A hammock couldn't kill my cell!!

Crater Lake in Volcán Irazú. You can drive to the summit. 

If it isn't cloudy, you can see a very long way 

A hammock stole my cell phone in Costa Rica. It might seem strange that an inanimate object would be guilty of theft but now that I read Gadd’s article I see that guilt is the true word.

At THIS LINK you can read a great article by Will Gadd about hammocks and why they are evil. Gadd is not only correct in his tongue and cheek way, he is a good author and he is a real climber and not an amateur like me. Gadd’s gist is that:

• Hammocks are comfortable until they are not and then they can strangle and suffocate you.
• Hammocks are dangerous because people hang them using cams that weren’t designed for outward pull, which lands your ass on the ground, literally. Your ass hits first.
• Hammocks are obnoxious because people set them in all manner of pretty places, obstructing the view for others while they spend the day taking selfies. Follow #selfishselfiesonhammocks on twitter.

Mostly Gadd is spot on but I disagree with the latter. Hammocks don’t take selfies, people take selfies. It’s the human race that sucks. Will Gadd might agree. 

Manzanillo Refugé, near Cahuita

My beef with hammocks is they are thieves and it doesn’t matter where you are, even in the beautiful little town of Cahuita, Limón, Costa Rica. Cahuita is traditionally Caribé Cultura and there is a Rastafarian influence there. It wasn't Rastas that stole mi celúlar.  We arrived in Cahuita on a night of a Rasta party that came about because it was "World Cultures Day" in Costa Rica and a long weekend.  We expected to not sleep but as it turned out the Rasta party was more like a family reunion with little kids. Children jumped on a trampoline in the front yard and across the street Caribé teens played fútbol on the beach. The place was quiet by 10PM and that made our day because we were both pretty stressed by the idea that we might not have a place to stay. Apparently there is a lot more to Rasta culture than smoking dope. I saw a cop in Costa Rica with dreadlocks past his shoulders. I chalk that up as one more thing I thought I would never see. He did not arrest the hammock that stole my phone.

White Faced Monkey, 

Parque Nacional Cahuita

Every morning while there I went running while Evonne did yoga on the deck. My first day running I ran into the Parque Nacional Cahuita.  I saw Howler Monkeys. I went swimming in the Caribbean three times, once before the run, once mid run, and after I was done. This was to cool down as it was already 75 degrees at 6AM and because the water felt good. I temporarily “lost” my shoes the first morning I was there.  I took off my shoes to run on the beach and hung them on a branch. It’s easy to run on the beach sans zapatos from the beach to the cabina went through the town is sharp gravel, mostly broken coral. Cahuita is a small town that takes laid-back to new definitions. While running a park ranger picked my shoes up thinking they were lost. When I came back for my shoes and they were gone, I was worried because getting back to the cabina would have ripped my feet to bits. Worse things can happen than losing your celúlar. Luckily, I thought to go by the ranger office and see if there was lost and found.  After the run we went to breakfast, which was an awesome gourmet of fresh eggs and fruits and vegetables. Every breakfast was like that.  After breakfast, we went hiking in the Parque Nacional Cahuita and saw white faced monkeys and howler monkeys. There were monkeys outside the parks too.  We also saw bright green frogs and more types of trees than we could imagine. We bought a book of the trees of Costa Rica and we couldn’t keep up.  I think there are more species of tree in Parque Nacional Cahuita than in all of the western United States and it’s a teeny national park.  Not all parks in CR are small.

Parque Nacional Cahuita 

A hammock stole my phone on a Thursday, the day we left the province of Limón.  

That morning I got up and went outside try and see some sloths that had been seen in the mango trees near our cabin. It had started to rain and the sloths had hunkered down out of sight so I made my way to the coffee maker. The coffee maker was outside but under a tropical gazebo. I set the coffee maker to action with water ground up beans and as it burbled, I sat in the hammock that was strung from the gazebo supports. Life was perfect until later that day when I couldn’t find my phone. We searched our cabin and all around the car and concluded that my phone must be in the car. All our bags were packed in the car and clearly the phone must be in one of them. We made this conclusion because we were too lazy to completed dissect all our bags because what seemed clear was not. We should have known that hammocks and laziness are best friends.  Not clearly as the story unfolds. We checked out and drove from the Caribbean Coast to La Fortuna in the mountains, a five-hour drive. We unpacked our stuff and soon concluded that the phone was not in our stuff.  The following day we went hiking on Volcan Arenal instead of calling the owner of the cabin Cahuita. “When the going gets tough, the tough go hiking.”  Arenal National Park has the best warning I have seen. Do not climb to the crater of the volcano as you could crack through the earth’s surface and boil in lava underground. I am paraphrasing but that was the gist of the sign and it was written in Spanish, English, and German. I had planned to climb Mount Arenal before seeing the sign.  Using Evonne’s phone we took cool photos of Volcan Arenal from the base and left the summit of Arenal to the birds. Incidentally, burbled is a word.

Evonne at Breakfast, 

Brigitte's Restaurant, Cahuita

As I searched and failed to find my celúlar I inevitably reached the status of weeping and waling and gnashing of teeth at the loss of my old friend. Admittedly, I sometimes hate cell phones and find them addictive, corrosive, and misnamed. They are not smart.   It’s love/hate with me and cell phones. I have been through thick and thin with this phone and this wasn’t my first close call. I once dropped out of a kayak into a glacial lake where it lived 18” deep in the water for 52 hours. Yet, it lives. While trying to set up a top rope, I dropped it off a cliff out the Pirate Shore north of Juneau. It fell forty feet and it lives because it’s a tough phone and Juneau has more moss than you can shake a stick at. My phone sat at the bottom of the cliff, cradled in moss. Saved by nature.  It once fell out of my pocket while kayaking a fjord in Alaska, also near the Pirate Shore, and sat under salt water for an hour on the floor of the kayak.  Yet, my phone lives. It was almost undone by a damn hammock.

We realized the hammock stole my phone Friday when I called the Cabinas Tito, our cabins on the Caribbean Coast. The owner told me she found the phone in the hammock. Either hammocks steal phones, like kayaks steal phones, or my pockets suck. Regardless there is a lesson for me. We had to fly home Saturday and we found out the phone was on the other side of the country at 5PM Friday.

Ceiba Tree, Parque Nacional Arenal

Costa Rica is a small country but it is still large enough that I couldn’t drive to Cahuita and back to the airport in San José in time to fly home. In case you are ever in Cahuita, Costa Rica the people that run the Cabinas Titos are awesome.

Just so you know, hammocks steal phones, pocket change, car keys, and all manner of things you might want later. Apparently, kayaks do as well. These things can’t be trusted for diddly squat and this brings up the conundrum. Stating that you don’t have diddly squat means the same thing as stating that you diddly squat.  Anythehoodle, I had diddly squat for a phone and no way to get it before returning to Alaska.

My wife and the owner of the Cabinas Titos are namefellows, a word for two people with the same name. Costa Rica namefellow spells her name Ivon but it’s said the same as my wife Evonne. Ivon is very cool person and I knew this before she helped get my phone back from that thieving hammock. After some struggle that hurt my head and probably Ivon’s, we chose Spanish to talk about to get the phone back. My online program (duolingo.com) says I am 58% fluent and the cabin owner is about 58% fluent in English so it was tough arranging on the phone. Evonne’s phone, not mine.

Volcán Arenal, Lago Arenal foreground

 Parque Nacional Arenal

Evonne and I drove to the airport in San José.   Ivon knew a cab driver who would drive my cursed phone to San José for $150. It might also be called a blessed phone San Telefóno.  $150 is quite a deal because it’s five hours one way and the driver paid for gas. I was to meet Oscar at the airport at a restaurant on the first floor. I didn’t know what Oscar looked like other than he is un hombre joven, a young man. The reason for this lack of understanding is that www.duolingo.com  is muy generous when it says I am 58% fluent.

Duolingo.com is guilty of grade inflation as can be expected for a free program. Another problem is that it’s not that easy to discern the numbering of the floors in the San José airport. It’s a big airport and it isn’t clear if baggage claim is on the first floor or if you count the parking levels beneath. By the time I found Oscar I was sweating more from the running around the airport than any other part of the trip and the airport was the only air conditioned building I went inside in Costa Rica. Oscar had the same frustration. He earned his money. I think Oscar has some friends in San José and I hope he took his tip and bought a round of drinks for all of them.

Orchid

A hammock stole my phone and it wasn’t punished because society cuts hammocks more slack than they deserve. The same is true for kayaks because a kayak stole my phone and tried to drown in twice. Twice.  Where is the justice?

Yet, I ask myself if there is a way to set up a hammock between two kayaks.  I must love thieves because I want to return to Costa Rica and sit in a hammock and kayak in the Caribbean. Can you trust a person that has NEVER stolen anything? Maybe by the end of my next trip I will be 58% fluent in Spanish. Losing your phone builds language skills.

Video I took of a white faced monkey eating a noni fruit. Link to youtube

Eclip's Rock's

There was a sign in Condon, Oregon read, "Eclip's Rock's." I think there were rocks for sale and it seems they don't know how to spell eclipse and they love using apostrophes. I don't know if they thought the rocks belonged to Eclip's or the eclip's belonged to the rock's.  

There is a large cast of characters in this story and at numerous geographic locations. I am pretty sure it’s confusing. That said, this story holds more truth than some. While I was away from home religious zealots came to our house. Twice. They left cards on the door with a picture of a red haired guy that was supposed to be Jesus and I am pretty sure Jesus wasn't a Scandinavian surfer. Hashtags showed how to find God on twitter. It’s a messed up world. At least I am not under water in Houston.

Tomorrow I go back to work, 7 days AE.

Eclipse, photo Sam Reese

The eclipse was cool enough that time is now reckoned as BE and AE (Before Eclipse and After Eclipse). My brother did a good job of organizing a complex family event that focused around the solar eclipse. He picked Sydney and me up at the Portland airport and he had done grocery shopping the night before. This was two day BE. We went to his house and arranged some stuff for camping. My sister and two of her daughters flew to Portland the previous night. Things were coming together. My sister reserved a rented cargo van for the trip and we picked it up at 11AM. By noon we were headed east through the Columbia Gorge. We stopped for pizza in The Dalles and got gas even though we didn’t need it. We had heard that some things like gas might be tough to find in the smaller towns. Someone planned a rave during the eclipse in the little burg of Prineville and 40,000 people bought tickets. We didn’t go to Prineville; we went to a campground just north of Mitchell, Oregon, population 130. If you count my Portland brother, his wife and kids, my Arizona sister and her two kids, my British Columbia sister, her husband and two kids, and my Arizona brother, our group alone was 8% of the population of Mitchell. Ultimately, the campground had about 800 people. I think it was wise to get gasoline as I don’t know how big the storage tank is at the Mitchell gas station. 

Sunset Priest Hole, Oregon.

We didn’t hit any traffic going down there and I was beginning to think the predictions of mayhem might be wrong. Then we pulled into the Priest Hole campground and lo and behold folks trickled in all day and previous days BE. Some arrived Sunday, 1 BE. The crowd spread over about a mile in a campground along the John Day River. On its busiest day prior it might have had 30 people. Most days less. Waits for the one outhouse were up to an hour. If you didn’t bring your own toilet paper you were shit out of luck. Literally. It was almost impossible to find a private tree to poop behind on the campground side of the river because peoples’ camps were strewn everywhere. I swam the river to find privacy. I  dug a hole with a stick and did my business. That’s the bad part of the story.

John Day River

Priest Hole is a BLM campground in a vast expanse of wide open space. The “hole” is a fishing and swimming hole on the John Day River. It’s a Wild and Scenic River with no dams.  The landscape for hundreds of miles around Mitchell is either sagebrush of short grass prairie. There are way more cattle than people in that part of Oregon. There is something to be said for that. We got settled into camp and made some dinner. Sometime the next day my sister Paulette’s family and my brother Dean showed up. Sunday night we sat up and played music by the light of a lantern. Camp fires were restricted because it’s dry, dry out there. Dry is why we were there. Clouds mess up the view of an eclipse.

Solar telescopes set up by more serious eclipsers. 

Note the smaller telescope on left is on crutches, though it’s still serious technology.

Sam picked a great locale. It’s not too hot nor too cold this time of year. In the afternoon we swam in the river. We had inflatable kayaks and other water toys to get us through the afternoon heat. Highs were in the upper eighties and lows in the low fifties. The landscape is hilly to the point of almost mountainous but not. The most noticeable feature out there is the HUGE amount of wild space. Yet, Sunday afternoon when I climbed a mountain to get a view, there were dozens of people camped up there for the eclipse. Along the river there were cowboys, nudists, serious astronomy geeks, and all manner of folks.  Nothing like it will ever happen again in Mitchell, Oregon.

The morning of the eclipse my nephew got sick. He is a trooper and didn’t complain even though he was camped out in the dirt with no plumbing. The bathroom had an hour wait and it was an outhouse. Pablo just sat in the shade and did his best to ride it out. He vomited three times. As the eclipse time approached, my sister in law helped Pablo to a chair by the river where he sat the whole time. I think he was glad he went.

Pablo feeling pretty good.

The Reese clan when 10% of the sun was gone.

As I said, we were not remotely alone. A group near us cranked out Pink Floyd music with a big stereo as soon as the first sliver of sun slid behind the moon. At first it bugged me but by the time half the sun was gone I was liking it.

And all that is now

And all that is gone

And all that's to come

And everything under the sun is in tune

But the sun is eclipsed by the moon.

Eclipse, Photo Sam Reese

My sister in law didn’t share my love for listening to Waters and Gilmore during a spectacular natural event. I can see her point of view. She asked them to turn it off during totality and in a human act of spectacular, they did.  So we all sat there, the Reeses, the Pink Floyders, the cowboys, and the nudists and watched the whole world change hew. When the sun went black the temperature dropped about ten degrees almost immediately. I was shocked at the difference between totality and 98%. With a thin sliver of sun it looked mostly like day and then it wasn’t. I have never seen Venus so bright. The moon looked like the sun was a black hole. The sun was a black and the landscape looked like nothing I had ever seen. I have seen a solar eclipse before but it was annular so the sun was a ring, not covered. This was amazing. I couldn’t contain hoots and hollers, nor could anyone else. That part was weird.

Sydney with the Pink Floyd Camp in background. 

Our camp was just uphill.

There is a lot of buzz in the media these days about a group of people called the Flat Earthers. You know the folks. They amuse us. Most of the time I don’t give much thought to global curvature denialist but when the sun covers the moon it’s hard to mentally shake the fact that the universe is bigger than we can ever grasp. Global curvature is not a hoax and neither is global warming. That celestial bodies are round isn’t even the most important part. We are spinning on a ball in space circling the sun and the sun itself is a bit player in the Milky Way.  The Milky Way shone like a rock star in the Oregon sky every night. From a calculus perspective the human race is nothing at all. When you count up the number of stars the significance of one planet asymptotes toward zero and the significance of one species of apes wearing clothes even less.  Does it really matter what shirt I wear tomorrow or what religion folks belong to? The sky is way too large to care how many wives Joseph Smith had or that ten of them were married to somebody else or whether people think the earth is flat. The human race isn’t quite as important as we think it is.

Syd and Fern

I could have done without the other people at the campground. I know some experience an eclipse as a social event and I can see that point but not entirely. The sun and the moon didn’t do a dance for us or even for themselves. The sun and moon don’t even like each other and we are completely insignificant. I think part of the allure to many people is that you can’t put an eclipse on TV or any other media with any success. That media fails is part of what’s cool about it. The eclipse was viscerally real and uncopiable. There are things I don’t want to only read about or hear about. You can read about a moist wet kiss but it never stacks up to experience. Even lousy experiences exceed vicarious ones. In this case I felt I had to see the total eclipse, not just watch it in film or read about it. Totality lasted about two minutes and it ended in a white flash and all of sudden it was hot again. Over the next hour or so the sun returned to being a full sun. The moon and the sun finished dancing. Indifferent to us as they always are.

Pablo said it was the coolest thing he had ever seen even though he blew chunks again before the eclipse was completely over. After that we sort of hung out for the rest of the day and hit the road the following morning. Dean went back to the Grand Canyon, taking a couple days to get there. Sam and his family, including Pablo headed to the Medford area to my sister in laws family’s home. Pablo got feeling better and they went on a raft trip. Paulette and family went back to Canada. Janette, her two daughters, Sydney and I went back to Portland. We ate Thai food that night and slept at Sam’s house.

Wednesday morning, 2 days AE, my sister flew home and Syd and I were in Portland solo.  Sam was still on the river in southern Oregon.We rented a car and drove to Leavenworth, WA. It’s a strange and cool place. We went to Leavenworth because we wanted a road trip. It’s a four and a half hour drive from Portland.  Juneau folks don’t have a road and you gotta drive when you get the chance. Leavenworth has at least two attractions, climbing and it’s a cheesy mock Bavarian village. The latter is so cheesy that it’s fun. We ordered bratwurst and beer in big mugs. The rock climbing is phenomenal though we didn’t do as much as we wanted. Both of us were feeling ugg. I think we may have had I smidgeon of Pablo’s nausea. We sat in the shade. We had hammocks. We swam briefly in the Icicle River, no surprise that it’s cold.  That said, we climbed about two hours each day on a rock called Eight Mile Rock, which had all the elements we needed. It had climbs that were difficult for us but eventually within reach and we were camped nearby. Before we left Leavenworth, I finally climbed the route I was working on.  

I bought a guide book to climbs in Leavenworth and would like to come back. This trip was a scouting trip. We got back to Portland Friday night, 4 days AE. 

Leavenworth, Washington 

Saturday, 5 days AE, we flew back to Juneau.

It’s good to be home.

Solva Buttress and Nick Drake

Nick Drake had a way with words and guitar. 

From The Morning.

A day once dawned

And it was beautiful

A day once dawned

From the ground

Then the night she fell

And the air was beautiful

The night she fell

All around

So look see the days

The endless colored ways

And go play the game

That you learned

From the morning 

Mount Stroller White as seen from base camp Friday morning. Summit of Mt McGinnis is a nubbin to the left of Stroller.

On August 4, 2017, we rolled out of Alex Burkhart’s four-person tent at 4AM and started getting out gear together to climb the Solva Buttress. Rumor has it the buttress got its name from Norwegian climbers in the fifties who named it the Sunshine Buttress in Norwegian. I always thought sunshine might be a Norwegian inside joke given how much it rains in Juneau but now I think not. When it’s sunny up there, it’s really sunny, many square miles of whitish wall facing south reflecting and absorbing light like a solar oven. After a summer of rain, it felt good to be in that "oven." 

The Solva Buttress (Fifth Tower) as seen on our approach to base camp from the helicopter. Photo Dylan Stuart (Stewie)

We woke above a marine layer about 4,000 feet thick,a bed of clouds with mountain tops poking their peaks and we were above the clouds. A day once dawned and it was beautiful. The previous night we were dropped off by helicopter on the glacier at the base of the south side of the Mendenhall Towers. The Solva is the Fifth Mendenhall Tower from the left as counted from the west. 

This was my third attempt at the Solva Buttress and my third post about it. The first two attempts I didn’t reach the top. It wasn’t failure but turning around before the summit was not the goal. My first two attempts are here (LINK 2015) and here (LINK 2016).  Everything went smoothly this time and there are summit photos if you read on.

Base camp before the climb. 

We got rolling by 5AM. There were two teams: Alex and Stewie and Kevin and me. I am probably the weakest in the group.  We stayed about a pitch apart with Stewie and Alex above us most of the time. We met up for a short lunch. The Solva Buttress has ten pitches, more or less. The starts and endings of pitches aren’t demarcated by fixed anchors or any means other than descriptions on summitpost LINK. That and some pitches have obvious useful ledges that are clearly good places to end a pitch and start the next.

Alex Burkhart front, Kevin Walsh, Stewie, Carl Reese (me)

It was starting to warm up by the top of pitch one, one of the trickier climbs of the day though it is well protected. There was a lot of rope drag on some of these pitches and the first one was bad.  None of the day’s climbing was that tough taken singly but it was a challenge for me taken all in one day. The Buttress is 1,600 feet or vertical rock with very little space for un-roped climbing, at least for climbers like our team. That is part of the beauty of the climb that it’s tall, consistently technical rock, and yet not overwhelmingly so. The exposure is huge in some places and the location is shockingly beautiful.

Pitch one and Kevin at the start of pitch one. 
I didn't get any photos of Kevin climbing as I was his belayer.

Pitches two and three went smoothly. I led two and Kevin led the first part of 3. I led the last part of 3 and continued leading about halfway up pitch four. Pitch four is about a 5.6, long and fun. The ratings are understated for sure. 5.6 feels real and 5.7 and 5.8 even more so.  I set an anchor at mid point of pitch four and Kevin took over on lead as he is faster than me and we were worried about having to rappel in the dark. As it turns out, we were right to be concerned because that is exactly what happened. It wasn’t a huge problem. 

This is the place! I don't know what was over 

there but it wasn't the Salt Lake Valley. 

I think it was near the top of pitch seven. 

Photo Kevin Walsh.

A leader takes the larger risk in an alpine climb. I figured I’d say that since not everyone reading this is a climber. The lead climber climbs first, with the belayer feeding him/her rope, and placing cams or nuts into cracks in the rock every 10-15 feet. This is ideal but sometimes an appropriate crack doesn't exist for a stretch of rock and this is called a run-out. You have to turn back or change direction if you come to a large run-out that you don't feel 100% confident climbing, sans fall.  If the leader falls, the gear catches the fall when the rope comes taut. If you are 25 feet above your last pro, your fall is 50 feet.The fall is called a whipper and people have survived whippers up to 80 feet because the rope stretches. Often whippers up to 20 feet have little to no injury but there are exceptions if you hit something on the way down. 

Kevin led most of the trip this time. The follower climbs second and cleans the protection as he/she climbs.  At the anchor there is an exchange of cams before the next pitch.  Our exchanges got quicker throughout the day but were clunky at first. The follower is belayed from above so falls are comparatively short, say 10 feet at most, though falls on traverse (moving laterally) can be longer because there is more slack in the rope and the follower can swing.  Large swings can be a problem. Whippers and swings are WAY better than ground falls, scrapes and bruises verses busting apart like a water balloon.

We were able to link the upper part of pitch four and five and make it back to what summitpost described. It wasn’t our intent to follow summitpost but it worked out that way. Pitch five is the one pitch I didn’t like that much as there was a short section with some wet rock and it was run-out. Last time I was there I didn’t think much of it but it was likely dry that day. There was very little wet rock this trip though. The top of pitch five had some snow and that helped with my water supply. We ate lunch at the Palacio del Cinco, the large ledge at the top of pitch five. Another climbing team slept up there that night.

Alex on pitch 4. 

Pitch six was an exercise in mindfulness. Breath slowly and focus.  There is a run-out section where you have to climb right, back left, do a belly slide down-climb, and then finish the climb.  The route felt like a 5.9 but was rated at 5.7.

I don’t believe any of the ratings.

Pitch seven is long and ends with a twenty-foot traverse that hangs over perhaps 1,200 feet of air. A whipper on lead would be thirty feet and a fall following would be a twenty-foot swing. There aren’t any cracks to place gear on the traverse for a while.

None of us fell on this trip. 

Part of Pitch Eight with the step out marked lower left. 

I got to the top of pitch seven thinking about turning around. I kept going partly because Kevin was confident leading and after looking at the traverse, rather than the 1,200 feet. I am not afraid of heights but I do get jitters when I am above major exposure. the jitters are actually counter productive and I knew the only way I was going slip on that traverse was to trip over my own head.I noted the step out into open air was simple climbing and falling was highly unlikely with minor consequences. The consequences were perceived because of the exposure though a fall would not have been fun.  I would have shit myself for sure. 

I also kept going because I am beginning to be known as the guy with multiple flailed attempts at the Solva Buttress and flailing this time might have meant three strikes. Climbing isn’t baseball, however.

Pitch eight is the crux and it starts with a few simple ledge and then there is a thirty foot sheer face with a single crack. I gotta thank that guide I paid for in Indian Creek a few years back for crack climbing lessons. I did just fine and I shouldn't make fun of people that hire guides. The next crux wasn’t physically tough but mentally stressing, much like the traverse at the top of seven.  

The walk to the summit of Solva Buttress

The traverse move is to step right off a small ledge at the top of the crack and step out for about 8 feet on some medium sized foot holds. It sounds easy enough, and it is easy enough except that the leader is twenty feet above the last cam and there is twelve hundred feet of air below your feet. Kevin did wonderful as leader. I don’t think I could have led that part. The crack crux I could have done because you can place as many cams are you want. I felt nervous and I was on a top rope. If I ever get up there again, I could lead it because I know what it’s like. It’s a couple steps to the right, a step up, and then you find another spot for a cam. If you fall you will drop about fifteen feet before the rope catches you.  You will have to prussic up the rope.  Once he got his first cam in the wall, Kevin started climbing with hoots, “This stuff is fucking dope!”

Dylan Miller on the skyline of Fourth Tower. 
I zoomed in as it's 1/4 mile away.

Indeed it was dope. Following the traverse, we climbed about fifty feet of magnificent rock with spectacular exposure, excellent protection and exchanged the rack. Throughout the day we got much faster at exchanging the rack and I think that is key to not getting stuck rappelling in the dark. Get up earlier than the sun, make quick exchanges, and don’t dilly dally. That and drink a ton of water because the sunshine saps it out of you.

As I was getting ready to start climbing pitch nine, Gabe Hayden climbed past me without a rope. A minute or so later, Dylan Miller past me too. Both of these guys are amazing climbers with incredible control. I stand in awe of free soloists.  I spoke for a minute to each of them and continued up. Pitch nine is easy stuff and so was pitch ten. Both could be considered class IV scrambles. If I go up there again I might just pack the rope away at the top of pitch eight and climb ropeless. The last approach before the summit is a casual walk along a wide ledge that abuts nothing but sky. The view is knockout and walking to the summit feels like my version of an honorary red carpet with honors bestowed by the Goddess Solva upon the whole climbing team. I am guessing the Solva Buttress was no big deal to Dylan and Gabe.

Looking north from summit.

Kevin and I and Stewie and Alex got to the summit about 5:30. We sat up there for twenty minutes and figured we needed to get moving. Dylan and Gabe climbed across the saddle between the Solva Buttress and the Fourth Tower and up the Fourth.  They rappelled the Fourth Tower starting about the same time we started our rap. They got down around 9PM and we got down at 1AM

Kevin and I on summit

Our first rap started a 6PM. Even though we had two ropes we opted for 30 meter raps; one sixty meter doubled. The potential for getting a rope stuck is huge on the Mendenhall Towers and it seemed faster to go that way. I think it worked too. One of us rappelled pitch ten, the next rapped to meet him with the second rope, one of them would rappel pitch nine while the third and fourth climber took turns rapping pitch ten. We leap frogged the whole way like that and only got the rope stuck once, on pitch nine. Stewie climbed back up. Thank you Stewie.

Stewie and Alex on the summit. 

Even though our raps went mostly smooth, it takes time. Darkness fell around 10:30 and we were still 500 feet above base camp. The northern lights came out. Fortunately, it was a full moon and we all had good head lamps so we trudged downward. It’s not possible to rappel a wall like this in the dark if you don’t have enough light to make out the major features in the distance. On a moonless night, we would have been benighted (waiting it out for sunrise.) It also helps that I had rapped this section twice before, once in the dark. Failure has benefits.  With the moon, we could easily see our target on the ice and route quite well. I placed a bright red tarp on the snow away from the wall so we could see it the whole time and aim for it as we descended. The headlamps helped us see details close up like our knots and such. Kevin had never seen the aurora before. Despite our fatigue, it was an inspiring few hours.

Meanwhile in a more civilized world about fourteen physical miles and four hundred philosophical miles away, a photographer named Ron Giles had his tripod setup to photograph the northern lights at the north Douglas Boat Ramp. I don’t know Ron but he posted a photo on Facebook showing headlamps on the Solva Buttress and somebody forwarded it to Stewie asking if this was our group. Indeed it was.

Me on pitch nine. 

We got back to base camp at 1AM and I gobbled some food, brushed my teeth, and collapsed in the tent. We woke up around 7:30 because the wind howled like a rabid wolf all night and finally we had to get up and secure the tent so it didn’t fly back to Juneau without us. We flew home at 11AM.  Before the trip, we thought we might climb some single pitches in the morning before the heli showed up but our feet were sore so we sat in the sunshine for a few hours eating and drinking coffee. There was even some whisky in the morning which we drank like rock stars.

Ron Giles photo of lights on the Mendenhall Towers. 

There is something surreal and magical about the Mendenhall Towers and indeed the whole Juneau Icefield. It’s an area stuck in the Pleistocene. The towers themselves are a nunataq, a large chunk of solid granite jutting out of one of the largest glacial systems in North America. But it isn’t just the geologic history that draws me to the place. 

Sunset in the lower part of our rap.

Maybe the lure is that humans don’t belong up there for long.  The icefield invites me in and allows me to stay until the weather or some other harsh reality brings me home. Though the rock is spectacular and the climbing challenges my every nerve, it’s the beauty and magic that draws me back, not the rock.

So look see the days

The endless colored ways

And go play the game

That you learned

From the morning

Youtube LINK, From the Morning by Nick Drake.

Selfie taken at the top of pitch seven. I will have to return and smile next time.