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FEEDING THE AK ADDICTION

Get Lifted

Words Annie Fast Images Chris Ankeny

Takshanuk Mountains, AK Tom Routh

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They call it rock bottom when one truly realizes the cost and severity of an addiction: A term usually reserved for gamblers whojust went under big in Vegas, or the middle-class alcoholic who wakes up on the streets. As we came in hot for our third botched landing approach, and the planes’ skis jibbed the glacier’s rolling windpillows, it occurred to me, with my moist palms and my death-grip on the lawn chair-turned-passenger seat… that I had hit rock bottom. There was no denying it.

We all had perfectly good lives back in Montana. Spring was just around the corner. Mountains were afire with wildflowers, houses were being

cleaned and the river was coming up to enticing levels for whitewater-heads. But we couldn’t be content. As with much of the West last winter, Montana had left a lot to be desired, and we were all smacking our mainlines for pow-der turns. There was a noise about a stable snowpack and “lobe deep” pow-der in Alaska. After a phone and e-mail frenzy, Bill Buchbauer, Chris Ankeny, Tom Routh, Eric Jeffcoat, Jason Schutz and myself had successfully relocated ourselves to Haines, AK to get our fix. Like middle-class Vegas and booze casualties, we strung ourselves out in the middle of Rock Bottom Ave.

Gripping the lawn chair, thoughts of severity, cost, and addiction flashed with each skid of the aeroskis and slip of the plane. In past years, our group had seen our lack of finances as a major obstacle standing between ourselves and Alaska. Now, as the enormity and beauty of the Haines mountainscape overwhelmed us, we came to realize that we just needed to open our eyes and not our wallets a little wider. While we didn’t manage to squeeze a week of heli-skiing into the budget, we did find an alternative. And if you’re willing to earn your turns, and risk your life a little, anyone can put it together and ride in Alaska with skiplanes.

Humans make excellent trail-breakers

Powder camp, base-training, and acclimation.

We were shelling out about $150 a day to get dropped off in the moun-tains surrounding Haines (for reference, operational expenses on a

helicopter run about $1000 an hour). As we zigzagged the mini-plane through jutting mountain spires and over the glacier, we were as insignificant as an individual snow flake in a vertigo whiteout. The snowfields cascaded off peaks, rolled over cliffs, along spines, through narrow chutes and created an alien winter planet. We glided along with it, alternately being swallowed and regur-gitated by the whitescape. From the landing zone, we shuffled one foot in front of the other up these ethereal peaks, re-assembled the splitboards and floated down. Insert, push play, and repeat all day long. We were getting three runs a day and going non-stop from sunup to sundown. At the end of each day, we skinned back over to

the landing zone eagerly awaiting the sound of the buzzing prop (“da plane, da plane”) signaling our ride back to Haines. We would return with just enough energy left to make a huge dinner and pass out. We had chosen the path of most resistance, and despite the constant thumping reminders overhead of the ease of heli access, we were sticking to the plan. Backcountry travel comes with hazards. As the pilot tightened his seat belt repeatedly, we came in for a landing. His eyes fixed on the sloping shoulder ahead, we unanimously decided that the most obvious backcountry hazard was the mode of transportation itself. At the serenity of the airport, our pilot had joked about how “landing a Cessna Skywagon with skis on it, is about as easy as landing a tricycle backwards”. At the airport it was funny; in the plane it wasn’t.

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View from the Addicts’ Suite.

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In Alaska, they say a bush pilot is only as good as his last flight. With this in mind, and in an effort to minimize our risk, we decided that camping on the glacier

would be the sanest and safest thing to do. Safe airtime is minimal airtime. To clear the flight pattern, Jason attempted to “drink it blue” for the next few nights in a self-sacrificial clear skies ritual. Nature obviously knows a losing battle when it sees one, and with the ensuing weather break, we packed sup-plies like we were going for two weeks with the intention of going in for one. One recon mission to find the perfect location, and three gear drops later, we were digging ourselves into base camp at 5000 feet in the Takshanuk mountains, overlooking a fjord splitting the Chilkat and Chilkoot rivers. It was by far the most scenic camping spot ever, and as one member of the group would later excitedly exclaim, the site of his most scenic rest room break ever. As we settled in for the night, a soft pit-ter-patter, like brushes on a jazz drum, began to tap the tents. This would be the rhythm for the next 24 hours. The first morning was beautiful, or so it seemed from inside the yellow tent. As I unzipped the door, it became apparent we were either floating around in the stratosphere, or in the midst of another forced “clam bake”. The blinding white fog was so dense, it obscured everything,

including the hand in front of your face. Our world consisted entirely of a cluster of four little tents, packed into the snow. Alternately, we would suit up for a tour, get spitting distance from camp, look back, see the spooky white void, sketch out, and follow our short track back home.

The following morning, the ziiiiiip of the tent was followed by shouts of “BLUEBIRD!” This set the tone for the remainder of the trip. After getting

our necessary coffee fix (auxiliary addictions), we scrambled to remove the previous days deposition of rime from our gear and, we were off…

A fleet of splitboarders trudging through the mountains far removed from the tempting whirr of the heli’s. Efficiency was replaced by an awareness of place. Each sparkle of freshly fallen snow caught the eye. The rolling contours of a lower cirque met with the peaks across the skyline. They say Eskimos have twenty-some words for snow. Did anyone ever ask how many words they have for the color

blue? The shades of the glacial crevasses; the colors of the morning, afternoon and midnight sky. To call them all blue, would be like describing a

waterfall as falling water and leaving it at that. That day, we slogged up peaks and flowed through steep powder; cliffs were dropped, chutes were pointed and spray was thrown. All in this blue and white world. Over the next four days, we explored longer runs in neighboring cirques, peaking over the edges to see what lay below. We played on mini-terrain features, shredded some cauliflower lines, and ended each day with turns far down the rolling slope back to camp as the long shadows of the setting sun lit up the peaks. Then came dinner, and then came the stars.

Each day we became more comfortable in our environment. On the final day, our group was ready to push the envelope. We awoke early to

summit a peak, overlooking the camp. Two hours of skinning during the tran-scendent hours of an alpine morning, and we were on top. Bliss turned to concern. No sooner did we begin to hear the deep roar of rock slides and avalanches from neighboring valleys, when a cornice dropped off in front of Chris’ toes. Weary of the snowpack, Jason roped in and dug a pit on the face of the slope. The snowpack showed a very weakly bonded layer under a foot deep slab, which could only be described as hairtrigger. Looking at that layer the wrong way might have made ‘er go. We resisted the temptation to set off the biggest avalanche any of us had ever seen, unsure of the actual distance it would travel…perhaps back to, and over our camp. All signs pointed negative for snowboarding that peak. It was obvious that the warm weather of the preceding afternoon had adversely

affected the cohesion of the snow. Faced with the increased threat of avalanches and, not insignificantly, a diminishing supply of whiskey and coffee, we decided to pack up camp and call in the plane for a pick-up.

Thoughts of fresh black cups from the Haines Brewing Company steamed in our collective head, as Chris and I loaded our gear into the plane and

braced for the lawn chair ride back. Our trusty pilot, Drake, fired up the pro-peller. We looked left, expecting to bank a turn out, when the plane unexpectedly dipped right down a concave slope, hidden by the flat light of the incoming weather system. A quick lesson on how a ski plane steers on the snow: they don’t. Ski planes utilize the features of the mountains, and the power of their prop to turn the plane. When you find yourself sitting in a plane heading downhill towards a cornice, which drops thirty feet into a hole, the sheer absurdity of ski plane steering “technology” sets in. Without enough distance to force a takeoff, Drake shut off the engine and we silently slid towards our fate. By all accounts it looked like “549 Charlie,” our Cessna was going in and taking us with it. I considered the ease with which this flim-flam plane could be demolished -- it had all the structural integrity of a beer can, and the impending hole was the brawny equivalent of a frat boy’s forehead. In what I thought was the end, Charlie was skiing towards the hole. We were all leaning to the left side of the plane, eyes riveted on the overhang in front of

They say Eskimos have twenty-some words forsnow. Did anyone ever ask how many words they have for the color blue?

us, when, by the skin of our teeth, the grace of God, the blessings of Buddha and the combined years of good karma… our plane, heading downhill on freshly waxed skis, stopped two feet away from the edge of the cornice. If it had been a movie, you’d walk out right on the spot, the suspension of disbelief too much to bear. It was totally unreasonable for the plane to have stopped, but it did anyway. We gingerly jumped out and tied off the wing of our precariously perched Cessna. There was no time for “holy shits” or “oh my Gods’”, no time to ponder the quality of the reel of your life moments ago flashing before your eyes. Instead we hastily built a runway featuring a banked turn away from the hole, dug ourselves into some make-shift pits, and reconsidered and refigured this one-shot-only plan. Drake fired up the plane. The roar of the prop resonated across the glacier and the wings evened out as we held on to the rope with a com-munal death grip. Drake managed to flip an immediate U-turn, pivoting on the rope. All that experience digging out snowmobiles back in Montana had paid off… on a much bigger scale. Life-affirming high fives, back pats and the

expected hoots and hollers ensued. Chris and I again piled in our gear, and found that last shred of will power to jump back into Charlie for our final ride out before the weather moved in.

Zooming through the mountain tops, highlights of the trip playing through my head were as numerous as the peaks ahead. In the end, 549 Charlie

didn’t fall into the hole, Chris didn’t get taken out by the cornice, and Billy didn’t get eaten by a hungry bear roaming the glacier (a long story). We maxed out our karma credit and got our pow fix without going completely in debt. Plane skiing and glacier camping were the answer to our financially impaired dreams of riding Alaska. En route to Seattle, we listened to Tom Burt, a heli guide for Juneau’s Out of Bounds Adventures tell stories about peaks further inside the Glacier Bay Park which are only accessible by planes, “huge peaks, first descents, end-less, never before done”. It seems the Takshanuk Mountains are just another gateway drug, and we still haven’t hit rock bottom.

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Author Annie Fast