"Skiing on Volcanoes"

Craig Barnard climbs the flank of Mount Iliamna in order to ski back to the borrom.
(All photos courtesy of Barnard, Tyler Johnson & Rory Stark)

 

SKIING ON VOLCANOES

November 2008

It seemed like a good idea at the time, although most of their friends thought they were nuts.

It was a Thursday afternoon after work in May 2006, and the onset of Memorial Day weekend was in the air. Buddies Tyler Johnson, 32, and Rory Stark, 37, had a free Friday and a good weather forecast in front of them, so they decided that this would be a good time to climb and then ski down a volcano.

They targeted 10,016-foot Mount Iliamna across Cook Inlet, and sketched out a rough plan of attack: Drive down to Ninilchik, launch their 16-foot Achilles inflatable from the beach, motor nearly 50 miles across Cook Inlet and far up into Tuxedni Bay, work their way inland on foot until they reached snow, and then start climbing on skis with skins.

Simple enough, they thought, despite the fact that neither of them had been there before. It would be an adventure. And Johnson and Stark, both veterans of the Alaska Mountain Wilderness Classic, were accustomed to adventure and to thinking on their feet.

 “Me and Rory, we’re trying to find people in Anchorage (where both men live). We’re like, ‘Hey, we got good weather for three days. We’re gonna take the boat across,’” according to Johnson, a 1995 graduate of Skyview High School. “Nobody wanted to take the boat. Everybody’s like, ‘You’re crazy, man. Nobody’s gonna go across in your 16-foot boat. Come on!’ So when we left town, it was just me and Rory.”

Of course, all of those doubters back in the big city didn’t know about 35-year-old Craig “Chunk” Barnard, an extreme-skiing enthusiast living on the Kenai Peninsula.

“Rory was like, ‘I know this guy, Craig. He’s down in Cooper Landing. He lives in a tent. We’ll stop by and see if he’s there,” Johnson said.

“So we stop in Cooper Landing and we start driving down Craig’s road, and there he is, walking from the liquor store with a six-pack. We’re like, ‘Craig, hey, man, you gotta come.’ And he’s like, ‘All right, all right. Yeah, yeah. Hey, can I call my boss real quick?’

“So he calls his boss and leaves a message and tells him he’s not going to show up to work Friday and Saturday.”

According to Barnard, the “invitation” from Johnson and Stark was more of a command. “We walked into my tent, and they told me what I need and what I don’t need,” said Barnard. “And what I don’t need was ice axes or crampons or ropes. So they just kind of quickly shuffled some gear into a bag for me.” And rapidly the three of them were on the road, heading south.

“That’s how it started, completely off-the-cuff, no planning whatsoever,” said Johnson.

They brought no maps and no GPS. They brought no mountaineering gear—just backpacks, skiing gear, some food and alcohol, and their boat.

“We had four days of food,” Johnson said. “We had some Taco Bell. I think we had, like, one thing of Mountain House, maybe, but we just stopped at the fast food.” They purchased a stack of cheeseburgers from McDonald’s and then took advantage of the “10 burritos for $10” deal at Taco Bell. “And that worked out really well. That was our food for the whole trip.”

They arrived in Ninilchik in the early morning.

“We barreled off across the inlet at 2 a.m., and it was pretty rough going across, and then we had to go up Tuxedni Bay,” Johnson said. “We didn’t quite know where we were going, you know. We just knew we had to get somewhere up into Tuxedni and see how far we could get.”

Actually, Barnard had been on Iliamna before, just the year before, and had a general sense of the best route to take. In 2005, he had been part of a three-week, fly-in trip onto Tuxedni Glacier, and from there he had skied the mountain, eventually reaching the summit.

Based on Barnard’s experience, Johnson and Stark had planned to run their boat as far into Tuxedni Bay as possible to reach the glacier flats, but the upper reaches of the bay eventually became too shallow to continue. They beached their craft and dragged it above the high-tide mark, then hoisted their gear onto their backs and began a slow trudge up the heavily bear-traveled mud flats of Center Creek.

They planned to follow the Center Creek drainage into the high country, eventually crossing over a rocky ridge before dropping down onto the Tuxedni Glacier, which they would follow to the base of the actual mountain.

That Friday evening, about 18 hours after leaving Ninilchik, they stopped at about the 5,000-foot level and established their first camp. None of them had slept since Thursday morning, when they’d awoken to go to their respective jobs: Barnard as a handyman and carpenter, Stark as a pilot for the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, and Johnson as a civil engineer.

The next morning, they were on the move again: up the glacier to the mountain’s southwest flank, and from there to the sulfur-smelling summit of the volcano.

“We had to pick our routes, and there were some crevasses, but the crevasses weren’t that bad. It was more the avalanche conditions we were a little concerned with,” Johnson said. “We picked our way up (the main mountain) in six hours, and then the ski down was like 30 minutes.”

They had reached the summit early Saturday evening and had soon returned to their Friday campsite for the night. On Sunday morning, they skied off the snow of upper Center Creek, then walked the mud flats back to their boat.

“We got down to our boat, and it didn’t get mauled,” Johnson said. “There’s just circles of bear tracks around our inflatable. We heard that the bears like to take swipes at those boats over there, so we thought for sure something was going to be wrong.

“So we launched it. Nice weather. It was like glass coming back.”

And they arrived in Ninilchik in the middle of the Memorial Day weekend salmon-fishing flurry.

“We beached the boat on Ninilchik beach, and there’s probably a thousand motorhomes all lined up, and these people were there, and they come walking over,” Johnson said. “They were just blown away. They’re like, ‘Where’d you guys come from?’ And we’re unloading our ski gear and stuff. They just couldn’t believe it.”

By Sunday evening, all three men were at home—satisfied, and yet not satisfied.

Johnson said that when they had packed up in Ninilchik and were driving north, they were all thinking the same thing: “Man, that was absolutely, unbelievably the best trip I’ve been on in a long time. And so we’ve gotta do all three now.”

The Redoubt and Spurr volcanoes were waiting.

*****

About five months after the Iliamna adventure, Stark found his body in need of an overhaul.

In 2002 on Mount Hunter, Stark, who grew up in Homer, had been caught in an avalanche that had injured his hip and mangled his ankles, requiring three surgeries to one ankle, fusing the bones so that front-to-back movement was still possible but side-to-side movement was not. The ankle injury altered his stride; however, it didn’t keep him off his skis or out of the woods.

In 2005, for instance, Stark and Johnson joined with a pair of other competitors to participate in the rugged Alaska Mountain Wilderness Classic. They won by finishing in less than two days, the first competitors ever to do so, much to the chagrin of former record holder, the renowned Roman Dial.

But Stark’s compromised body could endure such punishment for only so long, and eventually one of his hips began to give out.

In October 2006, Stark went in for hip-resurfacing surgery.

Doctors dislocated the hip, and then ground down the head of the femur until they could mount on it a chrome-alloy ball. Into the hip joint, they affixed a metal socket, then set the ball into the socket, and put the hip back together.

Seven months later, in May 2007, Stark was ready to tackle another volcano. The target this time was 10,198-foot Mount Redoubt, standing in its snowy mantle almost directly across from the city of Kenai.

“We realized that (the ease of the Iliamna trek) was complete luck, so we planned this one out a little better,” said Johnson. To start with, they decided to allocate more time than they had the year before. They opted to give themselves four days instead of three.

Although they still carried no climbing gear, they did pack a map, emergency-locator beacons and shovels, and three 4½-pound Alpacka one-man rafts. They also spent some time researching their route. Then, eschewing McDonald’s cheeseburgers this time, they settled on a diet of mainly burritos from Taco Bell and a fifth of whiskey apiece.

An acquaintance of theirs with some experience on Redoubt laughed at their sense of preparedness, Johnson said. He also warned them about the crevasses on the mountain and worried about their decision to ski the untried north face, but his arguments failed to dissuade the trio.

Again leaving Anchorage on a Thursday night after work, Stark and Johnson picked up Barnard in Cooper Landing and headed south. At about 3 a.m. Friday, they launched their inflatable from the Kenai beach near the waste-water treatment plant and motored west across Cook Inlet toward the Drift River.

Entering the river mouth, they followed the stream course until they noticed a road near the river. They pulled into a slough and tied off their craft, realizing that the road likely belonged to Chevron’s Drift River facility, but not realizing that they were being watched.

“We got down the road a little ways, and, man, two or three trucks come barreling down the road toward us,” Johnson said. The trucks belonged to Chevron security officials, who were obviously upset by the adventurers’ appearance.

According to Johnson, a Chevron boss from the West Coast had just landed at the facility, and officials there were already on a heightened terrorism alert because they feared possible threats against a whaling convention in the area. Officials talked of confiscating the boat and all the gear until, as Johnson said, “cooler heads prevailed.”

“We had motored right up a pipeline,” Johnson said, and there was a concern about bombs. Ultimately, though, after a long powwow between officials, they decided to not only forget pressing charges but also—after checking out the inflatable and laughing at all the beer inside it—to escort Barnard, Stark and Johnson in a company truck on up the road and off Chevron property.

In the end, the trio saved five to 10 miles of walking. Still, there was plenty of hiking to be done and, since the Drift River is a braided glacial stream, plenty of cold-water crossings to be had. Fortunately, the bluebird skies continued and the sun remained warm. On Friday night, after stashing their pack rafts along the upper river, they camped at about 2,000 feet.

On Saturday morning they affixed skins to skis and began to ascend through a series of seracs, icefalls and thinly veiled crevasses. Especially nerve-wracking was a notch they recognized as a collapsed crevasse still containing beneath the snow fissures that would parallel the direction of their skis on the descent.

All that day, they covered less than five miles, camping at about 5,000 feet near the base of the main mountain. While Stark and Johnson remained in camp, Barnard scouted the route ahead, noting that the avalanche danger was high while still being able to select a reasonably safe route.

“You always want to ski (down) your ascent line because, if your weather turns to crap, you can kind of follow your tracks for a little bit, and it’s real important to know where you’re going,” Johnson said.

By noon on Sunday, following Barnard’s plan, they were on the summit and preparing to head back downhill.

“We hit it just right,” Johnson said of the descent. “Another week and probably it would have uncovered a lot of crevasses, and these (snow) bridges would have been gone.” As it was, noted Stark and Barnard, some of the bridges began to collapse as they traversed them.

Back at the Drift River, they made camp and readied their pack rafts for the trip out. A distance they had labored to cover over much of Friday, they floated in only two hours on Monday morning, but when at last they reached the Achilles they discovered that Monday’s smaller tides had left their boat high and dry in the slough. Consequently, they had to drag the craft over the mud and back out into the current.

“We had to take the outboard off,” Johnson said. “We took out all the stuff. Me, Craig and Rory, we drug that boat. It was probably a little over a quarter-mile. And then we had to go back and get the engine and then we had to go back and get all the stuff. We looked like a bunch of mud turtles out there.”

Eventually, however, they were back in the main channel with their gear packed and ready to go. They reached the Kenai beach on Monday night as the weather began to turn. “It was just blowing up,” Stark said. “It was starting to get just nasty there. We just beat a storm in.”

On the way north, they stopped off at the home of Johnson’s parents in Soldotna and learned that Johnson’s father had tried to “send” them a care package.

According to Barnard, Johnson’s father bought some food at Arby’s and then flew with a friend over Redoubt on summit day, planning to drop a bag of chow to the three men, but the fliers were unable to spot the climbers, and so the delivery never happened.

Less than a month later, they were ready for 11,070-foot Mount Spurr.

*****

At 11,070 feet, Mount Spurr stands about a thousand feet higher than Redoubt and Iliamna, and because reaching it would require traveling a greater distance inland from the coast, Barnard, Stark and Johnson changed their usual modus operandi.

They decided to charter a plane from Merrill Field in Anchorage to Tyonek, to take mountain bikes to roll up the snarl of logging roads leading out of town and up the Chakachatna River drainage toward the volcano, and to give themselves at least five days for the round-trip.

On a Friday morning in early June, they boarded a single-engine Cessna Skywagon piloted by Spernak Air, and after a short flight they were unpacking gear in Tyonek and preparing to maneuver about a 40-mile maze of backcountry roads that would lead them up along the Chakachatna to its confluence with Straight Creek.

“It was crazy,” said Barnard, the least experienced of the three riders. “These guys were flying. It was all I could do to keep up. And I was hot for every break. I was, ‘Oh, a break! Come on! This is supposed to be fun, guys.’”

Near the confluence, they stashed their bikes and began following the creek, crossing and re-crossing its chilly waters to avoid prying their way through thick tangles of alders. Once, Barnard, who said the water sometimes moved so fast he could feel himself starting to float, tumbled into the stream.

“I bit it. I was on all fours,” he said. “Your legs are numb all day long. And then just in time to start feeling your legs and stuff, you plunge into the river again.”

Eventually, after camping for a night on a gravel bar to avoid all the bears in the area, they reached the source of Straight Creek: a swath of ice they called a “dry glacier” because its dense main vein was topped by a thick carpet of rocky debris.

Johnson called the up-and-down, boulder-strewn traverse of the glacier “tedious.” Stark said it was “just like a moonscape.” But, after day of such travel and a night on the glacier, they exited onto a southeastern flank of the mountain, and it was here that their real troubles began.

The clouds moved in. The light flattened out. Warmer air began to deteriorate the snow.

At about 8,000 feet, according to Johnson, they “got up onto the ridge, and, man, it was super steep. But it was the only way we could see to connect our route to the summit. We’re like 3,000 feet from the summit, and the snow at that point was so soft where you could stick your ski pole all the way up to the handle. Like four feet of mush.”

Stark painted an even more severe picture: “There was a cornice on one side of this ridge and then a really steep drop with crevasses running down the other side. This snow, it was just ready to rip. I mean, real sort of unstable snow conditions.

“I pretty much figured if we tried to traverse that ridge, we’d break a slide on it and go into one of the crevasses. And if you stayed high enough to be away from that, then you’d be hanging over the cornice on the other side, which is a cliff. It was pretty untenable.”

They sent Barnard out ahead for a closer look, and even though he said he was “disappointed” by the decision to retreat, he knew it was the right call. “It was such a good decision to turn around,” he said. “Their vibe was totally right.” They descended to 6,000 feet and camped.

On Monday, they worked down the full length of the dry glacier and camped along Straight Creek. On Tuesday, they reached their bicycles and trundled back into Tyonek, where they called Spernak Air. By Tuesday night they were all at home.

Johnson said they were all disappointed by failing to summit, but they decided to take a practical perspective: “The (other two) trips were so perfect that it was kind of nice to throw in three-quarters of a mountain in there. Nobody’s that lucky.”

Johnson added that he had no regrets. “They were the cheapest trips I’ve ever done, and the most rewarding,” he said.

In the months to come, the trio would have many more rewards but also more difficulties.

In October, Johnson, Stark and Stark’s brother Will flew into Katmandu in the Himalayas and climbed then skied down Cho Oyu, the world’s sixth-highest peak.

Then, just before the end of the year, Stark and Johnson were skiing high on Silvertip Mountain on the Kenai Peninsula when Stark, for the second time in his life, was swept away by an avalanche. “It was horrible,” he said. “I broke my femur in three places, and my tibia was just shattered. For about six inches it was just bone fragments. And there was a piece of bone coming through my leg, and I lost a lot of blood, so I had to have a transfusion.”

Stark was rescued by the 210^th Rescue Squadron of the Air National Guard. In November, he had surgery to remove 20 screws and some metal plates from his leg. Sometime after this Christmas, he said, he hoped to start skiing again.

In March 2008, Johnson and a pair of other Anchorage racers finished second in the Alaska Mountain Wilderness Ski Classic. And in July, Johnson and Barnard won the summer version of the race.

“It was mainly for the adventure,” said Johnson, speaking chiefly of the volcano trips but also about the men’s shared love of the outdoor experience. “It’s not just the mountains and the skiing. That’s fun, but I think for all three of us it’s just the adventure of going out and doing something different, and rolling the dice. If it works it works. If it doesn’t it doesn’t.”