you can do

   And it was me that triggered

    The death cascade.

 Cracking, shouts, thundering,

   Let your destiny ring!

 Ship is going down 

 Just jump the whole thing,

While I stand to the side

Watching you drown. 

  I'm sorry we never danced around

   Or stopped at the Safety Saloon

 The lights of town

  Were always dragging us in.

   Now the climb is gravity's child,

Groaning half ton blocks

Right down on your timeline.

  Now the climb is coming down

    Right into our face

   If ever we get back to town,

    Never go back with you to this place.

Quarry face, 2003. This iteration of the cliff was blasted
away in subsequent years.

      Peemarking, in a 2-year tree ring such as this post, presents a technical challenge due to my complete lack of recall. I do remember soloing around. I whacked tool into every chunk of ice that was present. I do remember air under the crampon points, and punch-card holes spent on objective danger. I remember chickening-out of every climb I started up. I remember David chunking his way up some wet flow on his first day ice climbing. But I do not remember enough details to lift a leg and make a confident peemark (a claim of real climbing using locations, grades, nomenclature). Any peemarking claims I might try to make would only spray, dispersing message. Too bad there so few ice climbers come to Nome. David went south. Lack of climbing partner creates such a weight of nothing. No partner creates psychological rope drag holding you back from a partner that's not there. Chicken-out is reduced 75% when there is another climber present. If only there were another climber besides the great lone ME hanging in the sky, blocking the sun.

Map showing Norton Sound Coast inupiaq place names, found in a random drawer at Nome Elementary School

      
       Earth energy streams eastward off the Pacific, into the bottleneck of the Norton Sound, and gets channeled up against the Norton Sound coast between Cape Rodney and here, bathing the bluff in PHI waves. The other key ingredient for sentience is present: a rich archaeological history of the area. There may no longer be a kasGi every seven miles, no more L.A. coastline glittering with lights, nor even a big encampment of families a fathom down where the water is now off the beach at Nook, but stone memory is slow to dissipate. Ishigait, little people, still roam the place, manifestations of morphogenetic eddies, like dust devils of PHI, potential nodes of mental process. Does an ishigak climb ice?
      Quyana, BSNC...  

Oregon Creek Hill

       Broke GLUE-LOCK on early February weekend, Mr. McRae and Mr. Lastine, astride fearsome, belching, two-stroke torpedoes aimed west away from Nome, to climb and ski the mysterious hill at Oregon Creek, "Pk. 1900+", a foothill of some prominence left out of my foothill report from the Winter of 2015.

Looking up Oregon Creek. Pk. 2900+ in background. Super Smooth Andy G. in foreground.

     Mr. Wind had destroyed our snow even before we got to it. As we dismounted machines and disengaged boards at Oregon Creek, Pk. 1900+ rose bare before us, slopes of snice corrugated by schist chips, once-fluffy snow like we had skied the day before on Newton ABSOLUTELY POUNDED by a continuous blow-holes into a veneer unskiable, at least by an old telly dad with my pitiful skills.

Parts of the old road are still visible and helped us get through the willows to the gulches on snow-machine. Saw no cabins, but lots of remaining ditches on the hillsides

       The greatest excitement occurred during the snow-machine phase, of course, the most dangerous segment of any trip, when, unbeknownst to my own awareness, I executed the most prodigious jump ever accomplished by myself on my snow-machine (the redoubtable Bearcat, Super Smooth Andy G.) when, purely by accident, I launched off a bare tussock at high speed and sailed 16 feet over a creek. Leonard, following my tracks, wasn't as lucky... his front end went into the creek and he over the handlebars, his face smashed in the process.
        "How is my face?" he inquired.
          Oh no, the wedding is off. It was like that Seinfeld episode where George drops the guy at the Shawangunks. How is his face?
          "Not gushing."
           He examined himself in my phone. Nothing to do but get back on the hogs and GUN IT onwards toward our objective.

    Did I mention it was cold? Allapa, allapa, yes, cold as a van of I.C.E. Agents throwing up dust in a carrot field. Since I had never climbed Pk. 1900+ (though it has undoubtedly been well walked-over by members of the Oregon Creek mining community who lived at the foot of it some time last century), I left my skis strapped to Super Smooth Andy, and set out to bag the summit. Leonard couldn't go up because he had neglected to bring his Micro-Spikes, and the snow, which could no longer be deemed snow but simply ICE, seemed really a bit treacherous, take-off-like-a-rocket-on-easy-ground kind of thing.

Shadow selfie on summit.

       "Could this be the mist bootyful somewhat we half ever seen." Just short of a Donald, Pk. 1900+ evinces a pleasing architecture, the ridges like runnels, the kigs-view as encompassing as any hill's, jagged as it is into the big flows of weather that stream across the peninsula between the Norton Sound and Imruq Basin, the very flows that had hardened our ski into an ice climb. 

       With the attainment of this high point, all of my dreams and ambitions had been realized. Buddha-hood, achieved. Ego/Id structure, momentarily stabilized. My self-identity was no longer in doubt for I had become nothing. There lay the Kigs in the near distance to the north. The GLUE TENDRILS simply vaporized into wisps that dissipated in the clear, cold air. 

One looming question remains. Is Pk. 1900+ the intriguing summit that often pokes up behind the Snake River hills as I am driving home on the Beltz Highway from Nome? The one that sometimes gets mistaken for Osborn because of the way it pokes up? In other posts,, I have attributed this peak as Pk. 1460, the one out by Cabin Rock. So I drew this little map to see if there existed a line of sight poking through the Snake River hills. Thinking now that peak must by 1900+. What an utterly exciting discovery to make in a mundane life of driving back and forth from Nome to home.  

Bouldering 2015

       For any climbing narcissist seeking to assuage their desperate need for ego recognition, Facebook provides a far more efficient spray-device than a blog. So prodigious a spray-device is Facebook, I routinely chicken out of posting on it. Of course, I could paint a noble picture of my self and claim this is because Facebook violates the ancient taboo against bragging, or that my ego structure is so Buddha I have no need of simulating my territory to the map of Facebook, or that action is all that counts in this life, but that would be a lie, only to mask the fact that I am another person ruled by fear, prevented from posting by my own introversion and social anxiety disorder. 
      So this blog it must be, a smaller, more obscure nozzle to release the great tensions of the ego. "Pee-marking" is what I call it on Kigsblog-- gaining attention online for a move of climbing you have executed. Giving in to the irresistible urge to claim credit for an act of climbing, a first ascent, or even a second first ascent. To matter, for an instant, in the eyes of others, before geological time subducts the climb you have proudly done into an eroded, toxic miasma of the future.

Great mud mounding action this year, climbing on frozen tailings

     Always bouldering... three days a week, four, all year round. Wandering in a dream state, executing little yoga moves on loose rock. Kind of an odd behavior really... A child lost in his imagination. humming softly to himself as he imagines a great abyss under his feet. I am Walter Bonatti stemming a dihedral on the Jorasses, with the soft ground one foot away. In the summer, rock shoes, in the winter, crampons and ice tools. It takes a fervent imagination, but if you can sustain the illusion, the rewards include a reduction of stress, freedom from lower back pain, and abundant adrenalin, as suddenly the child snaps into reality to find that the ground has become much further away in reality.

James on the Orange Wall (5.10a) at Engstroms Mountain

       I hereby officially claim during the 2015 bouldering season that I spread urine on every square inch of rock within a twenty mile radius of Nome. That is, executed or repeated any and all climbing moves which might within an error range of three YDS grade levels be deemed a V0 or easier, (that leaves an awful lot of harder problems left for YOU to claim) at Anvil Mt., the Windmill Boulders, the Sunset Boulders, the Penny Boulders, the awesome Penny Crags, King Mt., and Engstroms Mt., in multiple visits, in continuous circuits, by car, snow-machine, or ski.  MARK!  MARK!  Can't anyone smell this? Look what I can do!

James on his "first trad lead," the fun Chimney Route (5.5) at Engstroms

        No. The weather and the tides will wash away the scent of your climbing. New climbers will come and lay their pee-marks over yours. You have bolted no sport lines, you have published no guidebooks, you have left the crags the way they were. Others will post on multiple websites and lay down a golden sheen over these pitiful squirts. There will be no recognition, no ego-satisfaction. Narcissus is forced to get up from the side of the pond and just go climbing, despite the will of the Gods that he be cursed for an eternity to dote on his own profile.

The big bouldering news of 2015 was the long-awaited send of the Courtyard Arete (5.10b) at Windmill Rocks, a high-ball with a treacherous landing. Many was the time I fondled the creaky flakes of the last move, but backed off, as in the photo above. This year, the Courtyard was filled with an extra padding of drifted snow, ten feet thick. Sure felt good to crank off that last move!

      Now there is only the next move: a patch of toe rubber oozing off the hold as the areoles of lichen crumble underfoot. A centimeter of chrome moly steel cammed into an icy crack in the schist. The blue of the ocean hoving into view as you struggle to get your foot up so you won't have to look like a noob and use your knee at the top of the crag. And now you're about to break your leg and crack your skull and lie paralyzed dying in the cold as you realize you did not bring a cell phone. It was all meaningless and pointless. The only reason to climb was to climb. There was nothing to say about it all along.

Return to the Thompson Creek Headwall

(above) Schistocity, Tumit Creek, October 2012.  A major new route extending upward for ones of tens of feet. Climbing practice on such a staircase of teetering turds is analagous to the hydro-fracking of the climbing world, dredging up routes from fractured shales that had always been overlooked because far far better climbing lay somewhere else on crags more steep and sound, and then injecting the route with the fracking fluid of imagination to render the climbing a viable practice. 

   Bivvied Salmon Lake late Fall three Saturdays ago in vaporous moonlight, peace at last, the GLUE of TOWN defeated again, breeze through space emptying the mind between the ears.     
   Rose early Sunday morning, mostly cloudy, the points of the Kigs embedded in 3000 ft. ceiling.  Drove (dog lashed to bed of truck) back towards town a bit past Grand Central bridge up the hill to good old Nugget Pass, parked car.  Started uphill west hiking in plastic boots on twenty centimeters of firm snow up a ridge paralleling Grand Central towards a little summit, Pt. 2339, that sits on the rim of steep, north-facing slopes at the head of Thompson Creek.

(above) Undisclosed location showing sacred Amato/Miller et al Geologic Map, a virtual treasure scroll leading to littered troves of worthless choss scattered like hardened dung.  The pink patches of "orthogneiss" provide the choicest choss.   Notice the resemblance of the Kigluaik Range to the giant amoeba in "The Immunity Syndrome." (below)

   Fog and wind inside head same as fog and wind outside head.  

(above) Looking north from Pt. 2470, Tumit Creek.  Osborn dominates this frame but has been erased by the fogginess of memory.

   The idea was to hike to a point above this purported "Headwall," drop a couple hundred feet down its north face, and then have fun climbing back up on the very same gneiss which serves on the sacred Amato/Miller map as a geological indicator for all the gneiss in the Kigluaik Range:  the pre-Cambrian Thompson Creek OrthoGneiss.
     Halfway through the hike, the weather began closing down.  Time for the old solo mountaineer to wait it out in the lee of a crag and lose all sense of time and space in swirling white-out.  

  
(above)  Thompson Creek rocks.  Find the black and white dog.  Lucy once again passed the "be cool, dog" test and wisely elected to STAY on the rim while I began to crampon down the insecure slope.

         But what is this, emerging through mist?  Holy schist!  It's the crags of Tumit Creek  (which drains off north into Grand Central, intersecting the old Grey Goose Pipeline on the way down, source of that fine California redwood that makes such a fine, hot fire on a cold Autumn night).  

    Tools came out of pack and were soon scraping hideously at loose choss frozen into place already by September frosts occuring at the 2,000 ft. level.  Hooks thunked neatly into frozen mud; front points balanced on sills.  Dendritic snowflakes blew like microscopic tumbleweeds across the holds.  The schist was not that bad.

(above)Thompson Creek Headwall last April.  (mr.congerphoto) The grandiosity of the name belies the relative paltriness of this turdcake.

      How much time went by bouldering in fog?  Then, an indeterminate brightening in the mist above gave the godlike illusion of fortune changing.  Lucy the little mountain dog and I packed up again, de-cramponed,  and continued on up the hill, somewhat hang-dog in posture due to Seasonal Affective Disorder having already set in with this season of dying light, but psyched to have licked up any slight crumble of climbing like we had Tumit Creek.

(above) Rimestone, Pt. 2339

     But when we arrived on top, the weather began to blow like holy hell.  Here was the 3000 ft. ceiling.  At the same moment, the ground suddenly dropped away.  Here was the north-facing cirque of Thompson Creek sloping massively down, looking like real mountains as promised.  On went crampons. Started down slope with a casual, facing-out kind of attitude, soon squelched by an Eiger-like feeling developing around me as I slowly progressed lower.
    Was surprised to see a yellow warning light showing on the dash board of the Mind;  in the summer this slope would be a Class 3 treadmill of unsavory, but basically casual, scree escalators.  However, here in October, with only 20 centimeters of snow to glue things down, the fact was inescapable that the slightest mistake would initiate a high-speed, skidding, rock-studded glissade of potentially bone-splintering proportions.  

(above) Looking east. Squalls play follow the leader up the valley.  Start to climb, starts to rime, turn around, sun shines down.

 Technical Chicken Out:  you could have kept climbing, but prudence paid the better part of valor, and you decide to fold your hand. 
    Sapped of strength by the battery cables that had attached my brain to the brains of others in the preceding weeks, and with the sharp snow-flakes slicing my corneas like knives, there was nothing black and white,no green lights, only gray, inside and out. 

(above)  Cliffs at the head of Thompson Creek.  TylerRhodesPhoto from last May, 2012.  The high point where the sun is shining is actually Pk. 3207, mismarked on the map as Tigaraha.

    "Get down therefore," spake Menlove Edwards.  Or, in this case, "Get back up therefore," up to the rim, where Lucy peered out over the edge. Instantly, the inexorable force which is named the GLUE of TOWN clicked on: the dog and I were propelled rapidly down the slope, towards the car, emails, phones, mood swings, elections, back to the madness of the whole human race.

(above) The hike to Pt. 2993, top of Thompson Creek (Class II). Perhaps the most direct access to the pre-Cambrian Thompson Creek Orthogneiss.

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?