ALASKA: THE CHILKAT MOUNTAINS     By Doug Fine A seven-day Expedition Primer course Everyone who dances with the Mountaineering Dream has his or her own reasons. Andean people, back in 2500 BC, would sometimes schlep up to 14,000 feet just to throw a sacrifice victim in a volcano. Today, modern adventurers pay $70,000 to get their hands on an Everest permit. It’s difficult to explain even my own motive for looking up and wondering, “Could I?” The fascination is something deep inside and individual, like sex drive. For me maybe it’s about showing myself, every couple of years, that I can do anything if I set my mind to it. The fact is, more and more people are acting on the Mountaineering Dream. For anyone who likes to challenge him or herself: You can’t get much higher than Nepal’s Mt Everest or Denali in Alaska. But panting four miles skyward is not a task attempted without preparation—mental and physical. With more and more climbing deaths occurring each year, it’s clear that mountaineering is not something that everyone with an ice axe should attempt. A lot of preparation is necessary to attempt any Big Peak—here defined as any mountain over 10,000 feet that requires any level of technical mountaineering skill, from roping off to crevasse rescue. There’s a huge variation within that definition; even Denali ascents vary greatly in difficulty between the West Buttress route verses the more difficult West Rib route. But for a beginner like me, anything that requires crampons is a step up, so to speak. DAY ONE: Alaska Mountain Guides and Climbing School Warehouse in Haines to Base Camp at Flower Mountain, 4,000 feet. As the three male clients and two guides fumbled with equipment lists and energy bars, I could tell that we were all infected with the Up Urge. It was written on our artificially grim faces. Personally, I had come to prepare for a long-time dream of climbing Denali, the mountain with the largest base-to-summit rise of any peak on earth; the climbing of which entails a hike of at least 36 miles to the top and a trek that could easily run 30 days if hit with foul weather. Before taking on that kind of punishment, you have to know in advance if it’s in your make up. While the unspoken assessment of clients by guides and vice versa unfolded, we started the course immediately, right there in the warehouse. Assistant guide Eli Fierer asked me to flip my prussiks around a rope strung through the rafters. “Prussik?” I asked myself. "What’s a prussik? A Prussian toothpick of some kind?" I felt the sinking feeling one might experience upon, say, realizing one is about to fall at a high speed while skiing, but hasn’t actually hit the snow yet. I was still at the point where I would prefer to die rather than prove to be the wimpiest and most ignorant of the three students on this expedition. I would soon dismiss that way of looking at things as counter to my own natural survival instinct. The jargon was coming fast in our first lecture. Head guide and 12-year teaching veteran Cedar Dumont, who had been helping Tal, a soft-spoken Israeli special forces paratrooper, fit his crampons on his boots, stepped in to clear the misty film he saw setting in over our eyes. "The prussiks are the lines and knots you attach from your harness to the main rope. There’s a waist prussik and a leg prussik. You use them for self-rescue should you fall into a crevasse. Don’t worry, you’ll learn how to tie them yourself during the trip." And that’s how the instructional model of Alaska Mountain Guides works: You learn a skill, such as planting rectangular metal "pickets" in snow, which steady rescue ropes during climbing or crevasse rescue, and then you use it the next day when you summit a peak with a scary name. It’s a nearly ideal tutorial method: The student sure pays attention. The question was, Would I learn enough in a week to tickle Denali with my crampons? I looked around at our crew and noticed one thing about mountaineering: Even beginners look professional. I was wearing strange things like carabiners, an ice axe, a harness and a helmet, which, it occurred to me, would be useful in my everyday life, given my general proclivity for falling. I could see myself tying off on icy parking lots. I tied on to the practice rope and climbed up to the warehouse rafters relatively successfully by loosening and raising my prussik knots with Eli and Cedar’s helpful coaching. What had been foreign to me an hour earlier--knots and loops and harnesses--were already becoming familiar. The five of us rode in two tortured rigs up an old gold-mine road until it ended, at 4,000 feet, in an alpine wildflower meadow near the base of Flower Mountain, some 50 miles from Haines, less than that from Glacier Bay National Park. Clear weather (the sky’s only appearance for seven days) meant I could see the Canadian border station in one direction and the 3,000-year-old Tlingit village of Klukwan in another. Ahead of us lay another stretch of Alaska’s unnamed glaciers. Panoramically speaking, it was one of the most beautiful places in the world to pee. It was also the last night we’d camp on actual ground for the next five. As soon as the tents were up, we grabbed our ice axes, strapped on, and I tripped over my crampons. We practiced climbing technique on a nearby snowfield, which glowed magenta with a coating of watermelon algae. We learned techniques like "French stepping" for heading up inclines, "plunge stepping" for coming down them, and my favorite, "glissading," basically French for butt-sledding down fast. Perhaps most important, for hours we practiced "self-arresting," the process of planting your ice axe and then your toes when you or someone in your group falls. It prevents you from sliding off 400-foot cliffs. "Most mountaineering deaths occur due to failure to self-arrest," Cedar told us. "Was I fretting over prussiks just this morning?" I asked myself, trying to self-arrest but really glissading on the snow. "Would I have the presence of mind to ‘self-arrest’ when tripping, say, at 18,000-feet up Denali?" Midway through this day, the sun went away and the rain started, but we were having too much fun to notice. I went to sleep that night feeling like there was time for everything I wanted to accomplish in my life. But something deeper nagged my dreams: would I remember these new skills on an actual big peak? Your whole metabolism is different above 15,000 feet. That’s Yeti territory, not human terrain. And this class didn’t get above 10,000 feet. Even more important than altitude is the technical difficulty of a climb. Some peaks, like 14,410-foot Mt Rainier, you can pretty much walk up. Even Denali is not known as the most technical Big Mountain in the world. But would I be ready for 20,000 feet in just six days? I just couldn’t see it. Mountain climbers seemed a different breed of person from scared-ol’ me. DAY TWO: Base Camp to Glacier Camp We made two intense trips to our glacier camp, which was around four miles from base camp. This involved stuffing my pack as heavy as I ever have, maybe 50 pounds, twice, then maneuvering over unstable boulders, slippery brush, and crunchy glacial ice, only to set up camp on a glacier. Not near a glacier, on a glacier. Even in Alaska, this activity elicits a strange sensation in August. And somehow, sweating and shivering at the same time, the moment this mammoth task had been accomplished I realized that every second of effort was worth it. Here’s why: Under my feet radiated the magical blue of ice pressed so tightly together that no other color’s wavelength could escape. Next to me the freshest water in the world was born after 15,000 years as ice. And as I looked to the south, the water collected in creeks along the velvety green of the late summer Chilkat valley below, running 40 miles past Haines to the salt water where the salmon and whales live. I was standing in the place Where It All Begins. It was becoming increasingly difficult for me to focus on the life-saving mountaineering skills I was here to learn, and not on the stunning beauty of the place. For example, I had to force myself to pay attention to Eli’s lecture on sinking ice screws when a rainbow the size of Vermont opened on the ridge behind us. When I was supposed to be atuned to every crampon step—a matter of life and death in the steep terrain—I noticed a family of ptarmigan foraging on the nearby moraine. Already my fear of the technical side of mountaineering was dissipating. All three of us rookies were relatively close in skill level. We got along well, too, which was lucky— remarkable even, considering we lived, wet and increasingly smelly, in the same tent for several days. Tal, in between telling stories of serving as part of Israel’s security corps one summer, proved to be one of the planet’s gentlest spirits. And Michael, a 41-year-old accountant from 100-degree Phoenix, if a little slower than the rest of the group, was the most inspiring due to his determination. And he didn’t whine about the weather once. Okay, maybe once. The only thing that worried me at this point was the shall we say, "dynamic" quality of the earth around the campsite we had chosen. Rock slides from the shifting glacier under us occurred about once every half hour, some of them unnervingly close. At one point, while we chatted after setting up the cook tent, Cedar and I watched a massive calving cleave off the top of two great blue spires near the glacier’s peak; it exploded in a rumbling roar about 100 yards away. "How are Alaska Mountain Guides’ liability insurance rates?" I asked, wondering how binding that "release form" was I had signed back in Haines. "Pretty high, I imagine," Cedar said, knocking in a tent stake. We took to wearing our helmets pretty much everywhere, even at meals. Tal even suggested fetching them to the tent one night when a nearby rock-and-ice slide woke and frightened us all. But I knew how the earth felt, and I empathized with it: As a human, I’m constantly readjusting too. DAY THREE: Glacier Camp My first thought upon waking on Day Three: "Ah, good, more rain. Most places in the world are short of water." But sipping cocoa at 4,500 feet in a heart breakingly blue landscape cured any incipient whining, which is frowned upon in the Alaska Mountain Guides world as a safety hazard. Today was anchoring-and- belaying day, during which we learned, among other things, how to plant pickets, those metal bars bored with carabiner holes. Unbelievably strong, they easily support full body weight. We practiced a number of methods of picket-burying. There’s the Deadman’s System (a name I didn’t like) and a bunch of other ways to secure one of these things in snow and ice, some involving a lot of banging with ice axes and stomping with boots. Pickets are important because they anchor you if you’re climbing a steep face, or if you need to tie-off because someone in your group has fallen into a crevasse. Then we moved on to knot-tying perhaps what I needed to learn most. I’ve always been bad at knots; along with driving in reverse. But especially knots: It’s not that I can’t tie them, it’s that I can never remember how. Tal watched Eli cinch off a figure-eight loop and had the spatial relations to copy it. I needed a two-hour tutorial. Keep in mind this was while wearing wet gloves on ice, in rain. More importantly, this was all taking place in non emergency conditions. I tried to place myself three quarters of the way up Denali, at 50 below before wind-chill, trying to tell my prussik from my figure-eight. At this point, if I had to guess whether I would ever be fully prepared to climb Denali, I’d have to say no, not likely. Not without a cerebellum transplant. We were covering so many mountaineering skills, so quickly, that I hoped I would remember to "brake" the belay if someone below me fell. But if we were going to do the planned climb up something called Abandonment Peak on Day Six, we needed these skills. Quickly. I wasn’t panicking: I’d learned to rely on my mind’s ability to "sleep on" new information, incorporating it into the general knowledge base when I awakened. Or so I told myself, as Eli semi-patiently explained the same hitch knot to me for the third time. Gaining competence and confidence where there had previously been none was one of the points of this trip. Making routine what had earlier seemed extraordinary. Still, I kept looking north and thinking, "Climb that looming peak in the distance? Me? If you say so, Cedar." Dinner conversation tended to center around the topic cold, hungry men usually discuss when far away from the scent of a woman. Namely, women. Everyone in my tent had been through similar recent heartbreaks. Maybe that’s why we were sleeping on ice in the rain in Alaska in August. DAY FOUR: Ice Climbing, No Name Glacier Though I love scrambling up mountains, I’ve never really gotten into technical rock climbing. But ice climbing—this was fun. You need to understand what it means for an Alaskan to say “I'm actually looking forward to winter, when the waterfalls near my house freeze.” Alaskans generally don’t look forward to frigid winters. “But I’ll actually be able to practice ice climbing – in my backyard!” The principle is simple: Apply spikes to hands and feet, and make like Spiderman. Defy gravity. Walk up walls. It was so enjoyable, I didn’t even notice the driving rain that felt like it was part of a giant heavenly leak. Climbing ice is the closest you will ever get to feeling like an inchworm. There’s not much to it, skill-wise. You whack into a sheer ice wall with a specialized ice axe or two, dig your toes in, and keep climbing. If you fall, someone’s belaying you from below via ice screws and anchors sunk in at the top of the "pitch," so you drop maybe a foot. Even falling is fun (if you’ve got a good harness). Again, I had to remind myself that this lark in which I was engaging 100 yards from my tent was just one of the skills I needed to master to climb the big peaks. If you can’t make it up an ice wall, you can’t turn back or call in the air rescue. And I wasn’t at 17,000 feet yet. It was hard work, too. I recommend two months of daily pull-ups for anyone who wants to take up ice climbing. You’re halfway up a 30-foot wall when suddenly your arms feel like they’re made out of overcooked linguine. Our group bonded hard this day, loudly rooting for each other to reach the top of a wall that Cedar called "advanced intermediate." It had a nasty convex lip about three quarters of the way up, which you tended to reach just when you started to get tired. Cedar said he started us on this wall because we were such a hard- core bunch. The day made me realize again how important human chemistry is on a wilderness trip. And how fortunate we were in this regard. In fact, the supportive energy of Tal and Michael got me through the day. Day Four was about personal accomplishment. On two of my climbs, I was ready to quit after three successive falls from the dastardly lip. My arms felt like they were being pulled out at the shoulder, I was short of breath, and generally out of energy. Or was I? I sucked it in, grunted like Monica Seles before a backhand, and made it to the top, both times. The group cheered. That night I crashed with a clearer view of myself than I’d had in a long time. One that felt right. DAY FIVE: Glacier Camp, Crevasse Rescue Field Workshop Up at Glacier O’clock to more rain (even the real world professional Michael had relegated his watch to a deep recess of his pack). Eli was our alarm clock, calling out his daily, "Beautiful day! Hot drinks in five minutes." I don’t know how the guides remembered which day we were to be picked up. I was in full Playing On Ice mode. I loved walking in crampons: first off, I felt like a bear, and my tracks even had claws in them. Second, as a normally slip-prone person, these things grabbed everything—even my bootlaces. This day we learned how to rescue someone who falls in a crevasse and gets knocked unconscious. And this can happen to anyone: Even Sean, an Alaskan Mountain Guides co-owner and among the harder-core climbers on the planet, recently fell into a crevasse in the first hour of a trip, breaking several ribs (it didn’t stop him from completing the trip). Crevasse rescue is based on a pulley-system principle, where you disperse the dead weight by tying a series of anchors and tugging in what’s called a z-drag formation. Here I was using everything I had already learned: tying prussiks, self-arresting and burying pickets, all of which would have seemed part of an inconceivably foreign set of skills a week earlier. I think I’d need to go through this part of the workshop again before I felt confident rescuing someone on my own. (I spent half the time working on my knots.) Practice is key in this sort of thing, even for guides. But after this basic training I think I’d physically be a useful part of a group rescue. But here we get into the mental aspect of mountain climbing. I was told by a sports shop salesperson before this trip that at 32, I am the perfect age for mountaineering. My body is still pretty much intact, but I am (and here I allow pause for those who know me well to snicker) much more "mentally together" than I was, say, ten years ago. These were the salesperson’s words. Cedar pointed out that these factors can mean the difference between life and death in an emergency like a crevasse fall. It was at this moment in the trip that the "mental" component of mountaineering preparation came into play for me. As I watched Tal rather convincingly simulating an unconscious victim in a crevasse, I wondered, "Yeesh. Could I handle this, if it were real? If I were half-frozen and panicky myself?" In the end, I decided I could, just to avoid the shame of leaving someone for dead. Of having to explain it later. Better to bite it myself, too. It’s a question about a grave situation that can’t be definitively answered until it happens. DAY SIX: Glacier Camp to Abandonment Peak to Base Camp It turned out that climbing Abandonment Peak was only the second-hardest event of this epic day. I don’t know if this is because we had so systematically built up the skills necessary for the ascent over the week, or if it was because of the death march upon which we embarked after returning to glacier camp. Even Eli, who tended to lurch forward with the steady tirelessness of the Terminator, called Day Six "A Day." Thank goodness for long Alaskan daylight. In any event, Day Six was one of the most physically challenging of my life. It started with the moderately technical summiting of Abandonment Peak (I was afraid at first to ask the source of the name), that mountain to the north at which we’d been staring every day whenever weather allowed its top to show for a minute or two. I had a moment of fear when we all roped together for the first time, with Cedar lecturing us on avoiding rope slack and keeping our ice axes in the uphill hand. This was all getting kind of real. What if I really did fall on a steep slope? Would I be able to self-arrest? Other people’s lives were at stake here. And Cedar had promised Michael "a more technical route" than he embarks upon with most groups, because of our high achievement up to this point. But before I really had time to get insecure, we were on our way up, the trickiest part being this picket maneuver we had to pull in the really steep stuff. Every now and then Cedar, who was leading, would hammer a good ol’ picket into the snow and then continue. When the next person reached it, he had to yell "Picket!" then unclip himself from the rope and reclip above the picket. Then he yelled, "Climbing!" The process shortened the amount of slack rope and thus the distance of a fall. The only thing was: You reached the picket in the steepest spots—that’s why we used them. It was all pretty scary for a few seconds, until you got used to it. And no one fell into a crevasse. Hail was pounding down when we made it to the summit, where we found mushrooms growing. Feeling bold, I asked about the peak’s name. Turned out it resulted from Alaska Mountain Guides’ other co-owner, Darsie, making a pee break into a personal hike so extended it made the rest of his group feel abandoned. What I abandoned this day was most of my fear of mountaineering. I was elated at the top—nearly weak-kneed with climber’s high. But it wasn’t the altitude of maybe 6,000 feet. It was seeing life from a different angle—in this case from above. It’s what I imagine time travel would be like. My sense of how life moves was altered. But Abandonment Peak was just the morning warm up. Now we had to break down our soaking glacier camp and carry everything back to base camp: rope, stove, tents, personal gear, pickets, ice axes. We had allowed two trips for this a week earlier. And things are so much heavier when wet. Nothing to do but suck it in, go with it. Some of our jokes at this point were probably banned under the SALT treaty. When we finally scrambled over the last moraines and pitched camp, I jokingly asked a near-comatose Tal if he’d had a nice day. "It reminded me of special forces training," he said. I looked at him closely. He was serious. DAY SEVEN: Base Camp to Haines I noticed something strange and unfamiliar to me, above the eagles and clouds, as I stretched outside the tent on this final morning. It was a yellow ball in the sky. It was warm. I liked it. Three hours of almost mocking sunshine ensued, allowing a partial drying of our gear. Eli and Cedar gave us a lecture on high-altitude health dangers and a demonstration of transceiver use (for recovering people buried in avalanches). This gave me one last reminder that summiting Denali would mean climbing to three times the altitude I had experienced this week. I thought about this for a couple of hours: I was still very much the climbing rookie. Then our rides showed, and we headed back down to the other world at sea level. So am I ready for Denali? One of the lessons of living a week in Ice Age beauty is to not think of life in such event-based terms. But the short answer, I think, is “yes, eventually, and only as part of a guided group.” Cedar told me my skill level even now would make a guide’s life much easier on an ascent of one of the world’s big peaks. But I haven’t been tested at altitude yet. I am considering an ascent of Aconcagua or another more manageable peak before taking on Denali. But, someday in your future you’ll be reading right here about my Denali ascent. Meanwhile, I’m already excited to be climbing those frozen waterfalls that cascade down like kryptonite just miles from my home in Haines. Thanks to Alaska Mountain Guides and a glacier with no name, I’ve a bunch of new addictions. I look at mountains differently now. When I see areas once relegated to scenery status, I now wonder if there’s a way up. blue Contributing Editor Doug Fine has reported on locations from Burma and Uzbekistan to Rwanda and the Arctic for venues like the Washington Post, U.S. News & World Report and Wired. He lives in Alaska where he recently finished Not Really An Alaskan Mountain Man, a first-winter memoir. A website of his work is at www.well.com/user/fine. ### THE GEAR THAT GOT ME THROUGH Just as I entered my mountaineering course psyched to learn skills I was previously unaware of, I came new to modern alpine exploration gear as well. Here’s the list of what’s required, and the products that got me through. 1. Shell Jacket: On a trip like this you learn the difference between water-resistant and waterproof, quick. Alaskan rain is going to make you wet—It's as simple as that. Patagonia Essenshell jacket ($179, www.patagonia.com) dried quickly, and allowed ventilation in the pits when the going got hot. Patagonia DAS Parka ($259) was super warm, packed down small in its own stuff sack, and kept me dry during those heavy rain bathroom runs. 2. Shell Pants: With full leg zipper, Marmot Precip Pants ($69, www.marmot.com) are useful for removing with climbing boots on. 3. Sleeping Bag. The 0 degree Marmot Never Summer sleeping bag ($319), not only kept me warm and dry every single wet cold night, but like an oven dried the clothes I tucked inside before zipping up. 4. Tent. Sierra Designs Hercules ($399, www.sierradesigns.com) is a strong four season tent. At glacier camp, we consolidated into a Kelty Typhoon 3-person ($490, www.kelty.com, 11.8 oz, 95x75x48 inches) to save weight. 5. Pack. I fell in serious like with my Arc'teryx Bora 95 ($395, www.arcteryx.com) which was light and expandable and had an elfish-magic way of not feeling as heavy on my back as it did when I tried to lift it by hand. 6. Ice Axe. Charlet Moser Snowalker 68 cm ice axe ($70, www.charlet-moser.com) felt like an extension of my limb and was the lightest in our group. 7. Helmet. The Petzl Elios helmet ($55, www.petzl.com) protected my head and was the least bulky in our group. 8. Harness. Petzl Corax harness ($79) performed well and packed small. 9. Carabiners/Pulley/Belay. I used Petzl carabiners (which were perfect at $9.95-non-locking and $16.50-for locking) and cutting edge accessories: a Petzl Tibloc ascender ($25), a Petzl Oscillante pulley ($10.80), and a Petzl Reverso belay device/descender ($21). 10. Crampons. Black Diamond Contact crampons (strap version, $99.50). 11. Rope. I climbed with 60 meters of 10 mm Sterling Marathon dry rope ($62, www.sterlingrope.com). 12. Headlamp. Both Black Diamond Gemini and a Petzl Tikka headlamp ($28.95) worked great. 13. Eyewear. I recommend polarized sunglasses: I wore Bolle Congas ($110, www.bolle.com). 14. Socks. Patagonia capilene mid-weight ($17.50) and Smartwool expedition socks ($7.99, www.smartwool.com) were warm and fast drying. Sock prices have gone through the roof, but admit it: Good socks are worth the investment. 15. Underwear. Helly Hansen polypropylene ($35, www.hellyhansen.com) on the bottom and Patagonia capilene tights ($59) and a Patagonia R.5 shirt ($69) on top. When things were really wet and chilly, I'd also wear a Marmot Driclime Windshirt ($99). 16. Hand-Warmers. I recommend bringing a lot of air-activated hand and toe warmers. I used a handful of Grabber Mycoals ($1.50).