Imaginary peaks, p.18
Imaginary Peaks, page 18
About five miles from Terrace, at a Copper City cabin, Glenn and Dick met Arthur Clore, a Black explorer who left Virginia around 1910 to seek a place where “his abilities and steadiness were more important than the colour of his skin.” Arthur had prospected along the entirety of many local rivers, including one that now bears his name. He kept a porcelain tea set in his cabin, but when he headed into the woods, he traveled light and lived off the land. “With his rifle and a bit of fishing line,” Glenn recalled, “he could usually find something to put in the pot. To my surprise, he went without a tent or even a tarp, but he knew where to find rain-free shelter under large boulders and trees.”
Although Glenn and Dick didn’t find the Riesenstein on their trip, they sensed how a wide array of meanings can accumulate around a wild range. For years afterward, Glenn returned to the area to study the geology of the Coast Mountains, to have tea with Arthur, and to explore some of the real and mythic peaks. From a high point on a clear day, he could see the spaces where the Riesenstein peaks were supposed to be—part of an invisible cartography of other imaginary mountains. One of the formations in this region Glenn called “pseudo spires.” From a distance, they looked like big towers. Up close, they turned out to be mere buttresses that merged into hillsides.
There were also the stories of nonexistent or quasi-fictitious peaks that he and Dick collected as they aimed to clear up old errors and to amuse their readers. Dick’s published guidebooks later included intriguing statements about other mountains farther south, such as: “The 7500-ft Nahatlatch Needle, located by some maps N of Nahatlatch Lks., does not exist.” Back in 1957, he’d gone looking for Nahatlatch Needle near a river of the same name in the Lillooet Ranges of the Coast Mountains. He scrambled ever higher up a ridge until he reached the exact spot where the peak appeared on the map—only there was no prominent summit there. Today, the name “Nahatlatch Needle” marks a small bump in the long crest that leads to the apex of Tachewana Peak. The higher, more dramatic spire that once appeared on a 1923 Department of Interior map has dissolved into climbers’ daydreams.
Dick dedicated his 1965 guidebook to “the ‘land of beyond’—its explorers, its dreamers, and its victims.” The quotation came from a Robert Service poem that describes a realm “at the gates of the day,” which lures adventurers ever deeper and higher. In the middle of the night, climbers might arrive on a summit, believing that they’ve reached their goal—only to realize that the “land of beyond” glimmers still farther away, like a dream vision lit up by the stars. “Thank God!” the narrator concludes, for the existence of an unreachable place: “A vision to seek, a beckoning peak.”
Dick was aware of the potentially severe consequences of such dreams. In 2009, Glenn published a collection of Dick’s poetry, The Coast Mountains Trilogy. One poem, “A Mountain,” recounts the first ascent of an unnamed, sentient peak: “A citadel of finest granite / Smooth as glass and steeped in storm.” After four climbers scale its ramparts, men and machines churn roads into the mountainsides and demolish the forests. Slopes erode and collapse. Glaciers wilt. Another poem, “The Ballad of the Border Survey,” tells the tale of an enigmatic summit named Matsaac. Dick told Glenn that he’d seen the name on an old map, but Glenn could never locate the map or the mountain. Neither could Fred Beckey, after Glenn requested his help. When Glenn asked Dick about Matsaac again, Dick could no longer remember where the peak was, and he said he might have invented it. In his 1965 guidebook, Dick tried to designate another peak near the US-Canada border as “Matsaac,” but the name didn’t stick. Today, it’s known as Mount Custer.
The Matsaac in the poem remains, “misty and waiting,” in the North Cascades, somewhere “out beyond” Hozomeen Mountain: “Across the dark moat of the dim, deathless Skagit, / A tall twisted country, alive and aloof. / A great phantom network of mist-tangled ridges.” Closer up, Matsaac appears like part of a supernatural realm. “The peak of cloud no wind could change / Soared from a land of crumpled ice / Into a world its own.” Men who set out to climb this mountain suffer from mysterious misfortunes, as if cursed for their desires. “The unknown will haunt them, allure them, addict them,” Dick wrote.
“Nobody was totally clear as to which parts of the poem were based on fact and which were fiction,” Glenn recalled. In addition to solving some of the cartographic mysteries in the Coast Mountains, Dick, who died in 2017, left behind at least one of his own. Looking back on Matsaac and the Riesenstein, Glenn realized that the lure of imaginary places—the persistent longing for unseen lands beyond the horizon—might lie at the heart of mountaineering. “You never know what’s on the other side except when you can make it up,” he said.
WHILE CLIMBERS FROM THE LOWER 48 SEARCHED FOR THE RIESENSTEIN on Canadian maps, Indigenous people had long been aware of Alaskan peaks that fit the description of the imaginary spires. For thousands of years, they paddled along the braided currents of glacial rivers, hunted wild sheep, caribou, and bears across the foothills, and trekked over vast expanses of ice and high passes in the mountains. They created summer trails that wove through dense thickets and winter tracks that vanished and reappeared across the snows. They made their own cartographies of tales and songs. Miska Deaphon, a storyteller from the upper Kuskokwim region, recalled tales of Dzi» yehwt’ana (Hill-People) who lived inside a mountain west of the spires and who helped those who left gifts at its doorway. Dena’ina Dene (Athabascan) residents gave the name “K’its’atnu” to the river that flows near the peaks of the fictitious Riesenstein. And they called the real mountains K’its’atnu Dghelaya.
To Europeans, the entire expanse of land that came to be known as Alaska had remained a mostly imaginary place for centuries, a lost corner at the upper edges of maps. Rumors, errors, and hoaxes flourished there long before the invention of the Riesenstein. In eighteenth-century cartographies, Alaska oozed like a giant white amoeba that mutated as generations of mapmakers blended facts and myths. Some cartographers drew it erroneously as a giant island with shorelines that wriggled into emptiness. Others depicted a fragmentary coastline, its largely blank interior speckled with high peaks. In the spring of 1794, British explorer George Vancouver jotted grumpy notes in his journal about an inlet that Captain James Cook mistook for a river: “Had the great and first discoverer of it, whose name it bears, dedicated one more day to its further examination, he would have spared the theoretical navigators, who have followed him in their closets, the task of ingeniously ascribing to this arm of the ocean a channel, through which a north-west passage . . . might ultimately be discovered.” Vancouver added that he hoped his own meticulous remapping of the area would finally put the absurd myth of the Northwest Passage to rest. More than a century later, it was through Cook Inlet—known to Dena’ina people as Tikahtnu—that the Kichatna Spires first came to the attention of white American explorers.
When the United States bought the Alaska territory from Russia in 1867 (without consulting Indigenous people, who hadn’t ceded their lands), members of Congress and the media alike denounced the purchase of a frozen wasteland or “polar bear garden.” Decades afterward, non-Native explorers had still mapped only fragments of its vast interior, mainly near the coastlines and major rivers. Then the discovery of gold in southern Alaska increased the demand for geographic information. In the spring of 1898, US geologist Josiah Edward Spurr and his companions set out with cedar canoes from Tyonek (Tubughnenq’), a Dena’ina village on the shore of Cook Inlet. They intended to chart a course up the Susitna River, to cross the divide to the Kuskokwim River, and then to float downstream toward the Bering Sea, while surveying mineral resources along the way. “Nearly all of this region was entirely unknown,” Spurr insisted in his expedition report, “never before having been explored by white men.”
Before his expedition, Spurr had woven together a hazy speculative cartography, formed of scraps of information from previous travelers and vague reports that traders told him they’d heard from Alaska Natives, possibly Dena’ina people of the Susitnuht’ana and Tubughna bands, who went on regular hunting trips in the K’its’atnu region. During the 1830s, Russian Alutiiq explorer Andrei Glazunov had ventured up the Kuskokwim, and he’d reported seeing a giant ice mountain in the distance. He referred to it as “Tenada,” a Deg Hit’an Dene (Athabascan) name for the peak that Koyukon Dene people termed “Deenaalee” (the “High One”), later rendered as “Denali.” On a Russian map based on Glazunov’s report, fuzzy hachures radiate around Tenada like the body of a giant “hairy caterpillar,” indicating a series of summits between the Kuskokwim and Susitna Rivers. Subsequent explorers charted more pieces of terrain along those two waterways, but large gaps remained in printed geographies. By the 1880s, the surrounding arc of peaks—Deghi:lo:yi in the Lower Tanana language—became known as the “Alaska Range” to American surveyors who hadn’t yet tried to trek across the mountain chain. In 1896, US prospector William Dickey gave the highest summit a new name, “McKinley,” after the soon-to-be successful presidential candidate of the time. On his own map, Dickey sketched what he called a “great range very rugged and high” to its south.
Spurr likely had misty notions about these big mountains, but he also believed in a swath of “low, flat country,” where he could rely on a “string of lakes” to paddle from one headwater to the next. From a fork in the Susitna, Spurr and his companions headed up the Yentna River, averaging about four or five miles a day, yanking on branches to haul themselves and their canoes upstream. Dena’ina hunters glided by in moose-skin boats, floating downstream on their way back to their villages. Many of them paused to sketch maps for Spurr of the land ahead, including some troubling pictures of labyrinthine highlands.
By early June, the distant slopes of Denali had billowed into the sky like a mass of bluish-white clouds. River currents swelled with melting snow. Floodwaters sliced at the shores, and trees crashed into the rapids. Spurr and his companions kept going up a tributary that he called the “Skwentna,” an Anglicization of a Dena’ina name, Shqitnu, which might roughly translate to “sloping ridge river.” Inside its web of narrow channels, shallow water snarled around collapsed trees. When a battered canoe leaked, the group tore strips of canvas from provision sacks and used spruce resin to glue the cloth in place. Each time a boat overturned, they lost crucial supplies.
By late June, Spurr fully admitted that the “low, flat country” between the Susitna and the Kuskokwim didn’t exist. They would have to find a pass through the ramparts of high peaks ahead. Although they had little food left, Spurr was determined to continue, by himself if need be. His companions agreed to follow him. They could always chew on tree bark while they starved, one of them said. On July 10, after they’d spent weeks searching for a navigable gap in the range, Spurr left his long-suffering teammates behind to stagger up a hillside alone. At the top, the sketches of the Dena’ina hunters finally aligned with the panorama of peaks and valleys. Spurr returned to camp, elated, with the news: he’d found a pass through the range. Many more miles still stretched ahead before the end of their journey, but they would survive.
Slowly and wearily, Spurr and the others ferried gear through dense alder and over broken rock to the place he called “Portage Pass.” There, they seemed to enter an unearthly world. Butterflies arose in a glittering mist. The fragrance of wildflowers filled the air like wafting magic. Fireweed burst pink against stone cliffs. White and yellow crowberry shone alongside the snows. Spurr, who loved composing poetry, carefully noted each wonder. The clouds had tattered, and from the apex of the pass, as he wrote in his Log of the Kuskokwim, he contemplated “magnificent precipitous bare mountains, set with many spires and columns . . . gray, awe-inspiring, like vast Gothic cathedrals . . . but 1,000 times more vast and elaborate, with glaciers for roofs.” In general, he tried to use Indigenous names in his report, but he hadn’t heard of these peaks before. He thought of the term “Cathedral Mountain,” which later morphed into “Cathedral Spires,” for a cluster of rock towers to the south, eventually known as the Kichatnas.
A year later, when Lieutenant Joseph Herron headed toward the same region, he understood the Alaska Range to be “a mass of enormous peaks and glaciers about seventy miles wide, extending across Alaska and constituting the chief barrier to the interior.” Nonetheless, he hoped to find an overland route from Cook Inlet through the mountains to the goldfields of Cape Nome and the Klondike without crossing the border into Canada. In June 1899, with three soldiers, two horsepackers, and fifteen horses, Herron took a steamboat to Susitna Station. From there, two Alaska Native men (possibly Dena’ina Susitnuht’ana), whom Herron referred to as Stepan and Slinkta, agreed to guide him up the Kichatna River, to a gap that led to the other side of the range. Herron’s team brought more than three thousand pounds of gear (including six hundred pounds of bacon) to sustain them for over one thousand miles of wild terrain, which he, too, claimed in his expedition report was largely “hitherto unknown and unexplored” (except by the Indigenous people whose geographical knowledge would prove essential for his team).
Day after day, members of his expedition cut paths for the horses through thick forests, placed logs where the ground might sink beneath the animals’ hooves, and built bridges over streams. The use of pack animals had drawbacks, Herron noted: “The transportation stampeded back on the trail at every opportunity, raced through the woods, knocked off packs, plunged into mud holes, bogged down.” By July 10, the Dena’ina guides informed Herron that the horses couldn’t make it over the steep pass. Herron insisted on trying. That same day, a pack animal stumbled, rolled over one of the horsepackers, and tumbled with him down a bluff. To their teammates’ likely surprise, they both survived. Stepan and Slinkta urged the expedition to turn back. A week later, the rapids of the Kichatna River swept a soldier away, dashing him against boulders. Stepan pulled him out. It seemed only a matter of time before someone died. When they reached the break in the hills, which Herron called “Simpson Pass,” they could see the Cathedral Spires. Herron added names of his own to three of the visible peaks: Gurney, Augustin, and Lewis. As mountaineering author David Roberts later observed in his 1968 chronicle of the Kichatnas (published in Summit a few years after the Riesenstein Hoax was revealed), any justifications for Herron’s choices appear to have been lost to history: “To Herron’s survival we owe some of the worst names in the Alaska Range. . . . It was his habit to sprinkle the scenery with names of politicians and personal friends from his own (no doubt beloved) state of Ohio.”
Six days after Simpson Pass, Slinkta and Stepan abandoned the journey. Maybe the guides decided they’d had enough of herding white soldiers over the mountains, chopping paths and hunting for them, rescuing them from drowning, observing their dangerously ineffective attempts to shoot bears, and trying to convince them to go home. Perhaps the guides were also concerned that the expedition was entering the traditional land of another Dene group, the Upper Kuskokwim people. Left to their own devices, the remaining team members floundered. Soon, the grass withered in the evening frost of early autumn. The horses became unable to graze, and Herron abandoned them. As the men trudged through archways of snow-bowed trees, wet clumps dropped onto their heads and snowdrifts soaked their feet. Their provisions were nearly gone, and they lacked adequate gear for the approaching winter. Both Herron and one of his fellow soldiers limped on sprained ankles. “The outlook,” Herron noted, “was becoming annoying.”
In September, during a hunting trip, Chief Seseui of the Telida band of Upper Kuskokwim people was butchering a bear he’d shot when he found bacon in its stomach. He guessed that the animal must have stolen food from a party of lost white men. Retracing the bear’s path, he tracked down the famished expedition members, offered them some of his own provisions, and brought them to his village. Herron and his team camped there for two months while they waited for the snow to firm up so travel would become easier again. Villagers sewed warm clothing for the group and gave them fur hats, moccasins, and snowshoes. On December 11, with the help of local guides, Herron’s expedition reached a new military post at the confluence of the Tanana and Yukon Rivers, the goal of their journey. “This report,” Herron declared, “represents the earnest efforts of a small party in unknown regions against extraordinary obstacles, deserted by guides, caught by winter, deprived of transportation, and hampered by scarcity of food.”
A modern-day reader might sum up the story otherwise: a group of white soldiers set out to gather information that might lay the groundwork for colonization. They found themselves hopelessly underprepared for the challenges of the backcountry, left their depleted horses to starve, and were saved from nearly certain death by the aid of Alaska Native residents—the same people whose traditional rights white settlers wanted to displace. Decades afterward, Carl Seseui, the chief’s son, told anthropologist Raymond L. Collins that he’d never forgotten how much assistance his father had given to Herron’s expedition “and how little he received in return.”
On his map, Herron sketched Gurney, Augustin, and Lewis Peaks with delicate hatch marks, as ornate as the patterns on a seashell. The sinuous lines of two bodies of ice, which he called the “Fleischmann” and “Caldwell” Glaciers, flow past the summits. Rivers and marshlands extend outward like the veins of leaves. He added the name “Foraker” to another big mountain near Denali, thus replacing the original Koyukon Dene name, Sołt’aanh (“Woman”) with the name of an Ohio senator. The long dotted line of an “Indian winter trail” runs alongside parts of his own itinerary. “In exploring my route,” Herron admitted, “I found that there already existed throughout its length winter sled trails cut out, blazed, and in regular use by the Indians and coinciding with or paralleling my trail throughout. . . . These trails represent the result of a knowledge of the country accumulated during many generations.” To Herron, these paths seemed like possible locations for future roads and railroads. Readers of his epic account were less optimistic, and the search for a route to the goldfields shifted elsewhere.
