A climb with bite

A perilous air drop, then onto a treacherous path to a coveted peak

August 08, 2010|Brian Irwin, Globe Correspondent

ANCHORAGE, Alaska — “Talkeetna one-niner, what are the winds doing?’’ inquired Paul Roderick, a pilot for Talkeetna Air Taxi, one of a few bush plane operators that ferry mountaineers deep into the glaciated Alaska Range that skirts Mount McKinley, the highest peak in North America.

“Gusts kicking up out of the northwest,’’ the tower replied from the dilapidated hangar that is its office in Talkeetna.

“Hope all that training pays off,’’ Roderick said as he turned and shot me a cocky smile. He was flying me and my climbing partner, Conrad Yager, in a 1975 cherry-red, eight-passenger, single-prop Otter that wore skis instead of wheels. Twenty-five gut-jostling minutes later we weaved through 4,000-foot-deep gorges carved by a maze of moving ice rivers. Giant walls with thin, ephemeral runnels of ice framed the view as Roderick banked the plane steeply, directly into a blind-ending pocket glacier. Our landing spot was flanked on the right by a ridge, straight ahead by peaks known as the Eye Tooth and the Bear Tooth, and on the left by our objective, one of climbers’ most coveted peaks: the Mooses Tooth.

Lacking an apostrophe because of a still-uncorrected cartographical error in nomenclature, the Mooses Tooth, was first climbed in 1964, by a German party. In 1975 Jon Krakauer, who would go on to write “Into Thin Air,’’ and friends made the first ascent of the most direct and safest line to the summit, a 2,500-foot groove of ice, rock, and snow they named Ham and Eggs. The climb was remote, requiring weeks of hiking to reach it.

Roderick, seeing an opportunity in shortening the approach to 30 minutes by dropping his plane onto this frozen bowl, pioneered the area for paying customers. Today, this one-shot-or-death landing strip known as the Root Canal Glacier is how almost everyone gets to the climb. Weather permitting, this once extreme adventure can now be done in a weekend from Anchorage.

Our plane drifted over deep crevasses just a hundred feet below, onto the smooth belly of the glacier, and coasted to a stop. Five minutes later we sat next to 200 pounds of gear and 10 days’ worth of food as the Otter took off, spraying us in dry, cold powder. We were left to melt snow for drinking water, pitch tents, and start erecting protective walls of snow bricks in the event of a storm. We weren’t alone on the glacier. A few other parties had already dug in, waiting for good weather. Three of the teams consisted not of climbing partners like us, but rather of climbing guides and their clients.