Alaska Range adventure

Hello-hello,
I am back from spending 4 weeks in the Alaska Range with Larry, and about to start work (Now that it‘s finally sunny here, more or less!).

We drove Larry’s gas guzzling, luxurious van north from Denver, where we went through the medical process for Antarctica, then up through Montana and to the Alcan highway. The Canadian Rockies are as spectacular as they look in photos, esp. that time of year. With a stop at Liard Hot Springs, we passed through the Yukon and arrived in Larry’s (adult-life) hometown in SE Alaska about 4 days later. After he gathered up his gear, we continued north, having to go through Fairbanks because the road to Anchorage was washed out. Eventually, after thousands of miles and having seen moose, elk, caribou, a fox, woodland bison, "stone" bighorn, and a bear (Larry also saw a wolf), we arrived at our final destination of Talkeetna, Alaska (“A quaint little climbing town with a drinking problem”). Gas prices in parts of Canada were up to the equivalent of US $3.80 per gallon. Oww.

Soon were boarded a little prop plane and flew onto the Ruth Glacier with well over a hundred pounds of food for four weeks in the field.

The Ruth Gorge is well-known for it’s steep rock and challenging mixed routes on stellar granite surrounded by huge glaciers, especially on the Moose’s Tooth massif. We, however, had no such aspirations for a number of reasons not the least of which was our relative lack of fitness. Rock climbing, especially with Larry healing from 3 broken ribs, in Arapiles didn’t do much for our mountaineering strength despite our efforts to train by carrying packs on steep terrain.

Our goals were quite modest. We simply wanted to check out the area, get some fun routes/peaks in, ski tour, get in a few turns, and otherwise enjoy ourselves.

We basecamped near the airstrip and started with a couple of refresher classes for Larry on skills like single-rescuer crevasse extraction. Given his overall competence and experience, I was not surprised how quickly and thoroughly it became clear that I had nothing to worry about.

Neither of us skis especially well, so skiing downhill roped up provided “opportunities” for “intense concentration” for the second person in particular. Somewhere lies a balance between not catching up and damaging the rope with a ski edge, and not slowing down, which results in hitting the end of the rope and getting launched forward while the first person is suddenly yanked from behind. Good humor.

Not far from camp were some nice slopes that everyone skis unroped (just don’t ski into one of the 2 crevasses!). It was really fun to actually get in some turns; sometimes the snow was excellent, if heavy. Numerous days we’d go out and make up for having missed ski season by being in Antarctica. It was fun to still remember, more or less, how to telemark.

We averaged a couple weather days per week, but that was fine because it meant we could lounge around in the tent, read, eat, and remodel/maintain our snowcamp, which turned out to be a significant project due to the warm temperatures. We had great views, especially to the north, and many times a day listened to gravity interacting with geology and glaciology on the surrounding peaks.

One morning we climbed a straightforward snow peak called Barrille, right near camp. It was a lot of fun and we left early enough to need crampons, thereby avoiding the wallow that other teams suffered by leaving later during this warm weather. On top we enjoyed incredible views down the Ruth Gorge and to Denali, Hunter and Huntington as well as a Gyrfalcon circling high overhead.

On other days we ski toured into the NW Fork of the Ruth Glacier to check out the widely known SW Ridge of Peak 11,300’. It was a great day in terms of weather, skiing, and getting a look at that route, which has largely melted out, and the north side of Huntington with it’s hanging glaciers. We also scoped out our intended route on Mt. Dan Beard.

Starting the day we planned to climb Dan Beard, which we expected to take a couple days, the weather closed in. Instead of the peak climb, we decided to head over to recon the Moose’s Tooth despite the weather (and just to get out of camp). On the glacier, we saw wolverine tracks… very cool! We wondered what the critter was doing as there certainly doesn’t appear to be much to eat, at least not yet, up here.

When we were in the crevasse field approaching the base of the West Ridge we became socked in and the light completely flattened, leaving us unable to see the snow bridges over the crevasses. Then it began to RAIN! We were at 5,100’ and it was only May 12th; this was wrong. We were quite dismayed not only at the rain soaking our ski skins, but how it weakened the bridges over the crevasses that we couldn’t see.

We turned around and headed home to make quesadillas.

Worse than the small amount of snow the system brought was the warm temperatures. At times it didn’t quite freeze at night at our 5,700’ camp, so the climbing conditions were rapidly deteriorating. Not to mention the increase in avalanches.

Soon we made plans to get a flight over to the Denali basecamp on the Kahiltna Glacier to the west, where we hoped the higher elevation would make for colder temperatures and better snow conditions. The Talkeetna air services use that airstrip for their “glacier landing” scenic flights and many other climbers were coming and going, so it was easy enough to get a flight.

It was only 1200’ higher there, but it was still freezing hard at night, so the snow was quite nice for climbing, at least if you got up early enough! We were nearing the solstice, so the days were long, nights were dusky as most.

Kahiltna Basecamp is large encampment, with dozens of tents and caches from many expeditions representing numerous continents, and also a National Park Ranger quonset hut. The basecamp manager Lisa has her own hut and coordinates the airstrip activity.

The basecamp is situated at 7,200’ at the foot of Mt. Hunter, a major Alaskan peak with no easy routes to the summit. Basecamp sits between Hunter (14k‘), Denali (20k‘), and the also massive Mt Foraker (17k’). The “Alaska Factor” dramatically applies here: it’s hard to conceptualize the scale of the terrain (and no trees as reference points). The many kinds of avalanches that frequently release appear to fall in slow motion because they are falling so many thousand feet.

Predictably I saw a number of people I know, mostly guiding, and we also enjoyed seeing some of our Antarctic friends, including 2 guys from my department (and on the Ruth, a friend we met from Arapiles!). The social scene was fun, when we chose to partake!

Our first day on the Kahiltna we skied 4 miles to the most unnoticeable choss heap in the Alaska Range. Here we are, amid the most spectacular peaks in North America, and what do we climb? Some obscure tiny slag pile called Farine. Enough time had passed since my last scree slog that this one was actually fun enough. There was even one spot where we actually had to climb a short section of very steep snow-- yee haa! Plus, it was a good opportunity to see how well crampons work on tele boots on rock, which turned out to be quite well. I didn’t wear my mountaineering boots again on the trip.

One day during unstable weather, we took our approach shoes and scrambled up the west ridge of Mt Frances, a granite, mostly rock peak next to camp. We turned around when we needed a rope, which was also when the weather began closing in and snowing. It was really fun to move on rock, nice alpine rock, and be light and fast. A number of alpine plants were in bloom, most notably, Purple Mountain Saxifrage. It was a treat to see plants (why does that rarity remind me of Antarctica?).

We had planned to climb Mt. Crosson, but closer examination revealed that the rock was much like that of Farine. Having had our fill of scree/talus, Larry renamed Crosson “Chossen“, and we instead turned our attention to an appealing peak a mile from camp.

The elongated south ridge of Denali ends as a peak at 12,200’, which consists of some of that nice granite, but is mostly steep snow and glacier travel to the summit. It looked like fun.

At our 3am wake-up time, it was foggy, but at 5am, the weather had cleared so we packed up for our late start. We moved efficiently through what we thought was the crux: a long section of steep snow not far above the saddle. We were surprised to find that the steeper rock on the ridge was not passable on the side that was out of sight from camp as we’d hoped. Our pace slowed quite a lot as we picked our way through the steep, loose rock and weak snow around to the side of the ridge.

By the time we got to the easier upper slopes, we wondered whether we might end up having to bivy! We certainly hadn’t packed for it, but could make it work if need be. The last couple thousand feet took awhile as it involved exhausting post-holing, finishing up on weak snow on steeper ice to the west summit. Clouds surrounded us so we didn’t see anything, and our wet items froze in the chill. The main summit was another half mile away of low angle post-holing and only a few hundred feet higher. It was getting late, so we contented ourselves with the west summit. After brewing up and drinking over a liter of water each, we headed down, arriving back at our skis after midnight.

The ski home was surreal in the dim light and fog, blue-grey crevasses silently sliding past, giving no sense of their distance from us; we had no depth perception. I could only see our trail by the holes my ski poles had left on the way up. The steeper slope made for its own adventure, making turns in the faint light, unroped on this hill we knew well.

The climb had taken us 19 hours! Funny to think how much less time 5000’ can take on easier terrain, especially without the deep snow wallow.

We finished up our expedition with a ski tour up the Southeast Fork of the Kahiltna, under the famous and beautiful Moonflower Buttress of Hunter. We checked out a route on the Kahiltna Queen, adding that to our long list of potential climbs for a future expedition to the Alaska Range.

Before driving to Anchorage in Larry’s van, we had dinner with a college roommate of mine, Diane, and her family. We were joined by another friend who works with both Diane in Denali NP and Larry on the ice. ‘Twas a fun way to end a really nice month together.