Out There

by Chris Townsend

  It was August and I was camped alone beside Talus Lake in the heart of the Tombstone range just south of the Arctic Circle in Canada’s Yukon Territory. Across the lake the huge curving amphitheatre of granite walls and spires glowed gold in the rising sun. The great black wedge of Tombstone Mountain towered above the ring of rock peaks, soaring some 600 metres into the sky. It was a glorious dawn amidst scenery of unsurpassed grandeur in remote wild country and one of the most memorable camps I’ve ever had.

  Seven years later I stood beside the gravel Dempster Highway, the only road in the northern Yukon Territory, and stared up the North Klondike River towards Tombstone Mountain. I was going back. Could it really be as splendid, as awe-inspiring, as I remembered? Would years of looking at the photographs I’d taken, of giving slide shows and talking and writing about the area, have dulled the reality?

  I shivered in the cold air and turned away. There was little time to ponder such things now. I had a group to look after, for this time I was leading nine others on a ski tour. Our plan was to ski through the mountains to Dawson City, which lay to the south- west on the edge of the fabled Klondike goldfields. This should take only five to six days, leaving at least four for side ventures. I knew though that this could only be a tentative aim.

  Much would depend on the state of the snow. Would it be deep and soft, making travel slow and arduous or would we be able to glide rapidly over a firm, wind-packed surface? Would we be able to follow the rivers, which should still be frozen, or have to find a way through the dense bush that filled the lower valleys?

  By the end of the next day we had the answer. After a few kilometres of relatively easy skiing on river ice swept clean by the wind, plus some old snow scooter tracks, we plunged into deep, sugary, unbroken snow and breaking trail became extremely difficult. Every step involved wrenching a ski tip high out of the snow then thumping it back down. This quickly proved exhausting with our heavy packs and we soon realized we could make slightly faster and certainly less tiring progress if the leader broke trail without the added burden of a pack. Even so, ten to fifteen minutes was the longest most people could manage. Progress was very slow. Going back for the pack was easy and fast of course, as the trail was well broken.

  Even on the frozen river the snow was knee deep, though in places moose had made bits of trail that were slightly easier to follow. On the banks the tangles of springy willows added to the difficulties so we often followed the loops of the river rather than a direct line. Higher up we found intermittent thin strips of hard snow along the lower edges of south facing banks where the snow had thawed slightly and then refrozen, and linking these made skiing a little easier and faster. Even so, after two days and around fourteen hours of skiing we were only seventeen kilometres from the start. Our heavy loads didn’t help. As well as packs, containing winter camping gear and clothing along with ice axes and crampons, we had two sledges packed with ten days food and fuel.

  Hazy granite peaks appeared at times in the mist. Light snow fell. We were skiing up the North Klondike River valley towards Tombstone Pass, which separates this valley from that of the Tombstone River. To the north of these valleys lay the shattered scree slopes of the Cloudy Range, to the south the massive granite walls of the Tombstone Mountains. The first is the higher, just, though peaks in both rise to well over 2,000 meters, but the Tombstone Range is by far the more impressive with 900 meter pinnacled cliffs that curve round vast cirques, unbroken for many kilometers.

  Shedding our loads for a while we spent two nights at our second camp, spending a day finding a route up to Tombstone Pass and down the far side to Divide Lake. As we’d hoped, the snow on the mountainsides above the willow clogged valley was firmer and made for good skiing. Even so it was hard work hauling the sledges up the steep slopes to the pass the next day.

  The gentle run down the far side came to an abrupt halt when we reached the Tombstone River valley. Here the willows were even thicker and there was a thick crust on the snow that gave way beneath us and made trail breaking even harder. The river, which I’d hoped to ski down, was open in places so we had to smash a way through the willows. We learnt later that the thaw had started early.

  Exhausted and frustrated, we ground to a halt. A choice faced us. If we went on it would probably be like this or worse all the way to Dawson and it was possible we wouldn’t meet our deadline. There would certainly be no time to explore the high cirques of the Tombstone Range as we’d planned. Alternatively, we could abandon the through route and spend the next six days in the high mountains, returning along the trail we had so laboriously made. This was the more attractive option by far so the decision was quickly made. We would stay in the mountains. How we would tell our pick-up of the change of plan would be my problem.

  Our camp that night was below Tombstone Mountain itself and we spent the next day touring the three great cirques that lie directly east of the 2192-metre peak. The weather had remained hazy for the last few days but now clearing skies gave us our first good views of the mountains. We also had our first real downhill runs, mostly in deep, heavy powder snow. Skiing without heavy packs and on reasonable snow was a great joy. I was aware too that lifting the burden of concern about getting to Dawson had liberated my spirits and I was now enjoying the trip.

  That evening the final clouds faded away and there was a wonderful golden light over the jagged peaks. In the middle of the night I stumbled outside to a brilliant display of northern lights. Bright white spots on the horizons suddenly turned into dazzling searchlights while ragged white sheets of light rippled and swayed as if in a celestial wind. Once a twisting red and green coloured band sped from horizon to horizon. With the sky rimmed with the ragged black outline of the peaks and all around a vast expanse of pale snow there was a feeling of immensity and grandeur. This was a glorious place.

  Two hours easy climbing took us to Talus Lake, where I’d camped seven years before and where we’d decided to spend a couple of nights. The scene was as exciting and dramatic as I remembered it. Although the lake was frozen and snow-covered and the shoreline unclear the view showed me where I’d camped. We pitched our tents on the same spot, but this spectacular site had one disadvantage; no water supply. We’d been close to rivers up until now but here at 1500 metres there was no running water.

  Attempts to chop through the hard ice on the lake with our ice axes came to nothing. It was well over a metre thick. Melting snow was a process we wished to avoid, especially as we were using butane/propane cartridge stoves due to the airline refusing to carry petrol or paraffin burners. These stoves were just about adequate in temperatures above –10°C but agonizingly sluggish below that. When only half empty the cartridges had to be changed because of the cold. Luckily we had plenty.

  Two search parties went out to seek water. Both were successful but the farther source, away down the Tombstone River, was the better one and throughout our stay pairs of skiers set off regularly to fill our motley collection of water bottles and vacuum flasks.

  Above our camp lay a great cirque of granite peaks, the most distinctive being Mount Monolith, a huge granite wall topped by a giant boulder. Below Mount Monolith ran a wide flat shelf, high above the floor of the main cirque. We spent a day skiing up to this platform and then along it below the sheer cliffs. There was no wind away from the lake and the sun reflecting off the rock walls and the vast snowfields made it very hot. The sky was deep blue, the granite cliffs gold in the sun. Far above an eagle circled over a distant spire. The grandeur was awe-inspiring yet at the same time there was a peaceful, relaxed feel.

  The hot sun turned the surface of the snow soft, making for good downhill skiing as we returned to the camp. When it set behind the mountains a soft pink alpenglow spread across the peaks.

  Tombstone Mountain was shining in the sunshine early the next morning but the camp was still in the shade and the temperature was down to minus 20°C. Once the sun reached us though, it was soon very hot as again there was no wind. We began th
e slow journey back to our starting point, following our tracks back over Tombstone Pass to the North Klondike River. This time the mountains were sharp and clear and the views beautiful and spectacular. Back down by the river, which was now much more open than before, we found many tracks of grouse, fox and hare and saw several of the first. Spring was coming and the world was waking up. For the first time we sat outside the tents, warm in the sunshine.

  We had the sun early in the morning, although there were clouds to the east, small white fluffy cumulus with more solid grey behind. With just one day left for exploring the mountains we decided to try to climb a minor peak in the Cloudy Range, none of the Tombstone summits being feasible without rock climbing gear. Leaving the skis in a gully high on the mountain as the terrain was too rocky for them we climbed steeply through deep soft snow amongst boulders to a broad ridge up which easier walking, sometimes on scree though mostly on snow, led to the neat little summit. As we climbed, the sky clouded over from the south and the peaks grew hazy. A cold wind swept the top so we soon turned back, stomping down the ridge back to the skis then making fast descending traverses across the crusty, bumpy snow above the camp.

  A final day was spent following our tracks back to the Dempster Highway. As we sped along it was hard to believe how difficult it had been to make this trail. At the road I started walking towards a highway maintenance depot we’d seen when we arrived. Using the depot’s radiophone I called the charter bus company. The driver had already left for Dawson, where he was expecting to pick us up the next day. ‘I’ll try and reach him,’ I was told. He turned up at lunchtime the next day. We loaded our gear and said farewell to the Tombstone Mountains. It had been a difficult trip, but a satisfying one.

  An expedition to Greenland

  Huge rock walls rose silent and grey to either side as our tiny boat chugged up the Tasermuit Fjord. We stared, overawed and somewhat intimidated by the spectacular and inhospitable Arctic landscape that was opening up around us.

  This was our third day of travel, days that had seen us go from transcontinental airliner to passenger helicopter to small fishing boat; from the inhuman confusion of vast urban airports to the friendly atmosphere of the small fishing port of Nanortalik on Greenland’s south-western coast. Ahead, at the end of the fjord, a jumbled mass of smashed and cracked ice poured down some 1300m from the inland ice. The height of Ben Nevis, I thought, trying vainly to sense the scale. I knew that the rock walls lining the east side of the fjord were up to 1500m high but I couldn’t grasp what that meant.

  My emotional reaction was strong. The scene was wild, fantastic, intense, but also in some way, uncaring. No, not uncaring, rather indifferent, alien; a world not for people but for what? Itself?

  Mountains can feel friendly, welcoming and reassuring. At other times they may seem hostile, threatening and dangerous but always there is a human dimension, a sense of relationship between you and the mountain. I felt none of that here. This land existed apart, in another world. Entering it was going to be exciting if, indeed, possible. Even the maps added to this feeling of disconnection with few features named. At a scale of 1:250,000 with 100 metre contour intervals many do not appear at all.

  The purpose of our group of ten was to find a way through the coastal ring of defending peaks onto the permanent ice and to ski as far out on this as we could in the short time available, hopefully climbing some of the easier peaks along the way. At home this had seemed almost without ambition, here it seemed immensely arrogant.

  We had come well prepared with winter climbing gear, Nordic ski touring gear, winter camping gear, food and fuel for ten days. Too much by a long way for even the biggest packs (and I’d brought a huge 115 litre capacity one) so we also had three pulks (low sleds), each capable of carrying 50 kilos or so.

  Late in the afternoon the boat chugged in towards the land and we ferried our loads ashore in a dinghy. Finally the boat turned and slid away, and we were alone. I was acutely aware that although I’d been in places as remote as this before I had always travelled there on foot or on ski and knew I would leave the same way. Here there would be no exit until the boat returned in ten days, although we had both a radio and a satellite distress beacon. I put them out of my mind, aware that they were no substitute for care and experience.

  Our first camp in this wilderness, and for once the word is completely accurate, was on the beach, the tents pegged out with ice axes and weighed down with rocks on the loose shingle. Sparse bushes of scrub willow and birch and a few smaller plants were the only life in what was mostly a barren world of stone and ice. Above us lifeless cliffs soared into grey threads of cloud spitting squalls of cold rain.

  Although south of the Arctic Circle, we were far enough north for darkness never really to arrive in June, which was just as well; during the night the wind shifted 45 degrees and strengthened until it was a wailing banshee powering down the fjord to seize the tents and shake them violently.

  Half the night was spent resetting the tents, putting larger and larger rocks on the pegs only to see them dragged across the gravel. Eventually a frighteningly powerful gust hit the tent I was clinging onto, inverted the poles and smashed it to the ground. More of this and we would lose them all; we took them down and packed. No-one could sleep anyway.

  Retreating to the partial shelter of a large boulder I set up a stove and surrounded by a windbreak of packs and pulks cooked up a large pot of porridge for breakfast.

  Our first day was spent hauling gear across the stony moraines of the beach, through a huge boulder field and up a steep slope of loose scree and earth to a long valley. At its head lay a magnificent wall of cliffs and spires. We camped here for two nights while we ferried gear up the valley to the base of some tongues of steep snow and scree, leading to a traverse around an overhanging frozen waterfall below the glacier we hoped to ascend.

  Pulks, we were discovering, may be wonderful on snow but, for carrying over rough mountainsides, they are about the worst things imaginable.

  My co-leader John White’s mountain rescue experience came in useful the next day. Thankfully not to assist anyone, but to haul the heavily laden pulks up the steep snow by a system of continuous ropes. It was unnerving to hear John refer to the pulks as stretchers! That night we camped at around 650 metres by the iced over meltwater lake at the toe of the glacier, We were ready now, after three days, to actually start skiing.

  So far the weather had been very mixed, each day bringing bursts of sun, showers and wind. This pattern continued as we skied up the glacier, finally moving all our gear at once. That afternoon the clouds descended and we finished in a white-out, skiing across a vast white plateau between huge rock walls. Careful compass work took us to what we hoped would be a sheltered site around 1500m below the invisible walls of an 1870m peak. We were to spend four nights in this spot.

  Despite building double snow walls to protect the tents, the wind that first night threatened to flatten them and we spent long hours sitting with our backs braced against the poles. Beyond our tiny camp the low sun blazed through swirling spindrift, shining gold and red on the soaring peaks. Such a dramatic scene made up for being outside at 4.30 am, but I noted that the sky had blazed with the same fantastic light during the windstorm on the beach. Clear and windy, cloudy and calm was the pattern for the early morning weather.

  As the winds eased the clouds closed in and we spent the morning catching up on lost sleep. With visibility down to a few metres we couldn’t risk travel in this potentially heavily crevassed terrain. In the afternoon the best high level weather of the whole trip gave us a few hours respite so we skied, packless and pulkless for once, north and east to look across Lindenows Fjord on the east coast (Greenland is very narrow at this point) to a superb array of rock peaks. The scale was unbelievably vast.

  Unfortunately, that glimpse of the mountains was all we were to have. For the next two days we lived in a claustrophobic closed-in world as mist shrouded the tents. Even worse, it rained, steadily
and persistently. The snow walls melted, sagged and collapsed, and the skis, ice axes, snow pegs we had used to stake out the tents rose out of the wet snow. Other than rebuilding the walls and resetting the tents all we could do was lie inside having endless brews, ripping up and sharing round paperback books and dreaming of what we could be doing.

  A clearance on the fourth evening led to high winds again in the early hours but also to a clear morning. With just three and a half days left we decided, reluctantly, that we had better retreat while we could.

  The descent was dramatic with the great rock peaks silhouetted against a threatening black sky. To either side great crevasses split the mountainsides and steep icefalls filled the hollows between the peaks. However, the skiing was quite easy and we were down at the camp site at the snout of the glacier early enough for some people to scramble up the 1230m peak above the camp (ironically 300 metres lower than our highest camp), while others returned up the glacier for a load free descent.

  Our route to the fjord now open, we remained for a second day, as the weather worsened and snow started to fall. There was little in the way of views, though below and to the north the pale lines of the massive, heavily crevassed, Semiitsiaq glacier floated in the hazy air.

  Wet snow plastered the tents the next morning and with more falling steadily from the leaden sky we packed for the final descent to the beach. The snow kept up throughout the morning as we stumbled and staggered down the rough slopes, lowering the pulks down the steeper snow on ropes, then strapping them to packs for the walk down the upper valley and the last clamber through the boulders to the beach.

  Finally, the skies cleared and the sun came out to give us one last afternoon to wander the shoreline and revel in the wildness and beauty.

  Being the joint birthday of two of the party, an impromptu celebration was held with balloons and whisky courtesy of their respective spouses. A driftwood fire in the soft light of the sub-Arctic night followed, making a gentle finish to a long, hard day and a tough trip which, in the way that these things are, was a satisfying adventure.