Slimedog Millionaire!

THIS IS A REPOST of an EARLIER POST from JUNE 21, 2012

(above)  Slimedog Millionaire (IV,5.9) goes up the North Arete of the "Third Tog," the righthand skyline as seen in this photo from the South Fork of Crater Creek valley.  New route completed on third attempt, last Saturday, June 16, 2012, in a 22 hour, 9-pitch fun-fest, in good weather with Phil Westcott, new guy with great attitude.  Best rock climb I've done yet in the Kigs!

link to 2010 solo attempt

link to 2011 attempt with Andy Sterns

(above) Phil on Pitch 1, where we defaulted to green ledges  (cheerful with poppies) for speed's sake, somewhat perverting the true and future line of this aesthetic arete.  The true and future Slimedog will take the prow at the left edge of the photo (below), the one with the incut overhang;  for the reason that we didn't go that way, our route must be considered unfinished.  I just wanted to get up the whole 1200 ft. buttress, and so chose line of least resistance in the green strips at center of photo.

Pitch 2, went fast, more green strips on golf course ledges leading leftwards to the Slimedog itself, a greasy seep that stains the wall black.  Pitch 3, a giveaway also but for treacherous slime, traverses left through the Slimedog and over to the base of the upper arete, where the good climbing definitely begins.

(above and below) Stemming a slot Pitch 5.  How novel to be climbing in the Kigs on good rock:  pitches 4, 5, and 6 provided a nice flow of granitic climbing over featured, fissured gneiss, relatively clean, and spectacularly situated.  In a Lower-48 rock garden, these pitches might be described as fairly continuous 5.7;   we must have done a 5.9 move in there somewhere, hence the overall rating, and a Grade IV because you're not in a Lower-48 rock garden, man.  A move of pure layback up high on the route stands out as fine in my memory.  We banged a few pins, but good climbers could do without them.  In truth, Phil and I spent the majority of our 17 hours on the climb dully sorting out great "smegma-tangles" of gear we created with our double-rope technique and large rack.  A confident soloist could do this climb Norman Clyde style and have a very good time. 

(above and below) Phil emerging from overhangs, pitch 5.

(above) Topping out on Pitch 5.  Phil admitted to that glorious phenomenon where one "forgets to be scared." I am almost always scared out of my ever-loving mind high on a Kigluaiq wall.  On Saturday, however, the vibes (subconscious cortical function processing input from the snynaptic interface, i.e., the energy body, with surrounding "quantum energy foam" associated with nuclear matter, as well as normal inferential predictions based on stored information in human neural network, i.e., weather, smile on partner's face, kinks working out of my lower back as I climb on gneiss, pale stone, etc., resulting in an assessment and decision-making framework that takes into account input from domains other than the 5 physical senses....) were good.

   Pitch 7 was good too and transitioned us away from the prow to the horizontal summit ridge.  Pitches 8 and 9 were nebulous and involved scrambling to the left of a prominent spire which is the top of the climb via ledges and bouldering walls that lead to the true summit of the Third Tog, and the 3rd Class walk-off.

 (above) Third Tog from northwest, further up valley.  Slimedog Millionaire is the arete on left.  Phil and I descended in rock shoes the painful talus slopes to the right in the photo above.  Torture, like wading through canted bowling balls in ballet slippers, like your knees are 15 years older than they already are.

    A further note on the above photo: the west-facing slopes in the picture are excellent for boulering/soloing—  good rock, lots of options, Lake Mary kind of thing, recommendable.

(above)  Crater Creek near Kougarak Road, June 2012.  The 5 hour approach hike in and out of Crater Creek was greatly expediated by a species of Aufeis we nick-named "The Board." 

(above) Map of Crater Creek.

  Adrenal glands wide open to the universe, we perched on the wall in green eyries pulling on strands of spider web and praying to hold off the storm dragons, we mined sinh tala from the stone and transferred it to the physio-electrochemical data banks in the fibers of our bodies, and when we got back to town, though there was no parade for the local heroes, things were different from that moment on.

    Slimedog Millionaire has some awesome climbing on it. Double camalots through 2, an extra 1, nuts worked very well on this climb, didn't seem to need much big stuff...  It's still the Kigs though, and pins are the only thing that ever make one feel secure on these Volkswagoning stacks.  Banging pins behind stacks sometimes produces an audible creaking sound that I don't like.

(below) Other views of "Tog 3"(Pk. 2150+??). 

Thompson Creek Headwall and other Spring Adventures

"Thompson Creek Headwall" (above), panorama by Tyler Rhodes, the site of Spring weekend exploits, 5 Sundays Ago.  We approached the Headwall blindly from the broad ridge on top of it and, after some trial and error among the peaklets of Thompson Creek, managed to descend the Headwall via the wide-ish snow couloir at the righthand vertical sun-shadow line in the photo, Tyler and Keith on skis, me and Lucy on crampons!            The ideal is to suffer.  This suffering is necessary to offset the deleterious influence of growing up a spoiled American brat who has been handed everything and never truly learned the knowledge that true suffering has to offer.

     Swooshing down powdery mountainsides is NOT suffering.  A good telly run, echoing Buchanan once again, is "entirely too much fun," and I agree:  the Spring skiing in the Kigs these past few seasons has registered considerably high on the PURE ENJOYMENT spectrum, and Spring 2012 was no exception.  However, it must be noted, that although a ski-mountaineering descent qualifies as the reciprocal of an ASScent, thereby qualifying skiing as a form of climbing, skiing as an end in itself poses a transgression of the RULE OF SUFFERING because it is TOO PURELY ENJOYABLE.  

       It can therefore be concluded that the act of choosing to ski downhill rather than go climbing qualifies as a chicken-out, a cop out, a fraidy-cat failure to face the solitude of the brooding north wall.

       Panorama looking north from the Buffalo Creek/Thompson Creek divide. (above).  More panoramic wizardry by Tyler Rhodes.  The image faces the opposite direction of the one above.  This one faces north, looks down Thompson Creek, perpendicularly across a segment of Grand Central, and up Gold Run Creek.  Mt. Osborn is about a quarter of the way across the panorama from the left.   Pt. 3207, high point of False Tigaraha, at camera's left hand.  Pt. 3080, which we ascended on the way, at camera's right hand. 

    On a sunny day in Spring 4 Sundays Ago, I am sitting on the tailgate at Deep Creek Canyon, Mile 30 Kougarak Road, getting ready to return to the cold and shaded Headwall on which I had not done a route the weekend before due to damnable, super-fun skiing with Tyler and Keith.  All ties with humanity have been cut.  Flaming ruins lie in my wake. Severed tendrils of TOWN GLUE still trail from the rear bumper from yesterday's battle with the MACHETE to escape town. Beetle-browed and grim-jawed, I am sharpening the positive-clearance chisel on my BD Cobras, a knot of self-involvement, a Haston, a House, my own wizened version of Dr. Doom poised to risk it all for obscure glory on the north wall waiting out of the sunlight.  The plan is to sneak back in to Thompson Creek and solo/scramble a line through the granitic gneiss...  at last, for the first time in a long time, to face down my demons and actually climb something...

      Then, I see them...  Coming along the Kougarak Road in the morning sunshine, a sparkling parade of people I know and love, BOATLOADS of fun and friendship, all enroute to the nearby ski slopes of Nugget Pass, party after party, Jeff, Laura, Erin, Nate, Lorne, Keith, Mallory, Erica, all yahooing their way towards what promises to be a corn-fed day in the Spring Kigs, still blanketed with snow.  

        Leading the parade, Tyler, the avenging Angel of Angle, leering with the knowledge that once again he is stealing me away from my appointment with Hermann Buhl's Lonely Challenge on the Thompson Creek Headwall, that he is sucking me away from pain, blood, and bruises, into one of the FUNNEST days I will ever have skiing. 

        We will follow the sinuous gullet of a filled-in Copper Creek into the steep hills that lie to the east of the Kougarak Road at Nugget Pass.  I will spend the day hanging out on tundra patches with beautiful, laid-back Nomenclatures, trying to keep up with Tyler, taking the ridges where he drops the chutes, freshly driving out the grizzlies from the valley, and hanging with my good dog, Lucy.

(Below) Map of totally excellent ski tour, Mr. Rhodes, Mr. Conger, and Mr. McRae, May 6, 2012.   Deep Creek Canyon would be the easier way to access Buffalo / Thompson Pass from the Kougarak Road.  The endless slog out Grand Central was aided and abetted by wind and crust.  

(Below) Ian, Tyler, and Lucy gesturing over the drop-off, Pk. 3080.  

(Above) Tyler arrives at the pass between Buffalo Creek and Thompson Creek. The waters of Lethe have bleached out my memory cortex, but suffice it to say, the descent into Thompson Creek was not desirable from this point.  Mark this one down as "probably not a feasible pass." An interesting feature in this photograph is the summit pinnacle of Pt. 3207,  upper left corner, the true high point of the long ridge marked on the U.S.G.S. as "Tigaraha," which I like to call "False" Tigaraha—  a frightening solo, MARK!, squirt musk here, internet scent mark.

(Beleft) Descent Gully, Thompson Creek Headwall.   Mr. McRae, being unwilling to chatter, sideslip, or take 800 ft. skidding falls down icy-hard snow, had to suffer the ignominy of ice-climbing down slopes everyone else, including my dog Lucy, were gleefully swooping and carving.  

  

Thanks to Tyler Rhodes and Keith Conger for lending the blogseed for this post, their pictures!

      Two roads

   One leads to fun and friendship.

         The other to self-confrontation.

 The scars

  From the big Lonely

     Have not healed.

   Butterflies

      Out over the wall...

    I am glad that you are here.

What is this?

      A yellow pod in the wilderness

Containing friends in larval form.

    Easy is the Kool-Aid.

      Kernels of corn rest momentarily on my ski tips.

    There will be no climbing today.

(Below) Three views of the Sinuk headwaters, April 28/29, 2012.  Friends conjoined in a partially-metamorphosed pupal form revealing the individual faces and personalities zipped inside the pod as we found it, lying on the tundra at the Sinuk headwaters early on a Sunday morning. 

         Mr. Lastine and I snow-machined into the upper headwaters of the Sinuk River, 6 Sundays ago.  He wanted to try out his late-season acquisition, a Polaris .440 (black and silver like the Oakland Raiders).   Our plan was to leave early Sunday morning and meet up with the Rhodes/Collins party who had bivouaced "somewhere around Mosquito Pass"the night before in Tyler's Arctic Oven.  My secret plan was, once there, to abandon human contact altogether, to motor away around the corner to Turncorner Mountain for a gigantic Herman Buhl sufferfest on a narrow, exposed ridge of snow and schist.

       The day started well.  The Kougarak Road was already punched out to MacPherson's Troll at Mile 18.  Machining conditions were ideal.  We easily followed Tyler's tracks in to the upper Sinuk where we found Tyler, Erica, Jeff, and Laura encased in their curious shell-like encrustation on the tundra.  Arms extended centipede-like from within the pod-casing and served Mr. Lastine and me hot breakfast burritoes.  

       It was so incredibly cool to be there in the Sinuk head, the fortress of scatter-my-ashes-here solitude, with such a fun party of friends, with cool human company, it was so nice having a traveling partner like Mr. Lastine, we had come so far together already, I didn't want to leave.  I couldn't.  I abandoned the idea of the frightening, windy, spiralling arete, and instead climbed two forty-minute hike-ups nearby at the head of the valley on the Sinuk / Thompson divide, so that I could return in time to roar out of there with the rest of the gang.  

        Days such as these are the glorious times of our lives.  Who would be foolish enough to exchange them for something that is not only equally silly, pointless, and selfish, but painful to boot?  

(above) Map of Sinuk headwaters. 

A.  The "real" Tigaraha ("Forefinger"), Pk. 3500+ (??)

B.  "Pen Tri Cwm," Pk. 3600+ (?), this is the name given by 1990s Todd party-  first ascent?- likely not.  The name has kind of grown on me, wish I knew how to pronounce it.  

C.  Pk. 3400+(?) I like to call it "Snakey Peak" after the aesthetic, unskied, "Snakey Couloir" on the northern, Grand Central side of the mountain, which Tyler refers to as "the Z-Couloir.

D.  Pk. 2750+, one of the ridiculous summits I reached from the Sinuk on the 6SA outing which is the subject of this post.  Call it one of the "Thompson Creek peaklets," as it is much more interesting from the side other than the one I climbed.

E.  Pk. 2900+, the other "Thompson Creek peaklet" I climbed that day.

F.  "False" Tigaraha, Pt. 3207.   

MARK!  I hereby squirt a little digital/glandular secretion of ego onto the internet for having climbed each of these summits!

(below) View to the northeast from Tigaraha. The only picture I have (from a previous summer) to identify the previously unreported "Thompson Creek peaklets" mentioned above.  Pk. 2900 is the peak just to the left of the end of the rainbow.  Pk. 2750+ is the leftmost foreground peak. They were, of course, seran-wrapped in snow 6 Sundays ago.

(below) False Tigaraha from Sinuk, with badass couloir skied by Tyler on April 28, 6 Sundays Ago, the third, left-slanting couloir from the left.  This picture was taken by me weeks after Tyler's ski, 2 Sundays Ago, on a recent rockclimbing trip with Phil Westcott.  My estimation is that Tyler's couloir represents the most technically difficult descent yet skied in the Kigs.  Laurent and I climbed the couloir on the left (with some dips into the mixed on the prow to the left) with a rope years back.  Why is Tyler always skiing things I ice climb?  

(below) BONUS PIC:  The "Z-Couloir" on "Snakey Peak" (Pk 3400+?) from the Grand Central side, a fine climb between walls of marble that I did with Mikey Lean one February years ago, and one of the great ski descents still to be plucked in the Kigs, assuming no one has already plucked it. 

        In a previous post from 8 Sundays Ago, I invoked the No Sketch Partner Law:  "the scope of your climbing ambitions must conform to the mean climbing ambitions of the group."  In this rather empirical way of looking at it, if you are out with a partner who has zero climbing ambitions, then your climbing ambitions would be halved.  I was first introduced to the No Sketch Partner Law in James Ramsey Ullman's classic Banner In The Sky, in the scene where Rudi Matt remains with the injured Saxo near the summit of the Citadel.  However you name it, the Law comes down to this:  you can't sketch out on the people you're with.  You may need to practice the difficult art of NOT CLIMBING in order NOT to be an asshole.

        However, a loophole for climbing mediocrity exists here.  The No Sketch Partner Law becomes a force unto itself, much like gravity, or the GLUE of TOWN.  That day in the Sinuk, I could not escape the encampment of my friends because it was just so delightful to be in their company in the sacred CHI-giving mountains.  That day on the Kougarak Road, my friends in cars were like corpuscles of TOWN GLUE traveling down a capillary and finding me at the last minute.  For we know that the glue of town is composed of the ones we love most.  The company of friends is the most golden thing of all.   So it is that the No Sketch Law too often results in a violation of the NO CHICKEN OUT LAW which states, simply, 'Thou shallt not chicken out of climbing."

            (below)  Shadow of Tigaraha against False Tigaraha.

OTHER SPRING 2012 KIGVENTURES

      7 Sundays Ago:  Earp and pre-schooler Robby riding Crusteo, Me on Super Smooth Andy G.., went gliding out to Salmon Lake for a night.  The April weather in the interior Kigs the next morning was 50-50, not so bad, really, cloud-torn over Salmon Lake, but mellow enough to consider going for a long ski, which I decided against, wisely as it turned out.  We decided to pack it in early and swim with the Sunday GLUE CURRENT towards Nome.

      But somewhere around Dorothy Creek (Mile 26), all Hell broke loose.  We found ourselves in zero visibility, with active drifts and near-hurricane wind pushing us right off the icy road, at a place with big drop-offs.  Big surprise!  The reverse of the usual weather graphic, with the blizzard in the foothills and the calmer weather at the crest.

        Earp waved me over:  "Robby's hypothermic!"  We stopped in the storm to grimly load him into a silvery, slippery sleeping bag, which Earp then had to wrestle like a giant flopping larva with one arm while driving the snow-machine with the other.  Little did we know, that right near the spot where Earp and I stopped to load the larva, Janet Balice was crouched in a drift hole, accepting a slow death in the storm for her and her dogs;  she had fallen into the same trap as us after a two nights in the mountains and her 5-dog team, with the legendary DIBELS in lead, had given up.  The sound of our snow machines passing nearby gave Janet the courage to roust up and drag her team out to Basin Creek, where at least the road was discernible.

     9 Sundays Ago:  Solo reconnaissance trip on Smooth Andy G. out to the Grand Central Glacier to check on Sluicebox.  

(above)  Sluicebox Couloir, April 8, 2012.  Super Smooth Andy G. (Arctic Cat) in foreground.

     3 Sundays Ago:  The best trip of all:  Kristine and Raina made it out to Earp's cabin for this one, along with Carl, Janet, Rod, Joni, and Robby, as well as Tyler, Erica, Jeff, Laura, Lorne, Erin, Nate, Tom, and others, tent camping across the lake in the BLM Campground.  Flowers, midnight sun, dogs rolling in anaq.  My camera had been consumed by Spring adventures so I got no pictures.  With my family at my side in the mountains, the tensions created by the GLUE vs. the LONELY CHALLENGE had cancelled out.  Mind at rest...

(Pk. 3300+) Canyon Creek

      The measure of a valley is the degree to which it and the surrounding peaks radiate a certain type of energy:  sinh tala, after the interior Athabaskans, or maybe just chi.  But measure requires a unit, and there is no established unit of measure for chi because the Uncertainty Principle renders chi too unpredictable a form of energy for quantitative measure, one only "feels" it qualitatively.
        Whatever, Canyon Creek in the western Kigluaik Range is a valley that exudes particular waveforms of this energy.  For so long I had tried to access Canyon's mysterious interiors, but like Alice at the door to the garden, had been denied, until 2SA weekends ago, when Rick Anderson and I finally managed to find the right pass into Canyon Creek on snow machines, in sunny Spring traveling conditions.   

(above) Pk. 3300+, Canyon Creek, Kigluaik Mountains, April 14, 2012.  I ascended via the easy slopes on the righthand side, treating the opportunity as a mere peakbagging exercise, wussing out of more challenging lines due to a good excuse:  a good friend waiting at basecamp who deserved better than to wait the extra hours a more technical line would have required.  To be fair, even the lowly Class 2 slopes sported some AI1;  you wouldn't want to trip on your pantlegs, or you'd go whizzing down the slope at a high rate of speed! 

(above) Map of Canyon Creek area

   A.  Snow-machine pass of choice to access Canyon Creek from the south. 

   B. Pk. 3300+.  Climbed to summit via easy southwest slopes.

   C.  Untouched gneiss. 

   D.  Pk. 3850+.  Highest peak in the area.

   E.  Canyon Creek

   F.  Pk. 3390.  Climbed last year.

   G.  Blume-Valpa Pass.  Easy hiking- maybe not so good for machine.

   H.  Pk. 3195.  Also climbed last year.

    I.  Johnston-Canyon Pass.  Easy hike. Possibly snow-machinable.

   J. Johnston-Right Fork Pass.  Class 2.  

   K. Inuksuk Pass (American-Right Fork) Interesting set of manmade rock piles.

   L.  Pk. 3000+.  Climbed year before last 

(above) Pk. 3850+.  This mini-massif may be the fifth highest independent summit in the Kigs, depending on how you define "independent summit"— (My unofficial list: 1. Mt. Osborn (4704)  2. Osborn's northwestern neighbor, Pk. 3998   3. Grand Singatook (Pk. 3870) and 4. Kayuqtuq (Pk. 4000+ ?)  Peakbagging the summit in the above picture was my primary objective this Canyon Creek trip, but Pk. 3300+ up canyon seemed like a nicer place to be, so we camped there.

(below) Gneiss towers on the southeast shoulder of Pk. 3850+.  The wall in this picture has, on very rare occasions from certain summits, flitted into my frame of perspective through lined-up corridors of mountain, but its exact location remained hidden in the geologic folds until this trip, when Rick and I turned a corner on Canyon Creek to discover its true location.  

The NO-SKETCH PARTNER LAW is stated thusly:  the scope of your climbing ambitions must conform to the mean climbing ambitions of the group.

     What this means is, you can't be an asshole.  We've all had that kind of Comstockian partner who is ready at a moment's notice to bail from the corniced ridge on which you both are standing.  Some alpinists have no natural ability to execute the crucial task of NON-CLIMBING when the conditions permit, and these are the ones who seem strange and extremely self-centered within a group in, or going to, the mountains.  Such a climber cannot hang except with those of their own kind.  It takes great effort.

      On Friday, 3SA, as Rick and I were packing for our weekend trip into Canyon Creek, I saw a post on Supertopo by a friend of mine:  Jabber's thread on Supertopo .   He was bailed on by a mancrushed partner!  Huge arrangements had been made and dates precisely calibrated for the two of them to escape the GLUE OF FAIRBANKS, but at the last minute, the guy goes "off with Bridwell" to some other mountain.  Clearly, a violation of the NO-SKETCH PARTNER LAW.

(above) Rick Anderson at the "Snow-machine Pass into upper Canyon Creek," looking south.  (The one labelled "A" on the map.  Gneiss unclimbed tor in background!

(below) Upper Canyon Creek from Pk. 3300+, looking southeast.  The Snow-machine Pass is at center of photo.

 

      I was psyched!  A friend to go to the mountains with!  And a fellow Kigluaik lover who's been all over these hills on foot and by dog team.  It's so much fun doing trips with Rick because we can sit around like long-lost brothers discussing extremely obscure minutia of hill and valley, and never grow bored with it.  
      But first we had to escape the GLUE OF TOWN.  Over many weeks of winter, the GLUE OF TOWN had gotten Rick pasted down like a victim from the movie Alien, but I was certain the lure of a trip to the Kigs in perfect April weather would loosen the bonds of the slimy substance that coated him.  I offered him my best old mount, Crusteo, the Polaris .340.   The GLUE began to loosen.  We hacked at it with our machetes, carving away excuses, harboring sleep throughout the weekdays, patiently unraveling obstacles.  My wife Kristine, who possesses the magic power to either dissolve or intensify the GLUE with the slightest look, was blowing in our favor;  someday soon Kristine and I will wage our own war on the GLUE and escape together, but for this weekend it was Rick and I, and I was mighty glad of it, someone experienced with whom to share the adventure.   

(below) Rick power lounging at Canyon Creek basecamp, base of Pk. 3300+.

(below) Pk. 3300+ from south.  This photo was taken in June 2011.  Rick, note the fresh, cataclysmic landslide in that gully we were hanging out in behind camp—  Is that why I felt creepy in there?

(below left and below right)  Inuksuk.  I found these homunculi on a previous reconnaissance to Canyon Creek, at the pass marked "K" in the map above.  I know nothing about how they got here, only that it looked like a likely place to herd reindeer into a ravine.

        Solitude is jagged and hard, a bare floor.   All it takes is another mind in a lonely valley to warm the place up, no matter how cold the temperatures, no matter how far from town you might lie.  So enormous is the contrast between a trip into the Kigs with friends, and a trip to the Kigs with no one, that my brain cannot even grasp the disparity;  they are two different mental modes, the one primitive and speechless, the other easy and confident. Both are necessary for wisdom, I cannot turn my back on either.  But it is very hard to fight the GLUE alone.  I am deeply grateful for the friends I have found, for the times we have had huddling in the wind and surreal beauty.

(below)  The Grand Singatook (Pk. 3870) from the north. Nils Hahn and I had a great trip here sometime in a June of the 2000s.  We came from the Teller Road seeking the ultimate Nordwand of the Kigluaik on the back side of the Singatook:  instead we found a two-thousand foot snow-slope capped by two or three pitches of easy Scottish-gully ice.  Why are my climbs always skiable?  

   

Topkok 2012

     People have always climbed (for eggs) at the Tapqaq seacliffs, but probably not the kind of frozen-mixed-dry-tool climbing done by Andy Sterns (above, left) and I during the latter half of Iditarod last week.  We hung out nights in the Topkok shelter cabin (above, right) and climbed by day in the sunny micro-climates up against the south-facing quartzite cliffs.

  Interesting paper on Archaeology of Topkok  

    The highlight of the trip came the second day when Andy led Don't Succumb To Finish Line Fever (M-5), a prodigious, multi-hour effort on the 100 ft. wall of relatively decent rock we called Crapiles (above), (pronouced ka-rap-a-leez).  The 1-pitch route follows the indistinct right-facing corner system on the leftish side of the wall, then makes a righthand turn at the top cornice through horrendous bottomless snow.  Andy dug through powder over poised rubble, then sank picks into solid mud.  Named for back-of-the-pack Iditarod finishers out of White Mountain and desperate for Nome at all costs, the route felt like it had three M-5 cruxes, and for me, at least, like impending death by choss at all times, despite the quality of the rock relative to the hanging death elsewhere at Tapqaq.

     I was extremely happy to be cruising in the wake of Andy, who was in the finest form I've seen him.  I had regressed to nOOb yet again after a horrendous winter of injury and non-climbing.  I shamelessly begged off every lead, happy to provide Andy the hours of belay slavery necessary to make technical pitches on choss such as this possible.  Before we founded Finish Line Fever, we made a false start on a different line at Crapiles but got shut down by choss drippings, during which time I snapped this picture of Andy, (above).  

(above) First moves of Don't Succumb To Finish Line Fever.  Bomber torquing.

Andy pulling through a roof (left) and starting the awful rightward snow traverse (below, right) on Finish Line Fever.  I was humbled by Andy's perseverance in these choss fields.

(above) Map of west Topkok cliffs, drawn from the Mind's eye.

A.  How far you can go with snow-machines without going out on the sea ice.

B. Ishigak.  Fun turf scramble / solo.

C. First Weep, WI 2/3, one pitch. I've soloed these ones a few times on previous trips, see here and here. See below.

D.  Crapiles, Don't Succumb To Finish Line Fever, M-5, one pitch, belay in alders.

E.  Second Weep, first pitch WI 2/3. We omitted the second candle pitch due to crushage.

F.  The Big Weep, WI 3.  I climbed it in 2009 and again Iditarod '12.

I've never explored much further down the cliffs than the Big Weep.  Most of the human habitation previous to the flu epidemic in 1918 seems to have been miles to the east at the other end of the cliffs, a mystical place I've never been.  In the picture (below), Andy hikes on the sea ice past the First Weep, on his way to bigger fish further down the cliff to the east.

        There must have been names for various features on the Tapqaq seacliffs.  Maybe they died with the people of this area in the great Rub-out of 1918.  This coast has the feel of a desert ghost town.  Ishigak, the little people from the Old Time, are heard whispering in the copious wind.  Having hung out in various south-facing quartzite hollows far too long over four or five trips, I've developed little pet names for things, such as The Ishigak, (below).

 

(above) Norton Sound Qaweraq place names, found in a random box at Nome Elementary School.

(below)  Dan Seavey, still in his prime at 74,  outside the Topkok Shelter Cabin, on his way from White Mountain to Nome, March 17, 2012, around 11:30 p.m.

        The Topkok Shelter Cabin was put in by the Nome Kennel Club to save unfortunate wayfarers from "The Blowhole" which roves about like a flailing hose all through this area..  As occupiers of the cabin, Andy and I expected a certain amount of Iditarod 2012 interface, and it came, usually in the middle of the night, on account of the Taylor Lagoon to the west being bare ice.  Several mushers had their teams turn around and come back to the Shelter Cabin, inside which Andy and I sat eating power bars. 

       Coolest of all our visitors was Dan Seavey, old dad of the early Iditarod days, the elder of three generations of Seaveys running the race;  the third generation, Dallas, had won the race entire four days earlier. Now, with the red lantern not far behind, and the relentless north wind chilling things way below zero, here came the first generation pulling up in front of the cabin at Topkok.  Dan's team had him pointed back towards White Mountain, in the wrong direction!  As his headlight approached the cabin door, Andy and I huddled inside nervously;  several of the back-of-the-packers who had passed through already had seemed out of it, like hypoxic climbers on the summit of McKinley.  Would this be more rescue-bait?

          But Dan Seavey was perfectly calm and at home on the trail.  "Sorry fellas, can you tell me which way is Nome?"

          The old musher came in and slumped onto a stump by the fire.  We thought he would fall asleep.  We filled him in on Taylor Lagoon.  Andy had already interfaced with Dan once before at the Old Woman cabin on this very same race, on a ski trip Andy made from Koyuk to Unalakleet with a Fairbanks group prior to coming to Nome.  The GLUE OF TOWN was strong on the man, it came off him like vapor, Nome was singing in his his ears—  we watched as the GLUE OF TOWN, an implacable force, sucked him out of the cabin, and drew him and his team along their way back towards Nome, and the cold, windy night...  

(above)  The Second Weep, the first pitch of which (below) we climbed, (WI 2), on our first day. This was my first time climbing this particular ice;  the first few times I visited Topkok, it must have been covered with snow.  I walked up to it to solo it in the Spring of '09, but the whole thing felt unstable, so I backed away. 

The second pitch (below) was a dessicated pillar glued onto absolute death rubble.  Andy wanted to climb it;  I balked, citing death by crushage, so we rappeled off.

(above) The Big Weep, (WI 3).  I had already climbed this one during the Winter of '09 on an extraordinarily cold day trip with Jeff Collins.  That's probably about a hundred feet of ice in the picture. Andy led it this time, and we set up a top rope, and ran some laps, mostly for my benefit, on account of it was my first ice of the season, and my paranoid old brain needed exposure to the thwacking and dangling, unlike Andy, who had been hitting it hard all season, in New England and in Fairbanks.

(above) Andy on the first pitch of the Big Weep.

(below)  Ian bouldering on good Tapqaq quartzite.

Did I mention it was cold?  Oh Lord, yes it was, ALAPAA!!