Despite being extremely remote, the Alaska Range is also very popular. Common glacier-landing areas will usually have dozens of tents pitched near them, and it’s not uncommon to run into other parties on route—especially on the classics. The weather forecast is put out over the radio every night, and the guidebook has pitch-by-pitch topos of the best routes, so you know exactly what you’re in for.
The Kichatna Spires, located at the Southwest corner of the range, are exactly the opposite. Sometimes years pass without a single party going into the range. It took me a week just to put together a list of the peaks and aspects they had been climbed from. I didn’t get anything really specific, just “Peak such and such has seen one ascent from the East.” Most of the routes have never seen a second ascent, and some of the peaks haven’t either.
Rick and I flew to Anchorage, hung out with our friend John and his family for the night, hopped a ride to Talkeetna, and then took a flight with TAT. As we caught our first sight of the Kichatnas and our pilot gave us the tour, one thing was very obvious—we were about to be completely alone. Not only was there no one in the range, but as far as we learned we were the first to go there in at least two years. When the plane left, it was just us. Us, and a four-mile glacier lined with massive walls and peaks. The small ones were bigger than Half Dome. The big ones were bigger than El Cap. When everything is huge, nothing looks big. There’s no sense of scale from trees or houses or anything that makes sense. That peak just over there? That thing is miles away and 3,000ft tall.
After a good night’s sleep, Rick and I took the spotting scope and went to go have a look around. We didn’t show up with any routes in mind. In fact, we weren’t even 100% sure of the names of the peaks around camp. A lot of our information came from GPS coordinates with a peak name, but the dot would fall between three summits. So, we had to go see for ourselves. We spent the day skiing up and down the glacier, taking photos and making mental notes along the way.
We learned that the South-facing aspects get hammered immediately by the sun and the snow turns to soup immediately. The West-facing aspects started having wet slide avalanches like clockwork at 1:00pm. There was basically no water ice, even on routes that had been done as ice lines previously. The one glimmer of hope was some alpine ice visible in a North-facing couloir under what we determined to be Pollak Spire. So, we set our sights on that, packed what we thought we would need, and headed for bed.
