Basically, the United States Geologic Survey never got
around to naming many Alaskan mountains and there is little money for revamping
the maps now. Thus, many mountains are points or x’s on maps but that doesn’t
mean people don’t call them something. For example, most of the peaks east of
Skagway don’t have USGS names but you can see them from town and from the boats
in inlet. Literally a million people a year come to Skagway on cruise ships and
they all look at Pyramid Peak or Mount Triangle or Mount 5212 or Mount Fillintheblank. It
has no official name and thus new names can pop up any time.
Peak 5212 or Pyramid Peak
Indeed, there is a history of greasy misnaming in the world
of mountains. Mount Denali was called Denali for about 10,000 years until
somebody named it after a dead president that never set foot in Alaska. It took
Alaska a century to get our mountain’s name back. Mike has a point. If there ever is a Mount Don
Young I will climb it just to shit on the summit.
Couloir on No-Name Peak, that is what they call in Skagway.
Memorial Day weekend the plan was to kayak south from the
Skagway ferry terminal to the mouth of Kasidaya Creek starting on Thursday
afternoon. I met Mike and Brian before work on Thursday at the Juneau ferry
terminal and gave them my kayak to carry.
We I took Friday off work and I flew Thursday afternoon to Skagway and
met them there. Our plans changed throughout the weekend. Our initial plan was to
kayak south from the Skagway ferry terminal to the mouth of Kasidaya Creek and
head inland to climb an unnamed mountain that is 5,883 feet tall. We called it Peak 5,883 and this mountain
doesn’t have any unofficial names that we are aware. Lots of Alaskan mountains are rarely seen by
anyone except for the occasional mountain climber and people in planes. This is
one of those. We didn’t make it and hope to climb it later this summer.
Once we were all in Skagway, we staged our gear and kayaks
by a clump of alders about 50 yards from the public boat ramp. Mike and Brian
had a double sea kayak and I have a whitewater kayak. As I tossed my
mountaineering boots into dry bag, I experienced that “oh fuck” feeling that
comes from realizing I forgot something critical. I left my crampons at home. My
crampons are old and almost too small for me. I needed crampons, or so I
thought, and my team needed me to have crampons so I ran to the store in
Skagway and bought a new pair. This delayed the trip thirty minutes. In the
meantime, the harbor master approached us and told us we couldn’t launch kayaks
from the harbor unless we used the official ramp and we had to pay ten clams
each to the harbor. That all seems silly because the shore we were staging was
good for kayaks and the ramps can become busy with people loading fishing
boats. Why slow up the fishing boat ramp unnecessarily? We followed the
instructions of the The Man! and
unloaded the kayaks and shuttled 400 pounds of stuff to the boat ramp and this
delayed our departure even longer. We hadn’t paid our ten clams yet when we
noticed nobody was using the boat ramp. We looked south and the whitecaps were
getting bigger and whiter and it kept getting worse. Soon the wind was lifting
mist off the whitecaps and creating what sailors call “smoke on the water.” If
you aren’t thinking about the song now, I am surprised. Smoke on the water is a
white mist hovering over the white caps, moving quickly in the wind. We decided kayaking was a no-go.
By this time, it was 6PM. We bought a pizza at a restaurant,
a map from the outdoor store, and figured to hike up to Upper Dewey Lake area
that evening. In Alaska, it’s light until 11 this time of year, we had spent
all day sitting, and the two-hour hike seemed good. There are some very nice
mountains right out of Skagway and there is an old log cabin at about 3,000
feet we could stay for free.
Once again we changed plans. Brian has a friend that keeps
his gillnetter on dry storage in Skagway and he told us we could sleep on his
boat. Mostly we opted to stay on the boat because we had cold beer and there
are lawn chairs on the back deck. It was sunny out and Skagway is a beautiful
place even in the middle of a boat storage lot. Note, that this boat was not in
the water; it was sitting on blocks in an industrial park waiting for fishing
season. The boat was about 40 feet long and a nice working gillnetter. We drank
a few beers on the back deck and went to sleep by 8:30.
Upper Dewey Lake is frozen near the lower end of the cirque.
This is the view from near the Gunsight.
We got hiking to Upper Dewey Lake by 8AM and got to the
cabin by 10. Upper Dewey Lake is a kettle lake in a large cirque surrounded by
tall granite mountains. Skagway has a bunch of things named after George Dewey,
a hero in the Spanish American War who probably never thought twice about
Alaska. I would guess Dewey was a good guy but I am guessing the Tlingkit name
was lost from modern vocabulary because some surveyor wanted to brownnose the
folks in DC. Dewey was popular in Washington DC for killing Spaniards in the
Philippines. Our plan B was to climb Unicorn Peak (one of
its names) and Pyramid Peak in two consecutive days. We left kayaks and other
non climbing gear in the gillnetter. We left overnight gear in the Upper Dewey
Lake free use cabin and continued up to try and climb “Unicorn Peak” with light
packs. Mike’s friend told him you go through a notch in a pass called the
Gunsight, drop to the icefield behind the pass, climb up the back of the
Unicorn. He was also told that ropes and cams weren’t needed. Mike’s friend went
up there under different conditions than we encountered I think. I can imagine
that with lots of solid snow or no snow at all, that you could pass the
Gunsight without a rope. As we pressed
to the Gunsight, it became clear that snowshoes would have helped a lot. We
punched through a surface crust every minute of so, sinking to our knees and
sometimes deeper. The snow rising to the Gunsight was deep and soft. It’s what
skiers call corn and it would have been great skiing. Corn sucks without skis
or snowshoes.
We made the base of the Gunsight by noon. The snow rising
the ramp to the Gunsight was three to six feet deep, close to 50° angle, soft,
and pocked like Swiss Cheese. From what I could discern, the ground underneath
the snow is a jumble of bowling balls to house sized boulders. Gaps between the
boulders created air pockets. I punched through the snow to my neck once. It
sucked to climb out because there wasn’t anything solid to pull up on and I
needed to calculate every move to ensure I didn’t slip down the ramp. It took
us 70 minutes to ascend 100 yards up that ramp to the Gunsight because each
step had to be planned so we could get an ice axe into something solid in case
we slipped. Once in the Gunsight we noted that back side was a rock ramp
dropping off four hundred feet down the Juneau icefield. It’s the same icefield
we have in Juneau. I am oft impressed by the sheer size of the Juneau Icefield.
In the Gunsight there was webbing on a rock to rappel from but we didn’t have a
rope.
Juneau Icefield, north end as seen from the Gunsight.
We decided the Gunsight was a great destination and turned
around. It took us an hour to descend the snow ramp. Then we plodded our way
back to the free use cabin and got there around 6. We were asleep by nine. Late
night partying is not our forte I
suppose.
The following morning, we headed up to climb “Pyramid Peak.”
It froze at elevation over night and we found we could walk on top the snow at
first. Soon it melted out and we started punching through again. By afternoon
it was 65° F and that was comfy but it made walking across the snow suck. We should have woken up really early in the morning to avoid the soft snow. The
path to Pyramid was much more melted out and much of the path is bare rock
which made for much faster traveling. The route from the cabin to the base of
Pyramid follows a bench with fantastic boulders that have otherworldly look.
Finding this bench was a pleasant surprise. We spent a lot of time sitting in
the sunshine. We could see Taiya Inlet below and noted that the whitecaps had
finally died down, our kayaks sitting on the gravel next to the gillnetter. We
followed the bench south and approached Pyramid Peak from the back side where
it is steep but not technical.
Boulder on the bench.
The summit stands above the icefield. You could count
mountains all day and never count all the peaks you can see from up there. From
the top of Pyramid we could see Peak 5883 which the one we had planned to climb
up Kasidaya Creek. From our vantage point we determined that it would have been
a struggle to try and ascend Kasidaya Creek and the best way to get to Peak
5883 is to follow the same ridge to Pyramid but traverse round the south to the
valley east of Pyramid. Lower Kasidaya watershed is a jumble of thick alders.
Selfie from the top of Mount 5212 or Pyramid Peak.
I forgot my crampons, that are never called clampons, and it
was a good thing I did even though in the end I never took them out of my pack.
Had I brought crampons, we would have pushed out to sea before the waves kicked
us off the water. Had we made it to Kasidaya Creek we would had a fighting day trying
to muscle our way uphill through a colander made of alders and Devil’s Club.
Devil’s Club is the jumping cactus of Alaska. Most likely we would have made it
a little way offshore and simply got wet and very cold and returned to Skagway
to dry and warm back up.
After climbing Pyramid Peak we made our way slowly back to
camp climbing boulders along the way. Once again I wished I had brought my
climbing shoes because they are light and bouldering in mountaineering boots is
less than optimum. I have never brought
climbing shoes and wished I hadn’t but I often leave my climbing shoes and home
and wish I had them. We had a lot of time in the day and it was nice out,
regardless of footwear. We got back to the cabin by six and found some people
camped nearby. We shared a fire for an hour or so with seven young people that
were in Skagway working for the summer.
One of them was the Aleut kid about 20 years old that wants
to longboard across North America. Many Aleuts live in Juneau and Angoon.
During WWII the military evacuated them from the Aleutian Islands in western
Alaska and dropped them at Funter Bay near Juneau to fend for themselves
without food or shelter. A third of them died. When the war was over many of
the refugees never made it back to the Aleutians. The Aleut I met at the fire
spoke Tlingkit but not Aleut. He grew up in the Tlingkit village of Angoon and
in Juneau. He told me the Tlingkit word Skagway means "Birthplace of the
north wind." No wonder there was smoke on the water. He didn’t know any of the mountain names in
Tlingkit. I wonder if anyone does.
Mount 5,883 is the peak in center. Next time.
We might return to Skagway when the snow is melted out and
try again to go through the Gunsight with a rope and gear. The ferry ride was
beautiful. On the way home I thought
about the years I lived in Arizona and that I am living in place where snow
exists in late May and it isn’t 5,000°F.
Eldred Rock Lighthouse, seen from the ferry.
