Bouldering 2012

Raina McRae photo

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

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

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

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

Phil Westcott photo.

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

Phil Westcott

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

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

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

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

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

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

Raina McRae photo

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

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

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

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

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

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



On wilderness bouldering... 

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

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

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




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

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

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

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

 

Dorothy Falls

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ayasayulgit

(above) Ayasayuk quarry face, 2012.  Scarp rendered transitory as ice, never the same year after year, never before climbed, never to be repeated in exactly this same condition.  I feel very embarrassed to have gone to such lengths blogging about what essentially amounts to a piled slag heap, but perhaps its charm lies in this very ephemerality.  No egos have been chiseled into anything that will stand the test of time, it all gets dynamited to bits tomorrow.   

           Imagination is needed to climb in Nome. Once climbing becomes the metaphor that defines existence, logic follows that any medium whatsoever becomes climbing:  the two-inch jam between the bed and cab, the main-mast ladder on the six-story Dredge #5, a steep mound of frozen tailings, or the chair upon which you sit.

         Or, a ghastly 45 degree debris-flume of frozen sand and glued-in granite chunks--  I am speaking of the Ayasayuk quarry, 15 miles east of Nome.  Yes, the cat is out of the bag, there is no adequate way for Kigsblog to obfuscate around the location any longer.  It was I trespassing upon the Cape, along with Mr. Collins, last Saturday, in the kundali-intensive freezing cold of thirty-below chill factor. 

      Can this quarry even be called a cliff?  Does this 450 ft. tall scar count as a climbing area, a place where you don't go near the steep areas of rock for fear they will fulfill their destiny prematurely by rolling down the cliff over you on their way to the seawalls of Nome, Kotzebue, and other villages?       
           Imagination is needed to climb here.  But once you have made the decision to apply your imagination to this festering junk show, a run up the Cape provides a great climbing workout in a majestic setting, so closely approximating the motions, decisions, and risks of real climbing that it can only be counted as such.

 (above) Lower tier. Forty-five degree, chalk-hard frozen mud. Is this intended as another Monty Python simulated climbing shot?  Not at all, it turns out:  you cannot tell from this photo, but if Mr. Collins were to open his hands, his feet would begin to skid downward with surprising velocity. 

           I went back with Mr. Collins to get good pictures, something lacking in the Thanksgiving Ayasayuk Post due to dead batteries that day in the now-legendary Canon ProShot, the camera that spent the entire summer lying in the tundra in Tyler's driveway but still functions;  picture-taking in these photos was hampered by extreme allapa.  Did I mention it was cold?  Great streaks of gangrene it was cold!  
       The other reason for going back for another climb of the Ayasayuk was to straighten out the original Thanksgiving line, which zig-zags a great deal due to confrontations with death beetles of  trigger-happy batholithic bullshit, combined with horizontal access roads wide enough to drive  large excavators across the face of the cliff.  Mr. Collins and I should have bypassed Cape Nome altogether that day and driven 60 miles down the Norton Sound to the cliffs and ice-flows of Topkok, a journey possible in the comfort of our heated town trucks because of unusual freeze-up conditions.  But the TOWN GLUE was thick, we were losers, and we didn't go.  We settled for a repeat of the fun route on the Cape.

(above) Lower Ice Dribble, Middle Tier.

     Tried to put in screws, but the ice was cold, and they were the dirt screws— not the sharpest screws in the shed.  The first move onto the ice solicited an inelegant mantle onto a tool that, according to the Law of the Hardest Move, might give the pitch an overall rating of WI3 though it really be WI1. In truth, the whole climb felt rather like a Class 4 scramble, except that the entire medium is so weird and shattered and improbable that the only rating one could ascribe to this climb would be to invent a Cape Nome Dirt Scale specific to 2012 and use the climb itself as the one benchmark to measure itself relative to its own group of one. 

(above and above) Upper Ice Dribble. 

      Though not strictly necessary, we wore the rope between us the whole way, feeling vaguely as if we were enrolled in some groovy, therapeutical, human bonding class.  We set up anchors and went over sequences and pretended it was real climbing, even though it was.

(above) Upper dirt pitches.

    The upper dirt pitches is where I had dreamed Jeff and I could make a big splash and push the very frontiers of low-angle dirt climbing.  But the day was simply too cold for any dicking around.  I straightened out the line a bit by stair-casing it up a little rock ramp above where the ice comes oozing out, but it warn't nothing we didn't simul-climb.  There is something pleasurable about the continuous movement of crab-walking over steep mud in ice climbing gear.  Soon we were at the rim feeling like we had climbed something, though we weren't sure what.

       What has not been mentioned is the constant, pulsating force of the natural beauty exuding from our surroundings, the white desert ocean stretching to the horizon at the ice edge, the abrupt angles created by the quarry face, the buzz of SINH TALA exuding from the exploded pores of the Earth...  I apologize for not doing more research on the industry of this fascinating site.  I have so many questions.  How do they plan the excavation?  Just what causes these frozen waterfalls?  Has the quality of gneiss changed over the years.  Who works here?  What are their terms for each little thing?  Who draws the hieroglyphics on the boulders?  And will we be arrested for climbing there, and Kigsblog used against us as evidence?  Leave comments....

Ayasayuk, Fifth Iteration

(above) Raina on pointy summit of 4-story Pea Gravel mound, Ayasayuk, November 3, 2012.  

(above) Same spot 4 days later.  The ice grew surprisingly while I was in Fairbanks for those four days to say goodbye to a friend and mentor.  Though I climbed the ice visible in the picture to a discerning eye, a complete ascent of the entire cliff would require two more trips. On the sunny, gorgeous day I finished the climb, my cameral malfunctioned, so these rather gray images are from earlier trips.  The ice has continued to grow, and by Thanksgiving was blue and bulging. 

      I've down-graded the fall situation from "mangled for six to nine months" to "only minor enmanglement, maybe just a deep bruise," should I lose my purchase on this steeply canted mass of huge boulders frozen in place by semi-vertical frozen dirt.  This down-grade makes me feel better and able to enjoy the spectacular situation:  the slushy, still blue ocean stretching over the curve, and the dull yellow of the frozen dirt cliff against the sky.
        I am leaving the low-angle water ice and kicking a tentative foot into the upper dirt pitches for the first time.  Last week the dirt did not feel good, but the dirt feels good today, not the usual sensation of a cohesive mass ready to solifluct at the slightest weight.  It's Thanksgiving day.  Five above, no wind-- the Norton Sound is congealing with the first skins of sea ice.
     Now, up on the cliff, barely a centimeter of dirt glued onto a solid granite slab. Swings produce sparks.  But the steepness is not sufficient to create real tension;  magically, front points glue onto blops of dirt, good sticks are everywhere in pillows of dirt, the dirt will not landslide today.  Curved plane of blue ocean drops away as rapid progress is made scuttling through surreal steep slabs of falling sand, saturated and sculpted to the perfect consistency for dry tool climbing.
      The rim.  Four hundred feet above the silenced breakers. Chips have been spent in karmic lotteries in order to complete the ascent of this shattered facade, all for nothing:  this wall will never last.  This itereation, too, will be dynamited into the same type of dust which made the frozen climbing of it possible today.

    (above) Upper pitch of ice, Fifth Iteration, Ayasayuk 2012.

  The aquifer is not dead after all.  The seep will have its way. It twists and turns as they blow it this and  that.  Each iteration sees its own seep, but never in the same way twice, so dry in previous years I had the temerity to think it over and done. But pieces of earlier iterations reappear, toes of buttresses remembered from years back, ramps with a particular ice flow, certain distinctive cracks in the granite, all of it overladen with this gooey frozen mashed-potatoes dirt that just makes it the most fun continuous simulated alpine climbing on this fine Thanksgiving morning, until I am going mad trying to piece the whole puzzle together of how this cliff has progressed through such accelerated geological cycles, where it ends and begins. 
    Is there anyone else out there who has followed these iterations?  A foreman, an operator, perhaps? Is there a mastermind behind this cliff, a Daedulus of these iterations?  If so, allapa must not come forward, for he is surely trespassing, but let him salute you, he is one of your biggest fans, besides the same three ravens that always occupy the choice eyries, year after year.  These iterations I have shored against my ruins...

 (above) Lower drip, Fifth Iteration. 

       Clem was gone.  That is how this year's iteration started. 

Take a look at poor Peter

He's lying in pain

Now let's all go 

Run and see

Run and see

Run and see

    So I got off the plane in Nome at mid-day, all death-mongered out on the passing of Clem in Fairbanks, on the subject of which there can in truth be no words to sufficiently convey.  He was Kristine's father, and Raina's grandfather, and my father in law, and a father figure to many, and kigsblog has not the parameters to express the respect I feel.  So when I got back home I headed down the coast posing as a surfer thinking it was good to be alive.  
     Very surprised to find drips of live blue ice that had grown nicely since Raina and I had visited the spot a week previous.  Like a starving mouse seizing crumbs, I was soon soloing.  To be climbing water ice so close to a road:  it was as if the Seward Highway had come to the Seward Peninsula!  A pitch of WI1 was followed by a steepening dirt apron:  I wanted to boulder out onto the steeper dirt for kicks, but my mind saw dump-truck-sized loads of sand and gravel and boulders oozing out under my knees if I stepped up on the steep.  
    So I settled on path of least resistance, and soon gained a full-on road that transects the upper face.  This led to an enormous wall of dirt (sand and gravel would be a more apt term) with one, distinct dribble of water ice coming down.  This I soloed, but the pitch ended abruptly in a ridiculous dirt wall where the spring bubbles out of the face, ridiculous because who would ever want to climb such a slag heap?  With the orange in the West fading fast, I retreated.

(above) View from cliff.  
 Back in town, back stuck in the gluey GLUE CENTRAL of Nome, it nagged me that I had not rimmed out on my initial attempt at this year's Sixth Iteration of Ayasayuk.  I have a little Kigs-rule that states that the yearly ascent of the Ayasayuk quarry face must go from bottom to top with a maximum of vertical, and climb over whatever mediums may present themselves for that given year:  ice, mud, rock, or lameness. 
   I went back with Nate days later, but our workaday, late-afternoon formula for TOWN GLUE ESCAPAGE did not permit an ascent of the entire face;  once again, I had only time for the ice.  The dirt headwall to the rim remained unclimbed. 
    It nagged at me still.  Kigsblog lay constipated until a complete ascent could be made on the all-time Thanksgiving Day.  A person can write, and say they had an epiphany, and were laid bare upon the Earth, and were humbled by the great maker, and were weeping with thankfulness at the beauty and intensity of it all, but that wouldn't be anything at all the same as the actual moment it all happened.  Humility is to be found in the boulder-slathered fields of the quarry because it's all going to come down on you and crush you and bury you and be taken away in huge trucks and be forgotten.

     

(above) Chart from a previous post.  Simply add another slice to the bluff for the latest iteration.  As has been necessarily pointed out in earlier installations, the ordinal numbering of these Iterations is only relative from the author's point of view in space and time;  an older-timer than allapa might employ a different numbering system for the face of this ever-changing cliff. And I am glad to report the "friendly ice-making aquifer" is not dead after all.

Links to earlier posts:  Ayasayuk Iterations,   WI 3 or 4 pillar of Second Iteration,
Ayasuk 2010

Pk. 3653, "Little Singatook"

Grand Singatook (Pk. 3870) on the left, Little Singatook (Pk. 3653) on right. The Little Singatook is WEST of the big one.

      Fog was draining the snowy Kigluaik Range like mucus subsiding through sinus passages out towards the sea.  In the bright breathing sunshine left in the fog's wake,  Lucy and I were heading west on the Teller Road bound for the Grand Singtook, Peak 3870, the Mt. Washington of the Seward Peninsula, where hopefully a basting of ice garnished its walls and buttresses.  Time was crystallized that day, Sunday, 1 Saturday Ago,  there was only NOW, beauty wallowed in fields of itself, a total chi-fest echoed down the hallways of eleven-dimensional time/space.

(above) Northwest aspect of Grand Singatook (Pk. 3870) taken from "Singtairuq" (Pk. 3653), Saturday, October 27, 2012.   In June of 2004, Nils Hahn and I climbed this side of 3870 by traversing down on to the face from a point halfway up the lefthand skyline (after drunken June bivouac on eastern slopes);  we finished in one of the Scottish gullies leading through the steep cliff band there at the top for three pitches. 

      The "Singtook" stands at the western bulwark of the Kigluaik Mountains;  it is the cleaver that cleaves the big weather systems flowing in off the Pacific.  Known to locals as "Thirty-Eight Seventy," it rates only a lump in comparison to Chugach or Alaska Range peaks, but nevertheless is a peak invested with psychic energy. 

      Imagine a family back in the day piled high into an Umiaq making what must have been a very worrying crossing from King Island to the mainland:  

          "Daddy— when is it ever going to end?"  

         "Just concentrate on the Singtook, my son, and reel that mountain in."

        Someone from King Island told me they looked for the outline of not one but two Singtook, a Big Singatook and a Small Singatook, which may explain why 3870 appears as Grand Singatook on the map, semantically implying there are other, lesser Singtut in its vicinity—  not to mention the -k ending on "Singatook," possibly indicating the amazing, inupiaq, "duple" plural ending.    

          The Singtook has a little "mini-me" of a mountain standing at its side, Peak 3653, the "Little Singtook" I once heard it called.  Having ascended the Big Singtook various times by various routes with various people in various years (tallying less than 50 percent success rate on this notorious wearer of storm hats), a climb of the Little Singtook—   Pk. 3653 on the map, the Singtairuq—  was now in order.  So that's where Lucy and I were heading in the vaporous heaven of sunshine last Saturday morning.

    

(above) Teller Road, dissipating fog.

(above) Lucy, 3870.

       Lucy bounded from the truck. Away we went up the gleaming southern slopes of 3870.   The big blue globe of Woolly Lagoon dropped steadily away as Lucy and I made good time over hard frozen snow.  Soon found me donning my creepers to join Lucy's claws, but then taking them off again when granite rock fields intervened, then putting them on once more for good as we sloped onto the icy, frozen upper mountain, where a summit wind sprang up to greet us.

   
 (above) Pk. 3653 from the plateau lying between it and 3870.

    Singtook rose up now on the right as we crossed a plateau.  The recipe of sunshine, mountains, and wilderness had once again conspired to shift the nodal point of my seven chakraed energy body to a slightly different point;  what I experienced in my mind while one-step-at-a-timing it up the mountain was akin to an altered state.  The effect was in the temporal interface:  each moment passed as if through a telescoping lens capable of zooming out to my entire life, and back to the mountain again. 

(above) Summit tors of Pk. 3653.  The tor in the lower picture was judged the higher spire.  Both were ascended by path-of-least-resistance methods with Class 4/5 moves over rimed or snow-covered granite.

(above) Lucy perched on Class 4 summit of Pk. 3653.  SiNtuq in background.  This was actually a rather narrow and exposed summit, for one brief shining moment of real climbing in a life of constant slogging.

     A gift at the summit:  the high point appeared to be at the top of some small tors, meaning the climb might yet transcend the category of mere slog.  Indeed, massive chunks of de-rimed snow were thumping down on top of us, giving the locality a rather Alaska Range feel.  Since the snow bedecking the granite was de-riming, it wasn't much good for pulling on with picks, so I was forced to weave creatively around the tors on ledges, ramps, and blocks, in good Norman Clyde style, in order to access the tippy, tippy tops of both the highest tors.  

       Lucy began to whine and fret, questioning the utility of lingering in such a silly, lifeless place, with the late-October sun sinking fast behind King Island into the molten, burbling sea.

     But once again, human eyes had detected what the dog's keen sense did not—  the gibbous Moon, way over on the opposite end of the Range, already risen over Mt. Osborn.  There would be light aplenty.  Abandon this sense of haste and hurry, though night be falling soon.

(above) Looking east from Pk. 3653 down the spine of the Kigluaiks Range, gibbous moon to the left of Mt. Osborn.

         On the descent, I saw something I will not soon forget. Lucy and I were stumbling along in the gloaming, waiting for the Moon to pop up at our backs so we could see again.  The Moon was taking its time working its way over the horizon of the Singtook.  Meanwhile, the Singtook itself had put on THE MONSTER—  the localized, massive, lenticular cloud which often hangs stuck on the upper half of the mountain or curvi-formed in the air just above.  All mountains have lenticulars, but the Singtook runs a doozy;  it is no place to be.  Many is the expedition that has battled its way up through reasonable winds to the 2500 ft. level on the Singtook, only to encounter there a living, moaning, hurricane-force WIND CLOUD which completely precludes a summit attempt.  
        The Singtook was wearing its cloud, and the Moon rose directly behind it.   White light flared off the mountain, resembling aurora more than smoke.  Beams as bright as a spotlight, then with a sheet thrown over it, then bright again, blackened in the denser patches with sunspots, spasms of light streaming, flashing out, hallucinating.  The Singtook steamed in the night, it was a giant mound of dry ice in a black light Halloween display.  An equal display still smoldered in the west, oranges and reds melting down over Russia. 
       Such beauty gets into you, stays with you for a long time.  I still can't believe what a gorgeous day last Saturday was.  It makes me sad, life can be that beautiful, even for a day.  I must endeavor to serve others well, in exchange for having been given this unbelievable gift.  And thanks to the mountain for offering itself. 

(above) Map of climbing routes around Pk. 3870, Teller Road.
A. Pk. 3653, "Singtairuq"
B. Pk. 3870, Grand Singatook
C. "Eldorado Creek Buttress"

     The red line indicates my route up Pk. 3653 last Saturday.  Along the way you pass near a bluff, "Eldorado Creek Buttress," which sometimes sports a two or three pitch ice climb.  I stumbled upon this bluff lost in a whiteout one time;  since visited with a number of partners over the years, finding a paltry variety of ice conditions. It ain't Valdez— but it does provide relatively quick access from the road to a north-facing cirque in the Kigs near the 2000 ft. level, where ice can sometimes be found during Fall time of year.
      The yellow line indicates the "Solar Sidewalk," the regular route up 3870, which passes by a high lake for swimming in the summer, and which makes a CLASSIC car-to-summit-and-back ski in the late Spring.
      The green line shows approximately where Nils and I climbed the North Face of the Singtook (III, WI2) in June, 2004.

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.