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The
Big White
Where
no one has ever been before, and the chance to name your own mountain.
ThatÕs why Simon Willis went to Alaska.
When our trolleys collided in a supermarket just outside Anchorage, I looked
up to see a pair eyes glinting from underneath a baseball cap. Our group leader recognised Dave
Stahlei immediately, although heÕs known to the climbing fraternity simply as
"Alaska Dave".
Somewhere between the frozen food and dairy products we outlined our
plans for the next three weeks.
For a while Dave just listened, then pushed back his cap and expelled
a low whistle.... "Man", he drawled, spitting out each syllable
like a separate word, "that is ex-plo-ra-tory mount-ain-eering".
Let me make it clear right at the beginning, we were not a tough expedition
team of craggy, weather beaten mountaineers, at least not at the start. We were a group of fairly fit hill
walkers whoÕd come to Alaska looking for the ultimate high, the chance to
stand on part of the planet where not one single soul had ever been
before. A tiny ski-plane would
deposit us in the heart of the world's largest protected wilderness area with
thirty seven thousand square miles of pure white nothingness in which to
wander around. WeÕd hike down a glacier pulling our equipment on
sledges and, along the way, try to reach the summit of as many unclimbed
peaks as our skill, stamina and the weather would allow.
The drone of the ski-plane's single engine faded behind a series of mountain
ridges, and as a vast silence engulfed us, we filled the void with the sound
of stomping. Using snowshoes strapped to our boots we flattened the fresh
powder into a firm base and while we started erecting our tents, our group
leader Dean James began sticking bamboo canes into the snow around our
camp. Growing frozen runner
beans seemed somewhat unlikely, so I had been wondering why weÕd brought
along hundreds of canes, but Dean explained they would mark the extent of our
universe. "Inside the cane
perimeter is safe, outside it is not, at least not without a rope, because
there are hundreds of huge crevasses out thereÓ, he warned.
Time for
a quick geology lesson. As
glaciers slide down mountains, they bend around curves, and drop down steep
inclines. At these points, the
ice cracks into huge slots called crevasses, sometimes hundreds of feet
deep. In summer theyÕre clearly
visible, but early in the season they are hidden by snow. Walking down
a glacier without a rope is to play the mountaineers version of Russian
roulette. You canÕt see the
crevasses, but if the snow bridge is strong, then you can walk safely across
without ever needing to worry. But here's the thing. There is no
way of knowing, in advance, whether or not the snow bridge will collapse! The
first hint anyone gets that something is wrong is when the ground gives way
and they're either dangling from a rope or plummeting hundreds of feet into
an icy hole. As Dean finished this chilling lecture we made a mental
note: on exiting the toilet pit at night, turn left not right! At this
stage, what we didn't know was that, before long, four of us would have an
uncomfortably close encounter with a giant Alaskan crevasse.
Our first objective was obvious. Rising directly in front of our camp
was nine and a half thousand feet of solid snow and rock. A gentle slope led from our tent
doors all the way to the top. I
ought to say that achieving the summit of my first unclimbed peak involved an
heroic battle against the elements, but this was actually one of the easiest
hills I have ever climbed. The sky was blue, the snow was firm, and
within three hours the summit was ours.
As I looked out across a frozen ocean, studded with jagged island
peaks, I could hardly believe it had been so simple. On day one we had achieved one of our
lifelong ambitions, to stand on the summit of a mountain which no one had
climbed before. If this wasn't mountaineering heaven, it was the
closest I want to get to it for a long time.
This was also the moment when the scale of Alaska dawned upon me.
Statistics and superlatives completely fail to convey the enormity of
what the locals call, "The Big White", because in this one State,
you could fit the entire United Kingdom, all of France, Germany and Italy,
and still have room to tuck in Ireland. Yet this almost unimaginable
expanse of land is inhabited by fewer people than the City of Glasgow. It has
five thousand glaciers, (one of them is larger than the whole of Switzerland)
not to mention seventeen of the USAÕs twenty highest peaks. I enjoy travelling to the worldÕs
wild places but this was the first time the phrase "the middle of
nowhere" was actually an understatement. In fact, it was probably
my current address.
Signing up for a trek like this is not without risk. True, one might fall off a mountain,
but the real danger is being forced to share a tent with a stranger who
snores. In Nepal, my tent
partner sounded like a walrus trapped in a washing machine, but this time I
was lucky. Adrian turned out to
be a good companion, and I hope he felt the same about me, because in the
enforced intimacy of an expedition, tolerance and co-operation is essential.
Our tent was more like a tiny nylon igloo and had just four square
meters of floor space, in which we'd sleep, cook, eat, change, store all our
equipment and (very rarely) wash.
It was also the place we'd spend many long hours just lying around killing
time. Alaskan mountaineering starts in April when the weather is cold enough
for the snow to be stable and the winter storms are over. Only this
year, they weren't. Our first successful summit was also our last
simple climb as, day after day, new loose snow fell on top of old, hiding
crevasses and increasing the danger of avalanches. For a group leader
it is a testing time. Paying customers don't like sitting around and on
our third day confined to camp, muttering could be heard through tent walls.
The temptation is to go. The much harder decision a leader must
make in such conditions is to stay, but Dean was eventually proved correct.
We'd later learn that, two valleys away, a gentle slope avalanched and
swept a guide over a high cliff to his death.
Sled hauling is a feature of Alaskan mountaineering. I'd seen pictures
of explorers pulling tough pulks across the trackless wastes of the Arctic,
so I was a little taken aback when I was handed a childÕs red plastic sledge.
This was not the stuff of heroic adventure, it was a toy!
Nevertheless, when the time came to move camp it proved an excellent way
to carry heavy loads, and believe me, the loads were heavy. Tents, big
sleeping bags, mountaineering equipment, a gallon of fuel each and two weeks
of high calorie food just does not fit into a rucksack, not one that could be
lifted anyway. Split the weight
between a backpack and a sledge hauled behind on ropes, and the whole thing
becomes far more manageable. By
the time we'd trekked across the glacier and set up our second camp we had
made two first ascents in six days. Everyone was feeling fit and what
had begun as a group of strangers had shaped itself into a friendly
team. Which is why our first big
failure came as such a shock.
We hiked
up a long valley to a pass where we planned to turn left and follow a ridge
all the way to the summit. Four of us were tied together, equally
spaced along about forty feet of rope.
Dean was out in front, probing the snow, I was at the rear. When
it happened, there was no sharp tug on the rope, no cry and no explosion of ice. DeanÕs bottom half simply sank down
until it disappeared into the snow. I dropped to the ground to hold
him, and he yelled back for us to pull very, very gently. We quickly eased him to safety but I
could tell he had been rattled by the experience, far more than I would have
expected of such an experienced mountaineer, and later back at the tent, he
told me why. I had assumed Dean
had been the only one in any danger, but when the snow fractured, he could
see underneath and realised that all of us were standing on fragile snow
above an absolutely huge crevasse.
Our snow bridge could have given way any moment, and the chances were,
none of us would have been on firm enough ground to hold the fall. We spent a quiet night, trying not to
think of what might have been, quietly cursing crevasses.
A few
mornings later it was time to go home.
Our tiny De Haviland Beaver swept over the pass, skimming our tent
roofs with its skis. "We've
only a short weather windowÓ, the pilot yelled over the sound of his still
turning propeller, Òso I want people and I want them now". Bags and bodies were thrown into the
plane. There were no seat belts, in fact, there were no seats. We
clung to each other as the tiny craft hurtled down the glacier and out into
space. In fourteen days we had
climbed four previously
unclimbed peaks, but we had also spent seven days squashed inside our tents
with nothing to do except count snowflakes. It was triumph and tedium in equal measure, but before we
left Alaska we had to name our mountains.
Safely
back in Anchorage, we discussed the matter over a vast Mexican meal. Dean asked to name one after his
Sister, I hoped to christen one for my Mother and Adrian wanted to honour his
Grandfather. And that was
that - no one else had the urge to name a mountain, so we even had one peak
spare! Since it happened to look like a frozen tidal wave, we chose
something appropriate, and four Alaskan peaks were newly named with the clink
of Mexican beer bottles; Peaks Catterina, Beverly, Pettifer and Tsunami. "Hang on a minute, how do you register
these officially", I asked? Dean explained the process is long and
complicated but added that it wasn't all that important. "What really counts", he
said, "is when the locals start calling it by your name. Then you
know it's your mountain".
Simon Willis travelled as a guest of KE Adventure Travel and British
Airways
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