I don’t know why we chose Alaska. Maybe we just had had too many glasses of wine on the Tuesday night when we bought flights. Someone picked up a guidebook and we flipped it open, saw a picture of Middle Troll and bought flights that night. It was the culmination of what had first brought us together initially — the search for the hard.
Alaska embodied a challenge. We weren’t prepared. Nobody owned the right gear, or had the proper glacier training. But it was remote. It wasn’t comfortable or clean. You couldn’t Uber there.
We all had nice, comfortable jobs in the city. We each had our little community of friends and roommates, co-workers and bartenders, and had begun to hate it. Not to hate them, of course, but to hate the satiation, the overwhelming convenience of it all. The ease of everything irked us, and was compounded by a city hell-bent on building ever-more apps and services to streamline daily life.
In a way, we sought each other out. But it was mostly chance: an acquaintance from college, her friend who happened to be from my hometown, and a random guy I met at Ocean Beach in January. The inadvertent group, clawing at the quicksand of corporate insipidity, reaching out for a handhold.
We began climbing together. Out of thin air, and back into it again.
Photo: Nathan Falk
We started with day trips or weekends here and there. Then longer, harder climbs. We pushed each other to be active, engaged, and to challenge ourselves. To think critically about what we wanted, and why.
Alaska was the next step. Loading up our bush plane at the airstrip in Talkeetna felt right. The Alaska Range rose so quickly out of the flatlands that our 1953 de Havilland Beaver prop plane had to fly between the mountains, not over them. The landing on the glacier was smooth. David, our pilot, had been flying for into the backcountry for 34 years. He promised he’d come back in a week if the weather held.
The sapphire-tinted sky exploded over the valley as we began snowshoeing to the base of our climb the next morning. Unfamiliarity slowed us down and ripped us into the present. The ascent was slow. Inclement weather curled over the ridge-line, wrapping our party in fog. We kept climbing.
Twenty hours later, the four of us stood on a rock ledge smaller than my keyboard a thousand feet above our gear on a rappel. Ben put two small nuts into the crack system for the next rappel anchor while the others bounced up and down to stave off hypothermia. I turned and looked back at the sunrise. We still had a long way to go. I smiled.
For more from Nathan Falk and Terasu, be sure to visit them over at terasulife.com and check out their Vimeo. Also, don’t forget to Like them on Facebook, as well as follow them on Instagram and Twitter.
