Why everybody should be angry at the militia in Oregon.

North and South Six Shooters, Indian Creek,, Utah 2014 

Armed gunmen invaded a wildlife refuge in Oregon to try and steal millions of acres, including the land in this photo, from the rest of us and it's really starting to piss me off. The militants themselves speak using religious phrases and they may actually believe they are doing God's will but if so, they think God wants them to take the West for themselves.  Yeah, this is a blog about climbing and this post is about climbing. It’s also about a whole, whole lot more.

Part of our freedom as I see it is being threatened by a fairly dangerous and underestimated movement. We need to protect public land from the politicians and militias that want to sell it off to the highest bidder and I think our freedom and quality of life depends upon it.  What is freedom if we don’t have the ability to come and go as we please?  You cannot be free if you are surrounded by No Trespassing signs unless you are rich enough to be the bastard that put them there. 

The threat to our freedom is often couched as a struggle for public land. It is that but those struggling to grab public land are banking that most of us won’t realize how much of our freedom is tied to land until it’s too late. A few weeks ago an armed militia took over a federal office for a wildlife refuge in Oregon and they occupy it still. They demand land reform, most notably they demand that land be taken out of public hands and auctioned off to ranchers.  Some of them want the government to retain ownership of the land but allow grazing permit holders to control how the land is used. It’s a sweet deal for the rancher because the government pays the bills for upkeep of the land. Their demands aren’t new but their tactics are. They are armed this time and they say they will kill law enforcement that try to arrest them. Thus far they are guilty of trespassing, breaking and entering, obstruction of justice, and resisting arrest.  But they aren’t the real threat to our freedom. 

You are free to climb here, hunt here, camp here, ski here in winter, or roll around in the grass in the summer. There are no fences or signs reading “No trespassing.” Mount McGinnis, Tongass National Forest, Alaska. 

It might not be a comfortable thought for many people but if you don’t live in the West, Alaska, or few other places in this country with public land, you are not as free as those of us with public land. I spent a year in the Midwest and the land is truly possessed, in this case it’s possessed by thousands of landowners. Everywhere you turn you encounter somebody’s fence and somebody’s sign. Land is fairly cheap so a working class person can buy a quarter acre lot and walk around on it like a rat in a cage. You are free to mow the lawn.  Lawn mowers are a big deal in the Midwest and it’s not surprising.  Neighborhoods have lawnmower races on their riding mowers. Fun stuff if you are into that sort of thing.  However, you can’t go hiking or climbing unless you trek to a few state parks where you get to share your day with all the other people that don’t have anywhere else to go. You can make a major trek to northern Minnesota, northern Wisconsin, or Michigan's upper peninsula and find open space. Indeed, you can be free living in up north in the Midwest and it's access to public land that makes that possible. It isn't the rural nature of the place that makes possible. People living in Seattle, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Denver, Salt Lake City and many other places have almost immediate access to fairly sizable tracts of public land even though many of them do not climb mountains or hike a trail they are free to choose to do so.

Physically and geographically climbs and hikes I have written about so far in this blog have had little in common other than that I have been to these places and they are all owned by the government.  It is not a coincidence because without even thinking about it I went to these places because it was public land or more specifically because these places are not private land. Scroll back to previous posts in this blog and you will see photos of Mount Shasta, the Mendenhall Towers, Split Thumb, the Grand Canyon, Yosemite, and the Superstition Mountains. While going there I didn’t see one No Trespassing sign and it wasn’t because I knocked them down.

Mike Miller’s Video footage, Lynn Canal. Tongass National Forest, Alaska Tongass.

Chilkat Range, Tongass National Forest. Alaska’s politicians want to get their hands on this land and open it to strip mining.

The threat is many loud mouthed conservatives cheering this militia on and that prominent politicians are among the cheerleaders.  Many scream for the neck of the police officer who shot LaVoy Finicum, the militia spokesmen that committed suicide by cop. It is tragic that anybody had to die but immoral to blame the cop. Perhaps, some blame could be placed on the cult of Cliven Bundy. Indeed they believe they are on God's errand and Finicum was willing to die for it. However, Finicum reached for his gun because he preferred to die rather than go to prison. I suppose I can understand his not wanting to prison but forcing a cop to shoot you because you would rather die is a really shitty thing to do. I think it was immoral of Finicum that his last act was to place his blood on someone else’s hands. It’s too bad this whole fiasco led to his death but the people who defend his actions concern me because the national craziness level is rising off the charts. Another concern is that the media uses words like activist or protester to describe men who broke into an office building and threatened to kill cops. I understand they vowed to never shoot at an officer unless he or she drew first but they had to know that no sane officer approaches an armed militant without his or her gun at ready. They expected a war because they weren't entirely delusional.

A very prominent threat is that many politicians sympathize with them and that includes Alaska’s congressional delegation. I can’t count the number of times I have heard my senators and representative use the words “Federal Overreach.” It’s a buzz phrase for politicians that want to allow corporations to run roughshod on the land. In Alaska, the words Federal Overreach are often used when the feds operate the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge as a place for wildlife and not as an Exxon land holding, but the ANWR isn’t the only public property they want to steal and then give away.

There is a delegation in Congress pushing to give huge chunks of the West and Alaska to the states. Most of those states, including Alaska, are pushing for this so they can auction off the land or auction off the resources. Setting aside some very legitimate environmental concerns that come from rampant resource development, this raises the specter of access for all of us.

Students in the Juneau Icefield Research Project raise the flag on the Fourth of July at Camp 17, Tongass National Forest.




Right now anybody can go anywhere they want on public land. In Juneau, you can climb peaks in the icefield or boulder in the forest up the hill from my neighborhood. Many people living in the West and in Alaska take this sort of freedom for granted.  Until recently I did. I grew up in Utah, British Columbia, Arizona, and Missouri and even in Missouri I had some access to public land in the Mark Twain National Forest. I was so accustomed to being free to go wherever I wanted to go that I didn’t mentally process that many Americans don’t even know what they are missing. 

I don’t love the federal government. I think federal agencies trend toward red tape and suffer from swings in funding that cause them to bloat one year and starve the next.  Examples of government mismanagement are easy to see. However, even with the drilling and overgrazing we see on federal land, the public still has the ability to weigh in even though all too often we don't. Furthermore, quite often they do a great job and we ignore that too.

BLM land, Arctic North Slope. 

We ignore our public lands at our peril. If we allow  public land to pass to private hands, we lose not only our freedom to access the land but our freedom to participate in the dialog about how the land is managed. There could be a silver lining if this militant standoff spurs everybody from climbers to couch potatoes to pay attention to issues on public land. 

But even with the problems we see on federal land, their goal is to make it possible for us all to climb, hike, camp, hunt, fish, and many other activities on public land. I generally like federal employees and most do know the red tape can feel a bit clownish at times but they do care about the land. Trails are usually reasonably well maintained and most important we are allowed to use them.  Every acre of land deeded out of public hands runs the risk of a No Trespassing sign and often it runs the risk of a chain saw or a bulldozer to a greater degree than it does in public hands. 

Terminus of the Herbert Glacier, Tongass National Forest, Alaska

I agree with the Bundys about one thing; it's not about cattle. The militia standoff is not about grazing or drilling or mining; it's about whether public lands stay public. I don't even think the militia thinks it's about grazing. To them this is a holy war even though the end point is still thievery, as is the case with any holy war.  It's about ownership and control of the land and they are zealously out of control because they think God is on their side. The fact that they might graze it to dust once they own it, is secondary. 

Next time somebody talks about selling off public land, ask them where they plan to climb or hunt or fish or whatever it is they like to do. Next time you hear somebody use the phrase ‘federal overreach,” throw some rotten fruit at them. It’s a mild protest. Next time somebody tells you that God is on his side, throw rotten fruit at them with extra fervor. Our ability to access many things we love, including climbing, depends upon it. So does our freedom. 

Climbing Development

 

Sydney and Jane at Sea Cliffs, February 2014

Juneau isn’t Moab or Yosemite. We need to get out and develop some easy to access climbing areas, places you can access with a short drive or hike and not spend most of your energy getting there. Last summer I became friends with a geologist  and climber named Kevin who came to Juneau to work for one of the mines and he asked “Why haven’t you folks developed more of your local crags?” 

Good question.  

One answer is that it’s a lot trickier to do here than it is down south where you can drive right up to the cliff and there are thousands of climbers willing to jump in and help. Some of the rock around here is choss and brittle and that is especially the case near town.  There seems to be an inverse correlation between rock quality and how difficult it is the access the rock. We don’t have much road access compared to other states or much of Alaska so to find spectacular climbing you first must bushwhack in or climb to the icefield.  Untold numbers of rocks grow moss in forests here completely unseen. There are not thousands of climbers to help develop crags either.

Mendenhall Glacier. It's a lovely place but you wouldn't want to climb here. 

As I write, avalanche risk prohibits any sane person from going high into the mountains to ski and it is raining concrete blocks at sea level. It’s the middle of January and it shouldn’t be this warm even though it shouldn’t feel this cold. The wind whistles outside like a freight train and it’s 44 degrees but it feels colder because the wet sinks into the bones. Many cliffs along the sea are brittle and dirty as well. There is a granite zone five zone about miles inland but in most cases you either have to climb thousands of feet on foot or take a helicopter to get to it, it’s covered in snow eight months out of the year, and it’s raining half the time during the summer. A good bit of the icefield is in the granite zone. 

Lemon Glacier and Juneau Icefield from the top of Cairn Peak, Photo Pete Boyd.

The icefield can be spectacular but it is not easy to access by any stretch.  I posted already about Split Thumb and Solva Buttress. Herbert Glacier’s terminus ends in the granite zone and it only takes thirty minutes to get there from the highway on a bike but Herbert’s cliffs are largely undeveloped. There is a basalt zone about thirty miles north of town at the Sea Cliffs. These are wonderful cliffs but they are forty feet at most and the developed area is not very expansive. There are some great boulders at Tee Harbor north of town but they are in the woods in the shade so it takes a day or so for them to dry out after rain. It rains here they say.  

Sydney reading by the fire at Herbert Glacier.

There are undoubtedly other places to climb rocks that haven’t been developed. Boulders and cliffs dot the forests and hills all over the place if you look closely and their rock quality varies immensely.  When you first find a cliff, it’s usually coated in moss.

Summit of Mount Ernest Gruening, another place worth a revisit.

An alternative answer to Kevin’s question is that we should develop more.

I call this Miller’s Pillar because Dylan Miller wants to be the first to climb it. It sits in the middle of the glacier on the west slope of Mount Ernest Gruening. 

Somebody developed the Sea Cliffs and I am glad they did. The Sea Cliffs are short walls that look out onto Lynn Canal and beyond the Chilkat Mountains. After work in summer evenings you can go out there and climb while watching humpback whales, sea lions, and seals frolic. Make sure your belayer doesn’t get distracted; it’s a lot to take in. It stays light late in summer but at some point the sun will set over the Chilkats and the whole of the sea and sky will turn bright orange and red. 

Check out Paul on this Tee Harbor climb. 

People cleaned the boulders and Tee Harbor and now it’s a great place to go. Juneau is a small city sitting in a very vertical landscape. Mountains jut from sea level to near 7,000 feet right out of town. You can strap on a pair of boots and within hours find yourself wandering ridge lines and peaks with views that many spend a lifetime seeking and never find. When the snow is right, the skiing here is close to orgasmic. The snow isn’t always right but it’s right more days than I can count.

Slopes at Eaglecrest

Juneau climbing is underdeveloped but that is both a curse and a boon. It would be great if somebody had already scouted the cliffs out the road for more climbable sea cliffs. It would. However, I am quite excited that one of these times I go looking new cliffs; I am actually going to find a “brand new cliff.” It’s quite possible in Juneau to actually discover a new wall and climb something that has never seen shoe or cam. Imagine that!

In the near future I plan to focus some attention on finding new rock out Herbert Glacier way. Sometime next summer I am planning a boulder cleaning party in the woods near my house in North Douglas as well.  I figure climbers will come and clean a cliff if I announce on facebook that I built a fire and put some beer in the creek to chill. If you build it, they will come and they might bring brats. I would love to cruise the shore north of Echo Cove and see about the rock quality of some cliffs there.  It’s the same geologic zone as the Sea Cliffs.  There is a long cliff band on the back side of Dean Peak that I would love to check out. Getting there will be a bushwhack but it looks so cool from a distance and it’s in the granite zone. I would really love to get up to some of the summits in the icefield again like Solva Buttress. There are actually more spires in the Juneau icefield than I can count and some of them have never been climbed by anyone.

Dean Peak as seen from a boat in Lynn Canal, May 2015. I am interested in the cliff band on left. It's up Sawmill Creek.