Now! Climbing

Joey descends the south ridge of Mantok II after the first ascent of the peak via the Ladies' Couloir (2700' AI3+).

Here in my cabin at Joey and Mel’s, off a dirt road a few miles out of Talkeetna, I’ve been finding it hard to get started this morning on writing about our trip to the Yentna. We got back on Tuesday and today’s Friday. It’s only been a few days, but in between my unpacking and decompressing, I’ve been writing and rewriting the story of the trip in my head. I’ve been trying to cull my thoughts into a narrative that might make sense to somebody, and it’s been difficult, because I think what I’m really doing is trying to figure out how to tell the story to myself. I think I’ve been working to figure out what this chapter in my personal history is really going to look like, and in doing so, to figure out how I ultimately feel about it. I say ultimately, but I suppose I don’t mean it. It’s not been enough time yet for ultimates, really – that kind of perspective could take a while – but I wonder how long it’s going to take before I’m sure about feeling one way or another.

I don’t want to get off to a start that’s going to promise any undue dramatics – it’s really not that dramatic of a story. Nobody died; nobody even got hurt. We didn’t summit anything really big, and we didn’t almost summit anything big either. We didn’t even attempt anything big, really. We didn’t hang it out there all that much, we didn’t flirt with the edge, and we didn’t go looking for trouble. We didn’t do that much at all really. That’s not true exactly. We put up two new routes, we did the best we could with the weather we got, sort of, and we got a lot of reading done. I think my page count ended up at something like thirteen hundred, this all over thirteen days. We did some climbing, just perhaps not as much and not of the sort that I would have liked. If you’ve spent some time in the Alaska Range, you could say that ours was too short of a trip, that we set ourselves up by not having longer, especially in that western area we were in, and sure – maybe you’d be right, but I’m not sure that it would have made much difference. The weather’s been pretty lousy since we got back. Today it’s hailed and snowed already.

McBrayer dragging his sled to basecamp in splitter weather on Day 1.

I say already, but the morning’s slipped into afternoon and its quarter to four and I’m still in pajamas. I started to act like today would be a real day, did a few bits and pieces of errands, made a big breakfast and drank plenty of coffee. But just as the day started out with some momentum, it’s slowed to a crawl of watching movies on the computer and eating leftover Nutella out of the jar with a spoon, ironically the same thing I was doing a few days ago laying ensconced in my down cocoon. I don’t have to warm it up to get the spoon in now, which is nice I guess.

It seems increasingly obvious to me as I write though, my head resting lazily on the window frame next to me, that this whole thing is about coping with disappointment. This whole disappointment thing is something we climbers ought to be used to if we’re serious about our craft. Believe me: I fail all the time and get over it, but for a series of reasons, this one is tugging at me more than some others have. What’s more, I’m not sure I realized fully until I started writing all of it down that that was really what it was all about after all, disappointment. Last year we failed too, and sure I was sad, and equally surely the wound healed as did my fingers and toes, but again, it was different. Last year we gave it everything we had and for a variety of reasons then too, it just didn’t work out. Not fast enough, not light enough, not hydrated enough; too light, no bivy gear, bad weather, etc. This year I feel like I should be happy, which is why I suppose I’m having such a hard time dealing with the fact that I’m not. Ostensibly, we flew into a remote area of the Alaska Range with only a few weeks to try to get something done on a pile of unclimbed peaks and faces, and in the face of bad weather, we still got in a new route all the way up to a virgin summit, ran another one to the top of a feature on another unclimbed peak, but with no summit, and even did some fun mixed climbing as well. That should make you happy right?

So what do you do when it doesn’t, other than hole up in the Fairview of course? What do you do when you feel like you somehow should have tried harder and done more, and that despite knowing the weather was shit, and that conditions were lousy, what do you do with the feeling that you guys didn’t really give it? How do you slip the feeling that maybe you chose the wrong objective, the wrong route, the wrong partner, or the wrong strategy? I don’t know myself. I’m asking. Anyone else know? Grow up and get over it? Learn some lessons and don’t do it again? Write about it and ask a lot of deep, loaded, rhetorical questions about a little thing like mountain climbing?

McBrayer descends from a failed attempt on Mantok II in weather more typical of the expedition.

Maybe that’s just it. Mountain climbing, on this trip, felt like a little thing and that idea, the very concept of the pursuit’s insignificance, is perhaps what’s throwing me off the most. Granted I think this due to the fact that in my estimation the climbing we did on this trip was just smaller than I wanted it to be, but I’ve never quite felt this way before.  I’m generally careful to avoid any overly self-indulgent trespasses into profundity, but sometimes I can’t help it. In his introductory notes to this last issue of Alpinist magazine, Michael Kennedy, a man who I’ve always presumed to know about these things, quotes Conrad Anker’s article about the Latok group, saying “Many of us fantasize about summit revelations. We’ll be different when we get to the top, we tell ourselves. We’ll be closer to the person we envision.”

I’m not sure if anyone ever really believes that, and if they do, I’d be willing to bet that they’re destined for disappointment. It’s an idea we seem to bat about just so we’re all clear on how unrealistic it is. Nobody would base their entire world on getting to the top of a hill thinking it’s going to change them, right? But don’t we all spend our time trying to the top of the hill anyway, and don’t we still expect something, if not a revelation, to be waiting there for us? Are we cramponed Sisyphuses pushing all of our hopes for self-realization up the hill each time?  Could this be just one more conceit of “serious” climbing?

McBrayer mid-height on the first attempt at Mantok II.

Bear with me here if I start sounding overly philosophical, but it seems like a given that in those of us who take our climbing seriously, we all believe that we really do derive some kind of meaning from climbing hard. There are mountains of eloquent words on the matter, but I think the fact that the activity is compelling enough that we all put as much of ourselves into it as we do and, in a broader sense, have as much faith in the whole enterprise as we do speaks volumes about its validity on some level. We believe and accept, as a community, that climbing means something to us, whatever that is for each individual. And yet we all also laugh at the guy who makes a habit of spraying his accomplishments, and see it as shallow, transparent and even sad that he believes that those accomplishments are the foundation of his being. Such is the paradox: we are simultaneously obsessed and yet feel the need to be disinterested. That or we’re obsessed and feigning disinterest in deference to an idea of balance. More frighteningly, perhaps we’re feigning obsession in the interest of finding balance.

Okay. I’ll admit I have clearly trespassed into boggy territory here. I’ll put exegesis aside for a while and get some facts down before we go any further in the hopes that they might explain themselves. My good buddy Joey McBrayer, resident of Talkeetna, Alaska Range guide, former resident of Bend and partner of mine on umpteen climbs over the last five years, flew out to a fork on the Yentna Glacier in the western Alaska Range a few weeks ago to do some climbing. Without any really specific objectives, we were headed to the area looking for some new terrain and from the research we’d done, the Yentna seemed like a fine spot. With some helpful photos and recon from Freddie Wilkinson after his two trips into the area, we decided there should be plenty to do. The Fin Wall had only seen one route, the Bat’s Ears, Mantok I and Rogue Peak had also seen only one ascent, and almost everything else in the area hadn’t been touched, so far as we could tell. We felt we must be able to find something good to climb.

360° view from basecamp w/ the Fin Wall, Bat's Ears, Rogue and other peaks.

We flew in on a bluebird Thursday April the 8^th, the first nice day in a handful of grey ones. With a warning from our friend, pilot and guru Paul Roderick at Talkeetna Air Taxi that weather would be due in for the weekend, we knew we’d better pull the trigger quickly and try to get something done before the weather arrived. Picking a line that looked nice from the air and that was close to the base camp we’d set up after hauling our sleds a few miles up glacier from the landing strip inconveniently situated on the legal side of the wilderness boundary, we went to bed early and woke early. Owing to our late arrival at base camp, early was relative and we clipped into our skis and got started around six-thirty am. An hour and a half of relatively easy glacier skiing and a limited amount of post-holing brought us to the schrund at the base of the 3000’ northwest face of an unclimbed 10,020’ peak to the south of the Bat’s Ears. Our hopes were to start in what appeared to be a broad ice gully, transition to the face moving quickly on steep snow, ice and mixed terrain, and to gain the summit ridge somewhere around 9400’ and to continue on up to the summit from there.

The line completed on unclimbed Peak 10,020'.

As it so often turns out, things did not quite go according to plan. Things started out well, with the opening pitches being a delightful mix of 70-85° neve and ice, but with the disadvantage of being generally thin enough to be near completely unprotectable. Belays were as difficult to find as gear, but the steep climbing in the goulotte gave way to 40° snow after only about four ropelengths with only the occasional step of steeper ice. Shortly though, the climbing ceased to be interesting and technical and transferred instead to being arduous and infuriating step-kicking on steep, loose snow. It was both of our hopes that conditions would improve once we crossed the first snow arête at about half height. When I handed the lead off to Joey, it looked like that might be the case, but to both of our great displeasure, what had looked like steep snow and mixed turned out to be steep wallowing through often unbelievable sugar and drytooling when on the rock with very little ice to speak of.

After an epic section of wallowing and b-rate mixed climbing, Joey turned the lead over to me. Trying my hand at steeper rock hoping it might yield better climbing, I led a few of the worst pitches of my life up pleasant-enough mixed and thin ice sections that would dead-end in absolutely unprotectable and thoroughly horrible climbing on steep granite overlaid by rotten ice and snow. I was reminded of something Steve House wrote once about some project in the Canadian Rockies where he cited “that classic alpinist’s folly of dry snow over steep rock.” Moving laterally to try to get away from the sugar/rock trap, I would find myself continually following brilliant runnels of ice or neve only to have them dead-end over and over in my faceted hell. I would then find myself zigging and zagging back the other way, tunneling overhead through flutes made of 7mm facets, not so much compacting but excavating huge amounts of snow to make any sort of upward progress. Though I would occasionally find cracks for rock gear or the occasional ice runnel to put a screw in, I was constantly terrified at the increasingly exposed nature of the snow flutings and at the potential instability of the snow between them. Eventually, after what seemed like an eternity, I was able to crest a dull rib that seemed to run directly into the summit ridge. After about twenty feet of walking, and postholing at that, the snow decided to continue being a bastard and I was forced once again to the wallowing/drytooling solution for another few ropelengths before I was finally able to pull onto the summit ridge in the fading light of sunset. Soaked, worked, freezing and angry, I pulled out my belay jacket, plopped onto on my pack and hip belayed Joey up as I sat, shivering and glowering in equal measure.

The author in full wallow at mid-height on the face.

By the time Joey was up, I was wasted and it was getting dark. We resigned ourselves to the fact that the summit, though relatively close, was in fact far, far away, separated from us by at least few hours of heinous French Ridge-style cornice and mushroom battling. My thoughts were only on keeping myself together as I feebly fired up the stove in the hopes of a hot ramen and some water, while Joey investigated our descent options. Stabilized by food and drink if not by my frozen gloves, I followed Joey’s rappel down the other side of the ridge.  Two uneventful raps, some downclimbing, and a little jump landed us across the bergschrund and on the glacier the map led us to believe would wrap back around to the side of the peak we started on. Passing a crevasse one could easily hide a battleship and/or an elementary school in woke me up out of my blind march, but luckily that one was the only real note on an otherwise uneventful walk. Stopping once to brew up, I laid in a small hole I’d dug as Joey dozed on his pack, and I couldn’t help but think that our situation was probably one step further than my mother’s thoughts of a personal hell had ever really gone – freezing fucking cold, tired, hungry, sitting in a hole in the snow, in the dark, resolutely isolated from the world by an entire range of unflinchingly icy mountains, and separated from any idea of comfort by at least two more hours of plodding through the night across a snowy glacier full of man-eating cracks. It being far too cold to really hang out and indulge this line of thought and after spending upwards of twenty minutes coaxing a half a liter of water each out of our frozen iso-butane canister, we got moving. A few thousand feet of uneventful sidehilling led to our skis and true to our standard Alaskan formula, the first light of a new morning tinged the slopes to our east as we pulled headlamps and crampons off and wove back down the maze of crevasses to our basecamp. While I coiled the rope and packed my kit into my duffel in anticipation of the coming storm, Joey was already busy crawling inside the tent where he would promptly fall asleep on top of his sleeping bag, his helmet still on his head.

Joey shows off the barometer's dramatic slide downhill.

Storm engulfed the Yentna by lunchtime and we, asleep, didn’t much care.  Over the course of the next three windy, snowy days we laid, slept, and ate our way through the hours. I found time in those three days to finish, sobbing I might add, all 969 pages of Lonesome Dove, which is an amazing piece of work. We mused over the bottoming pressure as we sipped bourbon and attacked our chocolate supplies until finally on day 7 of our trip, after four entirely tent-bound days, we saw some improvement in the weather. Packing a light pack with a bivy tent and three or four days of food, we skied up the western fork of the glacier, up past Rogue Peak and Mantok I to install a camp near the toe of the icefall below Mantok II, a handsome and virgin peak at the end of a dramatic ridge of summits labeled by previous expeditions as the Mantok Group due to their looking “so damn manly.” Planning an attempt at the peak via a mixed couloir on the left side of the face, we woke at three and were off. Though the weather improved somewhat, after an opening bout of moderate but snowy mixed climbing and a thousand feet of snow, ice and more mixed in the couloir, it seemed we had climbed into something of a storm. Citing a crowd of lenticulars rolling in from the east, though within sight of the pitches that would take us to the ridge, Joey said he thought we should head down. Not buying that the weather was doing anything it hadn’t been doing already but not wanting to lead us into an epic should I be wrong, I acquiesced and reluctantly rigged the rappel. A few raps and some downclimbing deposited us back in the entrance to the couloir as the sun shining through a blue sky warmed our descent to the skis. High winds remained aloft and the sky was a mix of blue and blowing white for the rest of the day, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that we had blown our chance and had not made the best of the meager window we’d been offered. Joey on the defensive and me in a huff, we spent the afternoon laid out with our thoughts in our cramped Firstlight. When we decided to talk again we agreed to disagree and to try again if the weather held.

The author displeased after a failed attempt on Mantok II.

By evening it was clear that the weather was not going to start doing us any favors. Dropping pressure and increased wind gave way through the night to snow, and poking my head out the tent door once more at three, it was clear it was time to go back to bed. After a night of bizarre dreams and jet engine winds, we woke up, packed up, and headed back to basecamp.

Day nine brought much of the same. High, gusty winds and blowing snow kept us in the tent for the morning. Feeling antsy to do something though, I convinced Joey that a mission, however futile, would be better than another day inside our nylon palace, my page count and chocolate consumption having already reached near critical levels. Our mission for the afternoon was skiing over to the base of the stunning water-ice drip coming two-thirds of the way down a cliff near camp and scratching around on the rock to see if it would be possible to reach the ice. For the entirety of the approach we skied into face-fulls of windblown snow, and as we postholed up the debris cone that led to the base of the route, we were treated to both spindrift showers from above and snowy khamsins from the side. Nonetheless, I was encouraged by the apparent weakness below and to the left of the ice, and also by how much bigger the climb looked when one got closer. Freddie had mentioned an ice crag that he thought would yield some pretty good two or three pitch lines, but this looked at least double that length standing at the base. Not wanting to waste Joey’s tolerance of the project, I made efforts to empty my pack of the spindrift that was rapidly filling it, pull the rack out, and get to it.

Once started, the climbing turned out to be fantastically enjoyable, on my end at least. A techy but low angle scoop led up and left into a brilliant leaning corner system which took great gear and yielded steep climbing on sometimes technical but mostly positive tool placements and thin stems, before giving way to an ice-choked hand crack. Surmounting the corner turned out to be the mental crux as I left my #2 Camalot well below me and tapped and padded my way up another scoop of centimeter-thin ice over smooth rock before climbing steep snow into a gully, certain that easier climbing would lead to the ice above. What I failed to realize while climbing, apparently, was that I had gotten soaked by snow pouring into my jacket through any open space available, and that my fifty meters of M6/7-ish scratching had taken the better part of two and a half hours. This Joey was ready to remind me of as he congratulated me on my efforts and encouraged me to quickly build a belay and rap off. When I asked if he was really, really, 100% sure he didn’t want to climb, I was told not to push my luck. A few craftily placed nuts later I was back on the ground, apologetically offering tea to a frozen partner and getting ready to ski back to basecamp.

The author on M7 terrain under the unclimbed drip.

Back in the tent and stripped of all my wet clothes, I huddled in my sleeping bag and gratefully gobbled the mashed-potato, cheese, bacon and salsa verde quesadillas Joey masterfully fried in the flapping vestibule.

Morning on day ten came late and found us arguing lightheartedly over who would cave and have to leave the tent first to use the bathroom, and thus have to re-excavate said “bathroom.” I broke first and nearly broke all over again when moments later I stuck my head out into a bright bluebird day. Our pressure reading still on the floor, I was confused, flabbergasted, and immediately anxious. Plans were made for a quick return to Mantok II in the hopes the weather might hold. As we drank our coffee and ate breakfast I was grateful for the sunshine that allowed us to recharge our sat phone and dry out our clothes, bags, gear and almost everything else we had brought and soaked or frozen. By lunchtime we were again skiing westward to the Mantoks, but not a hundred meters from camp we were stopped by the sound of an airplane overhead. Normally this isn’t all that notable in the Alaska Range as planes are the only way to get around and are a common sight, but in the Yentna this wasn’t the case, it being located in a corner of the range nobody has much of a reason to fly over. Freddie had said they were there for almost twenty days without seeing a plane, and the only one we had seen since were dropped off was Paul’s Otter, Precious, circling overhead one afternoon as he followed his habit of seeing how his boys are doing. This time though, as the plane circled lower and lower to the glacier we could see it wasn’t Paul but our pilot and friend, Will Boardman. Will had paid us a visit last year on the Tokositna and brought not only levity and company, but goodies of apples and oranges and horchata as well. We turned around and skied towards his landing plane.

This time Will brought some skis and his girlfriend Joyce, who in turn brought us a delicious bag of homemade cookies. The two were out on a day off and decided to come out and see how were doing and to get a little skiing in. They joined us on the skin to our high camp, and in the course of our conversation the weather came up quickly. With few, if any, reliable weather resources for the range, the pilots of Talkeetna are often the best forecasters around. Will’s forecast was a bummer. We were apparently locked into a cycle of weather produced by the conflict of a low off the Bering Sea to our northwest, and a high off the Yukon to our southeast. Whether one or the other would win the tug of war on any given day was anyone’s guess. Today the forecasters had called for a 30% chance of precipitation, tomorrow a 60%. Will concluded that given the accuracy of the forecasts, this really shook out to a 50/50 chance both days. I was discouraged nonetheless, and was not enthused when Will and Joyce turned back toward the plane after an hour when the skies took an ominous turn for the worse. Fortunately enough, they cleared again by evening and we went to bed with clear skies over Mantok II’s southwest face, hoping for one more chance.

Joey gets moving above the schrund on the Ladies' Couloir

When I woke an hour ahead of my three o’clock alarm, my stomach dropped as I was certain I was hearing snow falling on the tent. When the alarm rang, I already knew it was still snowing. On this, our last and last-ditch effort to get something done, we were prepared to climb in bad weather, but rapidly falling snow in a couloir was one thing neither of us was willing to march into. We cursed the Yentna, we cursed the weather, and we cursed some more before setting the alarm for four and lying back down. Four o’clock brought no change. I think the sound of the snow stopping must have woken me up about an hour later. I poked my head outside the tent and saw a mostly clear sky just starting to lighten over the ridgelines. I took stock of the damage and found our packs buried under only two or three inches of new snow, which wasn’t enough to really be scary. Excited, thankful, a little in disbelief and anxious as hell, we brewed up, ate breakfast and got to it. We left the tent at six-thirty under a moody but stable sky; the sort of cloudy scene one normally gets after a storm. We decided to forgo the line of our previous attempt and try what looked like the most direct and easiest way to the summit, a wide-open couloir that snaked all the way up to the summit ridge. Our strategy this time was to take as light of a rack as we could get away with and to pull the rope off after we left the glacier, intending to simul-solo the snow and easy ice in the couloir until we were forced to rope up again.

The author topping out the Ladies' Couloir's final pitch of steep rimed snow.

The plan worked out well as we made our way quickly up mostly 50-60° snow and neve with the occasional 70-80° ice step. Only on the final pitch to the ridge did we even think about belaying, but decided not to as it looked reasonable enough. Most of it was a thunker pitch of AI3 with a few mixed moves, with only the last thirty feet of 80° rimed snow making us wish we had the security of a belay. That surmounted, we were pumped to be on the ridge and were rewarded with amazing views out the north side of the range, with snowy peaks giving way to bright blue glaciers flowing northward until they turned to distant rivers shining as they snaked their way through red tundra. After a quick stop to eat and drink, and aware of the fragility of the weather, we roped up for glacier travel, stowed a tool, and made our way on up the broad but corniced and crevassed ridge. More 50-60° slopes mixed with lower-angled walking took us up a series of steps and ridges, sometimes knife-edged, sometimes dull and sometimes meandering around cracks up the final seven hundred vertical feet to the summit. The summit resembled closely several that I experienced on a trip to Canada a few years ago: lines of grey on grey. Pumped but in no mood to dally, we took a few pictures, hugged, and turned around. It felt strange even at that moment. We were happy to have completed a climb, via a new route, to the virgin summit of a new peak, and yet it all felt so normal. I don’t think we’d tried hard enough for it to really seem all that special, beautiful as it was. It had taken us three hours to cover the 2800’ from camp to summit. It took us another three hours to get back to camp.

Mantok II's southwest face with the line of the Ladies' Couloir.

Excited by the prospect of getting out before the weather go worse, we packed our advanced camp quickly and headed back down the glacier towards basecamp. Arriving there, we called TAT and heard Paul had a flight in to the Kahiltna around four and that we might be able to get out if we could get ourselves to our strip on time. We packed basecamp at a fever pace, rigged the sleds, and left behind our abode of the last two weeks. With thoughts of his wife waiting at home fueling him to outpace me by a mile, Joey headed off down the glacier with me bringing up the rear, myself excited only by sitting down with the kettle chips and High Life we’d stashed in our emergency cache, and by the prospect of taking off my infuriatingly balling skins. Typically enough, the weather held off precisely until we started digging out the cache, at which point it promptly started dumping heavy, wet snow. Sitting on our packs, sipping slushy beer and gobbling chips, we thought it would be courteous to call in and let Paul know that the weather had shut down. Naturally he already knew, but said he’d come get us in the morning. We lazily set up our already soaked bivy tent and crawled in for one more night. Another beer and one last meal of our beloved Shin Ramyun put us out for the evening, everything soaking wet, the ceiling dripping, us not caring all that much, just hoping we wouldn’t have to get back in for another night.

On the summit of Mantok II after the first ascent.

The snow fell and the wind blew all night, but luckily morning dawned clear and blue and though it had half buried our gear and ourselves, the wind had done us the favor of keeping new snow on the strip area to about ten inches. Not wasting time brewing coffee or eating breakfast, we packed our kit and got to work stomping out a runway for Paul to land on. The irony of the runway operation was that last year we had spent most of two idle days at camp stomping out a brilliant runway only to have Paul land and take off next to it. This year when he swooped in in the Otter, we were sure to have a repeat, but to our surprise he did land on our runway of ski-compacted snow. With the propeller still spinning, we threw our bags in the plane and climbed in. Paul powered it up and in moments we were in the air headed back to Talkeetna. I couldn’t help but asking if he needed the strip and his reply was something like, “Well, no – but, um – if I had a Beaver and it was sunny for quite some time, it could possibly get bogged down.” “But,” he added, “it got you guys out there stretching your legs this morning didn’t it? Kept you warm? Gave you a sense of purpose? Man always needs a sense of purpose, right?” Right.

McBrayer putting the final touches on the runway.

As we flew back home past the immensity of the range, Paul pointed out other objectives he thought we might be interested in, we chatted about cameras, the weather I no longer gave a shit about, other activity in the range, and a host of other topics. We landed under a bluebird sky and pulling our gear off the plane I felt that the trip was over just as it had begun, unceremoniously and with no fanfare inside or out, and as I tossed our bags onto the carts to wheel them over to the car, I think I’d already started trying to figure out how I felt, already started trying to write the story, and there, as in so many things, we come back to the beginning.  [CW]

Area: Northeast Fork of the Yentna Glacier, Western Alaska Range.

Ascents: First ascent of Mantok II (ca 9800’) via the southwest face, the Ladies’ Couloir (2800’ AI3+), Peak 10,020, NW Face to summit ridge (3000’ AI4 M5), various attempts. April 8^th – 20^th, 2010, Joseph McBrayer & Christopher Wright.

For more photos from the trip check out the full gallery here.