Into The Dusk
“Staying here alone is crazy. You're a crazy man. Crazy!” I didn’t travel 3,500 miles for a psychiatric assessment from a stranger, and certainly not from some grandfather wearing rental booties to keep his New Balances dry. The stated reason for heading to Denali National Park was about to get underway in earnest, and the tourist family I flew out with to the Ruth Glacier had come to the end of their twenty minutes of staying close to the de Havilland Otter. They were getting back on the plane, and my sanity was being judged. Harshly, from my vantage point. “But look how pretty it is”, I replied.
The Gateway of the Ruth Glacier is otherworldly pretty. The purest white snow, as far as the eye can see, punctuated with spires of black granite, disappearing into the clouds at 10,000 feet. Alaska is vast, rugged and gorgeous, and with my freshly minted backcountry permit, I was one of just 15 people somewhere out in the millions of acres in the southern district of Denali NP.
Weather controls almost every part of mountain climbing, and the weather was getting worse. Good thing I saw The Big One on Monday, because it was lost in seven miles of clouds to the northwest, as I stood alone and / or crazy within striking distance of Mount Barrille, Peak 11,300 and any number of other peaks without names or numbers. Fifty-something pounds of gear and food on my back, I set my sights on Barrille, and pounded my first picket into the snow.
The scale of Alaska took me a few days to figure out. It was only after landing in Anchorage that I learned the “normal” visitor center for Denali National Park is on the north side of the Alaska Range. That is where I hooked up with Amanda and Andy for a day and a half of hiking and bus touring and other touristy stuff. It was huge fun, and on two lovely days of clear weather, we saw bears and sheep and caribou and a Park Service dog sled demonstration and Denali itself. Not wanting to intrude upon the entirety of their vacation, I took their leave and headed north.
The original plan had already changed given the location of the visitor center, so I loaded up the Jeep Gladiator and set off for Gates of the Artic National Park. The plan was to hike into the park somewhere north of the Artic Circle, and climb some unnamed peak in the Brooks Range. Hours into the drive, a flashing highway sign rather rudely but efficiently informed me my plan was not going to work. The Dalton Highway was closed twelve hours a day, and there was no way I was going to burn through 24 hours just sitting on the side of the road while providing sustenance to clouds of voracious mosquitos.
Thinking fast if not fully, I executed a U-turn and headed for Wrangell-St. Elias National Park. With nine of America’s sixteen tallest mountains in one place, I envisioned a climber’s paradise. It might be, but one of the things I learned in Alaska is there is almost always a mountain range in your field of view but there is never a road to get you to a trailhead. Wrangell-St. Elias has two roads within in, and neither gets you to a mountain. Calling Marcia from some town with cell coverage, I was a little down on the whole Alaska thing. Vast, rugged and gorgeous it was, but most everything man-made was ugly and ramshackle and beaten down by winters that must be brutal. The mountains, ever in view, could not be reached. I told her I was heading to Talkeetna, hoping it would have a climber vibe and maybe I could catch a flight out to somewhere vertical.
They say hope is not a strategy. Maybe, but it’s at least a tactic. Talkeetna, population 1,199, is a rugged, joy-filed jewel. Imagine an Alaska version of Seaside, Florida, but with hundred-year old bars, cabins and stores, all compactly walkable. The inspiration for Northern Exposure; music, art and beer are readily offered and while it has been infected by cruise-line tour buses, they clear out after dinner. There’s a $20 a night municipal campground with running water and flushing toilets. The general store sells brown sugar cinnamon Pop-Tarts for 75 cents each. There’s the cutest little ballfield, right next to a small airstrip, with bush planes parked at the ready. There’s a riverwalk, where people look to the north and wonder what is happening on the mountains in the distance. There’s the Talkeetna Ranger Station, where you can get one of the limited number of permits for Denali or go anywhere else your crazy heart desires, on an unlimited basis. They keep track of the comings and goings of the international collection of risk-amused goofballs passing through on a charming, low-tech board, graciously discrete in not having a line for deaths. I am head over crampons in love with Talkeetna.
There are three air taxi services at the “big” (still single runway) airstrip, but I can’t say enough about the crew at Talkeetna Air Taxi. They let me hop aboard a tourist glacier landing plane, and came and got me with a Cessna as the weather worsened and the tourist planes stopped flying.
Thoreau went to Walden Pond to live deliberately. All the complicated reasons for the mountain climbing thing are becoming better understood, but the deliberately thing is part of it. You don’t find yourself on a weather-worsening glacier, fifty or more miles from the next nearest crazy person, without working at it. And so there I was, with pickets to pound and ropes to tie and steps to take upwards into the clouds. There were bigger expeditions, with better climbers, pounding pickets on taller slopes, somewhere out there in the clouds. But this is what I could manage in the time I could create. A couple peaks summitted, a book read by the midnight sun and Pop-Tarts for breakfast, in an otherworldly beautiful place. The stated reason for going to Alaska gets filed away and maybe repeated in the future, skipping all the parts except Talkeetna and Denali itself.
But as you live deliberately in the wild with no one to talk to, there is no escaping the unstated reality. You only get so many days on this beautiful space marble and it’s hard to know exactly how many you get. But to spend a day fly-fishing with Colin or on a guided bus tour looking for bears with Amanda are among the best of them. Amanda said she was going to Denali NP and I cooked up the whole crazy climbing thing just to spend some time with her in a national park.
The sun never set while we were in Alaska. Nor will the memories.
Maybe (just maybe) not so crazy*, after all.
* BIG SHOUTOUT to Poynette Auto Body, for letting me just barge in and commandeer a power hacksaw on my way to the airport. Solo glacier travel is somewhere between ridiculously dangerous and certainly lethal, so I devised a scheme where I'd use three 36" aluminum pickets, a jumar and 90' of rope to hopscotch across glaciers with at least some protection from the unpleasantness of a thousand foot crevasse death. My genius (?) plan almost came apart when I figured out my 36" pickets would not fit into my trusty Northface duffle bag (I had always just tossed them into the back of the Jeep before, lashed to my backpack). With tools still packed from the last move, my only hope was Poynette Auto Body's tool collection, which they willingly offered.
So ... next time you hit a deer, or need just some metal cut, tell Luke I sent you to his shop.
