As I write this, I want to say that I am thinking heavily about the huricane victims in the Gulf states.. Nature can be both devistating and frightening, and insanely beautiful. I've been counting my blessings a lot these past few days..
I just recently came back from my first trip to Alaska. I was able to get to a really cool spot. I had to sell a few boas to get there, but I have to say it was worth it.
I also just received a smokin' new Harlequin from the Magee’s.. that was way cool too.. I'll post a few pics of him soon.
..sorry for so many pics.. I was trying to show our progress on the day we did this climb. It took us a drop off from a bush plane and then 4 days of hiking to get to where this first photo was taken. The peak we climbed is called Shot Tower. It's part of the Arrigetch Peaks which are in the southern part of the Brooks Range. It was by far the best climb I've done. We couldn't have asked for more perfect conditions.
this is what we saw as we were hiking on the beginning of our fifth day. We had just spent 4 days hiking with 90 lb packs and pulling ourselves through thick stands of alders until we finally got to high enough elevation that we were above tree line.
because we were so far north we had about 22 hrs of daylight. we had left our camp this morning at about 3:30am, just after sunrise.
On this day we felt great to only be carrying our smaller climbing packs with just a day's worth of food and water, and a few extra layers of clothing - just in case... and our climbing gear and ropes.
Finally we could see the summit of Shot Tower... all that hiking had suddenly seemed worth it.
we climbed the ridge starting at the right side of the photo. the roped climbing started at the notch at the far right side of the photo. hiking through these boulders was, in my opinion, the scariest part of the whole trip. Some of these boulders were the size of a VW bus and at times we would feel them move as we stood on them. Doug just kept moving fast enough to not stand on any one boulder long enough to let it move very far.. I was just trying to keep up with him.
Doug was eager to start the roped climbing... Go Doug!
it was 11:00am by the time we reached this point - already about 7 hrs into our day.
while Doug was climbing above me, I was checking out the view behind us... The melt-off from these glaciers is what was feeding the creek we had been following for the past 4 and a half days. By about the third day into our trip we decided it was safe to drink directly from the creek, and I stopped using my iodine tablets. the water was yummy good.
a few shots of Doug climbing... I haven't been able to download the photos Doug took with his camera, so I'm still lacking any pics of me.
the difficulty rating for most of this climbing was about 5.8 (on a scale that goes from 5.0 to 5.14 with 5.14 being the hardest climbing that has been done by only a handful of the best climbers in the world) - so 5.8 really isn't crazy hard. The rock looks steeper in these pics than it really was.
I did end up leading a few of the easier pitches. The climbing was on good rock - most of this rock was NOT loose, so it felt nice and safe. Doug is finishing a section of the climb that I had just led - with that glacier still behind us but looking a little further below us. We had done about 10 pitches of climbing by this point - which was about 1500 feet of moving up.
The final headwall was a section of about 60 feet that was dead vertical straight up. Doug had to use a technique of climbing called 'aid climbing'. If this section was free climbed it would probably go at a rating of about 5.12. - much too hard for either Doug or I to do free. But Doug got us through it..
a quick shot to get the view as we were doing the final scramble to the summit.
Doug looks satisfied with the day... and we both were for sure!
Doug is starting the rappels to get off the peak. We had to do about 9 rappels to get off. It was about 9pm when we reached the summit and by the time we stumbled back to our camp it was about 3:45 am.. the next day. We rested ALL of the following day before we reluctantly loaded up our larger packs for the hike back to our pick-up spot to wait for the bush plane to take us back to civilization...
