Respect Your Alders

Friday, July 11 (Day 15): It rains until 5 pm, but with eight more hours of light, it’s time to take the racks for a walk. We head into the bog.

“Imagine walking down the main street of Bozeman or Boulder like this,” I say.

“What, like this?” Madaleine asks, lifting her feet high, springing between tussocks, and flailing her arms. By now, we’ve perfected the Swamp Walk.

We reach the backside of the main Tikchik dome with high hopes. Until now, I’ve felt like I’ve been cheating somehow — as if not being in the alpine, not waking at 2 am with a scared belly, and not facing rockfall, snow, and storms somehow invalidated our trip. I’ve felt lazy: we have a table, chairs, a dutch oven, and four tents. We came knowing we might not climb, but still had high expectations — more for ourselves than for the climbing. So far, it feels like we’ve climbed very little. We all wanted a route that inspired us, some sort of Tikchik opus.

But at this moment, battling mosquitoes through another alder patch, a rack of triples and a tag line in my pack, I realize not only are we paying our dues, we’re also having a pretty good time of it.

We boulder-hop around the lake, reaching the dome’s 300-foot northeast face, with its cracks and seams leaning steeply upward. Kicking back on a tundra-covered block, we snack on smoked salmon strips. “All this for a picnic,” Kate says, squinting through the binos. “Somebody should check out that big left-facing corner. Wanna split up? Madaleine and I can see if we can get to the prow.”

After much scouting, we don’t find what we’re looking for. Madaleine and Kate cliff out at the water’s edge, and we don’t have enough knifeblades for the seam in the leftfacing corner. It’s 8:30 pm, time aplenty to enjoy a couple mosquito-less hours atop the dome. We trudge up a ramp, scratching to the summit in time to watch the slow, sub-arctic sunset. Kate drops onto a ledge. “Hey, guys — come down here,” she calls.

“There’s some rad bouldering.” We spend the next hour highballing over tundra on clean, coarse granite — the best climbing so far.

Hundreds of feet below, greens, golds, and blues resonate from the trees, meadows, and ponds. In the crisp light, I can almost see individual needles and grasses. I wonder how many unexplored climbing areas like this lie in Alaska, and if anyone else will ever climb here. And though we haven’t opened a new Squamish, we’ve had adventures in a wild place. I’ve also gained a new understanding of the immense patience necessary to establish routes — and a great respect for the pioneers at other places I’d climbed, like Yosemite, Colorado, and New Hampshire.

As we slog back to the boats, the one major dome we haven’t yet climbed stands dark, two miles away. Although it’s the largest formation — and an early scouting mission was promising — we haven’t been back. With our remaining two days, we hope to find something good there. Unless it rains.