I used to want to be a bonafide mountain climber—you know, the type that hangs off cliffs, smokes hand-rolled cigarettes and utters cryptic wisdom so great and terrible it makes the likes of Nietzsche feel like a lil’ bisquatch (the politically correct name for a petulant Sasquatch, according to the Rural Dictionary.) One might say I was suffering from a bad case of tunnel vision. Years ago, right before I transitioned into trying to be a birder, at times an even more harrowing passion, I went on a solitary expedition into the Eastern Alaskan Range.
I left the ALCAN Highway and walked up a brushy valley past three moose busy stripping willows and an inquisitive red fox. I fell into a half-frozen yet gushing creek and eventually climbed up onto the Macomb Plateau. It was mid-October and the tundra and willows blazed red. Three big bull caribou ran in circles as I trudged towards a wall of 7,000 foot tall peaks, the majority of which I hoped to summit in the next 10 days or so.
The days passed in a steady procession of ridge walking and stirring vistas. Occasionally, I’d get to the top of something, scratch my butt and hope to feel something a little more profound than tired and hungry. There were scatterings of caribou, fresh sheep and fresh wolf sign and coveys of white-tail ptarmigan near glaciers. One night the aurora encompassed most of the sky in a wriggling mass of purples, greens and reds.
The following morning I woke well before dawn and hiked toward a distant mountain. A cow caribou, her breath steaming in the gloom, gangly danced circles around me as the sun slowly edged the eastern horizon. The first river I crossed was hidden beneath a thick layer of ice. A few hours later I traversed a glacier and followed a narrow ridge that looked like it would lead to a glaciated slope and, then, the summit.
I was about an hour or less away from the top when I became aware of a butt so big and jiggly it would make Kim Kardashian envious bouncing its way up the ridge. The sun was in my eyes, and my first thought was “Gol darn, that’s a big marmot.” With the summit on my mind, not wanting to waste another second, I put my head down and kept hiking. Soon, as plump and hairy butts often do in the wild, the rear end turned into a fairly irritated yet strikingly beautiful golden-red grizzly. The ridge was about to end in a steep glaciated slope and on both sides were near vertical cliffs.
My next thought was “Shucks, it’s going to be hard to get to the top now.” The bear refused to budge another inch. The hair on its hump and back stood up and it glared to let me know it wasn’t going to pick a fight but wasn’t going to let me bully it either. My third thought was, “Wow bear, you’re a real weirdo for being up here on this mountain.”
I slowly backed away, heart pounding primordially in my throat, ice axe clutched at the ready even though I knew it was at best an inadequate defense. I descended the ridge, crossed the glacier and, though it was late, began trying to climb the peak via a more difficult route. The grizzly, a red dot on the other ridge, seemed to watch for hours.
Towards dusk, I turned around and cursed my luck for running into the bear and hence being prevented from attaining the summit. Preoccupied with these thoughts, I walked into a small herd of Dall sheep. A large ram eyed me warily before leading the group away. In darkness, by the light of the moon, I followed the fresh tracks of wolves back to my tent.
Winter came the next day and shut down my last attempt on another summit. That night as I sat in my tent, feeling like a failure, a real storm rolled in. A particularly strong gust of wind tore my tent away into the sky, with me in it. After a flip or two, I slammed atop a boulder and snapped two out of three tent poles. I undid the third, rolled a number of big rocks inside the collapsed tent and clung to a large boulder as the wind did its best to try to tear me away. Waking to deep silence, I undid the zipper and shoveled through a half foot of snow to be greeted with a much appreciated blue sky.
It’s funny how now, more than a decade later, the mountain tops and so many other things I once so badly wanted seem silly and are mostly forgotten. What I remember most fondly from that trip is a bear and a summit I didn’t attain.
• Bjorn Dihle is a writer based out of Juneau. He’s working on his first book, “Haunted Inside Passage,” and can be reached at bjorndihle@yahoo.com.
