Anchorage Writing Group

cold

2006-12-06T11:16:00.000-09:00

We climb out of the truck, sore and stiff from the 4 hour drive from Anchorage. It's after midnight and there are no clouds to obscure the sky. Sometimes the Milky Way is just a suggestion, a smudge of lighter sky. Out here it's a gash of light across the night. There is no moon and the stars throw shadows of their own. It is cold, and we add layers quickly: pac boots, gloves and liners, down pants, balaclavas. The snow squeaks underfoot, and our breath fogs in the bright lights of our headlamps. Between the foggy exhaust from the idling truck and our breath, it is hard to see what we are doing as we unload the snow machines from the trailer. They are cold-soaked and we struggle with balky starters, try to get them to fire. Simple two-stroke motors are dependable under almost any condition, and this struggle to start them is a good indication of how low the temperatures are. We don't have a thermometer to know for sure, but quickly numbing fingers and burning cheeks are telling us to get moving. We stuff packs and coolers (to keep stuff warm) into the sleds and hitch them to the finally idling snow machines. Zooming through the woods on these things is like trying to run in the dark with just a flashlight, the headlights pointing all over the place as we pound over bumps and ruts in the frozen trail. The air rushing past freezes our cheeks, and draws a line of solid tears running back from the corners of each eye. Runny noses and beards form their own unique formations; the less said about snotscicles the better. Thankfully, the ride is short, just a few miles and we are quickly at the cabin. Chet breathes fire into the wood stove, and we add twigs and tinder till the chimney draws hard and huffs with the rising heat.

There is a thermometer nailed to an aspen outside, the standard mercury tube mounted on rusty tin plating, a freebie from the local hardware store. Park's Place - Happiness is 50 below in Glenallen, Alaska. Tonight it reads 36 below. Knowing how cold it is makes it seem more real. We stand in the cabin and shuffle our feet, keeping the blood moving. We measure the rise of the temperature inside against how much of our breath we can still see. We force-feed dry spruce to the stove, and gradually the room warms from the top down. It's late, early morning actually, but the icy ride through the woods killed the torpor that the long drive had settled over us. We are wide awake, and start rummaging for snacks and spirits. Tommy rummages in the cupboard - whiskey and Tang (good enough for astronauts - good enough for us) is the official Copper Center Cocktail. But the whiskey is actually frozen, or at least the consistency of a wicked slushee. Cocktails will have to wait. Everything in the cabin is bitterly cold, and I set mugs on the stove to warm so our drinks won't freeze as soon as we pour them. I uncork a bottle of pinot I kept warm in my coat on the ride in. Tommy cuts sausage, slices cheese and bread.

All heat in the cabin is hovering near the ceiling. The floor is frozen where varmints have eaten away the insulation underneath the cabin, so we pile extra blankets and padding to sleep on. It is very close to being tomorrow, and more wine won't help that. Chet stokes the fire one last time. I awake at 9 am to the sounds of the cabin creaking as it cools. The stove is nearly out but a few smaller logs and a wide open flue get it going again. The thermometer outside reads -30. I set the kettle on for coffee and gratefully climb back into my down bag. With hot coffee and the cabin warm again, we crack eggs over the skillet and fry up far too much bacon and caribou sausage for just three people. At least enough to make my cardiologist start perusing Porsche catalogs. We'll be outside for the most of the day, and in these temperatures the more fuel you have in you the better. Before layering up and heading out, we stoke the stove up high and turn the damper low. It should burn all day and give us a warm place to come back to. I pile the food and drink high on a shelf, the warmest part of the cabin, so that it won't freeze.

The snow machine clutch plates squeal and protest at the cold, but eventually we coax them into gear and head down the trail. The sun only rises about 25 degrees this time of year and it's right in our eyes, making it hard to see. Chet has two cabins fairly close together, a fitted-log structure with a bad foundation that we are here to shore up, and an insulated plywood cabin that we stay in. We work hard, but things move along slowly. By six that evening it is well past dark and the temperature has plummeted. Just about anything edible or drinkable we could have brought with us to get through the day would be frozen solid, and we are left thirsty, hungry, cold.

Back at the other cabin we coax the coals in the stove back to life with a few handfuls of dry grass and a bit of bacon grease. The cabin is well insulated and has held some heat after the stove burned low. We down lots of water and start back in on the sausage, cutting chunks of cheese and bread to heat over the fire. Chet slices potatoes, chops onions and garlic, adds a little olive oil and sets the skillet on the stove. I cork a bottle of wine, and we toast the thermometer and damn the cold. Chet just returned from an elk hunt in Montana, and has brought some choice cuts along. He cracks a pile of whole peppercorns with an empty wine bottle and coats the elk cutlets. Throwing them in a hot skillet to sear for a minute or so on a side throws up a spicy cloud that stings the eye. A comment is made about the chef's ability to make us cry, even before we eat his food. Removing the meat from the skillet, the cook deglazes the pan with a bit of whiskey, adds red wine to reduce. After a few minutes the sauce has thickened, and Chet adds in a bit of cream and butter (ok, enough to make the cardiologist still happier). The fresh elk is cooked rare and sliced thin, piled over crispy potatoes, ladled with the pan sauce. No one makes any more fun of the cook.

After dinner we sit fat and happy, lounging and just enjoying the heat in the small cabin. Tommy quotes Robert (Bobby) Service, some 15-year old scotch appears. The fire in the stove hisses and pops as burning chunks of black spruce give up the last of their moisture. We talk and read until the oil lamps along the walls start to flicker and burn low. It is time for sleep, and I walk outside one last time. The thermometer is hard to read in the fog of my breath. I breathe in and hold it, peer close in the dim light of my headlamp. It is 39 degrees below zero. I head back inside, to fire and friends.

Were you ever out in the Great Alone, when the moon was awful clear,
And the icy mountains hemmed you in with a silence you most could hear;
With only the howl of a timber wolf, and you camped there in the cold...

News from AlaskaWriters.com

2005-12-16T14:56:00.000-09:00

Sharing the Bounty
Enriching Our Writing Community

Greetings!
The first guest moderator of our new online discussion area is Anchorage novelist and AlaskaWriters member Andromeda Romano-Lax. Read on to learn why she thinks the forum could be the best thing since sliced, um, goat.

Recently, my friend Cindy asked us to stop by her little house on West Dimond Boulevard, where she loaded our arms with an enormous bag of wild mountain-goat meat. A hunter had given it to her. She'd spent hours washing it, scraping it, picking out hairs. Then she'd passed it along to us -- with some homegrown apples, tomatoes, sage and a family recipe for Mexican birria. I was bowled over by the bounty.

"That's how we old-timers do it," she said, she said, slowly and deliberately enough to that I knew I was supposed to be taking notes. "You have extra, and you share it. Everybody used to do that."

My annual Kenai River dipnet trip yielded only three salmon, and you would pity my garden. Words are what I have to share. Which leads me to wonder, as I move into my second decade as an Alaska writer: What could we do for one another, if we tried?

We're lucky. In Alaska, there are few enough of us that we can get to know each other personally. And though we do compete with one another, we compete far more with Outsiders. (There are 200,000 authors out there publishing books each year, and
many more writing articles).

What do any of us need? Is it advice, networking, recognition, simple respect? A well-timed e-mail or phone call, passing on the name of a recommended book or a friendly editor... What does each of us have to offer?

I don't have the answers. In the next room, the goat is marinating in a chile and garlic paste. Our online community is just beginning to take shape. I do hope others will join the conversation, easier to do thanks to the discussion board now
launched at Alaskawriters.com -- a gift being shared with all of us who are willing to take it into our lives, season it, and make it our own.

I’ll be helping to moderate the forum, and I invite you to join in. Maybe you can start by sharing your comments on this question: What is the most helpful thing another writer, reader, or editor did for you?

-- Andromeda Romano-Lax

Meeting Rescheduled

2005-12-14T20:04:00.000-09:00

Due to weather (good snow) this week's meeting has been rescheduled by a quorum (hat tip to Jon) decision to next Wednesday, December 21 at 6:30. The current plan is for everyone to bring a "good book with a li'l somthin'-somthin' written in the front about why the book is great..." Cafe Felix @ Metro is the place.

Meet meet meet

2005-11-30T20:07:00.000-09:00

Hey all! We're meeting Dec 13th at 6:30 pm at Cafe Felix. Be there!

Cold and Lonely

2005-11-16T16:28:00.000-09:00

Here is my revision after incorporating your comments. Removing the last section works much better I think. I tried to fix all the verb tense changes. Let me know what you think.

“Whew, it’s cold,” thinks Jeff reaching in the back of the car for his coat. He knew it’d be cold from yesterday’s forecast. Single digit highs all over southcentral. That’s what he wants. What he needs. “Won’t be a crowd today”, he says pulling out his gear. “Cold and lonely.”

It is early. Early enough for the shadows to still stretch across the valley floor. As he puts his skins on his boards the sun just begins to push the shadows back from the road in the direction he is heading. He doesn’t mind the early start. The sunlight will catch him soon enough. He wanted to avoid any traffic that would be accumulating on the Seward Highway as the day wore on. Jeff had come to avoid traffic like a delinquent employee avoiding his boss. Traffic annoys him. Not because it slows him down the way the RV convoys do in the summer, but because of how he feels sandwiched between two vehicles with others ripping past going the opposite direction. He gets claustrophobic and then he gets angry. Jeff now looks at passing and oncoming cars and trucks with deep powerful contempt. He is fully aware of the irony, knowing the anger and impatience in him is exactly what he despises in the other drivers, but he can’t help it. Not yet.

The snow sits lightly on the ground and in the spruce branches around him. He loves the contrast of the deep green trees and the virgin white snow. He told Jenny, on one of their early dates, he planned to wear a dark green tux at his wedding to match this contrast. He couldn’t tell, at the time, if she knew it was a joke or not. A couple years later, she let him, after a brief discussion, wear a green vest underneath his black suit.

Blown aloft by a soft breeze, several dozen flakes glitter in the suns rays that had just crested the ridge in front of him. Cold snow is light, airy. His boards compress it quickly into the already well established track. Although Jeff is obviously the first to be here since the last storm, he can see a shallow gutter in the fresh snow leading up and away from him.

The breeze that lifts the lightest and freshest flakes from the tree branches isn’t strong enough to disturb the quiet. This quiet reminds Jeff something is missing. Normally, excited voices would be flowing back and forth around him, over him, and out of him. He rarely goes on a backcountry riding trip alone. Jeff’s buddies love fresh powder on a sunny day as much as anybody. Even this cold won’t keep them at home. He knows, inevitably, he will run into them. It’s no secret today will be good. The storm of the last couple days put 8 new inches on top of a stable base, and as of this morning, the winds had stayed calm, a demeanor due to change tomorrow. Today is the day. Even if they didn’t come to this run, he’ll surely see them, or Ryan’s Jeep, at the end of the day. If they are standing around drinking a beer after their run, he’ll have to stop by. But by then he’ll want to see them. Just not now. Not this morning.

But still, he does miss them. They all had been great to him. Much better than he even expected. He thought of the contrast of a group of guys that make a game out of finding each others weak spots and exploiting them for their own amusement, but that could also be supportive and genuinely kind to each other when the occasion calls for it. Like when they all helped Conrad build that extra room for his soon to move in mother-in-law, yet all the while never letting him forget his nose kept getting in their way. Not that it is grotesque or ugly, but, as Randy says, “its big enough to smell rotting salmon in Oregon”.

Jeff’s pace picks up as he falls into a steady rhythm. He already has ten days in, so he is well conditioned for the climb. An inner motivation takes full advantage of this conditioning, propelling him faster than he normally moves. He must move fast to stay warm, but there is something else. Some deep energy brewing in his gut and finding it’s way to his legs.

About half way up he stops to drink some water. This gives him the chance to look around at the surrounding mountains. Sun glints off tiny snow crystals all around him. A swirl of snow takes flight off a nearby peak. Thoughts of Jenny rush through him. She loved these days just as much as he and his friends. She would have struggled with the single digit cold, but his encouraging words of “bright sun, light winds, 8 inches” could have convinced her to come out anyway. He imagined her completely bundled in Puffy Daddy (borrowing the name from Sean Coombs for her red down coat), a balacalava, and every layer of Capilene underwear she owned. Not a single piece of skin would be exposed, even sunglasses would cover her bright brown eyes, and yet her excitement for the decent that awaited them would radiate out with a degree of warmth to shame the rays of the sun.

As he pulls his pack on, a loud whumpf, whumpf, whumpf, breaks the quiet. A pair of ravens cross the slope behind him. He turns to see them flying past gracefully, with determination, their wing beats perfectly synchronized like the strides of a figure skating pair. Jenny didn’t like ravens. She bore a deep resentment towards them. Several years ago she watched one systematically pluck Stellars Jay chicks out of a nest she had been watching since the beginning of the summer. When she saw it get the first one she chased it away with a broom. It flew off with the chick in its mouth. She stood outside for an hour underneath the nest in case it returned. Two days later it came back for the second chick. Again Jenny saw it grab and go. For several weeks after she’d discreetly “flip the bird at the bird” whenever she saw a raven. She knew ravens had to eat, she just seemed to take that particular incident personally as if the raven knew she was partial to those jay chicks. Jeff watched the pair fly off to the north with a painful twinge of envy. He misses her much more than he misses his friends.

The long summit ridge follows a short steep section that got him sweating. On top of the ridge he pulls his hat off to release some heat and takes a long drink of his water. Some ice had sprouted inside the nalgene despite the insulated pouch that covers it. He shakes the bottle hard to break up the crystals, but it has little effect, so he sucks a couple into his mouth and crunches them up with his teeth. The sun is at it’s apex. From here Jeff notices the highway below him. He watches a black pick-up drive past heading south. It looks to him like it’s going well over the speed limit. ”Typical”, he says out loud. Jeff doesn’t much care for trucks. He once wrote a letter to the editor of the paper calling for a mandatory governor on any truck over a half ton to limit their speed to 65, and argued that anybody who owns one should have a CDL and a business license to drive it. His friends still give him shit for that. Since that letter was published he swore, anytime a pick-up or SUV passed him, they knew he was the author of that letter. Somehow they recognized his car, their car. The first car Jenny and he ever bought together. He watches the black truck disappear around the corner and fantasizes that a trooper would meet it coming the other way. He raises his gloved hand and flips the bird at the truck, now out of site, before skinning the rest of the way up.

The ridge, more gradual in grade then the shoulder he just came up, allows him to travel even faster than he had. His legs fatigue slightly, but push forward, faster. His arms drive the poles to help him along. His torso leans into the mountain. His mind dwells on the truck. Not the truck that just drove past, but the white Chevy Silverado. The white Chevy that passed him against a double yellow line only a few months ago. Passed him and then cut back to avoid the oncoming traffic. Cut back too soon. By the time Jeff reaches the top, sweat runs down from under his cap, his breath labors, and the cold air tickles the back of his throat as it wheezes in and out.

The breeze blows stronger and colder at the top, so Jeff works quickly to peel off his skins and mate the two halves of his splitboard. He drinks a little more water and takes a leak with his back to the wind, looking, again, down at the road. Pulling up his hood he sits down to load the skins in his pack and strap into the bindings. His goggles fall into the snow and he instinctively reaches into his left pocket for a cloth to wipe them off. The pink bandanna he pulls out startles him when he sees it. Expecting the blue one he used to carry, he forgot he replaced it at the beginning of the season. This is the first time all year he needed it. Immediately a picture of it around Jenny’s neck last spring comes to his mind. He rubs it in his gloved fingers. He stares at it as if it is going to talk to him. As if it is a magic talking cloth that can grant his wishes, answer his questions, ease his pain. His grip tightens around it in the hope he can squeeze the words from it. A tingle wells up in his sinuses and the muscles around his eyes flex. Anger grips his chest as the bandanna in his left hand and the goggles in his right begin to shake, to pulse up and down. He starts rocking slightly back and forth. His lips sneer back as his breathing grows audible. He looks like a boxer waiting in his corner for the bell to begin round one. Then suddenly, as if that bell went off, he lets out a yell that sets off down the slope, runs out across the valley, and climbs up the opposite ridge. “AAAAAAAAAAAAA.” The yell releases from every cell in his body. “Fuck you!” he rages. “Fuck you!”. He stands. “Fuck you road rage!” Both hands raise with two numb middle fingers shaking violently at the Seward Highway below him. “Fuck you and your fucking Chevy truck”. He stares blindly, now. “Fuck you,” quieter this time. “Fuck you,” barely more than a whisper. His eyes shut, his face contorts in pain. Tears follow the sweat down his cheek. Now just his chest shakes, as grief fills the space left by the anger. For the first time in months there is room for the grief.

The crying that racked him after Jenny’s death came from guilt and disbelief. The real grief, the grief that invaded his soul, the grief that will now be a part of him like the fingers on his hands, only now comes out. As the wind curls around him, he lets that grief flow out in the form of loud sobs and moans. Here, on top of the mountain in the biting cold of a clear Alaskan winter day, there is no reason to hold back. Now there are no thoughts of the truck, no thoughts of the accident, no thoughts of what he could have done different, or even why it happened. There are only thoughts of Jenny and how much he misses her.

After several minutes Jeff slumps back into the snow and stares up in the sky. He is tired. He lays there for a couple more minutes wishing he could just drift off into a long sleep, but the cold creeps inside of him and his body begins to shiver. A few flakes, moved by the wind, float down on top of him. He watches them land on his chest, and then blews them off with a long exhale. “Well, the ride down should be good,” he says sitting back up.

Meeting

2005-10-26T21:06:00.000-08:00

Looks like our next meeting is planned for November 16th at 6:30 pm. We'll meet at Cafe Felix again 'cause their soup is so good.

The Severed Leg

2005-10-26T21:02:00.000-08:00

I gotta go pick up my car. I drank too much last night and couldn’t drive home. This means that I now have to bike across town to fetch my vehicle from behind the VFW way out in Dimond. The alcohol does need to be worked out of my system. Not to mention all that country Karaoke from last night. I plan to pay further penance for my singing and imbibing by going for a run in the mountains, even though the weather doesn’t look very good. A blanket of fog is hanging over the peaks and it looks cold. It’s cold down here, it must be awful up there.

I do want to see if there is ice on the north face of O’Malley peak. I’ve heard about this long alpine ice route, and given the snow conditions and warm/cold weather cycles, the Jackie Purcell in me says that it may be an early season climbing possibility.

The road up to Glen Alps has been graveled. This is nice for me as I haven’t yet changed over to studded tires for the winter. A red truck blocks half the road with their flashers blinking. A line of cars waits to get around it. The truck’s occupants are gawking across the road at something in the ditch. I look over and see two moose on the opposite side. It’s a cow and a younger moose. I maneuver around the truck and check my rear-view mirror to see the family now getting out of the truck to get a closer look at the moose. When will people learn that you just ought not to bother the moose?

At the trail-head, I see a few frustrated looking snowboarders. There is only about an inch of snow on the ground up here. Perhaps they have found a drift somewhere to shred. A pair across from me are changing into their street shoes. The very young looking driver lights a cigar and leans on the side of his green F-150, just above a “Murder is Justice” sticker. I suddenly don’t feel like asking them about the snow conditions.

I strap on my gear; trail shoes, tights, fleece shirt, hat, gloves, GU, iPod, keys, water, and a headlamp. I’m off. The trail starts out with a slightly packed layer of snow. Skiing on it would be a bad idea for your ski bases, but it would work. When it opens up to the Powerline pass trail, the sun has melted large patches of snow on the main trail. I take the Middle Fork cutoff towards O’Malley and cruise right past a paper sign listing the details of a recent bear sighting. Like in a cartoon, two steps later, I screech to a stop and jog backwards to read the sign. You never know what it might say:
“Bear right in front of you, don’t go down this trail”.
Actually, it says something like:
“10/21 – Bear sighted at moose kill site. Other side of river bench about 200 yards away from bridge on Middle Fork trail.”
I continue down the hill to a clear spot and stop to scan the other side of the riverbank. Nothing. I continue on.

I consider for a moment going up and over the football field instead of around the West (front) of the mountain. I decide to continue on with the original plan and turn left. The trail is narrow and there has been traffic on it. The slope is gently descending, making for a faster run.
Around the front of the mountain, I see two hikers in the distance. The sun has come out now and the surroundings are beautiful. The Southern cliffs of Wolverine are red in front of me. The little boulders and rocks on the trail have little snow caps. It all looks like a Bev Doolittle painting. I almost expect one of those hidden Pintos to pop out of the scene. Suddenly, my foot punches through a semi frozen marshy section into wet mud. Great, my little Bev Doolittle painting is shattered by my wet and muddy foot.

I catch up with the hikers after about twenty minutes. They are coming down the Williwaw Lakes trail towards me. Their energetic dog rushes ahead to greet me. The couple look to be Scandinavian. They say hello, but nothing more. I assume they’d made it back to the lakes.

I follow the couple’s tracks up the valley towards the lakes. I soon find their turn-around spot. The hiking boots and dog tracks are replaced by obvious bear tracks! The tracks are very clear as the snow is fresh as of last night. I put my gloved hands down into an impression of the bear’s front paw. It is larger than the both of my hands side-by-side. The rear paws are the same width, but much longer. There seem to be tracks going in both directions, so it is unclear where the bear might be.

I decide to go on anyway, but I turn my iPod off just in case. The scrunch-scrunch-scrunch of the fresh snow replaces the music in my ears. I start my “Hey Bear!” shouts as I make my way up the valley.

The bear tracks disappear at one point. The bear got tired of following the trail, or saw something more interesting I guess. I’m relieved. I’m also pleased to be the only one making tracks in the snow. It always amazes me that here in Anchorage, I can get a true wilderness experience just a short drive from home. I suppose others are watching the World Series today, or they were dissuaded from hiking by the clouds and recent snowfall. Actually, the weather is taking a turn for the worse now. It’s starting to snow and the wind has picked up, against me. The bear tracks have started up again. I’m thinking about turning around.

I click my iPod back on and Bad Religion comes blaring out. I find courage to fight the wind and keep going.

On higher ground I can see further ahead, and I see no bear. I kick up the pace and head for the lakes. The drifts are getting higher, up to my knee in places. At the lake, I wonder if the ice is thick enough to walk on yet. Inching out and thinking light thoughts, I test the ice. It seems to be holding, so I walk on it close to the bank. It’s easier than rock-hopping the perimeter and risking a broken ankle. Finally able to take my concentration off the trail, I pull out a GU and start sucking it down. Then there is a loud crack and my foot punches through the ice, soaking me up to my calf. I “fly” over to the nearest rock and think that maybe now I should turn around.

Looking up, I see that I’m now at the North face of the mountain. My watch says it’s taken over two hours to get here. I block the wind from my face and scan the cliffs above. I see snow and rocks, but no ice. I failed to look at a guidebook before my adventure, so I also don’t really know where to look. Oops. I keep going east. I might as well since I’m here. I notice a group of moose across the valley. They’ve already noticed me and are checking me out. I’m now beyond the lake and I see that there is a gully around the corner. Maybe that is it.

Icicles hang from a blocky stone ahead. This must be it! I head towards the center of the valley for a better view. A clear ice line is visible from here. I’ve found it! And it looks climbable! Success! I hoop and holler. A cow moose across the way starts heading up the hill for safety from this crazy screamer. A bull just stares at me. I take the hint and decide to head back.

Mostly downhill, the trail moves quickly beneath me. I’m out of bear-track zone in no time. Feeling good, I round the front of the mountain and start the climb back to the south side of the peak. The uphill halts me instantly. I struggle to make it up. A rest break, a GU, and some Lords of Acid helps me through this part.

Now almost back to the bridge, I’m stopped again. There is a severed leg on the trail! Uh, this was definitely not here on the way in. I think I’d have noticed it. The moose’s leg has the hoof and fur completely intact almost up to where the knee was. I can see the white bone and red blood at the end opposite the hoof. I get chills as I look around for the bear. Nothing. I kill the music player and proceed forward slowly. Where is he? Where is he?

Then I have a thought. It was probably a dog. Duh! A dog probably discovered the moose kill and the leg is just the right size for a dog to bring back to a disgusted owner. “Look what I found!” the dog thought. I’m gonna bring this back to my people! Why else would it be in the trail? Convincing myself of this explanation, I get back to running.

Back on the main Powerline pass trail, I start to see people again. I’m barley able to say “Hi”. It’s just a little ways back to the car. Must keep going. At the gate I stop my watch. Three hours, fifteen minutes. Not too bad. Now to call the Calvary and get this line climbed!

Next Meeting

2005-10-12T19:37:00.000-08:00

Next meeting is October 26th at 6:30 pm.
We'll meet at Cafe Felix again and discuss Matt's story.

Let's Meet!

2005-09-18T17:06:00.000-08:00

Hello all,
Anne suggested that we meet on Wednesday, September 28th at 6:30 pm at Kaladi's on Brayton. Ok, I put the where there. If that's not where you'd like let us know. I thought I'd put this posting here in case the emails haven't reached all interested parties. See you there!
-Jonathan

Talkeetna 2005

2005-08-24T23:03:00.000-08:00

“To immerse oneself in the power, velocity, vastness, and madness [of water] affords one of the noblest lessons of nature” – John Ruskin

It was the darkness that I first noticed. Not the cold nor the lack of air. Darkness. Unexpected darkness. Unsettling darkness. Yet, since I had been in this situation many times before, I knew it was best to stay calm. Struggling expends energy. Eventually I’d emerge and when I did I would need to act fast. But the darkness held me longer than it should. I actually had time to think about the peculiar lack of light, to guess where I might be, and to anticipate where I might come up. Then, just as the lack of air started to trigger my fight or flee instincts, I came up underneath the boat. A quick push off the bottom, actually the top, brought me out. Right next to Kevin.

It was just after noon on another hot Alaska day. A sunny cloud free day. “The new Alaska,” Kevin called it. “But, shhhh, don’t tell anyone,” he warned in typical selfish Alaskan fashion. Moments before only our life jackets and sunscreen covered our torsos. One of only a handful of days I’ve gone without a shirt in Alaska. But the second day since our plane landed at Yellowjacket airstrip to begin a three day raft trip on the Talkeetna River. We learned later that the temperatures on these two days reached over 80 degress, Not unheard of, but highly unusual for the middle of August.

The Talkeetna is fed by several glaciers. The most significant of which is it’s source and shares it’s name. Hot weather, such as we’ve had the past several days, means melting glaciers and high water. On this day the river ran at about 9,500 cfs. Which I think of as 9,500 basketballs passing a given point every second. This isn’t huge for the Talkeetna. In mid June it’s flow peaked at 22,500 and stayed above 10,000 cfs through mid July. But the last and only other time I was here, nine years ago, also in mid August, the river flowed at about 7,500. Then aqua marine could describe the color of the water. On this trip, silty, brown and opaque would be accurate. In other words: dark.

We camped the first night at Prairie Creek, as I remembered the first rapid, Entrance Exam, being just downstream of it’s confluence. Entrance Exam reveals itself with an unmistakable river wide horizon line. The forested banks suddenly press together into two vertical walls and the drone of the flowing water pitches to a loud roar. It appears suddenly behind a tight left bend in the river. A scouting trail on the right bank comes down to a small eddie just above the drop. There is time to catch it, but you have to be paying attention and get over quickly. Missing the eddie could put you into a steep hole off the right bank. After that stopping is unlikely until after the next rapid, a big Class IV called Toilet Bowl.

I thought Entrance Exam was only a short float from camp and began to anticipate it’s approach from the first S-turn we hit after shoving off. I told both Kevin, who rode in the front of my 13 foot self bailer, and Cameron, who followed behind in his cat-a-raft, what I remembered, but reminded them I had only been here once before, several years ago. I was wrong in my estimation. Bend after bend turned into another Class I section of water. As we stretched our gaze around each corner, careful to stay in the slow inside current, our anxiety seemed to multiply in intensity. The anticipation weighed on us like the humidity that blankets a mid-west city on a hot summer day. I even pulled over before one blind corner when the sound of the river grew noticeably louder. A quick look showed a Class III wave train that I didn’t remember from the last trip. I apologized to Kevin and Cam for the false start. They were nice about it. I think nervousness tempered their ridicule.

As we tried to commit that first rapid with the fun waves to memory, a couple more turns brought us to where deep shadows reached out from the left bank and the river pinch over a distinct horizon line.

Nine years ago Entrance Exam was a relatively tame ledge drop with a grabby hole on the right and a defined tongue on the left that flowed into a pillowy wave. Just behind, a wall juts out from the left bank, but the river calms down and flows through a tight canyon with a hard right turn, then it opens up onto Toilet Bowl. I ran it then in a small cat-a-raft with no difficulty. Now the tongue dropped into a wave-hole that stretched the width of the current and encompassed the right side hole. The line still started on the left and ran right. Kevin caught me on video telling Cameron I planned to drive over the right side of the “V” formed by the tongue with a right angle. The idea being to split the wall on the left and the steep hole on the right. He also got me explaining to Cameron where I would try to eddy out in case he flipped. Oh the irony!

After a quick scout we made sure every thing was lashed down, donned drysuits and hydroskin, and shoved off with Kevin and I in front. To hit the line I hoped for required boat speed faster than the current. Relatively easy in a kayak or paddle raft. But an oar rig is sort of like a tractor trailer. They can move with speed and power, it just takes a little while for them to get there. Pulling out of that eddy with a back ferry to get to the left side of the river is not the way to gain speed. I was on line and I had the angle, but without the speed I just set myself up for submission to the will of the river. That wave-hole rolled us up tighter than a fine Cuban Cigar.

I knew as we dropped over the edge of the tongue we didn’t have enough speed. I also know well two of the basic rules of running whitewater: when hitting river features (waves, holes, eddylines, even rocks sometimes) hit them straight on, and always be ready to alter your plan. Instead of adapting to the situation, straightening out, I held on to my intentions, hoping for the best. As a result Kevin and I were swimming glacial melt above a Class IV rapid almost 40 miles from our take-out.

Coming up Kevin asked me if I was alright. Adrenalin, cold, and urgency ripped through me, but I wasn’t hurt. I had to be quick to get the boat flipped back over before Toilet Bowl. I grabbed the floor stitching, pulled myself up, and attached my flip line just as we came through the corner of the short canyon. Never having flipped an oar boat before, I’ve been concerned my 138 pounds is enough to get one righted again. The corner of my eye caught sight of Cameron behind me, thankfully, upright and in control. I pulled the boat to about 45 degrees to the water when I slipped and fell back in. I climbed back up just as the boat started into Toilet Bowl.

The main current in Toilet Bowl flows right into a large hole backed by a similarly large table top pourover rock. The line we planned through this mess of pourovers, holes, and exposed rocks, skimmed the left of the center hole and cut back to the middle of the river just behind the table top rock. The cut back is required to miss a jumble of rocks jutting out from the right bank. The current lined up my upside down boat perfectly for a flushing down the big hole. Not wanting to be back under the boat for the impending swirly, I put off another attempt at flipping it over and readied myself for a quick abandon ship jump. For reasons I’ll not even try to understand, the raft changed course at the last moment and followed our intended line through the rest of the rapid.

With adrenalin revving down and a clear stretch of Class I water in front of me I flipped the boat back over easily. As expected my oars were gone, but as I looked back up stream for Kevin and Cameron, both of whom I last saw as I readied myself for Toilet Bowl, I could see, about ten yards behind me, both oars bobbing up and down, heading right to me like puppies running to their master. At this point the river is probably 50 yards across and still moving fast. For those oars to be right behind me after the whitewater we just came through is another gift of the river I’ll not understand. In amazement I pulled out my spare oar and started sculling and calling like an idiot, “hold on boys, I’m coming, I’ll get you, that’s it, over here…”.

We dried out and recuperated on a sun soaked sand bar with a few beers and bagel sandwiches. Kevin ended up making a huge swim across the current above Toilet Bowl and crawled out just before going through it. Cameron ran a clean line and picked him up at the bottom. Despite the beer and feeling grateful for coming out injury free with all the gear we started with, Kevin and I couldn’t relax. As it’s name implies, Entrance Exam, is just the beginning of a 12+ mile long canyon of continuous Class III and IV whitewater. It is so continuous the section beginning just down stream of Toilet Bowl through the rest of the canyon is considered one rapid: Sluice Box. Our unabated anxiety made itself evident when a black bear stepped out of the woods downstream from us, apparently looking for a spot to cross. Kevin and I didn’t give him a chance to even test the water temperature. We jumped all over him, “Hey bear. Ha. Get out of here.” The bear ran off as if a monster jumped out of a closet to spook him. Apparently a couple of wet wild eyed paddlers can be intimidating.

Still a full day and a half from the takeout we didn’t have much choice but to get right back in the saddle. Thankfully we made it through Sluice Box without any further mishaps. Just a lot of active gut-gripping rowing, dodging, and purposeful straightening out. “You did seem to be all over the river,” Cameron told us, laughing over a few more beers. These beers though came with relaxation and the warm happy feeling of success. We were through the Pearly Gates, the name given to the spot were the steep sided canyon, and the whitewater, abruptly ends and opens up to a broad river valley.

As we got back on the water for the stress free float to our next campsite, I took special note of the bright warm sun washing over me. I whiped the water spots off my sunglasses and looked around, slowly. The light danced on the water, shined on the trees, and illuminated the mountains all around us. I breathed it in deeply and swore I could feel it glow inside my lungs. In sharp contrast to my thoughts and feelings of a few hours earlier I knew that my swim got me to this point of appreciation. Light is a wonderful thing, but then, so is darkness.

Sans Ami

2005-07-26T23:15:00.000-08:00

James Sweeney
February 9, 1987

Garvey’s horizontal, I’ve never seen him climb anything like this. From the back of the cave to it’s lip, is six-feet. His right ice axe is wedged in a crack on the underside of the roof and he’s pulling out on it. He swings his left axe above the roof shattering the two-inch thick ice that cracks and spider webs for a foot, but the tool holds. His crampon clad feet scratch against edges of the rock underneath and parallel to the roof. Then, cool as a cucumber Garv sticks his right ice axe beside the other one. The ice splinters and the two spider webs join then dissipate into emerald green slabs of vertical ice that thicken as the rock steepens. The sky is made of grey and white low clouds and the rock is black as the raven swirling in the middle of the canyon. In a moment he pulls from this horizontal position up and over the roof. Garvey’s exposed. We have climbed a lot of ice together but on this one, I’m along for the ride. I lean right out and look at him. He’s just a few feet away and if he fell, would pound the ledge supporting me. It’s been a slim winter for ice and this is this least ice I’ve seen him climb. He gives me a wide-eyed look and asks, “What should I do?”

This is my first ice-climbing trip to Valdez. Steve Garvey and I both live in Girdwood Alaska. I am a professional ski patroller and he is a laid off slope worker recently divorced and broke with a big mortgage. I have a big bag of Thunder-fuck and that’s probably why he chose me to go with him. We didn’t get out of his house until 10:30 at night and we drove over here on long straight a ways between dark shapes of big mountains while a green, blue and red aurora glimmered on a raven black sky. The thermometer at The Hub in Glenallen reads forty-two below. This is my first real winter trip in Alaska. On top of Thompson Pass, Steve lets me out and points me west in the faint moonlight that’s wisping through vaporous clouds and I ski the “Road Run” in the dark. Ten minutes later I emerge on the road where Steve waits in his Ford Bronco. Back in Girdwood, I ski and climb everyday, but the run is still tough by headlamp. Just a few miles later the landscape becomes steep and narrow. Garvey says, “Keystone Canyon.” Then the gorge widens and we stop across from two frozen waterfalls that are so big that they’re visible in the dark. Pissing one-handed, Garvey points left saying, “Bridal veil.” Pointing to the right hand falls he says, “Green steps.”

Steve has arranged for us to stay in the basement of two local doctors, Andy Embick and Cathy Todd. As we head down Main Street towards their house at the far end of town, thirty-foot piles of snow loiter in the empty lots around town and the snow-pack is as deep as I’ve seen in my fifteen years of ski bumming. At 4:45 am we get to Andy’s and haul our sleeping bags into a large cold basement. Ice axes, kayaks, backpacks and ski gear hang from the walls and ceiling. A few mattresses lie stacked against the wall, I grab one, drag it into the corner and crash.

Garvey’s a sick sergeant and before I’m even out of my sack he tells me, “Sweeney go out get the gear from the car.”

“Kiss my ass.” I tell him. He moves about as slow as anyone I ever seen. Upstairs, Andy wears an Abe Lincoln beard and is an interesting one. He snatches the bottle of scotch from my clutching hands that I procured before leaving Anchorage. I never got a drop of that bottle, though I drank much of his scotch in later years and he is always good to me. He says Garvey is alumni and on my next trip I will be too. Chuck Comstock, enlists us to help him shovel snow off a roof. Chuck lives in a bedroom built in the corner (Chuck’s suite) of the doctor’s basement. We shovel for what seem like an hour and make 50 bucks each.

Right before dark we head to Keystone Canyon and I climb “Piece of Shit” an ice climb that’s right next to the road. It lives up to its billing and works me.

A raven and magpie soar between me and where Garvey is pointing. It’s a big drip on the top of the Keystone Wall a 1200 foot bastion of dark veri-glassed rock a hundred yards from the road. It looks insane and it’s never been climbed before. On the drive back to town I‘m completely enchanted by the mountains. I’ve never seen so many gorgeous snow covered peaks.

Of course, that night along with Comstock we get hammered drinking beers, tequila with Tabasco and burn an inordinate amount of weed. Comstock is a work of art. I can’t tell who was stranger, Andy or Chuck.

The next morning, we sleep in. By the time we get to the canyon, it’s after eleven. I hump a big backpack full of ropes up Arc in Cleft; an easy ice-climb that leads us to this frozen drip that Garvey identified yesterday. I really don’t know what he wants to climb. It can’t be that detached pillar because it is thirty feet from the wall and looks like it would come down with the lightest touch.

We torch haystacks of weed before Garvey launches off. The last thing Steve tells me after he blows the hit out in my face is, Schweenie, “I want a loose rope and a tight lip.”

The first pitch is difficult but I follow it easy. Steve is sporting a shit-eating grin as I climb into this cave that he’s belaying from. He says, “Mugs would love this.” Mugs, is a famous mountain climber we knew. Smoke contrails underneath the roof and then vanishes into the drabness while Garvey tokes as much of my weed as he can until the pure folly of everything forces him to get after the climbing. He points to a crack underneath the roof and says, “I wish I had a couple friends.”

Steve’s totally exposed on a ten-foot wide two-inch thick sheet of emerald green ice that spreads before him. The climbing looks really hard to me so I tell him, “I don’t know what you should do but, I’d jump.” Before I can say anything more supportive Garvey starts moving and he’s not messing around. After twenty-five feet of mechanical, athletic and precise like climbing Steve stops and places an ice screw. Besides ice screws he is carrying pitons and nuts.

Ice showers down like a curtain over the lip of the cave obscuring the grey bleak day. The cavern is six-foot high and twelve long. I am well protected and run in place wiggling toes and fingers. A bald eagle roars past like a jet fighter. I am 1000-feet off the deck and can see a couple cars in the parking lot that I imagine are watching Steve. Neil Young’s “Comes a Time” goes a round in my head. This is a long belay.

I lean out and look up at Garvey. He’s heading right for the two roofs with very little ice dripping from them. The higher he climbs the more ice falls past the lip of the cave, so I don’t lean out to look.

The rope hasn’t moved for a while and then it goes tight. He has fallen. After a moment I hear Garvey yelling, “Sweeney! Sweeney!” I lean out and look up.

“Garv!” I yell. “Are you ok?”

He is hanging from the end of his rope and says, “ Yeah! It’s so steep I didn’t hit anything. Sweeney, can you see my tool?” Sure enough, thirty or forty feet above Steve an ice tool lays stuck above a roof.

.“No problem, Sweeney. Check it out.” Smoke wafts from where he hangs there. He is burning a bowl.

“Don’t smoke all my weed. You fucker” I yell. I really don’t care but I don’t like him belaying me when he’s smoking pot and I sure don’t like being high on this hard of a climb, though I will admit, I smoked a bit of weed today.

After about five minutes I hear him yell, “Climbing.” He’s carrying a spare tool. He climbs these roofs by chimneying between the rock and ice up to the underside of the roof. Where the ice thickens at the lip of roof he swings out onto the ice pillars. There are two of these roofs thirty feet apart. This is the longest belay I’ve had in my five years of climbing. The ice shower stops and I take a peek. 120 feet above Garvey is traversing left across a series of vertical barber poles of ice that take him to a smear. This leads him behind the pillar that hangs precariously thirty feet from the wall and that leads him to the top of the canyon. It looks like he has it in the bag and it’s almost completely dark when he calls out, “On belay.”

I barely get over the roof and I can’t see anything. I give up after about twenty-feet and blame it on the darkness. He lowers me back to the cave where I wait while he rappels. I’m happy not to climb.

Back at Andy’s that night he and Chuck Comstock interview us for future use in Andy’s ice climbing guidebook. The climb is a big deal and Garvey names it Sans Ami, which is French for without friends. I say, “There’s nothing like it in the world.”

John Krackauer and James Balog are in Valdez doing an ice-climbing story for Smithsonian magazine. They want us to climb Wowie Zowie, which is the second hardest climb in Valdez, and they will films us by helicopter.

Wowie Zowie has a lot more ice than Sans Ami and it totally blows my mind. The helicopter bothers me. The ice is like Swiss cheese. I put my arm inside the climb all the way to my shoulder. They want me to give Garvey my red Patagonia coat and I’m just in a pile coat. Right at the top of the climb, I get screed by spindrift for a few minutes before it lightens up and I can climb up to the ledge where Garvey’s shoving a pipe in my mouth. I have to rappel down past fifty-foot daggers of ice that turn my stomach. We do get some good powder turns from the base of the climb down to the flats. It’s a long ski right to Embick’s house and I’m pretty much shell-shocked from all the hard ice and Garvey-mania. I just want to go home.

We take a long sauna. There is not one inch of fat on my body. I am actually quiet for once. We drink a lot of beer.

Later we are lying on our mattresses in Andy’s basement and I ask Steve, “ Garvey, I’m your friend, why did you call it Sans Ami?”

Committed on Suicide

2005-07-24T19:41:00.000-08:00

Perhaps it’s a cry for help. I don’t know what this fascination is.
All I know is that it hurts. It hurts real bad.

It started last Thursday with an introduction to mountain running. I was sore for four days afterward. Then I was looking at running-related websites when I found a local one called Thursday Night Epic Runs. They’ve planned a trip to South Suicide Peak. Intrigued, I thought I’d meet up with the group and find out what they were all about.

Driving down the Seward Highway, I’m re-thinking my clothing choices. I’m wearing a tank top and shorts. It was sunny and warm in Anchorage, but now I’m almost to Indian and it’s cloudy and spitting. I’m running late due to a traffic accident in town. There’s no way I can drive back now and change. I also didn’t email the organizer because I didn’t want to commit to anything. I just wanted to show up and see. If I turn around, I probably won’t come back.

I arrive at the Falls Creek trailhead in time to see a few cars and no people. I figure that since I’m here, I’ll see how far I get. I might as well get a workout in, right? I hop out and start up the hill, thinking that I might even catch up. This thought evaporates after about ten steps into the hill. It’s steep right off the start and isn’t letting up. I slow down considerably. My goal changes from “catching up” to “I hope no one sees me so I can turn around soon and leave undetected”.

The trail maintains its grade and I make my way up through thick brush; grasses, devil’s club, trees, and berry bushes. I start my, “hey bear, bear” chanting between breaths. I used to feel self-conscious about this, afraid what someone would think coming the other way. Now that I’ve spent a while in Alaska, I don’t care what they think. Bears scare me more than my fear of being perceived as foolish. I don’t have any firearms or pepper-spray. I just have my voice to keep me safe. I ponder this as I keep going.

Thankfully, the trail starts to clear up a little as I get higher. I check my altimeter watch and see that I’ve climbed almost 2,000 feet! The trail just keeps going up from here. In the distance I think I see some people making their way up another hill in the distance. I think I might be able to catch them. I increase the pace.

I’m now in a beautiful alpine valley. Behind me, I see a small section of Cook Inlet. I scan the green hillsides on both sides of the trail for bears. I don’t see any. Either they’re aren’t any there, or they’re hidden up ahead. There are rocky peaks above, sprinkled with snow patches that probably won’t melt before winter comes again. I’ve lost sight of those other runners, but I’ve made it to the bottom of the hill I’d seen them on. It’s steep and I have to slow down to very deliberate walking to get up the slippery trail.

Panting at the top of the hill, I look around for the people. I’m at a junction where the valley splits into two. To my dismay, directly ahead I count nine mountain goats looking back at me. I’d been following goats! I’m ready to turn back when I see something move off in the distance to my left. Either it’s another goat in red shorts, or I’ve found people. I take off into that valley in pursuit.

As I’m now on a much more forgiving grade, I can go a bit faster. The goat in red shorts is with another goat in black tights. They are climbing another hill, which allows me to get closer. I’m not close enough that they’ve noticed me yet, but close enough that if I were to scream, they might turn around to look. Maybe.

More uphill. I slow down. The other two runners have disappeared again behind rocks. I’m felling kind of sick. Dizzy, low blood sugar. I take a water break and almost finish the bottle I’d brought. I open one of my two GU packets and suck it down. Maybe I’ll make it to the top –if it’s close. I see another figure up higher, bounding up the steep ridge. I can tell that I will NOT be catching up with that person.

Soon I’m scrambling up steeper rocks that require me to use my hands. It’s a very steep drop off the other side. This kind of exposure doesn’t usually bother me, but a cold wind has started up and I’m freezing. Probably due to the fact that I’m not wearing hardly any clothing. I think to myself that if I ever do catch up with the others, I’ll introduce myself as Hypothermia.

Nearing the top, someone on their way down is upon me before I even notice.

“Hi track star!” the man says. He’s older, wearing a beat up windbreaker and even older turquoise tights with holes in them. Or are they sweat pants?

“Hi”, I say. I manage to get something out about arriving late and trying to catch up.

“We’ll rendezvous later.” he says and dashes off down the mountain.

“Am I close!?” I call out behind him.

“Almost there!” He replies without turning around.

At the top, I meet the man in red shorts and the woman in black tights. They’re named Ann and Alissio. They look tired.

“Did you see Rob?” She asks.

“I think so, he was moving pretty fast and said that we’ll meet up later.”

I explain the late thing and how I wanted to check out this group that I’m now realizing comprises only three people. “Rob will be happy to have another victim” Alissio says.

I take a second to enjoy the view from this 5,005 foot peak that I’ve never climbed before. I can see down to Rabbit Lake, a place I’ve camped at several times and wondered how difficult it would be to climb South Suicide and if I’d need ropes. I’d be able to see further if these clouds weren’t moving in so quickly. I’m shivering. We start down almost immediately.

Ann and Alissio are fast. I don’t want to look bad in front of my new friends. I also don’t want to be left behind if I fall and hurt myself. So I try to stay in front of them. I negotiate a boulder field containing rocks that range in dimension from the size of my head to the size of a refrigerator. Several move when I step on them. Thoughts of a broken ankle this far out scare me into slowing down. I look back to see Ann and Alissio closing in fast.

Rob is nowhere to be seen. Alissio says that he can see him sitting on a rock below. I can’t. Maybe I’m not looking far enough out. Indeed I’m not. A good ten minutes later, I can make him out sitting atop an enormous erratic. I catch up about five minutes after that. Seconds after the group consolidates and rocks are removed from shoes, Rob is off again. I take off too, I want Rob to scare the bears away for me, but not be so far ahead that they come back by the time I get there. It’s selfish I know, but he is apparently going to run as fast as he wants to up here. I’m going to take advantage of that.

My brilliant plan fails very shortly after its inception. Rob is ridiculously fast. Sure, it’s downhill, but it’s still technical and some of the trail is obscured by brush. I learn the hard way as my right food misses the next step and slides off the trail. I do the high speed splits and hit the ground. My groin hurts. Not only am I in pain, but it’s an embarrassing injury. I’ll think of something else to call it later. Right now, I need to keep going. I abandon the idea of staying somewhere in the vicinity of Rob and slow down to remain upright.

All is going well until I make it into the trees and my left foot gets caught under an exposed root. I’m down again, this time I tumble a bit and my left hand connects with a rock. Ow. I get up with a slightly bloody hand, knee, and a jammed middle finger. At least I don’t have to think of something to explain the groin injury anymore.

Then I get lost. On the descent, I’m suddenly on a trail that seems too steep. The soft dirt has no footprints in it. It doesn’t register until I’m at the creek. Washout. I’d followed an overflow that forms in spring when the snow is melting and the water level is higher. Now I have to go up again. I pick my way gingerly through the devil’s club until I regain the trail. Still focusing on my feet, I don’t notice when I repeat the mistake again. Ok, the goal now is to get down before everyone leaves.

Finally on the right trail, I check my altimeter to see that I’m at 300 feet. Getting close. The trail widens at this point and I can increase the pace for a strong finish in case anyone is watching.

At the parking lot Rob is waiting. He’s already changed out of his running clothes into a t-shirt, shorts and flip-flops. I get a thumbs up as I stop the clock. 3 hrs, 12 mins. The altimeter reads –10 feet. These things aren’t perfect. The parking lot is actually about 10 feet above sea level. The inlet is just across the highway. I’d feel like jumping in if it weren’t so cold.

To my surprise, Ann and Alissio are not here yet. Now that he’s standing still, I can get a good look at him. He’s tall and slender, with a head full of white hair. He must have a single digit body fat index as I can see every muscle that isn’t under clothing. Rob and I talk about the run as I stretch. He does these runs almost every Thursday all year round. He points to each peak that we can see and talks about the runs he’s done on them. He even talks about variations that involve extreme bushwhacking to the top of a peak and then taking the trail back. Pointing at the small community of Hope, he talks about the Resurrection 50, the fifty-mile race that he’s organized for many years. Rob is clearly insane.

Ann and Alissio arrive. They too, got lost. They’d also run into a bee’s nest and were stung several times each. I’m counting my blessings. Rob bids farewell and takes off to buy a bottle of wine. Ann and Alissio stay for a bit to talk. Ann is probably in her late thirties, also svelte and has long blonde-grey hair braided to keep it under control. Alissio seems to be from South America and speaks with an accent. He’s super-cut as well, with his massive delts pushing out of his raggedy shirt. I’m glad now that I did arrive late. If I had seen this crew before the run, I may not have done it. They may have even given me a quick up and down and asked me to leave.

They’re both very nice and tell me stories of Rob’s runs that they’d been apart of. Everything they mention supports my earlier diagnosis of him. I take my leave. I need to get hydrated, clean up my wounds, and get to bed. I’ve got work tomorrow and several days of painful recovery to look forward to. Then there is always next Thursday to think about. . .

Mountain Running 101

2005-07-16T19:26:00.000-08:00

I’ve always wanted to be a mountain runner. Who wouldn’t want the lean physique and energy level that these runners seem to have? Of course being a runner of any sort means wearing those shorts. This is a much bigger roadblock than the running magazines seem to realize. They should have articles on how to make the transition into those airy, flappy, and immodest “shorts”. In my personal experience, I had to gain some maturity and develop a sense of “well everyone else looks silly in them too” before I could wear what my grandmother calls the peek-a-boo shorts. As you get older, you seem to worry less about what others think of you. At least that’s my theory behind why older men wear black socks with shorts and those ridiculous sunglasses that fit over their regular glasses. I’m not there yet, but I think this is where I start.

So, I slip on my running shorts, and tell myself that the tan lines aren’t that funny looking as I drive up to the Glen Alps parking lot to go for a little run. I was thinking about fifteen minutes out and then turning around. I haven’t been up here since the snow melted and wanted to see what was up. The day is sunny and warm. A clear blue sky and sun to even out the difference on my paper white and almost-beige legs. I park, stretch, and gulp down the 1/2 liter of water I brought. I recognize the guy in the parked truck across from me. I go over to say hi to Todd. I haven’t seen him in probably a year or so.

“You here to run with us?”

“Uh, I don’t think so. Who are you running with?”

“Gil is supposed to be here any minute. We’re going to run up O’Malley, over the ball field, descend over by Williwaw lakes and then come back around the front of O’Malley to return to the parking lot. It’s only like seven miles or so. Takes about an hour and a half. Wanna go?”

I’ve heard about Todd and Gil’s runs. Todd has run the Matanuska Peak Challenge, the Crow Pass Marathon, the Lost Lake run, and eschews Mount Marathon because “it’s so short”. Gil is his faithful training partner that has filled me in on the details of the brutal runs they do.

“Maybe I’ll give it a try. I guess I could always turn back if it’s too hard.”

“Once you get to Black Lake, you’ll wanna go ahead and finish because getting back up to the ball field would be hell.”

We wait a bit for Gil and talk about some of the other runs he’s done while I lather on sunscreen. Who knows how long this will take me. I suddenly get a good idea.

“How about I get a head start? I think I’ll need it. You go ahead and wait for Gil and I’ll start now.”

Todd agrees and I’m off. I don’t know how to pace or anything. The longest run I’ve done was 6 miles on flat ground. All I know is that I need to get a good lead because they’ll catch up to me in no time once they start. I feel like the electronic rabbit at the dog track.

It’s downhill to the food bridge and things are going well. It all starts going downhill, er, uphill I mean when I have to ascend the pass between Little O’Malley and False O’Malley. The running lasts only a short time before I’m reduced to walking. My goal is to not rest on the uphill. So far, so good. I pass some sweaty hikers who give me a funny look when they see that I’m not carrying anything. Indeed, as I’d only counted on a short run, I didn’t bring any water. I notice that one of them has a pistol for bear protection. He seems to be memorizing my face so he can match it up with the one that will run in the obituaries later. I move on.

At the top, I scoot by some people having a picnic in the snow patch. I resist the urge to beg for water. I thought the ball field would be easier. It is, but I’m wasted. I alternate between running and briskly walking. There are a lot of rocks on the trail and I don’t want to roll an ankle at this point. “Breathe through your nose, keep the heartbeat out of stratosphere”, I tell myself. I look back for the first time to see if they’re about to catch up with me. No one in sight. I just keep going, knowing it won’t last.

The descent to the lakes is a scree mess. I negotiate it very slowly as this is probably going to be the easiest place to get hurt. I scree surf down a particularly lose patch, and make it to a more solid trail below. I pass the second lake and think about water.

Another downhill, then on past some people camping. I don’t wait for their looks as I feel my lead dwindling. Finally, flat ground! Unfortunately, I can’t see it. The bushes grow over the trail in a way that occasionally blocks the view below my ankles. I can’t exactly run by feel because of the rocks. I slow down during this point and start to fantasize about food. Everything hurts. My muscles are starting to cramp. Even my pecs hurt. Maybe I’ll find a GU packet on the trail. I come upon a stream and make a decision. Falling to a push-up, I press my face into the flow. I’m so thirsty that Giardia is definitely the lesser issue here. I need water now just to make it back alive.

The light is in my eyes and seeing is difficult. I stub my toe on a rock and fly forward. As my face nears the ground, I start to run out of it. Defying physics, I don’t hit the ground and keep going. A fall out here alone would be disastrous. How would I make it back? I push the thought out of my mind and keep going.

The valley is long, but at least it’s mostly downhill. The bushes turn into spruce patches and now I alternate my panting with “Hey Bear Bear!” At the top of a knoll I hear a noise behind me and whip around to see Todd effortlessly catching up to me. I say hi and stop to stretch a little.

“Cramping up?”

I nod as he hands me a bottle.

“Want some?”

I take a swallow of the sports drink. It’s sweet and tastes like pure energy.

“That tastes so good!”

It probably doesn’t, but right now it’s heavenly. I find out that they started running about a half hour after I did. We start going again and soon a figure in white catches up.

“I heard you were on this trail” says Gil with a smile.

Now we’re all running together. I find out that we aren’t as close to the finish as I’d hoped. Darn. The ground turns swampy and sucks my feet in.

“Careful here, we’ve almost lost shoes in this” says Gil.

Mud splashes everywhere, but the dirty water feels good against the backs of my burning legs. We start to make our way left and have more hills to deal with. They begin to put a lead on me as I walk the hills they’re jogging up. I can’t even fake it anymore. My body has had it. They hoot and holler encouragement as I try to catch up. After a while, we are on the very last bit back to the parking lot. I’m not fantasizing about food anymore, I just want to puke, or die.

At the end we’re greeted by Gil’s girlfriend and three-year-old son. I don’t say much as they talk about how the run went. I look at my time. Two hours and thirty-five minutes. Geez, I’ve never run that long before. Gil has a fancy shoe pod thing that connects to his watch and give altitude and distance measurements. I ask how far we’ve run. “Let’s see. About 10.1 miles”, Gil says. I glare at Todd. “Oops”, he shrugs.

As I stumble to my car, I thank them for the intro to mountain running. On the way home, I pick up two liters of Gatorade and some doughnuts (they just looked so good!). Finally in the shower, I take inventory:
Sore calves, really sore quads, sore knees, sore back, sore biceps (just from throwing my arms for so long!), and I find that the sore pectoral I thought I had was really where the singlet was rubbing across my nipple. My nipple was bleeding!

I was happy to have finally done a long mountain run. It was harder than I’d thought, but still very rewarding. I loved going so far with so little and relying on myself to get back. I’ve learned that mountain running is as hard as it looks. I might need some more training before I sign up for the Mat Peak Challenge. Let’s just start with seeing if I can walk tomorrow.

Summer Writing Course

2005-05-14T10:32:00.000-08:00

Bill Sherwonit is teaching a writing workshop this summer: adventure-travel writing, July 29-31, at Alaska Tent and Breakfast. For more details you can go to www.tentandbreakfastalaska.com, or to his website, www.billsherwonit.alaskawriters.com.

Ham & Eggs

2005-05-08T22:57:00.000-08:00

Hey All,
I know this is kind of a long post. Jared, let me know if you need me to adjust it. I just got back from the Moose's Tooth and wrote this up. I'm hoping to get it in the press, but I need some feedback. I still need to add a bit of historical stuff, but the main stuff is here. Please give it a read-through and let me know what you think.
Thanks,
Jonathan

Moose’s Tooth
4/29/05 – 5/6/05
Climbers –
Aidan Loehr
Matt Hage
Jonathan Hughes

I’m pissed. I’m standing dejectedly in thigh-deep snow with my shoulder against the cold blue vertical face of a glacial serac. The clear blue sky above taunts me as I try to think of excuses to get my partners to continue.

“I’m only 30 feet from being able to see around the serac.” I plea into the radio hanging from my neck.

“Naw, It’s just taking too long. We need to head down.” Aidan replies.

“It would make me feel a lot better if I could see around the ice.” I spit back -I’m desperate now.

Inside I know that he and Matt are right. It’s almost 8:00 pm. It’s too late. Resting my helmet against the ice, I say nothing. The disappointment is boiling inside me, but I know I haven’t a leg to stand on in this argument. I’m too angry to talk.

“At this rate we’d be on the summit at midnight and have to get back though all of this in the dark.” Crackles the radio.

He must know what condition I’m in and is trying to talk some sense into me. I relent.

“Fine. I’ll clean this pitch on the way back.” I transmit quickly so not to betray my uncontrolled state of emotion to the rest of the team.

I follow the rope back to the last ice screw and start to pull it out of the ice. “I need to get better about turning back,” I tell myself. “This is how people die, you idiot!” This alpinism stuff is tough. I know it isn’t supposed to be all or nothing, but it hurts right now.

When I’m back to the col, Matt gives me an empathetic look. “I’m sorry man, I wanted it too. It’s just too late.” I’m still too angry to engage the topic. I force myself to focus on getting down. We identify the area that will be our first rappel anchor. I start to drill the V-thread, two angled holes in the ice that meet at the back. I push a length of cord into one hole and fish it out of the other with a sharp hook. The process is repeated to provide a back-up V-thread in case the first one fails. “It’s a long way down,” I think before belaying the others over to me.

****

The Ham & Eggs couloir is one of the most direct and safest lines to the summit of the Moose’s Tooth. It was first climbed in 1975 by Blah, Blah, and Jon Krakauer. It has become popular in recent years due to increased accessibility. In the past, climbers would land on the Ruth glacier and then ferry loads up 2,800 feet of ice fall to the Root Canal glacier at the base of the route. Paul Roderick pioneered landing ski equipped planes on the Root Canal itself. Climbers can now fly practically to the bottom of the climb, take the afternoon to acclimatize, and start up early the next morning. At the moment, Talkeetna Air Taxi is the only outfit transporting to the Root Canal. Dave &&& and Paul Roderick are the two pilots currently doing the flying to this ice shelf. It’s a tight little spot to land a plane, and you wouldn’t want an amateur at the controls.

More will be added to this section.

****

On our visit in late April/early May this year, we found the route to be in thin conditions. The first ice pitch didn’t appear to have much ice on it through the binoculars. The ice crux looked passable from where we were standing, but the constriction pitch above that didn’t appear to have ice in it at all. Above that, well, we’d just have to see.

Aidan turned out to be our secret weapon on the route. He tackled the first rock pitch with gusto. It was unnerving to be using my crampons on bare rock, but it seemed to be working. I led the third pitch, at the belay we discovered that my borrowed radio had an encryption feature that made it impossible to understand. So we resorted to screaming at each other until we traded it for a working one. The ice crux was next. Aidan gave it a go. Then another. Then another. Water was running down his arms and legs. He kicked off most of the ice that was left. He gave up. Then he decided to give it one more go. In a show of brilliant climbing, Aidan managed to get his ice axes up and over the lip and into the good ice above. His crampons scratched up the now bare rock to follow. We could continue.

Matt and I decided to let the rock star continue, as he seemed to be so enthusiastic about it. That, and it would take a lot of time to reconfigure the ropes to switch leads. A long snowfield took us to the ice crux. There was a good ice screw placement near the bottom, but that was all. Aidan did it in one go, with a slight rest in the middle. When it was my turn to follow, I had to lean back into the air to swing my axes into the overhanging ice above me.

“You . . . are . . .a . . .great . . .climber . . .dude!” I panted as he belayed me up.

We’d hoped that it would get easier from there. It didn’t. We followed the recommendation of one of the departing climbers at the constriction pitch. “Go left and climb the rock, man”. He’d advised. We found ourselves on terrain rivaling the steep routes found at the local rock gym. We screeched and scratched our way over it, constantly looking at our crampon points as we balanced them on little nubbins of rock. Occasionally, they’d pop off suddenly. The steel would scrape against the granite and produce a curious burnt smell. It was a smell that I was quickly associating with fear.

This pitch deposited us at the bottom of more ice. The altitude was yielding better ice the higher we went. It was more solid, took the bite of our tools nicely, and wasn’t running with water. It was however, running with spindrift. Spindrift is a collection of fine snow particles that obscure your view and get into any of the weaknesses in your Gore-Tex“ shell. As Aidan traversed out under the falls, he disappeared from view in spindrift that flowed from above as if produced by a fog machine at a dance club. He just laughed and kept climbing.

Some of the gifts from above weren’t as easily laughed off. A Japanese team of two had passed us much earlier and was sending down chunks of ice and rock as they climbed. As the debris tumbled down the face, they gathered speed. “Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzsssssssst,” was the noise we heard. This was new to me. I’d had lots of ice kicked down on me while ice climbing during the winter. Of course that ice was hardly ever more than 200 feet above me. Here, the heights were much greater and the speeds much faster. It reminded me of the time I’d inadvertently camped at the wrong end of an informal shooting range that someone decided to use early the next morning. Bullets flew over me as I’d tried to meld with the ground. This felt exactly like that experience. I often couldn’t see what was coming at me, but the noise made me instinctively push my nose against the wall. Our helmets took a beating a few times. Matt took a hit to the thigh and I took one to the hand, but we kept going.

On the upper pitches, the climbing angle backed off. We enjoyed fine alpine blue ice in an environment with slower moving missiles. The sun warmed our backs and we were almost to the top of the climb. Matt and I simul-led the last snow/rock pitch to the col. We could see the peaks to the north, Explorer’s Peak, Mount Dan Beard, and the enormous east buttress of Denali. After some discussion, we decided to try and go for the summit. The GPS said that it was only 2/10ths of a mile away and 300 feet up. The path was blocked by a huge blue serac of ice. I grabbed the snow pickets and ice screws, and set off to find a way around it.

****

The rappels are going slowly. We want to be safe. Rappelling is one of the most dangerous parts of a climb. The climber must trust his weight to a single point of gear. The route was described as having obvious rappel anchors in place. We assumed this to mean bolts, which are extremely solid rock anchors. We were wrong. Each anchor is a hodgepodge of rusted pitons, nuts, or some other combination all tied together with old nylon webbing. We’re spending huge amounts of time adding more gear to the mix, and replacing the old UV-weakened webbing with new cord. It’s worth the time to feel safe, but the daylight is fading fast.

Out come the headlamps. We only descended six rappels before the darkness hit. Now we hope our batteries hold out for the next ten. Our pace slows. In the dark, you can’t see the tangles in the rope until you’re on them. Each piece of the anchor system must be inspected more closely with the glow of the lamp. Our crampons create brilliant shows of light as they spark against the rock on decent. We’ve been up almost 20 hours now and the fatigue is setting in. “Ok, nice and slow. Let’s be careful.” I say for the nth time.

It’s 2:00 am and we’re still making our way down. We took a short break at the only ledge on the route, which was about midway. I’d furiously consumed my peanut butter and jelly bagel sandwich –the last of my food. Matt couldn’t manage to stomach his salami sandwich and implored help from Aidan. We were all out of water. Matt and I are tied to a rock waiting for Aidan to set up the anchor below. He’ll radio up when it is time for Matt to go. Then I’ll pull the backup gear and follow. We’ll pull the ropes and repeat the whole thing.

On the glacier below, I can see lights. Headlamps huddle over flaring gas stoves, as they are primed to make an early breakfast for the climbers wishing to head up. My tired mind has trouble processing all the flashing lights. “Dude,” I say to Matt. “The cops are here.”

****

The sun is coming up back at camp. It’s 5:00 am and we’re now fiddling with the stoves to make hot drinks. Trail mix and pretzels are crunched to assuage the calorie needs that our bodies scream. We’d taken 25 hours round trip. The water refuses to boil quickly. I’m standing in the dug out kitchen talking to Aidan when I suddenly fall over. I’d fallen asleep standing up! The hot drinks finally come and I take my hot chocolate into the tent. I fall asleep immediately and dump the brown liquid all over my down jacket. I don’t care.

After sleeping for most of the next day, we finally have the opportunity to think about the climb. It had been a stout endeavor for sure. The climbing was exciting and challenging. We were pleased to have managed it without any serious injuries. We named ourselves “Team Stamina” as we’d taken much longer than a fast two-man team would have taken. But we did it as a team. I learned to trust my climbing partners that much more. My anger had vanished. I was proud of what we’d accomplished. There is no shame in coming back alive. I’m learning to be a better alpinist.

Me, Myself, and Peak Three

2005-04-21T20:22:00.000-08:00

I first thought about riding Peak Three the first time I saw it. Shortly after moving to the west side of the Chugach in the summer of 2002 my friends Dan and Mark took me there on a morning hike and told me it was one of their favorite springtime after work ski trips. A backcountry snowboarding trip accessible after a nine hour work day? It sounded to good to be true. Our rapid accent from Canyon Road to the top made me a believer. From that day on, each time I saw the top of Peak Three peering over the left shoulder of Flattop, I told myself that I must get up there and ride that sucker.

Little did I realize that these were but a few of the conversations I would have with myself over Peak Three.

Unfortunately a forty minute drive home to Girdwood the past two winters killed my motivation for any after-work riding on this side of Chugach State Park. A change of address this summer, however, rejuvenated my aspirations. Peak Three is now framed in my bedroom window. The past few months I have watched, with great anticipation, a steady accumulation of both sunlight and snow over it’s western face. Each clear evening I’ve noticed the change from deep dark blue to purple, pink, yellow and most recently bright white.

Only a busy schedule of work and classes has kept me away thus far. One night a couple weeks ago I watched two figures cut across the face ¾ of the way up, just as the Alpenglow started settling down around them. At seeing the two black spots slowly make their way up I let out an audible whine of jealousy. I followed that with silent resolution. My day would come soon.

It did. Last Saturday a list of chores kept me home, away from the normal weekend backcountry routes at Turnagain and Hatcher’s Passes. The day started out with commitments to many to give me any thoughts of riding, but sunny skies and warm temperatures kept diverting my attention to the mountains. As the list of to-do’s dwindled a window of opportunity materialized. I dropped off the trash, got the oil changed in Marci’s car, bought and changed her air filter, cleaned the garage, and cleaned out my own car all before the afternoon really got going. Other items remained on the list but they lacked urgency. Besides, as I said, it was a warm sunny Alaskan spring day. It would be sin to waste such a gift. I corrected my priorities and headed to Peak Three as it shone like a freeride beacon in a sea of procrastination.

It took me less than twenty minutes to gear up and drive to the base of the run. Cars and trucks filled both the lower and upper parking areas. Heavy traffic left a wide compacted trail up through the brush. Could this be the downside of urban backcountry riding? Could there be a downside to any type of riding? Can urban and backcountry both be adverbs in the same sentence? Not very serious questions, but questions that an urban backcountry rider asks himself nonetheless.

The crowd did give me some reassurance. Most skiers and riders know it is risky to go into the backcountry alone. Avalanche danger, unpredictable Alaskan weather, and the possibility of being hurt a long way from help must be considered. The lack of any recent significant weather events besides a consistent freeze thaw cycle made me confident of a solid snowpack. That and all the cars in the parking area convinced me to keep going. “Besides self,” I said, “I’ve got you to keep me from doing anything stupid”. Self suggested that talking to him might be thought of as stupid.

Just as I cleared the brush, shouts of glee greeted me from farther up. I looked to see a teleskier making smooth arcing turns through the nozzle at the base of the west face. His friend behind him traversed over to an open meadow on the south flank of Peak Two to get in another half dozen turns. He answered his friend’s comments with his own loud giggles. Nothing makes a man act more like a teen girl at a Brittney Spears concert than sweet untracked turns. I knew the feeling they expressed. The thought of it split my lips in a smile and quickened my pace.

My eagerness, mixed with the warmth of the late afternoon sun, made me sweat like a priest at a Brittney Spears concert. Normally I try to keep the sweating to a minimum. Even with high tech underwear, significant perspiration can easily chill my slight 140lb body once I stop climbing. At the top of backcountry runs I like to stop for a long while, catch my breath, and have a look around. The 360 degree views in such alpine environments are themselves, as any climber will tell, well worth the effort to view them. But gazing upon these views also means standing in a brisk breeze that will whisk away your heat in a nanosecond. A cold body has tight muscles and inflexible ligaments and tendons. A cold mind makes poor decisions. It’s best to not even get started down that road leading to Hypothermia.

Today, though I wanted to sweat. In addition to sweet turns I also wanted a workout. This route up Peak Three rises 2000 vertical feet. A great lung and thigh burner. Besides, I was in the “urban” backcountry. My own backyard. Mom could call me home to dinner with a loud whistle. That is, if she had a loud whistle, or if she lived at my house and not in Phoenix. Anyway, if I got cold I could just curl up in a ball and roll back to my house. I did have my helmet with me.

So I pushed on, breathing hard, regarding the many lines arcing down the face before me. Another pair of skiers descended close by so I stopped momentarily to watch them. As a snowboarder I wistfully admire the grace and strength of well performed tele-turns. Unfortunately these two stopped abruptly about the same time I did. One of the guys had just damaged his pole. It flopped like a wet noodle when he traversed over to his partner. Bummer, I thought, and continued up.

I met two more skiers near the top. They flashed broad smiles with friendly happy greetings. I reached them just as they packed away their climbing skins and finished a couple of beers. We exchanged comments on the weather, the view, and our own fortunes for being there. Common conversation for spring backcountry riders and skiers. Even urban ones.

The vantage point we shared offered a spectacular view over Turnagain Arm and the north end of the Kenai Wildlife Refugee. The sun threw a sparkling pale yellow stripe across the blue water as it flowed, shifted, and swirled, beneath bright white mountains. Inviting slopes stared back at us from all angles. I felt for a moment like an uninvited guest stumbling on an esoteric party that finds, to his surprise, a friendly crowd, warm and welcoming.

“Enjoy your run”, I said moving on to the final yet steepest hump to the top.

The top revealed another run off the climber’s right side of the ridge. This one dropping through a wide open bowl that slopes down to just east of the parking area at the bottom. With only two tracks through it, it offered an enticing alternative to the west face I originally intended to ride. I stared at it a long time. The idea of seeing my turns from my bedroom window finally drew me to my original plans. Myself reminded me that this would be the first of many trips up Peak Three. That bowl will get carved another day.

A brisk wind did meet me at the top, so I went about my routine of putting on a coat, hat, goggles, and gloves, unstrapping my board, replacing it with snowshoes and poles, drinking water, and taking another look around. I tried to find my house, but couldn’t. Myself said rolling home was not a good option.

I didn’t look around long, for the memory of that day with Dan and Mark rushed back to me in a hurry. Standing at the top, gazing down the west face, I suddenly remembered being a bit amazed that people actually skied down that side. It is steep. And it is especially intimidating as about 10 feet from the top the slope drops away out of sight, emerging back into view several dozen feet down. As the chill just began to seep in, myself and I reminded ourselves that we could see the whole face from below, there were no exposed rocks, and there weren’t any drastic drop offs. Myself then told me to just make a few slow controlled turns down to where I could see the length of the fall line. “You’ll be fine,” he said.

Good advice, except myself forgot to tell my snowboard the slow and controlled part. I made several nice turns at the top, but on the steepest part of the face my board made like a greased pig on a waterslide. Two to three inches of sun softened corn sat on top of a hard packed surface. Fast. Very fast. My next few turns lacked the control I hoped to maintain for the ride down. I rode a quarter of the way before I finally relaxed into the speed. Fssssshhhhhh, fsssshhhhh, fssssshhhhh. Several smooth controlled turns followed. The giggles set in soon after.

I cut over to the meadow below Peak Two and flopped down in an excited heap. “Wow, that was fast,” I said to myself, who could barely control his own excitement. All the anticipation and work preceding that run might make the few brief minutes it took to tear down seem silly. But I knew, right then, that it was even better than I imagined it would be.

Our celebration, though, ended abruptly. On the other side of the slope, riders left, two guys sat in the snow. One holding the other. At seeing me, one of them looked up and asked for a hand. His buddy was hurt. The two guys I ran into at the top were near enough to me to also hear the request for help and we all quickly traversed over. It was the second two skiers I saw on the way up. The guy with the broken pole laid on his side as his buddy supported his left arm. He had dislocated his shoulder.

Sean, the injured, recently completed a Wilderness First Responder course. A small reference book from the course lay open in the snow to a well illustrated diagram of a technique for resetting a dislocated shoulder. Sean’s friend, whose name I never got, held Sean’s arm up while gently pulling it away from the socket. The situation appeared well under control except for Sean’s friend badly needing a break from supporting the arm. So I switched places with him while the other guys looked over the diagram.

The book explained that the arm should be held up as if throwing a baseball. Slight pulling traction needed to be applied to the arm to keep the muscles and tendons loose. Sean, though in obvious pain, coached us through the process. This was the fourth time for this shoulder to dislocate. He knew it would go back in, we just had to go slow and be patient. I held and applied traction to his arm hoping not to jar it or move it suddenly. While I did this one of the other skiers came around me to gently massage the shoulder in order to help loosen and warm the muscles. Besides pulling and massaging we also, according to Sean and the book, needed to slowly, minutely, move the arm back in a throwing motion.

Two more snowboarders showed up and offered help. The six of us crowded around Sean giving encouragement and discussing the technique we were trying. None of us, besides Sean, had any experience with dislocated shoulders, but each of us shared a general understanding of what to do, thanks to the patient, the book, and common sense.

“Hey man I’m gonna head back to the car to get high,” said one of the skiers to his buddy, somewhat out of the blue. As his buddy responded the rest of us just stared in disbelief. Did he really say what I think he said? Sensing our shock the friend explained that “Hi” was the name of their Asian friend waiting back at the car. Sean even had to laugh at this. The pot references then flew around the group and helped ease the tension of the situation.

Sean began to shiver drastically from laying in the snow. It became evident that remaining in this position for much longer would make the situation much worse. We attempted to warm him up with extra layers of clothes, but with little effect. Here we were somewhat relying on this guy to not only coach us in the correct technique to reset his dislocated arm, but more importantly to let us know whether or not we were hurting him, and he was fighting off the early stages of hypothermia.

Just when I thought to suggest, for Sean’s sake, we bundle him up and get him to a doctor he calmly said his shoulder was back in place. Just like that. I have witnessed shoulders popped back into place before, but what I saw involved a fast loud and obviously painful adjustment. Completely different than this. Constant traction with slow, methodical movement reset the shoulder with relatively little pain. In moments, Sean was walking back to his car with his arm in a sling and his broken pole stuffed in his buddies backpack.

As he walked away myself, I, and the rest of the group congratulated each other on a well learned urban backcountry first aid application. We all expressed gratitude, once Sean was out of earshot, over the opportunity for real hands on experience. We knew immediately this day would stick with us for a long time.

I rode the last couple hundred yards to the car thinking about the irony of assisting a cold injured skier minutes away from my front door. Even the urban backcountry has potential for dangerous mishaps. I guess this, in part, is what makes Peak Three a “backcountry” trip.

Laying in bed that night I watched the darkness overcome the face I rode just a few hours before. I couldn’t make out my turns but myself promised me they were there. Satisfaction filled me as myself whispered gently in my mind “Fssssshhhhh, fssssshhhhh, fssssshhhhh,…”

Glad to be here

2005-04-13T23:50:00.000-08:00

Hi all.
It took me a while to find time to sign in here. Jared & Anne, thanks for the invite. Please bear with me, I'm going where I've never blogged before.
I haven't had time to do much writing since taking Bill's class last fall. Life and especially work have been consuming. Somehow, I've done more recreational reading than usual - my escape from the stress at work. At least that's a good sign.
Glad that spring is finally here-- the geese are back and there are two trumpeter swans at Potter. I'm looking forward to checking out your posts, and adding my own when I can.

discussion

2005-04-04T20:56:00.000-08:00

Anyone else been reading Seth Kantner's columns in the ADN? I've been enjoying his pieces on life in the Arctic. He endured a subsistence upbringing around Kotzebue, and has a new book out. Ordinary Wolves.

flight

2005-04-02T16:52:00.000-09:00

It is cold, twenty below, and there are no clouds. Flying north from Kotzebue, the Sound lies frozen and still beneath us. It will remain so for at least 2 more months. The days may be longer, but late February is still tightly bound by the long arctic winter. Sled dog and snowmachine trails are the only features on the icepack, another one of the seasonal highways in the Alaska bush. Something about the difference between tracks left by such opposed modes of travel, the old and the new, makes me wonder at the lifestyle of the folks that eke out a living here. The steady drum of the helicopter drones though my headphones and lulls me to sleep.
An hour later I jerk awake at the change in pitch from the rotors as the pilot circles a clearing, looking for the fuel that we had cached. He settles the Bell 206 down, down, and flares out gracefully next to six barrels of Chevron Jet A, painted bright blue to make them easy to spot agaist the snow. I drag the handpump out of the cargo box. The pilot, Arnie, wrestles a 55-gallon drum closer. After the hothouse inside the helicopter, the cold bites even as I work hard to pump the fuel. We have flown deep into the moutains, and the temperature has dropped. The wind blows spindrift across the snow crust. It scratches around the fuel drums, against my legs, hisses against the thin aluminum skin of the helicopter. It seeks a way in, probing for cracks and crevices in our defenses. The cold, the snow, the wind, all work together against us. We are fragile and puny, and we do not belong in this wilderness.
Back in the air we bounce and weave through the passes and over the ridgelines of the Brooks Range. We seek safe passage though the mountains to the northwestern coast, a plain without the flash and notoriety of its peer on the North Slope: Not yet anyway, but that is why we are here. This vast coast is the buffer between the pack ice of the Chuckchi Sea and the mountains guarding the interior, and it is full of oil, coal, and probably gold. The only thing guarding it is remoteness. The pilot pulls us up over another ridge, and its trailing edge becomes a gentle slope stretching off into nothing. It is the last ridge of the mountains, but we hover just past its crest. Clouds cover the land from horizon to horizon. To the east and west, moutains poke through like nunataks on a glacier, islands of stone amid the icy clouds. Intermittent passages open and close as the fog shifts, offering tantalizing and ephemeral pathways to our destination, but they close as soon as we try to fly through. The fog has joined the snow and the cold the wind in their work against us. Created when the relative warmth of the sea ice meets the bitter temperatures generated over the interior, the coastal fog cuts visibility down to yards and can last for weeks.
Our fuel situation is not critical, but we do not have the reserves to keep trying to find a path through the clouds. Arnie chooses the highest peak jutting from the mist and settles the helicopter onto its summit. We wait for the fog to perhaps blow away. Even though we are on the ground, the airspeed indicator registers 40 mph. The wind knows we are here, and wants us gone. I struggle into my parka and pull the hood tight. It leaves a long tunnel in front of my face to keep the wind from my skin, to help my exhalations heat the air I am about to inhale. The ruff is dense and soft, cut from the hide of a wolf. I once felt guilt at buying a parka made with real fur (from a dog for chrissakes), but it keeps me warm like nothing else will. Why I feel queasy about the wolf ruff and not about the down fill is another hypocrisy I will ignore.
Forcing the door open, I miss the step and stumble down onto the peak. Here, the only thing to block the wind for a thousand miles is the Russian Peninsula, and the small amount of snow left on our mountain eyrie is packed like concrete. The skids of the helicopter do not sink into it. I wander a bit, reveling in the liklihood that I am the only person to ever walk here on this wild and unspoiled place. Even in Alaska, there are few places left untrod. I find a large rock and pee on it.
Back in the helicopter we eat lunch, turkey sandwiches that are dry even though slathered with an alarming amount of mayonnaise. Apparently I have treated my can of Pringles poorly, and I must tilt the can to my mouth to pour the crumbs in. My chocolate bar is frozen. Arnie turns off the engine and we sit in silence, listening to the wind and snow scouring around us, still seeking a way in. The fog is reaching tendrils deeper into the valleys behind us, working with the cold to surround us. Full of food and the torpor of sitting in the aircraft for half of the day, it takes us awhile to notice that the clouds are filling the passes behind us, the ones we will need to thread to retrace our flight. The wind makes it easy to take off, almost throwing us from the peak, and we head back to the fuel dump, back to Kotzebue, back to an unearned dinner.

Springtime

2005-03-25T21:24:00.000-09:00

Spring is a smell in Anchorage. “Earthy” is a nice way to put it. Some areas have a plant smell, some have the distinct aroma of decomposition, and others aren’t too bad. The dust storm of a few days ago homogenized the smells of the town into the lowest common denominator, dog shit. I think about the particles of crap entering my lungs with each breath. Now I’ve made myself sick and my body is responding by coughing up copious amounts of green mucous that I’ve been told not to swallow. I’ll stay home in bed and watch the snow on mountains for signs of weakness.

I always approach this time of year with mixed feelings. I’m sorry to see the snow go. Yet again, I have not skied enough this winter. I have yet to say, “Gee, I skied the hell out of this winter and am glad it’s over”. I have a faint recollection of what it is that people do in the summer. Bicycles, right? I think I know were mine is. Those who say that you don’t forget how to ride one do not go through Alaska winters. There are more birds about too. I have yet another opportunity to finally learn their names before they take off again this fall. Memories from last fall come to mind. Didn’t I intend to buy new hiking boots and some binoculars? Those winter savings goals seem to have disappeared when REI put out the ski gear.

There are still adventures to be had. Convincing a friend that there was still ice to be climbed deep in Eklutna canyon, we head up the highway. Knowing that the normal route up the creek would be impassable, we drive up the road towards the lake scanning the roadside for a boot packed trail that I hope will still be visible. We find it and park the truck on the sunny and snowless shoulder. The descent to the dam is a rocky mess on a sun filled scree slope. We are thoroughly dulling our crampons making our way to river level. Soon at the dam, I very carefully approach the edge and peer over. The canyon below is an iced amphitheater with a huge gurgling pool of opaque water below. Water spills over the entire lip of this dam. There are a few rusted pipes that lead up to the canyon’s rim several hundred feet above, but they are broken in many places. This forgotten dam spillage forms a frozen fall on the lee side that will be our ticket to the greater falls downriver. A lot of the ice has already melted. I’ve brought a spare rope to fix here so that it will be available to get us out later, even if the ice doesn’t last that long. Tying the cord to every available piece of metal stuck in the concrete, I make sure that it’ll hold our weight.

Rappelling over the lip is also exciting. Water shooting over the edge gives me the feeling that I’m falling. My left boot unexpectedly finds a hole in the ice and slides in, causing my shin to come into contact with the lip. Ouch. At the bottom of the 60-foot dam is a small ice shelf. I disconnect and call up to Klay. While he makes his way down, I can look around. The ice looks filthy. I realize that the glacial-fed stream is loaded with silt. The water spilling over the top must churn the micro particles out into the air. It looks like melted wax with a layer of heavy dust –kind of fake looking. It’s also quite dark down here. For a moment, I feel like we’ve descended onto a Batman movie set. Should I pull my ice axes out of my pack to prepare for battle with the evil Schwarzenegger ice villain?

Klay meets me and we prepare for the real-life challenge, the open section ahead. It looks like there is a tiny shelf of ice next to the sheer wall of the canyon. It’s worth a try. Klay doesn’t seem so sure. I go first. If I make it across, it’ll be easier to convince him to keep going. Plus, I’ll feel less bad if I’m the one soaking wet. This whole thing was my idea. There is almost nothing to hold onto on the smooth rock. “Baby steps” I tell myself. Thinking light thoughts, I make it across without taking a bath. Now it’s Klay’s turn in the dunking booth. From here, I can see how silly it looks and take a picture while he tries to concentrate. After he too makes it over, it is a much more straightforward walk to the climbs.

No one greets us at the climb of course. The ice looks virgin. The running water has filled all of the previous team’s pick holes. We rack up and I slowly make a new line up the frozen fall. The belay station on top is still in good condition. I attach the rope and prepare to pull my partner up. The sun is lighting the top rim of the canyon. It is bluebird beyond that. The sunlight five feet above me can’t possibly warm me, but I feel it’s warming presence. “Up Rope!!!” screams Klay. I snap back to the present and tend to my job of managing the rope. We may not be able to climb here again this year. Or can we? If I can just find a pair of chest waders. . .

old dogs may be able to learn new tricks...?

2005-03-25T20:43:00.000-09:00

Okay, I confess. I have never even been in a chat room and I have never blogged before. Too amazing. The Toby Sullivan piece is next to my chair but I haven't started it yet -- read the short Sherry Simpson piece and liked it - especially the politcal part. I have decided that in the future I won't need to read the voter's guide that I will just use the Voice of The Times as a guide and vote against anyone they endorse... deb

discussion

2005-03-25T19:45:00.000-09:00

Anyone else read Toby Sullivan's piece, Killing Sea Lions, in this week's press? I like his writing, but wow. I had such a visceral negative reaction to what he was writing about, to what they had done, that I coudn't get past it. Wondering, hopefully, what the statue of limitations is on the wanton slaughter of marine mammals.

spring

2005-03-24T22:12:00.000-09:00

It's that time of year again, when for good or ill, Anchorage starts to flow again. The dripping from the eaves turns from sporadic to steady and joins the snow from the yards draining into the street. The lengthening days and rising mercury are welcome but the cleanup the long winter leaves us, less so.
Roads have shattered and cracked, buckled and heaved, opening gaps that threaten even the most ridiculous SUVs. Gravel pelts the windshield, making me jump on the morning commute. Thanks, MOA. Where do I send the bill for my windshield? The water collecting in dirty pools in the gutter never has a chance to settle before another car sprays through, leaving just a little more muck behind.
A winter's worth of garbage emerges from the receding gravel and ice. Tires, paper, everything you can think of is out there decorating the medians. Our office goes out each May and picks up garbage, part of the city beautification. I heard another office group discovered a rusty handgun, and another stumbled on dismembered mannequin. I can only imagine that first glance. One year we found a suitcase, locked and heavy. We bashed it open, and found it full of toys. The adult kind. Somewhere, someone had had a bad night. "Hey Honey, have you seen our..."
For those of us fortunate (or masochistic) enough to have live-in canine friends, melting snow and warm weather bring a special joy all our own. All our own unless we're the type to take the dogs for nightly romps in our neighbors yards, or long walks on the local trails without the ubiquitous orange newspaper bag, but we won't talk about that. February and occasional March snows cover and recover the obvious and oft-ignored mess in the backyard, giving the illusion that there is less of a cleanup job waiting. Foolish and faulty rationalization, I know: still have the same number of dogs, they still loudly insist on eating every day, and the rest is elementary.
One year I had the bright idea to compost everything, but neighbors and outright revulsion did that one in. One year I turned a trashcan into a giant sieve, drilling a few hundred holes in it so that the moisture would drain away. The holes weren't big enough, the idea was bad, and I ended up with a 55-gallon bucket of vile soup. A 55-gallon bucket with hundreds of holes...
Each fall the promise is made - I will keep up with the canine output, clean the yard on a weekly basis, walk them till they go in the neighbor's yard. As the temperature drops and the sky grows dim, my resolve wanes and each spring I find myself playing the role of some strange archaeologist, digging and raking through the strata of another winter, treading gingerly.

kick off

2005-03-24T21:00:00.000-09:00

I set this site up to save us the trouble of emailing things around. If your inbox looks anything like mine, you understand. You should have recieved an invite to join. There is a quick and painless account setup, but it is pretty noninvasive: just pick a user name and a password and have at it. Each post has a comments section underneath. Click on the link to post on specific posts.

Questions or suggestions? Leave a comment.