Angels in Alaska

Summit of West Peak. Douglas Island peaks in the distance

 If I ever see God, I know my words are going to be, “What the living fuck!” I haven’t seen Him and never will but if it any deity comes my way, I learned over the weekend that those words are coming out. As any of the readers of this blog know, I have at times alluded to the wilderness as a source of spirituality, though without digging in detail to what wilderness or spirituality are.  I don't subscribe any religion and I am not starting my own. 

Last Saturday the image to the left appeared out of nowhere while I was standing on the summit of West Peak. It seemed about a 100 feet away and about forty feet tall. It’s two inches tall on your phone. Our phones could be considered an optical illusion. They show us the world but not the world as it really is.

While my vision did not cause me to start a new religion, I am going to talk about a strange and rare phenomenon called a Brocken Specter (Spectre in some countries). Since last Saturday, I dug into what I saw and it fascinates me. A Brocken Specter is a circular prism, like a rainbow, that forms with the viewer’s shadow in the center. It was first documented in 1790 on Mount Brocken in what is now Germany. These specters seem to form sporadically in the mountains.  Wikipedia calls it a type of optical illusion but I disagree… but also agree. The specter looks and feels like a visit from an angel or even God with a halo of many colors. It’s an optical illusion if you believe you saw God and because your shadow is cast much larger than life. You see things that aren't there. These lit apparitions are caused when the observer is backlit in bright sunlight but there is a cloud or fog on the opposite side of the observer. The light creates a prism like a rainbow as it passes through the water vapor in the cloud. The angelic specter (sometimes called a Glory) is the shadow of the observer. It's magnified because the light scatters returning to your eyes. This seems to happen most often in mountains.

The story started when I decided to take my dog Duane hiking up West Peak. I have been up West Peak several times before but it had been a few years. It's a bit of a scramble in places but never technical. I was up and back in six hours and that's with stopping to have lunch. I also thought it would be nice to climb Middle Peak as I have not climbed it even though it’s easy to climb them both in the same day. West and Middle Peaks are some of the most windy places in the Juneau area but the forecast didn’t have much wind. 

Angel of Pride Week

After a couple hours of hiking we got to tree line. It’s still odd to me that the best autumn colors in Juneau come from the alpine where trees are rare. The ground cover turns a kaleidoscope of colors. After a few more hours my dog and I got to the summit of West Peak. The day was spectacularly beautiful and I sat down to take a few photos and eat my lunch, tamales and macadamia nuts. I turned see if the fog to my back had cleared because I wanted to see if the Middle Peak was still in whiteout. Note the photos have intermittent clouds and Middle Peak had been covered. Indeed, it was still covered in clouds. 

I don’t think the Brocken Specter was an optical illusion because things don’t have to have mass to be real. Rainbows are real and only an illusion if you start looking for a pot of gold or convince yourself the Land of Oz is on the other side. Shadows are real even if you can’t weigh or measure them. The specter I saw only seemed 40 feet tall. It was there but it wasn’t really there which why I said it’s an illusion but it isn’t an illusion. The specter didn’t speak to me or direct me to dig up gold plates.

On the way up West Peak. If I ever start my own religion, mine will be superior because I brought a dog.

I got to the top of West Peak my dog seemed interested in something off the cliff behind us and I didn’t want him to jump off. I was just standing there looking to the west and turned around to see a forty- foot personage surrounded by a multicolored halo standing above me in the air. That shadow looked three dimensional and huge.   You can vaguely see a mountain in the background. It’s not a hill. It’s Middle Peak. The angel of Pride Week.

I was seriously taken aback like my eyes were misfiring. Remember the part in Harry Potter where Hermione tells Harry that it’s never good to see things that aren’t there, even in the wizard world. That’s true in the mountaineering world as well. I was looking a forty-foot angel and I had not prayed to ask which church was true. Within a few seconds I noticed the forty-foot angel waved his arms when I waved mine. I did some jumping jacks. Both the angel and I did. I suspect Duane saw a forty-foot dog shaped angel standing in the air with a multicolored halo. He was a little tweaked, though not as much as I was. After I collected my wits, I took a few photos that do not do justice.

My heart slowed down a bit as I realized I was seeing an odd variant of a rainbow. The photo on my phone verified that my tamale wasn’t laced with hallucinogenic drugs though I never worried about that. I have never tried LSD or mushrooms so what do I know? To be clear, I never thought it was an angel, but I did wonder briefly if I was losing my grip on reality.

Recall that the world’s religions generally start with some dude walking into the wilderness which is precisely what I did that day. In ancient days people who witnessed strange things like Brocken Specters thought they had seen or become gods. I didn't see it that way because I have access to a world of information. I have always known about prisms and other tricks of light. Anyone born in the last century knows a hell of a lot more than the people who wrote all the scriptures and it's not the fault of the scripture's authors either.

Most religions started in the wilderness. Hinduism started in monastic retreats in the headwaters of the Indus River in the Kashmir Mountains in what is now the border between India and Pakistan. The Buddha, who was raised Hindu, gained enlightenment while meditating under a giant tree, now called the Bodi Tree. Jesus began his ministry by going to the wilderness to fast and pray for forty days. None of his miracles or teaching preceded his trip into the hinterlands. Jesus had to get His wild on first. Mohammed began his ministry by hiking up the Mountain of Light near Mecca and receiving inspiration in the Hiri Cave. Millions of people have hiked up the Mountain of Light and to the Hiri Cave over the years to honor Mohammed.  Joseph Smith started what came to be known as Mormonism by wandering into a grove of trees. The story goes that Joseph spoke to Jesus and God Himself.  Just so you know, I am not grafting for money or encouraging polygamy. In the old days, people who spoke to God seemed to hear that God wanted them to start polygamy. Judaism started when Adam and Eve were cast into the wilderness. Prior to being cast out of the Garden of Eden, snakes could speak and Adam and Eve  had neither knowledge of good or evil. Since the beginning, the wilderness taught us lessons, including the knowledge of good and evil. It has taught me a thing or two.

View from summit of Middle Peak
West Peak is center, specters vanished in the air

I wonder if a lot of angelic sightings in history were indeed Brocken Specters. I had zero idea that this sort of thing existed and my reaction was, “What the living fuck?” Yet I, and any modern person,  had a wealth of understanding of science that ancient people simply don't have. If you were taught from birth that astronomical events like an eclipse, a comet, or a blood moon could mean omens of war, famine, disease, or an important birth or  death. It could also mean you were to be invaded by a neighboring country or that you needed to invade them. We take for granted a lot of understanding of the world. A person in ancient days would have zero tools to mentally process a Brocken Specter. They saw God or the devil. 

The angel on West Peak did not appear bothered by my foul language. Having read about these specters, I now know Duane would have seen a halo with a huge shadow of a dog in it. The wand chooses the wizard. I leashed him and settled into wondering what was really going on. I had never seen anything like it and I have been on West Peak many times before and have climbed more mountains than I can count.  

I once heard that spirituality is reverence for something larger than you. Embracing that there are things greater than you and things completely out of your control breeds humility in my opinion. Humility is a central dogma of all religions I guess. We could all use more humility, even folks like me who do not believe in supernatural beings. 

When I got back to the trailhead, there were a ton of people parked at Sheep Creek because the coho salmon are in. Salmon have been here for 500 million years and will likely be here long after humans kill each other off. Salmon have brain the size of a pea but they are smart enough to not invent nuclear weapons or cancer causing herbicides. Earlier in the day, I debated going fishing rather than hiking and it would have been a grand choice as well. Fishing is always a good way to spend the day. None of the fishermen saw God or walked on water but many of them caught fish, a spiritual experience in itself.

If you want to join my religion, go hiking or climbing or go out on a boat. Play music, even badly. Be nice to somebody. Play with your dog. I have no commandments and don’t charge a fee.

Because music moves me, there's this. The Meat Puppets. Oh me.

https://youtu.be/ey6acnCIFtE?si=b8s4Ga9tM2AOhIeT

Peak 7035 in Tracy Arm.

 

Peak 7035 with False Summit to the left.

If you walk into places where nobody has walked before, it’s expected that you encounter things are not expected. Even in Alaska, it's work to get to a place where no human has walked. Our attempt to climb Peak 7035 was most definitely that. Peak 7035 has never been climbed and it remains unclimbed after our attempt.  You can quit reading if you’re the type that thinks conquest of summits is the only metric of success. We didn’t get to the summit and even if we had, mountains are never conquered by climbers. Unless we come with strip mining equipment, mountains are ambivalent to small lives of humans.  

Alder thicket

My friend Mike invited me to try and climb Peak 7035. It’s on the north side of Tracy Arm at the junction of the North Sawyer Glacier Arm of Tracy Arm and the South Sawyer Glacier Arm of Tracy Arm. Say that fast five times. Tracy Arm is a complex maze of fjords about 60 miles south of Juneau and it’s part of the Tracy Arm/Ford’s Terror Wilderness Area. About 100,000 people visit Tracy Arm because it’s a popular tourist destination for cruise ships and boat tours. It’s a bit like being in Yosemite Valley during the Pleistocene when there were glaciers dropping seracs into a valley floor and icebergs building up. Some of the walls in Tracy Arm rise 5,000 feet off the sea in places. Tracy Arm has almost no on-land visitors because there are only a handful of places where the beach isn't a cliff of some height. Trails don't exist. 

Mike’s plan was based on a newly uncovered “ramp” exposed as the North Sawyer Glacier receded. From near the toe of the glacier it seemed possible to scramble up slope to a ridge leading to the peak. The north end of ridge is about 4,000 feet in elevation and rises to a significant false summit (6745). Once you reach the base of the false summit, our plan was to maneuver around the east side (back side) and continue toward the true summit.  There were considerable unknowns because nobody has ever climbed to the ridge and nobody had even seen the back side of the false summit. It has been seen from planes of course but not close enough to be useful information. Satellite imagery and maps made for satellite imagery show a hanging glacier or a snowfield on the back side but imagery for glaciers suck often. Glaciers are melting too fast for maps to keep up.

We boated out early Sunday morning and got to the toe around 10:30 AM. After getting the boat anchored and unloaded, we started uphill at 1PM.  From there we scrambled uphill through scree for a few hundred feet and soon encountered an alder thicket. These alders were bushes rather than trees.  

I enjoyed  primary forest succession, the process of an ecosystem developing from bare ground to old growth forest. Primary succession starts at bedrock and the first phase is to develop soil. Secondary succession is more common and it usually follows a clear cut or a forest fire. Mosses and lichen are the first to colonize bedrock in primary succession. Alders are often the first trees to grow on exposed bedrock because they don’t need much soil. Alders create their own nutrients from the atmosphere.  Furthermore, alders adapted to avalanches by evolving the ability to bend downhill and flatten out when hit by a megaton of snow. Thus, an alder thicket in an avalanche zone is a jumble of sticks; most no more than 4 inches, often a foot apart, and they are growing up, sideways, and even down. Most alders in this thicket were no more than ten feet tall. We found alders in spades and while I appreciate the role alders play in the ecosystem, walking through a dense thicket makes me empathize with a fish caught in a gill net.  We were each carrying a 45 pound pack with an ice axe sticking out, the perfect tool to catch a branch. 

Base camp

 In the next six hours we wiggled through, pushed over, and jiggled past alders (and some willows) to a camp at 1,700 feet. Our plan was to climb to 4,000 feet on the ridge but we were completely knackered. Mike found a boulder about ten feet tall that was just above the height of the thicket.  This was our base camp and where we spent the following night as well. This boulder had a view to die for. Somewhere in the hike I punctured my sleeping pad so I slept two nights directly on a rock.  There was swarm of mosquitoes guarding the rock. We cooked some food, had a bit of bourbon, and went to sleep. The tent worked great for keeping out the mosquitoes.

Sunset from base camp

The following day we headed uphill again and about 3,000 feet we encountered alpine tundra vegetation and remnant snow. This was a huge relief. The views kept getting better and that was hard to believe considering the view from our boulder.  We reached the ridge at about 2PM. 

The ridge is not a knife edge but about 200 yards wide.  From the ridge we got our first glance at the back side of the false summit and saw a very impressive icefall. At this point we took some photos and took a nap in the sunshine. The downside was the icefall meant this trip was not going to go the summit. Climbing an icefall was not in our plans. Nevertheless, it was a very cool icefall and the views from the ridge were spectacular. The view had added gravy in knowing that we were standing in a place where no human being has ever stood. Up until five years ago, one had to scale a 500 foot cliff to access that ridge. 

Mike with Glacial Icefall in background

It’s difficult to describe an alder thicket to anyone that hasn’t fought through one. I have heard them described as “Spaghetti Trees.” You are a meatball ready to get eaten and meanwhile you are stuck in the dimensional space. The thicket snags, pokes, traps, and knocks you off balance all the time. Because the alders were higher than our heads, we rarely got a view of where we hoped to go. We likely meandered a lot. We both questioned our judgment in taking on the thicket because it wasn’t our first bushwhack and we knew it could get difficult. This was more than we expected but we didn’t have any information on what to expect.  We did not encounter any Devil’s Club and that stuff is next level malicious. Devil’s Club thickets make me briefly believe in God because only an evil deity would create something like that.  Looking at the panoramic view across from the icefall, makes me believe that the Nature itself is the only God I need. After an extended lunch and a nap  on the ridge we turned around, climbed down the snow field, and fought our way through the alder thicket to our boulder base camp. The mosquitoes were still there. We cooked food and shared a can of Long Island Ice Tea. By and by we went to sleep. That was Monday. Tuesday we headed back down into the alders again and got to boat about 11 AM. 

Selfie from the ridge, Mike (R) and Carl (L)

We loaded up the gear and took a slower trip through Tracy Arm looking at the scenery. I would like a kayak trip in Tracy Arm because it seems the smaller your boat, the more you see of the scenery. We were in a sixteen foot skiff and cruised slowly beneath a dozen or so waterfalls that fall from thousands of feet above.  Once we got out of Tracy Arm we turned north and got to Juneau a little after 5 PM.

On the boat ride home, I kept thinking that I would likely never go back to climb that mountain. I was freaking worked. I am 61 years old and it’s hard on the body. Mike is also 61 and he was also super tired though he generally travelled faster than me. Since returning to Juneau, I keep thinking of how climbing that peak could be accomplished. Trying again next year isn’t completely out of the question.

 Thanks for reading to the end. Unlike sports like football or hobbies like pickleball, nobody won and nobody lost. 

Video of the view from the ridge at about 5,000 feet. 

https://youtu.be/Zk0tvuCS4FI?si=jp-UyOIrHSB4zGVI