Skagway

Ya know the names of mountains don’t matter one whit to the mountains themselves. The Matterhorn could be call Silly Mountain or nothing at all and it wouldn’t give two shits about it. That said, we as climbers and mountain lovers would suffer some from the loss of understanding. How does one frame his/her thoughts about the Alps without words like Eiger and Matterhorn? The sentence, “That rocky protuberance adjacent to that other rock protuberance” means very little. The names of mountains matter, though often they are misnamed. There actually is a Silly Mountain in Arizona and it a bland looking hill with about 100 feet of prominence which means it’s neither silly nor a mountain. The naming of Southeast Alaska’s mountains befuddles the head sometimes. Some mountains simultaneously have no name at all and too many names. Let me unravel that riddle.

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 

I climbed Pyramid Peak Memorial Day weekend with my friends Mike and Brian. When descending “Pyramid Peak” I said that I thought it would be good if the USGS revamped their maps and added some names to the maps.  Mike thought for a second and suggested maybe it was for the best to leave the maps alone because they would probably just name all the mountains after greasy politicians and corporate overlords. Pyramid Peak could end up named Trump Tower or George Foreman Mountain. George Foreman named all ten of his children George Foreman. Some people have an ingrained need to name stuff after themselves.  I am glad Ali knocked him out. It’s too bad Ali isn’t around to knock Trump.

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.