Kayuqtuq, third attempt

          Ecstatic Spring weekend clusterJoy in the eastern Kigs, basing out of Earp's Rock of Ages home for not yet retired educators at Salmon Lake, the weather almost flawless, 10 degrees, negligible wind, traveling conditions a plane of perfect vanilla cream-- but due to partner's rucksack succumbing to Fell-off-the-machine syndrome, partnerless again in the high cirques for attempt number 3 on the mountain that I was this time calling (for my own personal silly referential reasons) KAYUQ, (Pk. 4000+) short for KAYUQTUQ, inupiaq for "Fox", which seems fitting for this peak which is located and visible from road at the head of Fox Creek drainage,  There are so many Fox Mountains already, who wants another?  If anyone has any information as to old Qaweraq names for this hill, let it percolate through, but I suspect no bubbles of name have made it to the surface of the present as the peak is rather secluded and unassuming, though it may possibly be the second highest summit in the Kigs, and unclimbed to boot.  (The U.S.G.S. maps I have seen smell a bit ambiguous as to its height.  They smudge the lines the way R.E.M. smudges lyrics.)
        If I have made this mountain sound like a brooding, inaccessible K2, it is not.  First of all, this is the Kigs we are talking about, a range for which the paradox is insoluble whether they are mountains or mere hills.  Second, KAYUQTUQ appears to be a walk up from the South from the Fox Creek drainage.  Each of my three attempts from the more precipitous north side have been beaten back by the same factors:  late starts, general disorganization, laziness, and chickenheartedness, which are not factors that would speak heavily for no one's technical difficulty other than my own.  But I will be back, and each attempt on old KAYUQTUQ, the tenth C-Tog technically, builds fond memories and deepens my love for the mountain.

Three views of Pk. 4000+ from last weekend's trip, March 05, 2011:

 (above)  From up in the east cirque of KAYUQTUQ (Pk. 4000+), the very headwaters of Crater Creek.  There's got to be a still-living nub of glacier in this cirque.  The route I followed was intended to be the path of least resistance:  up the broad couloir towards the left, then right along the easy back side of the south ridge.  The bowl at the top of the couloir was loaded, however.  There was evidence everywhere of recent and cataclysmic avalanching from the mighty storm two weeks previous, the tremendous south wind that had drifted everything around Nome in a weird and anomalous way and shut down town for three days.
      My paranoia spiked up like a dust devil off the desert.  The snowpack underfoot seemed to faintly echo with the sound of cellos.  Up above on the ridge, the cornices could be seen blowing gauzy banners of transluscent, rainbowed spindrift;  this gully was actively loading!  A massive chicken-out ensued, and I turned around.

 (above)  From the southeast near Salmon Lake.

 

 (above)  From the south, looking up Fox Creek.  Some dirtbag must have hiked up this mountain sometime.  You, reader, give a call, sharpen up your crampons, let's go this weekend....

 (above) Janet Balice and friends in Crater Creek.  A dog team in Crater Creek! Completely and absolutely something I have not seen in ten or more trips through here.   The irredoubtable DIBELS is in lead-cat position.  This is DIBELS second appearance in this blog in Crater Creek.  This team can cover some ground, let me tell you.  They started out from Nome late on Friday night, slept cold in Earp's bombed-out, blown-out cabin at Salmon Lake, penetrated into Crater Creek on Saturday, and mushed back to Nome via Eldorado Creek on Sunday.  

And now, another departure from the pure mineral indifference of mountain pictures... More dogs and humans superimposed on the snow, ice, and tundra:  friends!

(above)  Salmon Lake, looking south, Inuruq in background. Adhesion of TOWN GLUE is proportional for each individual in a party, meaning that, for a group to get out of town is no more or no less difficult than for one individual to get out of town.  The GLUE was fierce as usual, tragedy and psychological complexity lurking behind every move.  Ryan, Nikki, Carl, and me, already exhausted from the very trenches of public school education, headed out on the highway sometime near midnight.  Somewhere in the night we passed Janet and Dibels, detained as well by the GLUE, evidently. We'll get to the comfy cabin and pass out, was the thought that kept each person driving all night, bumping over sastrugi for numb hours in pitch darkness. 

        But there was to be NO COMFY CABIN.  Alai!  The monstrous South Wind had blown out a window. The familiar contours of the cabin's interior were coated over with snow.  The newly-installed drip stove had ripped apart in an avalanche.  Condition:  ICE STATION ZEBRA.  Instead of gratefully flopping onto snoring cots, we were bailing ship for hours and hours, ferrying little loads of snow out the door with our brightly-colored shovels until the middle of the morning.  Janet arrived expecting steaming mugs and warmth, and instead found people scurrying about grimly locked in struggle.  Through dint of Ryan's huge exertions the following day, the cabin was resurrected.  I could point to the epic of the cabin as the reason I didn't get up the mountain, But I know, to quote Jimmy Buffet, to avoid delusion,  it's my own damn fault.  

 (above)  Looking south from summit of Inuruq last Sunday.  Icy.  Loaded also, but windward-slope conditions still icy and good.

You better bring your buckets

We got some dreams to drain

I'll be at the bottom

I've been right here waiting so long

Just waiting so long

Writers Night

(left) An earlier Iteration of the Ayasayuk ice, early '00s.  The Grade III+ pillar where Mikey and I epic-ed is at center of photo.

Nome Arts Council held a WRITERS NIGHT last month in January, local authors getting together to read their original works inside the awesome vault of Old St. Joe's Church.  Mine came out steaming like a fresh pile of ANAQ, it being the product of a weird eight hour blitz of most-likely abominable writing that occurred just prior to the reading. It was fun writing about Mikey, she is a type of badass of the positive attitude.  

CAPE NOME

Mikey's going to come off.  Any moment she's going to explode off the ice and be dangling in space in the wind and darkness.  My job will be to hold her on a top rope and try not to go skating off the edge of the frozen waterfall when she goes.  The rope will pendulum and saw through banks of overhanging icicles and shattered granitic gneiss.  

It was hard, the move.  I had done it on lead twenty minutes ago and peed my pants a little.  But the really exhausting thing had been dealing with the pitons just below the crux.  To bang the pitons in I had to cram my body into this cramped little alcove of stalactites and thrutch around trying to get a good hammer swing;  the footing was bad, everything was horrible, the sun was going down, I was there for an hour making grunting noises and dropping things while Mikey sat below patiently holding the rope, her warmth sublimating away despite wearing both our big puffy coats.   But the pins had been pump well spent;  they had given me the security to commit to the Grade IV ice pillar above.

Then it was Mikey's turn to follow.  As had I, she waged a titanic battle trying to get the pins out...  Tap... Tap... Tap... Even though I couldn't see her from up top the pillar, I could picture her down there thirty feet below, all puffy coats, helmets, headlamp and bobbles, kicking, kicking, trying to get footing, all the while trying to pound out vise-gripped strips of metal using new modern ice-climbing tools that are so light they are named after sub-atomic minutae.  Tap...  Tap... Tap... went the Quarks for twenty-five minutes.  Like any faithful dirtbag climber, Mikey was not going to leave without recovering the gear, she had been schooled to the point of paranoia, recover the gear, and now she couldn't hear me yelling to forget the gear, I'm freezing, just try to get up, even though it's too hard.

     Finally, the tapping stopped.  The rope moved a little. I knew Mikey was abandoning the pins and going for the crux.  And it was then I knew she was going for a whipper. 

(left and below)  Mikey on top-rope, Left Flow-First Iteration, sometime in the early '00s.  The left flow was always quite a bit easier than the center one.  I soloed it on several occasions, which tells you just how easy it must have been, but no one else will ever know for sure because it was blasted into chunks and trucked away to exist as part of the new jetty at the Port of Nome, as well as other seawall structures within road's reach on the Seward Peninsula.

She isn't going to back off, you see.  The climbing spirits flow through Mikey and have taken control.  Her big mushing mittens are set in the wrist loops of her Quarks.  With characteristic determination, she is gripping down on cold icy shafts and setting the tools in the vertical ice above.  I know she is totally pumped from fussing with the pins in the alcove, but somehow I also know that nothing is going to stop Mikey from pitching herself at that crux like Don Quixote at the windmills.  The quarks are rebounding off the ice. Prepare for impact.

I pat my anchor—  a network of three willow branches knitted together with slings to equalize the forces.  It should hold.  But suddenly my anchor seems absurd.  It's the "Help me Mr. Wizard moment."  That vertiginuous feeling when your awareness scopes out to a point in space where you can view yourself against the wall, the veils of denial disintegrate, you realize you have done a silly childish thing and imperiled lives unnecessarily.  What's Charlie going to think?  What of my own spouse, Kristine?   The light is gone.  Mikey is emitting audible epithets over the breeze, terrible thrashings, ominous cussings, if her students could hear her now they would not recognize her.  The rope moves up an inch or two.  I'm sitting in a pool of slush trying to stamp out footholds.

The current of fear and sympathetic amygdala response running up and down the rope intensifies.   An inhuman sound begins to rise over the wind, a moaning wail, the sound of an animal suffering horribly...  catecholamines and fear receptors are triggering and firing, alarm is running up the rope like a current, MIkey has the screaming-barfies sensation in her hands, the wrist loops have cut off her circulation, her legs are starting to sewing-machine.  Here it comes.  With one hand off the rope, I fumble frantically with an ice screw.  Maybe I can push it into something and lash more of myself to the cliff, but I drop the screw, my mitten is out on the runway preparing for take-off but I can't reach it.  The sun is reduced to burning embers over the Bering Sea.

A scream.  A perfect, Hollywood, girl scream, several seconds duration, with receding Doppler effect.  Mikey is off.  Sudden pressure.  Rope stretch and rope twang.   

And now I have been jerked right off my stance and pulled forward like a diving shortstop.   I'm gliding smoothly across the frozen pool at the top of the waterfall.  Somewhere I hear the crashing sound of ice, and a muffled squawk.  I'm heading for the lip.  Maybe I can grab those two gravestone-shaped chunks of gneiss there to stop from going over the edge.  I don't feel too bad about my own injury or death, but I feel really really terrible about Mikey's...  

Tough plants, those willows.  No first person narrative from crumpled bodies.  There's no way to dramatize what amounts in the end to a routine top-rope fall, but then again, this story was not about the fall.   I came to a stop with my head looking down over the edge, the rope locked off twangy tight in the belay device.  Now that I could see her, turns out Mikey really was dangling in space, like Kurz,  Arachne, Jonathan Hemlock, her headlamp revealing tiny flakes of snow drifting down.   We could actually hear each other now...

"I think I'm starting to get the hang of it!" yells Mikey.

__________________________________________________________________

(above)  Mikey emerging from Osborn's Northeast Cirque (home to the largest little living glacier in the Kigluaik) and starting up the East Ridge. First we slogged up the broad couloir at the left end of Osborn's huge marble north face.  Near the top, we took a side trip up a three-pitch, M4 variation, the top of which you can see behind Mikey.

MT. OSBORN

Have I sucked Mikey in over her hat again?  Nobody else breaks into a grin when you ask them if they want to go suffer in the Kigluaik Range just to climb a mountain.  What does Charlie think?  I think Charlie is worried about his snow machine.  

Mikey hates the snow machine.  I hate the snow machine.  But the snow machine is necessary to get to the high Kigs.  We will have to suffer the snow machine, but we are both slightly in fear of the things, like dudes at a horse ranch.  The proposal is to motor in to the north fork of Grand Central valley to the fabled north wall of Mt. Osborne and make an alpine ascent of the northeast ridge, then start the dreaded machines and motor back to Nome, all in one day.

In the morning I can't find my hat, which turns out to be on my head.  The glue of town binding me to my life is so thick that I have to hack at it with the machete, damaging women and children on the way out the door, my awful Hog already roaring and fuming in the driveway.  Mikey has been ready to go for hours.  We arrive at Osborn by two in the afternoon.  A yawning, brooding gloom comes over the sun as our machines enter the shadow of the north face of Osborn, a dark, enormous, marble amphitheatre located at the very swirl point of the cusp between weather basins, the mighty Imruk Basin to the north, the wise and omnipotent Pacific Ocean to the south.   Osborn's wall is 2,500 ft. and draped with ice.  Mikey and I  take up the long axes and head up a low angle snow gully at the wall's left extremity.  The snow is deep, and we have to plod using the insectile "upward posthole" trick.

(above)  Has this couloir been skied?  North Cirque Osborn, '06 or so. Once again, the naming problem: North Couloir? 

(below)  Mikey in the marble halls.

Hours pass.  Mikey and I are having an utter blast.  We are in the mountains, the sacred meta-sedimentary chunk of Osborn itself, and walls are all around.  We are feeling so good we decide to bust out the rope and make a three-pitch variation up a rock band, mixed climbing up to M3.  I place cams and Mikey takes them out.  Our crampons bite ice and our tools hook limestone.  We top out on the crest of the northeast ridge.  It's not steep, but it's bullet hard, so we leave the rope on.  All Alaska is at our feet now, you can make out Distin and White Alice thirty-five miles south.   The summit of Osborn, a certain little rimed-up hump on the summit ridge above us, begins to look tantalizingly close.  The snow has gone peach, but neither of us notices.

(left)  Mikey at the belay on our mixed variation to the North Couloir.  There was some real climbing, though the real climbing was still just practice for the real thing. 

Again, the sudden moment of awareness, the snapping out of the aerobic trance.  What the hell are we doing? I suddenly think.  The sun is going down.  The middle-of-nowhere quotient is fantastically high.  And here's Mikey and me like the dazed children we already were questing upward for the top of the mountain.  Epic.  Why was it hidden to our perception until the last minute, why didn't I see the epic coming?  We were having fun, I guess.

  As often happens at sunset, the breeze has changed direction.  We stop for a conference.

"Down?"

"That's what I was thinking."

"You got any water?"

"Almost nothing.  Whaddya you got?"

"Nothing."

(above)  Mikey near our high point on the East Ridge of Osborn, right about the time we snapped out of our climbing trance and realized we had continued too long.  I returned the following year and soloed the ridge;  it's the kind of thing where nothing is the least bit hard, but you wouldn't want to slip or you'd go for a high-speed pinball.

We have to make five rappels. Mikey is bonking.  She is stumbling like a zomby, but it's OK because we're off the part of the mountain where a fall was going to result in a rapid sliding fall of up to 800 feet.   In the gully, I start bonking too.  It's a dehydration bonk, a severe one.  We're both zombies, just the worst kind, speechless, listless, joyless, hollow shells.  We have to rest for twenty minutes simply to gather enough energy to walk for five.  Hallucinations set in, flashes and movements in the corner of the vision.  It's the middle of the night now, and I have Mikey's headlamp, which doesn't seem fair, so I turn to give it back to her, but she is far, far up the mountain still—  I have left her behind.  Not necessarily for dead, but it makes me wonder.  And now I am wracked with guilt, because I'm not going to wait for her.  Because there is only thing in the world.  There is only the thermos full of liquid H2O waiting for me at the machines. 

We will arrive back in town at six-thirty in the morning, just as the concern calls are beginning.  In the time it takes to get off the mountain and drive the machines forty-five miles back home in the icy cold, we will live several lifetimes, lifetimes full of suffering, nauseau, and pain.  But now Mikey has arrived at the machines at last.  And now we are all packed up, and the dreaded moment has arrived:  it's time to pull the cord on the machine. 

Mt. Distin, January 2011

 

(above) Mt. Distin.  The quintessential foothill of the Kigs taken from Grub Gulch."Distin Bluff" (Pt. 1129) is the little knob visible in the distance at the left edge of photo.  Silver Creek is the little drainage coming in under the Bluff from the left.  The boat in the foreground is like Hemingway's leopard;  no one has explained what it was seeking at this altitude.

ICE REPORT;  By New Year's, the Thanksgiving ice had dissipated into a thin film.  Gone was the nouveau-art skirts of cellophane, only a single layer of seran wrap remained, not so much fun for climbing.  But then, in early January, a refresh:  there came a night of freezing rain.  The snow draped on the hillsides had become saturated, then flash frozen.  The white-covered world was once again become an ice climb.

      The glue of town was viscous, VISCOUS!  But we made it out...  

 

(above) The Bluff, (Pt. 1129) Ryan, at the base of the bluff, between Silver Creek and Steep Creek, on the shores of Goldbottom.  I wonder what the miners called this formation?  We're about an hour's ride from town.  Minutes earlier, coming down the icy slope above his left shoulder in the photograph, Ryan's machine briefly qualified as an uncontrolled projectile.   On went my crampons upon leaving the machines, and my footing was happy for them.  Ryan motored back to town to work one of his many jobs.

(above)  Looking down Silver Creek.  Believe it or not, that right-hand wall in the photo sports a tiny scampering little 60 ft. nothing dribble-climb of water ice.  I was so jonesing for ice, I pounced on the scrap, like a Brit licking candy wrappers from the trash bags. 

(above)  Bluff, from high in Silver Creek.  In the distance, Bear Mountain, over by Banner Creek, along with the ubiquitous lentiforms overhead in flying-saucer mode.  I completed the trifecta of Silver Creek/Distin summit/Bluff by squeezing in a route on the Bluff at the end of the day, in darkness, to complete a damn-near perfect day in the mountains. 

(above)  Metamorphic clifflets at the very head of Silver Creek.  Some fine mixed bouldering times up here, a new little place...  It was right about here I realized I had stumbled upon a sacred day, a day to end all days, a day where you could have climbed anything in the Kigs had you had the good sense to get there in time...  RAW power of Earth thickly eddying at the ground interface, the tricky moon literally emerging from out of the summit of Mt. Distin like an emerging egg--  the climbing is everywhere, everywhere is climbing, mostly daggers, piolet panne and poignard, and now the sublime crampon to the summit, with the supreme panorama of the Kigluaitch all bathed in sunset and mauve, for which my camera stopped functioning.

(above) approaching Distin summit, January 16, 2011.  That's not really snow in the picture, it's pretty much a sheet of ice.  Fifth time to the summit, I think, in addition to many more trips and peeing expeditions to this area.

(above)  This silly map shows S:  Snow machine, B: Bluff, and C: Cliffs at Silver Creek.  As you can see, Distin is just a hill, but by making things very difficult for yourself by taking the hard way at every turn, and bouldering hard on every rock, and contorting and flexing and hooking as high off the ground as you dare at every opportunity, you can actually pretend like you are doing the real thing.

Thanksgiving Ice 2010

  A big freezing rain storm came, Thanksgiving 2010.  Like Christo coating plastic wrap over everything, the QAWERAQ Peninsula was coated with several centimeters of clear, water ice, trowelled smooth by the usual horrendous wind combined with freezing cusps.   Like a town emerging up through the surface of a skating rink, the two-dimensional plane of ice conforming skin-tightly to the three-dimensional surfaces...   Schools shut down in Fairbanks, Anchorage, Seattle...  No snow day here in Nome— at recess the kids launched huge standing glissades across the Zambonied playground.  Routine hikes on the hillsides had morphed into Grade I alpine climbs.  And the rocks!... 

.

(above)  King Mt. rocks, Sunday after Thanksgiving. The shellac was back!  Holds frontpoints surprisingly well.  Man, this is some tasty climbing, what better way to spend a Sunday than to cling to odd facets and angles of these metamorphics, basted with translucent climbing sauce and topped with snow whipped into a crusty froth.  Little cracks and pockets stuffed with an extra centimeter or two of ice are especially crunchy.  Now it's time to hang all your weight from one arm!

(right)  Weak November light on King Mt.  For every route I have topped, I have chickened out on four others.  Frontpoints routinely explode from the verglas with great scrapings of metal.  Four millimeters of the icy film bonded to the rock seems to be enough to support a front point or hooked tool, but the charm of climbing this film, stretched as it is beautifully over a bare face, quickly runs out when you are any distance above the landing, with tib/fib snapping devices strapped to your legs.  As usual, the only tool placement you can really trust is a good solid thwack into a turf patch.

Hook picks or prosthetics.  Torque the crack or broken back.  Concentrate or frontpoint skate.  Climb ice or Spot Device.  

(above)  Mud mounding action from early Spring 2010.     The "mud mounds" are tailings piles left over from gold mining, dirt piles that freeze at certain humidities into the consistency of ice.  They are worked over by gold miners with heavy machinery in the summertime, (all the more in 2010 due to the rising price of gold) become saturated by Fall rains, and freeze into icy dunes suitable for a blunt, barbaric form of ice climbing... and probably a toxic one as well.   

(above) Tailings. Once again, this image is from a previous season, Spring of '09, and it is relevant to note that the dirt in this picture has been worked and reworked since then, so that the mounds in the picture are somewhat different than this year's mounds (of which I have no picture;  the camera has been phasing out lately.) 

(below)  Chipped tooth in the Mounds.  

    It is perfectly possible to get one's "climbing ya-ya's" on tailings in winter.  Out back of where I used to live in the legendary encampments on Happy Road in Fairbanks, an old mining pit was carved into the hillside of Ester Dome, and many a hippy friend was lured from the party up to the forested hillside to try mud climbing in a moonlit amphitheatre.  When I got to Nome, it was like one vast mining pit, and I remembered the fun we had had on the tailings at Happy Road.  Mud mounding is seldom without highballing: one never knows whether the impending fall will bring a harmless roll down steep mud, or a bone-splintering snaggy snapfest.  The fine tailings are better;  sparks fly from your tools when the tailings are coarse.  

     The mud mound's beauty lies in their transience.  Like ice, the climbs are temporary, soon to be demolished by machines and resurrected in the form of new moufile:///Users/imcrae/Desktop/IMG_0668.JPGnds.  I've been motoring out to the mounds frequently this month, in the thin crack of daylight between the end of work and sunset.  Glazed and gleaming ever so faintly with the Thanksgiving shellac, the mounds lead inward to darkness like a corner of the desert. More on Mud Mounds   

(above)  The ice climbs at Ayasayuk in the early 2000s.  Climbed with various partners over the years, and probably been climbed by others (Paul LaBolle among them)...   These climbs have been blown to bits and are gone now...  the pillar in the middle was a steep III or IV.  Link to previous post on Ayasayuk

AYASAYUK is a secret spot out on the Norton Sound coast where great forces of nature clash together to shape the environment.  There were giants in those days.  A high running bluff with bedrock at its base terminates by the oceanside at Cape Nome, where the bluff has been blasted away in increments, leaving an impressive granitic face that grows higher every year.  I never dare touch the poised tripwire-laden rubble pile until it is frozen up.  Those guys that chew it out during the summer are bad-ass.

(Below) Ayasayuk, Saturday after Thanksgiving, 2010.  

This year I kept getting shunted over to the left onto easier mud slopes.  Often felt a vague sense of unease, probably due to looseness.  Had a couple good direct pitches between several of the many roads, and several smatterings of wet water ice here and there. This is my Fifth Iteration of the cliff in my eleven years in Nome.  Here are some pictures of earlier iterations.

(below) Last winter, December 2008.  

(below)  Somewhere around 2003.

Those were the days of fat ice.  Before the giant came with his ANAUTAQ and chopped it all away.  The Earth here has been battered;  I'll bet the Earth was happy to find its new home in Shishamareff and Teller.  All the preceding pictures were taken from the same spot on the Council Road;  you can see the cliff growing bigger.

(above)  Cliff detail, Ayasayuk, 2010.  If you look very closely you can discern a few blobs of ice.  It felt good to sink a pick in real, blue ice.  Man, the lengths you gotta go just to get a little.

(above)  Teller Road, Snake River bridge, December 2010.  Christo also wrapped the roads for Thanksgiving.  Even men with serious trucks expressed their trepidation.  There was surely good ice in the Kigluaiks, but I just kept wussing out on the drive.  One Sunday afternoon I went to the Sunset Rocks but walked the Teller Road from the Snake River to get to the rocks.  The TINGMIURAQ on top of the sign had warned me not to drive any further.

       People sometimes think that climbing ends with summer, or that climbing is only possible through organized efforts involving gear and ropes.  But any thing, big or small, has routes on it.  The chair where you are sitting has some good climbs on it, probably.  Hence, climbing is always happening, at any time, at least to those of a bouldering mentality.

        When everything is wrapped in cellophane, then everything becomes cellophane climbing.  My tally for the Thanksgiving ice:  5 quick trips to the Mud Mounds, 3 trips up Anvil Mt. a trip to the Windmill boulders, a trip to Cape Nome, a trip to King Mt., a trip to the Sunset Rocks, and lots of trips without quite falling down.  Climbing up and down obscure little circuits on moss and verglas, a little bit up here, a little bit down there, monkey hang off some turf, stretch the sacrum, go for it, hook the top, feeling fine....  

        Routes were done.  I am reporting them.  Let them now be worked by backhoe and explosive, front loader and sluicebox, until they are blasted away completely.  It is Solstice now and a fine blizzard has buried the shellac under sastrugi curdles and whipped dollops.  It is not comforting to know that the shellac will be down there all winter, under the snowpack, at the base of all things, waiting.... 

Slump & Consolation: Fall of 2010

Cirro stratus over the Kigs on a Friday night in September from my doorstep in Icy View (left), right on time to create the illusion of Job one more time to cap off the school week, a week of fine Fall weather held  prisoner prowling the playgrounds smelling out trouble before it happens, all the meanwhile huge arrangements being made for the forthcoming weekend expedition and asses being made of oneself in one's family, all for the sake of climbing in the Kigs,  followed by Expedition Friday and  the sudden inexplicable rising of huge barometric pressure changes at the 3,000 ft. level, wind rising, the Nomens hunkering down to only party, the agony of defeat.  Is this what life is like in El Chalten?


       This pattern has been manifesting for a year and a half:  a precise and maddening enhosement, the weather bad when time is available, weather good when harnessed to responsibilities and the GLUE of town.  I have been through slumps before in 32 year career, but this one has really settled in.  What is implied by SLUMP is a failure to goal-achieve the BIG things.  There is always bouldering in this Arctic bouldering paradise, there is perpetually climbing, almost every day come moves with a move of the pure isolation over a particular section of stone, almost every weekend comes with a GRATEFUL TO THE WIFE mountaineering adventure of a surprisingly high cast—  but the thing that one lives for is the LARGE, the EXTENDED, the CAN'T FIND MY WAY BACK HOME of total commitment and wisdom-enhancing NO FEAR.  And a summit.  In this range, the tippy-top counts, it's part of the mathematical fun.

 Nothing coming in a year and a half.  Enhosement.

 (above) Penny Boulders, crazy meta-sedimentary a mile or two north of Penny Bridge, looking south in this photo, Teller Road in background:  homo traverse boulder and top of the orange lichen alpha clump of this group, the raptor tor, a fine klettergarten.

    Searching for causes of mountaineering slump, I consider this blog, this VERY BLOG.  There exists an exact correlation between start up of blog and beginning of slump.  COULD THIS BLOGGING B.S. YOUR ARE READING NOW BE AFFECTING CLIMBING OUTCOMES?  It's a proven fact (i jokes) that the nonentropy of minds participating in a mass consciousness structure (such as an internet site) can affect the probabilities of a climb.  More concretely, maybe keeping a blog is messing up my climbing brain.  The reintroduction of Ego after all that work to annihalate it! 

     Or, blame it on the GLUE of TOWN.  Muir had Martinez; I have Nome.  But this seems grossly unfair.  For the time has come to reveal a truth.  The slump is the result of an awakening.  The slump is transcendence, a stage of enlightenment.  The slump is the product of a slow awakening to the BEAUTY of the precious gifts of the GLUE?  It is time to look through the skin of this conceit and view the heart of the concept, the truth behind this term, "GLUE" OF TOWN, and see what really lies therein...  

so many blessings i cannot speak of them without the fragile flame of what they are blowing out like a candle:  love, family, friends— don't speak of them for they are the truly sacred— spray of climbing, but spray not of the sacred, love, family and friends... 

now the truth comes out:  the GLUE of town is composed of these wonderful things,

 these blessings...  this quagmire, this nemesis, this THING I had reified into a Chimera, is in reality the very fabric of which life is made, everything that is good, respectable, likable, warm, and human, everything that I cannot describe because my subcription is to the gloom and doom...   climbing is not important— it is the GLUE that truly feeds the spirit...

no wonder it takes such STEELY FOCUS to turn away from town

    (above) Consolation:  Penny Crags, from Penny Boulders, September 25, 2010.  Denied the copious Chi-intakes of the high Kigs, a great bouldering day between storms can forestall the onset of the climbing demons...

into white, the sudden giving way

one foot is gonna be on ice today

and one foot on rock, and rock was my bottle,

look at that white creeping in.

well, let it cover over,

let the whole thing go down,

i'm tired of the spray, 

let the machines resound,

once more into the iPodstream,

the roaring and the Kougarak,

heading into the Kigs today

with four bottles in eight socks.

the blog goes from tundra

into a blanket of snow,

now you've become an icecap

with your secrets below,

let go of summer,

it was overrated anyway,

the Cobras are out, and

now it's time to play

you crunchety-crunched,

you were stemming on rime,

don't push too hard,

ooh, that delicate spine!

the clouds were shrieking,

faith is absolute

live to see another day,

it's all turning to white.

(above) Rocky Mountain on the left, Pk. 2374, 100 ft. Bluff on the right, October 17, 2010.  Consolation in the form of a slog up the main mountain, my third time up this hill.  Too warm temps that day for the choss bluff.

 (left) Earp starting up the Bluff in a previous, more frozen-up year than this one is shaping up to be.

(above) Tom's Cabin:  rocks are visible as smudges up on the ridge.  Upon closer inspection, they open up to reveal,surprising depths of bouldering.  Not the Kigs, but a sweet Fall consolation.

(right)  October 10, 2010 (10-10-'10!  No wonder that day was such fine consolation), late afternoon, up at Tom's Cabin Rocks.  Pictured are a pair of aretes I slimed up.  Anything under 5.6,  I probably slimed up that day, including top-outs on each of the surprisingly exposed pinnacles.  However, the slime parameters were high that day, post extended Autumn rainfall, the lichen saturated to the point of mush. I know Graham and Jeff had slimed up a lot of these problems in previous years during their summer residence at the haunted cabin, and, for all I know, so did Tom, before them.  Increased ectoplasmic readings in this gulch...
(above)  The Discovery Goldfields, my ice hunting grounds on Sunday, November 7.  No ice to be found, but the snow was the finest consolation imaginable, silky sibilant grain snow parting with a sigh over steel edge of touring ski, perfectly weight-supporting.

   TINMIURAQ (above)   What privilege to be an integrated part of a hillside for a day.

     And indeed, these are times of wretched SLUMP.  The Kigs are but a distant memory, the Alaska Range so far away now I can no longer imagine facing those looming seracs.  No throne have we sat upon for many a month.  Only the gnarled clumps that cling to the ground, closer to home.
    Yet, zoom in, zoom in.  These clumps contain fractal depths and thrones in their own right...  flex and strain down in your tundra pit, hidden away from sight wrestling with rock puzzles...  what difference be a move whether it is one foot up, or thousands of feet off the deck?

Bringing Out the Bucket

     This "Prindle Bucket" (above) stashed in the moraines at Crater Creek is an indication I am still in the game.  I am a climber who has gear stashed in the mountains.  My next attempt is imminent.  I'm a player.  To the question, "Been doin' any climbing lately?" I am able to answer in the strong affirmative, yes, how are you, as a matter of fact I AM climbing at this moment, simply by virtue of having a bunch of hardware and ropes in a 5-gallon bucket cached deep in the mountains (because my back is trashed and I have to double-carry everything these days.)

       But now, September had come.  The bucket was coming out.  Summer rock climbing in the Kigs was coming to an end.  The beginning of Loserdom once more....      

        

       Saturday, September 17...  Town had ravaged me...  Too many proboscises had been reamed into my chakras...I had completely lost the plot... a chance opening of circumstances allowed escape from the glue, the terrible GLUE of TOWN, the glue that requires such shameful and embarrassing self-absorption to overcome, to simply get out and do some climbing.  
      Yukon Jack acted counterintuitively as a stimulant, and got me out of Nome on Friday night.  But then, hours later, mounted on a four-wheeler with no high beam in pitch darkness out by Salmon Lake, one mile from my destination after a long ride on a long Friday evening, I drove straight into a large herd of Muskox on the road. 
        OOMINGMAK!!   Drat!    I had only been wanting to get to the cabin and collapse in my bag.  Now I would have to bull my way through this crowd of head-butters like a Polaris Centaur.  Again I would wear the hat of wildlife harasser. 
        One calf did not grasp the concept of get outta the road.  His mom, like Jim Otto, squarely in my headlights.  I rode in tight, quick circles, advancing forwards in incremental loops, my little bobble head swivelling, waiting for the awful contact with the great skull-plate coming out of the darkness.  It took 25 minutes to sweep the herd slowly off, and certainly constituted the most perilous moment of the whole trip.  I was grateful to finally fall asleep in the utter serenity and peace of the most grateful cabin at Salmon Lake... (below)

    Ostensibly, this bucket trip would also be a rematch with the lumpen heap of Pk. 3535, scene of my fog and ennui the week before.  And indeed, the day dawned beautiful, one of those not-quite-freezing Autumn days suspended in time,  but the familiar Kigsborne ennui of hiking up a hill and calling it a climb persisted, like vestigial fog on a sunny day. 
        I followed my trail along the bluffs on the south side of Crater Creek.  AKLAQ was all around, including the polite brown one that Janet, Carl and I had met a week earlier.  But the Aklaitch were fat with fish and berries;  situation non-stressful.  I dozed and power-lounged on tussoks, captivated by the thrumming humming marvel of the Kigs...  That weird thing happened, where the mountains cease to be inert stone, and reveal themselves to be sentient presences, ever communicating....  no way to translate it. 
     
      The climbing day slipped away.  I had been defeated (for the umpteenth time) by the debilitating power drains of town, coupled with my own foolish inability to patch them. 
          As consolation, I went for a hike (above) up the upper east fork of Crater Creek, a valley I'd never seen before.  Up some high moraines until I could see around the corner, lusting for a view of the hidden north face of Pk. 3325—  it proved to be another of those brown facades on the clash zone between the schist and pluton, reminiscent of False Tigaraha:  not worth climbing, unless some ice drip were to drip it on down, which looked entirely possible, north-facing cauldron like it is... A stupendous view down the length of the entire upper Crater Creek canyon—  but I had forgotten the camera down at the bucket.  You'll just have to slog up there yourself.