The Place Itself

By Kyle Boelte

Originally published in Adventure Journal.

We’d been expecting it all morning, but still, we were startled by our inability to see the route ahead of us. A thousand feet above breakfast, we’d entered the clouds. We were near the top of the first of two passes for the day, the last two passes of the trip, after two weeks in the far backcountry of Wrangell-St. Elias National Park, Alaska.

It had been two weeks since we discovered our sat phone didn’t work. We had a sense it was broken back in McCarthy, at the bush pilot’s shop, when we tried to add the pilot’s number to the phone’s contacts. We confirmed it was useless on our first night out, in camp just a quarter mile from where we encountered our first grizzly.

We stared into the fog. "You come to the place on its terms. You assume the risk," I remembered John Kauffmann saying to John McPhee, in McPhee’s classic book about Alaska, Coming into the Country.

At the top of the first pass, we saw an unnamed glacier spread out in front of us. Beyond the glacier should have been another slope leading to the second, higher pass. It was there on the map, but hidden from us just then by thick fog.

"You're just not going to make a trip perfectly safe and still get the kind of trip you want,” Pat Pourchot says to McPhee. “People who come this far have to come to grips with that problem."

We stopped at the top of the first pass to put on our crampons, look at the map again, and take a bearing. We considered our options: 1) retreat to lower elevation, 2) wait out the weather on the pass, or 3) carry on through the fog into the unknown.

There were no roads out of that wilderness. Impassable rivers surrounded us to the west, to the north, to the east; a giant icefield stood to the south. A bush plane was scheduled to pick us up the next day. We had no way of communicating with the outside world if we didn’t make it to the airstrip.

After talking it over, we decided to push on.

Each step across the glacier was deliberate, neither rushed nor slow. We paused for a moment when we heard a loud rock-fall rumble through the valley like thunder. We saw nothing of it, only the whites and grays of the cloud that enveloped us.

We were experienced backcountry travelers. We were skilled. We had sound judgment. We were not in this place seeking risk; we’d come seeking the place itself.

Sat phone or no sat phone, we were reminded once again that we must be here in this wilderness on its terms.

Past the glacier, we headed up a loose talus slope, up through a series of couloirs, up into the heart of the cloud, up and up and up, toward a pass we could not yet see.