Earthquakes and Avalanches – A Gumby Foray Into the Alaska Range
By: Todd Bol (@cool_aperture),
Photos: Todd Bol & @somewhere_uphere
It all began as a dream to climb and ski North America’s Highest Peak, Denali.
Three Jerrys, one big mission. Austin (Elevated Local), Geno (Alpine Racoon), and myself (#1 Chuffer).
We did our homework. I knew that I was ready.
The year prior, I climbed El Capitan and spent eight days suffering up a hard aid climb. A few years back, I’d fallen in a crevasse in the Bugaboos and lived to tell tales of rappelling by soaring seracs and rowdy rockfalls. I had recently bivouacked with an obviously now ex-girlfriend in the San Rafael Swell. We had been insanely lost after dropping a slot canyon (among other things) and we were out of fresh water. Meanwhile large amounts of rain and flash floods were looming.
Looking back, it all sounds fucked up, but each one was like a medal. Each one a stepping stone. A feather in my cap. A merit badge, if you will.
What would Alaska be like? What kind of stories would we come back with?
Well, it turns out that Covid had different plans and we’d have to earn a few more badges before we could try Denali. Progressive trauma would engulf us (and the world) for the next two years.
Because of the pandemic, the authorities shut down the mountain for the year and we received our refunds for our permits. We asked ourselves, “what about next year?” The answer was that there would be too many gapers up on the mountain and we didn’t want to compromise our experience and safety with the crowds.
Planning turned to many options - renting an RV and skiing in the Chugach, skiing across the Eklutna Glacier, maybe something obscure in the Talkeetna Range?
No matter what, we knew we’d be doing something righteous!
In the year’s time that we had to prepare, we focused on skiing a lot of ‘big’ lines in Colorado. We skied Lamb’s Slide, Taylor Glacier, a possible first descent on Castle Peak, James Peak, Hagar Mountain, and the Dragon’s Egg on Mount Meeker. I had many other ski touring days, rock climbing, and peak-bagging days as well. I was even lucky enough to bag an ascent of Mount Tom and ski the Elderberry Couloir/Canyon and attempt a huge alpine climb on Lone Pine Peak out in the Eastern Sierras.
I was feeling really strong. No matter what we did, Alaska was going to end up being epic.
Geno is steady. Nothing can upset him. He was getting a lot of days in too. He has more or less skied every month of the year for many years straight now, so I wasn’t concerned about his fitness and stoke level.
Austin is an aggressive shredder and also one of the more fit friends I have, especially for the type of suffer fest adventures that we like to have. But some of the trials and tribulations I mentioned would rear their ugly heads en route to our grand voyage.
Ausitn developed Piriformis Syndrome and would be fighting it up to the week before our trip, and still today. Eventually, with many tears shed and many ups and downs, he had to pull the plug. It was heartbreaking because he had come up with the Denali idea to begin with. He was our Alaska spirit animal after spending so many seasons up there and even making it into the Alaska Range once before.
With his blessing, Geno and I marched on. We were not sure what to do still, but it was just going to be us - team ‘Alpine Racoons’ AKA ‘Trash Pandas’.
After much deliberation, we landed on the goal of exploring the Pika Glacier. The Pika offers 1,500 foot big walls, steep shreddy couloirs, and very real isolation (my favorite quality). It was kind of in the shoulder season for climbing and skiing, but what the hell, we had the tickets and how could Alaska be a bad trip?
We arrived in Anchorage in the beginning of June, bright eyed and bushy tailed. It may have had to do with Covid, but it was much less like the tourist extravaganza I had imagined when we arrived. Our introduction was amazing. We got to a hotel/traphouse and witnessed someone exit their room on the second story balcony, drop trou, urinate on the car below, and continue on back to their room as if nothing had happened. All in broad daylight. I was already seeing that the whole state was propped up on 2x4s and cinder blocks. I fit right in.
Our next big event was pizza that night, where I inhaled a piece of shrapnel from a metal can. Yum!
After some odd communication, Gary arrived to pick us up the next morning. Gary is legendary among climbers heading into the Alaska Range and definitely the preferred choice if you go! His shuttle service from Anchorage to Talkeetna includes a cookie stop (you read that right) and colorful conversation. It was entertaining to say the least, but Gary was a solid dude with a crazy life story that we learned all about.
10/10 would recommend.
We arrived in Talkeetna and there was bad weather, foreshadowing for the remainder of the trip. Our flight got delayed a day, so we had many drinks in town and visited the local dispensary. It was a blast. At day’s end we passed out in a pile outside of the bunkhouse that Talkeetna Air Taxi generously hosts.
We had seen a Wolf Spider before, while unloading our gear. I awoke in the middle of the night with a very itchy arm and by the morning I had three massively swollen bites on my right arm. We circled them with a sharpie to keep an eye on the swelling, which luckily went down over the course of our stay on the glacier. But I went into our flight convinced that my arm would become necrotic and fall off at a moment’s notice, 70 miles away from ‘civilization’.
I’m getting ahead of myself a bit.
Clay was our pilot and he was the man. TAT loved our expedition name (Trash Pandas) and we quickly became friendly with everyone there. It was to our advantage as Clay took us on some extra flight time, including a stop at Denali base camp on the Kahiltna Glacier. Finally, he dropped us off on the Pika Glacier and the feeling of isolation set in. We were in some of the gnarliest terrain I’ve ever seen, and we were on our own.
This is what I live for!
Quickly, we realized that we were not alone. We had a party of two on the glacier with us and we became fast friends. We got some beta from them and set up our camp. Our new friends had traversed all the way from Denali basecamp to the Pika with the intent of continuing on and pack-rafting out of the range. The conditions had stopped them though and they’d be picked up in two days. We theoretically had eight days to party.
Okay. We had our camp set up. It was easily the highlight of the trip. Our snow fort was entirely badass. We dug approximately six feet into the snow and had our tents above, creating a nylon canopy. We had a wall fit for a fortress, shelves, a kitchen, a storage area, and a lounge. I will go back to Alaska just to build another snow fort!
The next morning we went ski touring on some low angle corn snow to get the lay of the land. Then we skied some more, and some more. The days are so long, with light extending for 20 plus hours in June. We got pretty wrecked skiing many thousands of feet of fun, hot, sloppy, glacier snow. We would party a bit and retire to our tent late in the night.
The next day we did it again. The snow was too hot for any of the steeper lines. We certainly would’ve triggered some large wet slab avalanches. There had been a storm before our arrival and all of the slopes had been falling apart since we landed. It didn’t help that it wasn’t really freezing overnight either. But we were jazzed about skiing whatever we could.
We would recon several rock routes only to be scared off by substantial rock fall and more avalanches. Most of the crack systems were wet too, so low angle corn was our primary option.
After three long days of that, we were restless. We needed to climb something. We also knew that a really nasty storm system was rolling in and our only chance to escape would be the next day, cutting our trip short by four days. We decided we’d rather party some more and explore Talkeetna and Anchorage instead of being stuck in an Alaskan storm for the rest of our vacation.
On the fourth day on the glacier, we decided we’d climb ‘The Munchkin’ in the morning and be back in time for Clay to pick us up in the bush plane. We got up early, for us, and skinned up past big crevasses to our objective, already conscious of the terrible snow conditions. We put crampons on our ski boots and started up four pitches of slabby, loose rock and the most unstable snow we’d encountered yet. For the last pitch, I clipped my ski boots to my harness and climbed a mossy 5.7 pitch to the summit. Success! Geno quickly dispatched the pitch following me and we were ready to rappel down thinking that we did a possible first ascent, just a slight variation to our intended line. We had been listening to Roky Erickson the whole time and had his song about ‘Working in the Kremlin’ stuck in our head. In a tribute to him, we called our route ‘Twerkin’ with the Gremlin’, also an homage to the bad lip readings and misinterpreted lyrics that everyone loves to parody.
I made one successful rappel down, did a pendulum across a steep snow slope, and arrived at a rock anchor beneath an overhang. ‘Off Belay!’
Geno came down parallel to me, about to execute the pendulum. Just before he would swing we felt a mighty rumble. Much to our shock, a huge wet avalanche came ripping in between us, filled with rocks the size of small televisions. It shook the mountain and shook us a bit as well. It passed and Geno made it to the anchor. Time to G-T-F-O! We rappelled some more, made it back to the glacier, and skied back to our camp. We quickly packed everything up and got ready for the plane ride. The plane didn’t come and we figured we could get one more lap in! We put our skins on and rapidly ascended 1,000 feet up the glacier and skied one last epic run back to the plane landing.
Just in time!
We had another resplendent plane ride back to Talkeetna and saw some Grizzly Bears were starting to awaken from their hibernation and moving down towards the wetlands that surround the Alaska Range. It was amazing and inspired a sense of awe in me.
Back in Talkeetna, it was time to get some drinks and see what other trouble we could get into. We spent two days hiking around the forests and making friends in town. We visited the cemetery and appreciated all the climbers who had lost their lives in the mountains, including Mugs Stump and many other luminaries.
After two days, we were back in Anchorage and partying there. We hung out with people on the streets and gave them our leftover expedition food, rented bikes and shredded up and down the coast while evading moose, and had one more epiphany.
Our last night at the Captain Cook hotel was tremendous. Around midnight, the earth began to shake and we could feel seismic waves engulf the area. The hotel, one of the tallest buildings in town, quivered and moved side to side in the same bad way that I don’t know how to dance. Turns out, we’d just experienced a magnitude 6.0 earthquake. Putting two and two together, we had already experienced another earthquake while rappelling down from ‘The Munchkin’.
That’s what triggered the avalanche! Awesome!
With much melancholy, we found a ride to the airport the next night and caught our flight back to Colorado. Alaska had not been what we originally expected, but in many ways it was so much more. I promised myself that I would live there someday and imbibe more of the raw freedom and wilderness provided by the landscape and culture. Coming back to the rat race of the Colorado Front Range made me long for the next adventure.
Until we meet again, Alaska.
