First Day Back
I liked what I did on the Skiing Page 5-22 entry that I thought I would do something similar on my juant into the Talkeetnas today. To celebrate my first day back I decided to run up an old mining road off Archangel Road. I parked just before the culvert and ran for about twenty minutes, enough to get up to the first bench where Archangel Creek flows through several ponds. It became obvious that I couldn't run up the entire length of the road without killing myself, especially sense I was carrying water and a hurky digital camera, so I slowed down to a modest power hike. After 30 minutes I got up to the remnants of the Arch Prospect Mine. Old mining machinery and scrap metal were strewn about and boulders had blocked the entrance to the mine shaft. Thirty minutes ain't no quittin' time though, so I tried to see if I could pick a way up the mountain. Last night's hard rain and this mornings drizzle made the ascent extremely slippery, and the mountain kept getting steeper and steeper.
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Yeah, it got steep. My inclinometer shoots the slope
in at 44 degrees. In the bottom right at the bottom of the valley you
can see a sliver of the road I ran up.
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The picture was taken from where it got hairball enough to cause me to re-evaluate my game plan. I looked around and saw a small bowl at the upper end of the valley that appeared to have a patch of snow and maybe a lake. That seemed like a good destination so I carefully made my way down from the extremely steep part and started picking my way across the mountain and through boulder fields. Normally, boulder fields slow you down, but these were wet boulder fields, and I felt like I was hardly even moving through them. Several times I hiked back up to get to the narrowest crossing point. I must have hiked up farther than I had realized because after a while I found myself in a chute looking up at a suspiciously near ridgeline.
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Looks pretty close, eh?
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I figured it must be a false summit because there was no way I was anywhere near the top of anything. Well, after I got down and looked at it all from the road, then consulted some topo maps, that was a bona fide ridgeline. It starts at the top of the mountain I was trying to climb and is fairly level at 4200 to 4300 feet for about a half mile, then it hits the giant wall of rock behind Gold Cord Lake that's at about 4800 to 5000 feet, and from there a ridgeline goes South to Microdot and another ridgeline goes North to the Pinnacle. So now I kind of wish I'd taken the extra five or ten minutes to climb to the top. But instead I kept going to the small bowl I had seen. It was tucked away under the massive cliffs on the back side of Microdot at just under 4000 feet, so I actually had to go down a little bit to get there. The lake I thought I saw turned out to be the remnants of a shallow pond. It appeared as if the pond dried up and left a soggy meadow behind.
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In the meadow up on the mountain
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Amazingly enough, there were dwarf fireweeds all over the place up there. There were even blueberrys on the adjacent slopes. I doubt you'd have to worry about anyone else picking the berrys up there.
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Dwarf Fireweed
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Right above the meadow was the snow patch. The area looked as though it had either been covered by a glacier recently, or was at the bottom of a big avalanche path. The only rocks nearby were occasional chunks of granite, and there was lots of flat, hard, rock, which suggests extreme pressure. Sure enough, around the edges of the snow was glaciated ice about six inches thick. At the rate the climate is going that mini-glacier will probably be gone in a few years, so it might be worth seeing. Anyway, I ran back down to the car, all without seeing a single person until I got back to the road. Most people don't stray far from their cars. But I'll get more into that later.
© 2004, Michael Logsdon