The Mount Marcus Baker Glacier
Peter Halstead
The Mount Marcus
And the tines and runnels of the rock were riddled once with molecules of stars, the matrices which are the molds of sound, the stew of snow that contains all colors, and by them the tiles and blocks of life, a grid and trellis fused by light to channels, to mills and scrolls of matter, face up in the form, where the rounce between the frisket and the tympan turns the devil’s tail down the escapement to the mobile tongue, the weighbridge where we winnow sun and stone to alter middlings of the good we mill into meals and pions, geons that leak away, bound by the graininess of space, the symplectic manifold of time, as mountains flow through glaciers into overlapping ordinals, the long lines of our lives.
Glaciers are like the channels in which typesetters slide the letters of the text. The channels are then placed together and inked to print a page. The white of the glacier is the page on which the dirt of the moraines is like print.
Glaciers funnel dow n the valleys they carve like the grain I used to throw myself into in our grain silo, sifting down into the hopper car with the bran and the germ, holding my nose and my breath. Completely life-threatening, but what teenager doesn’t want to ride a silo?
The language of snow imitates that of the piano action, as the pressure on the key transforms into the arc of the
Marcus Baker Glacier
hammer in an avalanche of frequencies. Watches, slopes, printing presses, and quantum mechanics all have different kinds of escapements, mechanisms that morph energy into various results.
As white contains all the visible colors, in the white of a glacier lies the kaleidoscope of life, the molecules of dark matter. White is a black hole, sucking in color and energy. In quantum mechanics, space is composed not of blocks but of grainy foam, endless momentums and reactions which overlap the way type does in a printing press.
I n topology a real-number line consists of a countable number of line segments laid end to end, whereas a long line is constructed from an uncountable number of such segments, as our lives consist of uncountable events.
Glaciers and mountains themselves are granaries, storehouses of transitions and events and colors and actions and texts, as quirky as quantum mechanics, metaphors where the small ticking of our hours transforms into entire lives, mile-deep ribbons of fast-flowing ice bounded by slower-moving moraines on either side.
Back on ea rth, we rented two helicopters, one to photograph the other helicopter dangling the piano below it.
It all started because I bought in Stowe, Vermont, a book with photographs. I thought it was morally wrong to have such a book. Books should have only texts. Books with pictures were hedonistic, easy victories. The book had photos of mountains, and within a few weeks I was hooked.
I visited Mike Chessler on Hudson Street, who had so many on climbing they were double-shelved, books behind books. I went to Fort William in Scotland for its climbing bookstore. I frequented the Librairie des Alpes in Paris. Many of the great early climbing photographs came out of Chamonix.
Before long I was off to North Conway to learn rappelling. I learned to ice climb on le Mont Blanc. And I went climbing in the Hunku Valley of the Himalayas. One of my fantasies was to give a piano concert in the Everest View Hotel in Syangboche. I wrote a book about it, Pianist Lost, which has unraveled into a series of books.
Setting something like that up in Nepal would take a month, and I thought I could do it in two days if I stayed closer to home. Rather than carry a piano on Yak-back, I could fly it in. The Colorado Rockies were a wilderness, where you couldn’t fly a helicopter. The closest place with high mountains outside a wilderness area was in Alaska.
I’d seen a photo of the Chugach Mountains, and felt the location was off the radar; it could be a good stand-in for the Himalayas, without jet lag or altitude sickness.
So we booked a plane, a hotel, a helicopter, a piano, a tuner, a videographer, and off we went.
The Chugach Mountains are notorious for bad weather. It took Bradford Washburn two months to climb the mountain I picked, because of bad weather.
After a winter of blizzards, one of the longest recently, we landed in Valdez, home of heli-skiing and ski movies, and booked the same copters the skiers used. Not a cloud in the sky. That was true for two days, after which the weather closed in again for a month.
Only now, decades later, did I realize how lucky we were, and how foolish.
Starting with the Chugach Range, mountains wrap around the Alaskan coast down into Canada and the Ca nadian Rockies. To the east and south lie the Wrangells. And in Canada, the great walls of the Northwest Territories. Galen Rowell describes one of them:
Then came the Cirque of the Unclimbables in the Logan Mountains. Vertical granite erupted from unbelievably green meadows fringed with snow and ice. Jim guessed that fewer than twenty-five people had ever set foot in Fairy Meadow below Lotus Flower Tower, which he had climbed for the
first time by its most prominent face just four sum mers earlier. As we flew out of the cirque, Jim took me into a side valley that housed the south east face of Proboscis, by far the steepest and most sheer of the region’s big walls.
Below Mount Logan, the tallest mountain in Canada at 19,551 feet high, is the Fairweather Range, home of Mount Fairweather, at 15,300 feet capping one of the highest coastal ranges in the world. The Fairweather terrane lies under this range and is what created it. In 1958, an earthquake from this fault caused a rockslide which generated waves that hit the walls of Lituya Bay up as high as 1,720 feet.
Here the Alexander Archipelago begins, 1,100 islands and hundreds of inlets and bays, the North American Fjordland. Deep channels cut the steep walls of the islands off from the mainland. The islands shelter the northern part of the Inside Passage as salmon boats, tugs, freighters, ferries, cruise ships wind their way among them. At the bottom end of the Passage lies enormous Vancouver Island, the largest in the Americas, a wilderness of enormous mountain ranges and primeval forests.
Mount Marcus Baker, the second-highest peak in the Chugach at 13,176 feet, lies in the far west of the range, 50 miles from Valdez, hidden beneath the wild winds of the Matanuska plateau. On the far side lies its benign glacier.
We flew into waves and grooves, into the giant dunes of forces we never thought about, which lay in the firn sifting through the hopper of the flutes around us, like the leveraged action of the Steinway, gravitons of snow avalanching from massive sheets, disaster latent around us.
We could watch the vortices, the frenzy of the solar vacuums that raged above us, spouts and plumes where the weight of the wind transitioned into our relative vacuum.
Below, the two summits of Mount Marcus Baker, looking across the lower Chugach toward salvation in College Fjord and Prince William Sound. The lower, steeper summit is below the helicopter. The ridgeline here usually keeps hurricane-force winds to the left; notice the snow buildup on the hanging glacier. This is not on most days a basin hospitable to human survival, although it leads to the Matanuska Glacier, the standard climbing route.
Before we landed on a plateau near the massif, just to the right of this shot, we flew over seven different plateaus where we could successfully land the crate with its captive seven-foot Steinway. The final site we saw seemed to be the safest. By the end of the day, it was apparent that it had been the only site that was calm enough to rescue us from, as the winds built up in the sunset.
Had we been marooned on the mountain overnight or longer, we had only the Yeti suit and a few parkas. No blankets, mummy bags, food, or water. No crampons, mountain boots, ice picks, or ropes to help us rappel off the mountain, to guard against falls in the glacier’s hidden crevasses, had we needed to rope down the mountain and walk out.
We didn’t have walkie-talkies to find out if the copter wasn’t coming back. We were suicidally unprepared for anything but perfection. I didn’t know if it would take two days or a month to walk out. We seemed to be lost in an endless mountain kingdom.
Fortunately, we had perfection. That apparently wasn’t the case on most days. The weather is notoriously unstable in the Chugach, and there are often summers with only a few sunny days. It had been a wild winter, and our onslaught happened on the first sunny day of spring. The next day the weather closed in again, and we could have waited a month for another day like the one we lucked into.
We had no idea when we flew into Anchorage what kind of weather awaited us. We were lucky to get a tuner who was excited to uncrate and recrate the piano (it was crated because the owners were moving to California).
As we landed on our promontory, on the southwest buttress of Mount Baker, we saw the high winds forming snow plumes around 14,000. Those were the hurricane-force winds which created a wall between the fringes of the wilderness and the dark heart of the mountains. The chopper had to stay down in the valley, below the high ridge of Marcus Baker, for safety. It would have been dashed to pieces only a few thousand feet away from where we were calmly assembling the piano.
On either side of the pinnacle where we landed, avalanches rumbled down as the afternoon sun thawed the ice walls that lined the sides of the glacier. I stamped out a rectangle in which we could unpack and film. Beyond that line we ran the risk of plunging through the overhanging cornice on the edges of the pinnacle.
The glacier around us seemed like soft-serve Carvel ice cream, new soft snow mounded on top of older neve, hardened ice pack.
To our left , it went on for 23 miles, wedged between 2,000-foot ice and rock walls, and then swerved left out of sight, heading directly into what seemed an endless wasteland. It petered out in the Grasshopper valley,
which led to the Knik Glacier, which went west to the watery gorge of the Lake Fork River, bottled up by high walls. East, the Knik doubled back and dead-ended on the headwalls of Mount Marcus Baker. The Marcus Baker Glacier was a dead end.
Were we to have walked up the long ridge and contoured around the summit of Marcus Baker into the Valley of Desolation with the hurricane-force winds (assuming we wouldn’t have been blown off the ridge: 100-mph winds rip tents away and pick people up like water bottles), we could have made our way down through the dangerous torn-up icefall to the Matanuska Glacier, a slog through waist-high snow to Highway 1 at Glacier View, a rest stop 25 miles north. From here we might have hitchhiked two hours back to Anchorage.
Of course, we had no idea at the time that the Matanuska Glacier ended at a major highway—the only one that does. It would have seemed that we were walking into the immensity of Glenn Gould’s far North, straight toward Denali and the Gates of the Arctic, 700 miles of nunataks, tundra, lakes, and caribou. Like the monster vanishing with Frankenstein’s body into the ice floes and midnight sun of an unknowable fastness.
Below, the 60-mile-long mountain spine of Montague Island looms in the Gulf of Alaska to the west of Marcus
Baker. This ridge is lush green and filled with flowers on the few good days it emerges from the mist. Around it the Gulf flows into the North Pacific Ocean.
We had no idea where we were, the fame of Mount Marcus Baker, or the immensity of its two glaciers.
Mount Marcus Baker, the second highest summit in the Chugach Mountains, is in the middle of the blowing vastness of this mostly unexplored range. Marcus Baker was climbed in 1938 by Bradford Washburn, the great mountaineer, explorer, photographer, pilot, and cartographer. Washburn founded the Boston Museum of Science, and was its director
all his life. He put up and photographed most of the new climbing routes in Alaska. His wife, Barbara, was the first woman to summit Denali.
Below, but tresses form a chain of lesser mounds on the southeast side of the mountain. You can see the easy ramp on the lower right which leads to the higher south summit.
Below, the highest points of Mount Marcus Baker, (Middle Peak on the left at 12,139; North Peak on the right at 13,176;) loom over its snow plateau, a hanging glacier, which spills steeply down the bench to form the Matanuska Glacier. The North Peak is most easily climbed (in good weather) from the saddle to its left.
The Matanuska Glacier flows down from the bench around its massif, at 27 miles the second-longest glacier in Alaska. It runs down the Mat-Su Valley to Route 1, the Glenn Highway, two hours south of Anchorage. It would have been simple to walk out, if we had had to, breaking trail through the deep snow on the Matanuska.
(Assuming we had had the nerve to face the lethal winds on its ridges.) The deep cracks in the glacier are disguised by snow bridges. Falling in means being wedged upside down in the dark 50 feet down, with no way of turning around or climbing up the ice walls to freedom. Without crampons or ropes, we’d be out of luck. To revise, the walk would have looked simple, but in fact would have been suicidal. Well-equipped climbers like Mike Records (see below) have in good weather encountered no problems. Others have died.
Below, the deceptively creamy Marcus Baker Glacier butts up against the unstable walls of its canyon, from which avalanches would break free every half-hour or so.
Nor did we have a map, or know which way was out. Again, the Marcus Baker Glacier, so benign, is actually a very long dead end. We couldn’t walk on the side of the glacier, where sometimes there’s a scree or pebble border, because at that altitude the glacier was quite healthy and still carving its way downhill, eroding sheer cliffs on both sides. There were no margins on the side of its highway.
Had the copter been unable to return because of weather, it would have meant many days in subzero temperatures at night, trekking from an altitude of 12,000 feet down the Mat-Su Valley to the Glenn Highway at about 400 feet above sea level.
But without a map (how could we not have thought of one?), would we have continued north, in what would have seemed the wrong direction, and just stumbled on the road? Would we not have taken the closer, easier, and wronger glacier?
The Marcus Baker Valley is very different from the broad Mat-Su Valley. Two-thousand-foot high snow walls are made of giant séracs, snow spires towering over hikers below, spikes which cleave off the cliffs every half-hour in the summer heat and pound straight down onto the glacier from both sides of the claustrophobic valley.
Below, the deceptively milky layer of the Marcus Baker Glacier, some 3,000 feet below the massif from which it flows.
We would have fallen through the snow, up to our knees, sometimes up to our thighs, as we struggled in the heat through the deceptively idyllic frosting. There were ridges on the snow, sastrugis, ice ripples formed by wind, badly spackled like clumsy icing on a cake, making foot travel alternately crusty and brittle.
Looking back on it, we were fools to assume nothing would go wrong. We led a sunlit life for our one perfect day on the ice sheet, and flew back to Valdez without a thought as to the rare luck our cloudless skies had brought us.
THE FLAVOR OF
Galen Rowell describes the climb of the Half Dome–like wall of the Proboscis in the Logan Mountains, just south of the Chugach: https://publications.americanalpineclub.org/artcles/12199306600/The-Great-Canadian-Knife-Logan-Mountains
Katsutaku Yokoyama writes about the first ascent of the immense South face of Mount Logan: https://publications. americanalpineclub.org/articles/12201101600
Erik Bjarnason and Cathi Shaw write about their edge-ofthe-seat 2015 climb of Mount Logan in Surviving Logan.
Trevor Marc Hughes writes about the classic Logan climb in: Capturing The Summit: Hamilton Mack Laing and the Mount Logan Expedition of 1925
The climber Mike Records has posted a wonderful account of climbing the north summit of Mount Marcus Baker and skiing down it, complete with many clear photos which I’ve used for this article: https://14erskiers.com/blog/2016/06/ north-marcus-baker/
THE TERRITORY
