Mike Records, Author at 14erskiers.com

North Marcus Baker, Alaska – May 2016

Mike Records — Mon, 27 Jun 2016 03:21:29 +0000

Please enjoy this guest blog post brought to you from Alaska by our friend Mike Records! – Brittany

Marcus Baker is scary. Rising 13,000 feet straight out of the Prince William Sound, it turns benign southerly winds into storms, storms into blizzards, and blizzards into monsters. There are so many stories: 11 days in a snow cave, snow caves filling in too fast to dig out, time to dig mansions underground. So, when forecast run after forecast run showed a strong high pressure window forming, the destination seemed obvious. Next up was putting together a last minute team with the requisite rope, glacier, skiing, and avalanche experience for a smash and grab mission. Mary and Sarah were available, and as usual, up for anything. After a frantic night of packing we pulled into Mike Meekin’s Sheep Mountain air strip 8 AM on Friday. First, Mike would take me out with the gear, then the ladies would follow. Lifting off the gravel airstrip above budding trees it was hard to believe it could be winter anywhere. 5 minutes later, the cracked surface of the Matanuska Glacier was below us.

Melt ponds already forming on the glacier surface:

Mike briefly distracted me from the scenery because he had just returned from a packraft/SuperCub brown bear hunt that he had to show me pictures of. Looking up from his phone, the glacier started to curve away to the south.

Then the gorge came into view:

And then the Marcus Backer massif.

We set down at 5,500 feet, threw out the gear, I received several enthusiastic pats on the back, and he was gone.

Just as I was settling into a nice nap complete with serac fall for white noise, they were back.

Beginning to skin up the Matanuska was a jaw dropping experience. Seracs 500 feet tall stood on top of 2,000 foot cliff faces. Forward progress was efficient, occasionally pausing to probe suspicious dips, and to zig-zag around open crevasses.

Every few minutes thundering booms announced another serac fall releasing tumbling blocks the size of houses.

By lunch time we had left the mellow glacier behind and reached avy terrain.

Now more concerned about avalanche hazard, we removed the rope and started to quickly gain elevation. Mary:

Around 3:45, the terrain and snow surface became more complex and suspicious. I got out my probe, probed once, then the snow bridge below me promptly failed. Caught by a foot on one side and an arm on the other, I could see 25 feet down to where the failed snow bridge was jammed below me. More alarming was the water cascading into the abyss.

Clearly, it was getting too late in the day to trust the snow bridges. You’re never going to hit a perfect window on Marcus Baker, if it hadn’t been weak snow bridges it would have been snow, wind, or instability. So, Mary lead us back until we could safely egress from the glacier, then continued up along the edge of the moraine. 45 minutes later we ran out of ice-free terrain. Needing a solid freeze to move higher, it was time to find a camp. Which received the Sarah & Mary stamp of approval:

That night, while the tent flapped in the wind, Sarah and I discovered that our pads were leaking, and Mary rediscovered the joys of being on the downhill side of the tent. By 5 AM Sarah had us up and getting ready. Apparently there was a beautiful sunrise, my brain was asleep, but what Sarah described was lovely.

Heading out of camp, the soft snow bridges had refrozen overnight. But, the freeze was bittersweet: the hard snow made for slippery and aggravating skinning conditions. After two hours of fast progress, the slippery skinning became impossible and dangerous as we entered steeper and more crevassed terrain. At this point we switched to booting.

Booting had its own challenges, it was great on sections of ice, but slow and challenging when the snow became softer and deeper, and there was the increased hazard of breaking through a bridge. Mary with the Icing Peak just out of sight to the right:

At about 10,000 feet the snow surface was again soft enough to skin. Skinning was an emotional relief after the business of plodding. This didn’t last long – as Sarah lead across a ridge, she was whisked off her feet by more ice.

Moving into more continuous and steeper ice, booting was clearly the safer option. Ahead was a false summit that we decided to contour left around. This started with an exciting lunge across an open bergshrund. A few minutes later my foot broke through the brittle ice into a hole below. Unweighting and pulling it out, there was a dark void below.

Finishing the complex traverse, the north peak of Marcus Baker came into view. Everyone was a bit frazzled and took a break to melt water, eat lunch, and relax.

Refreshed we kept moving up. Probing our way across a big bergshrund brought us to just short of the summit. Looking back at our lunch spot and the better route around the false:

From lunch, the final west ridge had seemed like the least exposed option, but popping my head over, it was 2,000 feet straight down from the knife edge to the Marcus Baker Glacier. I retreated and tried the north ridge instead. Again, we had to lunge across an open bershrund before climbing steep rime to the ridge.

Then there was the top: a dramatic two dimensional blade falling away on either side. To the east was 1,500 jumbled feet of seracs, crevasses, and ice; to the west a 2,000 foot cliff dropped away.

Way off to the south there was Montague Island and the Prince William Sound:

An intriguing 3,000 foot wall of couloirs on a tributary of the Marcus Baker Glacier:

The view west into the dry side of the Chugach, the rain shadow of the coastal giants is obvious here.

Especially when compared to the huge ice fields rising out of the ocean:

I managed to grab a picture of Sarah at the top, but was feeling too wobbly to get one of Mary too. Sorry Mary, let’s go back next year and get that picture!

We briefly considered continuing towards the south peak, this would have required down-climbing 800 feet on the exposed knife edge ridge to the ice plateau beyond. But, we just didn’t have the gear to protect it, so started down towards our camp. Sarah:

The upper pitches were a patchwork of powder and ice, which transitioned to settled powder lower down. Mary:

Following our skin track we worked our way down. Mary above the Matanuska Glacier:

The final pitch above the camp was the scariest. This was the crevasse zone where I had broken thru the day before, and the bridges were soft again. Our options were: 1) stay in a snowcave 500 feet above our camp; 2) rope up, proceed slowly, and put more stress on the bridges; 3) ski it quickly one by one. Settling on the third option, we were soon back at camp.

There was no way to continue lower across the sagging snow bridges that evening. Instead we sat on our warm moraine campground, watched seracs fall, enjoyed dinner, and waited for the next morning to move.

In the morning, there had been the slightest of freezes, sun induced rock fall was already rumbling around us, and several of the bridges we had crossed just days before had failed. Given the conditions, we slowly worked our way down.

At one point we stopped to drop snowballs in a crevasse we had crossed on the way up. Watching them silently disappear into the darkness, we never heard them hit the bottom. Back at the LZ we built a little shelter and called Mike.

By 6 PM Meekin was on the ground remarking on what nice snow there was for landing. And he had news: our ride home had came with strings attached. He needed our help back at his shop, to make it up to us we’d be going on a flight seeing tour on the way home.

The flight went something like this: “Once I spent 40 days leading a team of horses thru this area…you all really should do a ski trip on those peaks across the way…they call that Mike Glacier because I was the first person to land there…” You get the idea.

Back at the airstrip Meekin got out a ladder, a climbing rope, a rake, and his backhoe; it was time to earn our flightseeing tour.

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Carpathian – 3.31.2014

Mike Records — Fri, 16 May 2014 14:31:39 +0000

Carpathian, the name is filled with intensity and intrigue, but where does it come from? Does it come from the Carpathian Mountains of Romania, perhaps the mythical super humans that inhabit them, or maybe an Indo-European root word for rock? No one seems to know. Regardless, the mysterious power of the name embodies the mountain. Storms pouring into Turnagain Arm from the Prince William Sound pound the Kenai Peninsula’s tallest mountain with precipitation – rain, snow, ice. The extreme weather and the seracs, avalanches, and glacier hazards that it bringswith means that it often takes two, three, even four attempts to get up and down Carpathian.

Back in late March, Malcolm and I decided to check it out. Due to my usual early morning grogginess, the day started out as a bit of a shit show. I forgot the appropriate allen key to adjust my crampons for my new boots, and my camera was definitely missing its SD card. But, after a refueling stop for power rings (donuts), we were on our way across Portage Lake. Due to its proximity to the coast, the lake is often a nightmare – a wind tunnel of ice fog and ground blizzards. We got lucky, finding calm wind and fast, firm snow.

Three miles later, our faces covered in a fresh layer of rime, we were across the lake and at the base of the Portage Glacier:

Following the advice of a friend, we continued past the toe of the glacier, then climbed one of the lateral moraines which brought us past the terminal ice fall. As we moved up the Portage more glaciers came spilling down towards us.

After a few more miles we roped up, threading our way through the crevasses and holes. Malcolm running up through a gap in one of the ice falls:

After negotiating another ice fall the summit pyramid came into view. The exit couloir from the hanging snow field is not visible in this picture. It exits through the rocks just lookers right of the large hanging serac.

Feeling the pull of the mountain, Malcolm surged ahead; he is so fast, something I was quickly reminded of by the rope/tow strap between us.

We passed under the huge north face of Carpathian following a narrow pass towards the northeast ridge. At the pass, the ice field and Blackstone Glacier unfolded beneath us.

From there, we followed the northeast ridge towards the summit. Covered in firm rime and snow, the exposed ridge was fast and fun.

100 vertical feet below the summit we moved back onto the north face, belaying each other across one last sagging crevasse before the final climb. Of course, the last 65 degree push to the summit was shiny and hard alpine ice complete with a frustratingly rotten layer below it. Hoping we’d find soft snow somewhere, we brought our skis to the top.

Popping out on the summit, it was much smaller than I expected. Its just a few feet wide and 50 feet long, falling thousands of feet to the ice field on one side and Skookum Glacier on the other. Knowing we still had miles ahead of us we briefly took in the incredible views of Marcus Baker, the Prince William Sound, and Isthmus peak, to name a few.

Skiing rock hard 65 degree ice above open crevasses, seracs, and thousand foot cliffs was out of the question. So, we began the tedious process of climbing down the final 100 feet. This process was mentally exhausting for me. At least I had an ice axe, Malcolm had forgone his ice axe for a whippet. But, Malcolm is Malcolm, and was unphased. After the downclimb we put on our skis and approached the first bergschrund crossing. I jumped it first, with Malcolm bringing up the rear.

The next 1,000 vertical feet was intense: equal parts chalk and gnarly ice. Navigating the ice through open and bridged crevasses was…rough.

Stoke or relief? Both?

We rolled into the next steep section with the constant concern of more ice as we skied towards the huge cliffs below.

As we approached the exit couloir, it got firm again. Really firm. I watched Malcolm slide sideways on his edges past the entrance. Finally he was able to get his edges into the ice, stop, and begin the painstaking process of sidestepping uphill on the bulletproof ice. Getting into the protected couloir was a huge relief. Fly on the wall:

Into the good snow, time to relax a bit:

Approaching the lower bergshcrund:

The exit couloir already hidden from view, we enjoyed soft relaxing turns below the summit block.

Then retraced our steps back down the Portage.

Back at the lake we refueled on wined and smoked gouda, offered to us by a wonderful transplant from Georgia. All we had left was the three mile skate out across the lake. Looking back at Bard, still on the hit list.

10 hours and 25 miles later we were back at the truck, sharing our adventures with a stoked group who had just ridden Bard.

Combining all the elements of big mountain skiing in Alaska, the day was physically and mentally exhausting. I can’t wait to string together Bard, Carpathian, and Byron next year. And, yes Malcolm, I have scars from the blisters I got on our race back across the lake.

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