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Yooooo for good grief sakes, mercy. The every Thursday Night Barbecue at the Apocalypse Design corporate headquarters was outrageous as usual. The baked Copper River Red salmon, from Chitina, was what you cannot get at even the best restaurant. Molasses, pepper, raisins, soy sauce, wine, the Chitna Red and four bizarre thoughts. Wow. I'm eating some right now. So I showed a gaggle of slides, and we took pictures of the fun ones, on the screen, with a digital camera. I hope this works.
Below are:
west ridge walk
moulin thing
Stand back everybody. This is serious.
These go with whatever story is about the west ridge of Mt. Hayes, or something like that.
South side of Mt. Hayes with spider clouds. West ridge on left. Streaks on the screen at bottom.
The common avalanche greeting at base camp.......................................................
This guy was following us.
Fact is, he was spying on us. We let him get this close only once.
Mt. Deception. Don't expect to find it on the map. From part way up Hayes.
Somewhere safer above the rime cave with the crack between the cave and the rock wall.
The standard winter summit freeze your ass, get the picture and get off the top, view.
The delightful ski out, before reaching the icefall that suggested our return back up the glacier a ways to find a way off the side of the glacier, where we then came across the fresh grizzly tracks too early to be out of hibernation, cranky and hungry. For some distance we were then followed by a lurking suspicion, not too distant from colleagues on Rum Doodle.
Mo Later...
It is later, so here goes...
These go with the moulin trip story. These photos have been transfered to the Stories 4 page, with their story. (reshuffle in progress)
The usual view. That's one mountain there on the left, and another one on the right. They all pretty much look and act the same.
The old moonrise thing over a certain unclimbed couloir which let two parties escape with their lives, barely. The pic was taken from the main entrance to the lobby.
The entrance lobby of the local accommodations. Two, count them, 2 bottles of Cognac. Other appointments contributed to the one star rating.
The main conference room. Desperate, desperate conditions. Not certain that we survived. These two scholars presented a long-winded dissertation on the relative merits of long winded dissertations. It exhausted them, and the Cognac.
The Glacier Traveling Magician Twirling Light Show provided for the evening entertainment of the convention delegates and their guests. It was all they could afford.
Due to the Cognac rapidly dissipating into the cold dry air, we threw the suspects out to look for holes. Digging a hole in the snow, to find a bigger hole in the ice, is an entertaining game. Hope that you find the edge of the hole, a bit off to one side, rather than the middle. At this point in this particular game, one has no idea what is down there, and not all that sure one would want to find out.
Finding out.
This guy is standing up there on top of the glacier, in a stiff breeze at minus fifteen degrees Fahrenheit. The camera guy is hanging around in nice dead calm air, at a warm thirty two degrees above zero Fahrenheit. Neither of them can see what is below them. Each preferred to be the other.
A long way down and still not sure what is down there further.
Not only do these guys stand in the middle of the occasional hallway, blocking traffic, but they leave their stuff laying around, kick holes in the walls, foul the air and generally conduct themselves in an uncouth manner, which is why we send them to such places where they won't bother anyone else. Don't be fooled by the bright picture. That is only what the camera flash saw in the pitch black. Except for the small headlamp area, we had to wait to see the pictures to see what we would have seen.
Some of the hallways lead to questionable places. The camera guy was looking straight up, from where he just came, and a little concerned whether he could, or even wanted to get back up there.
Artwork is occasionally provided by a complex geophysical intra-related anomaly between kinetic energy transference of molecularized vapor over disparate thermo-gradients involving long equations and a few whooptidoos that nobody can understand. That's why we call it artwork.
And it gets skewed every once in awhile.
Occasionally one gets too deep. The scale on this formation is big, real big, bigger than both of us.
Wiser to look back down on the way out.
On the way back up out of there. The camera guy is looking directly overhead from the impact spot, reminding the other guy to not drop his flashlight.
After toilsome hours deep in the bowels of the glacier where danger is the only comfort, he emerged into the dark of night, in the dead of winter, in the heart of the Alaska Range. The mountains towered above, and icy fingers of the down-glacier wind ripped at his freezing flesh. Worse than that, by this time in the expedition at the leading edge of scientific illusions tracking unknowns where they have not yet been found, there was nary a drop of Cognac in the cellar. Escape became imperative.
Just when you are desperately counting on a hasty escape, things turn to scat again. Worse. By the time we got the thing dug out and pointed in what we hoped was the right direction, with what we guessed were only wrinkles in the metal, the pilot, fearing that he could be stuck for the night or a week where he knew the cellar was bereft of cognac, shouted that he didn't have time to take us as he pushed in the throttle and disappeared into the white-out with an angry gust of cloud grabbing for his tail wheel, and towering mountains scraping his wing tips.
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