Wild Revelations
Last modified: 12th August 2019
June-July 2012, the Revelation Mountains (Andrew Mattox)
This article is currently being rebuilt.
The jagged, 9,000+ foot spires of the Revelation Mountains rear from interior Alaska like J.R.R. Tolkien’s bad dreams.
Fronted by sweeping tundra slopes and backed by the bulk of the Alaska Range, this soaring, ice clad range is one of America’s most remote locations. Extraordinary but forbidding, the peaks are hammered with snow and wind by the convergence of weather systems from the Arctic Ocean and the Bering Sea. They befit their biblical names: The Angel. Golgotha. Mount Hesperus.
The Revelations aren’t the end of the world, but you can see it from there.
Really, you can. One of the mountains is called “The Apocalypse.” You can see it.
The Journey
June and July, 2012, I walked and packrafted 525+ miles through the Alaskan interior, up the outside of the Alaska Range and to the Revelations.
Lake Iliamna: Ice Age Floods & Pebble Mine
I began at the southwest end of Lake Iliamna, the U.S.’s 2nd largest lake outside of the Great Lakes: a frigid blue inland sea, renowned for its harsh winds. Rippling cold-mirages rise off the lake, distorting the horizon.
The terrain around lake Illiamna and the Pebble prospect has a weird, archaic feel. When the ice sheets melted a hundred centuries ago, they sent enormous torrents of meltwater gushing through the landscape, carving it. Rivers the size of the Colorado and the Columbia scoured canyons now occupied by ankle-deep streams. Skyscraper-sized blocks of ice littered the landscape, and left lakes as their footprints when they vanished.
Lake Illiamna was an ice sheet 15,000 years ago. Now it’s ringed by moraines and abandoned shorelines. Satellite lakes perched in high places, their outlets choked by ice - and then drained catastrophically as the melt progressed. The skeletal remains of their silty bottoms ring the hillsides, creating grassy terraces and swamps that perch a thousand feet up, and springs that daylight on mountainsides.
After a digging in Iliamna’s sandy bluffs for evidence of ancient earthquakes with Hig for four days, I began marching up-lake, surveying for signs of ancient lake-level changes and seismic shaking. Several days later, I turned inland, crossed a low mountain range, and looped through the Pebble Prospect.
After hunting for the traces of long-vanished Ice Age lakes near the prospect, I struck out across empty, windswept highlands to the village Nondalton. I arrived in the pouring rain, as a thunderstorm slashed the village and a double rainbow arched over Lake Clark.
I stayed in Nondalton for a couple days, shipped out the science gear… slept, had a shower, heard stories about Dall Sheep hunting and how people felt about Pebble. Nondalton and Port Alsworth, just up the late, would be the urban interlude of my trip.
From Nondalton, I paddled my packraft up Lake Clark to Port Alsworth. After securing some route advice from the park historian and by strange coincidence of fate getting delicious Americano in my plastic water bottle (I think from the family of Franklin Graham, actually), I cut across Lake Clark, and landed on the north shore in the chilly afternoon.
Up the Edge of the Ranges
In a light rain, I plunged into the thick spruce glades, gathering fog, and confusing, hummocky terrain that mark the route of the old “Telaquana Trail” trade route. The target was my 2nd resupply, at a cabin on a remote lake, 90 miles up the Aleut Range.
For the next several weeks, I traversed up the outside of the Aleut and Alaska Ranges. There was inspection by caribous, days of eerie terrain under mist-shrouded ranges, thick willow, swamps, and nonchalant red foxes. A whitewater crossing in a thunderstorm; hail on the Telaquana river; fleeting days of spotless blue skies and fast walking through rolling vales. Generous hospitality at Telaquana lake from big-hearted people, and an unexpected couple days with my friend Tony & Becky, who I ran into at Proenneke’s Cabin on Upper Twin Lake. When I left Telaquana and the park, it felt like I was falling off the edge of the world.
At least 200 foot-miles after Nondalton, I crested a ridge and saw the southern tip of the Revelations.
The Revelations
The weather had been a fast-flowing motley of tattered clouds, mist, slashing thunderstorms, streaming mist, and reprieves of golden sun. Cinematic, eerie, beautiful. Like walking, in a way, through the end of the world.
As I marched up the chill, barren Swift River valley, the battlegray skies parted into a surreal blue. The Swift River valley is a strange place. Peaks jut up thousands of feet from the floodplain-flat valley floor, like frozen screams: vertical tsunamis of charcoal armor, dusted with delicate snow, and crested with corniced snowfields.
I craned my gaze upstream, constantly searching for the first named peaks at the heart of the range. Was that Golgotha? Was that… was that?
I reached a confluence, where the valley split into two upper canyons, running up to glacial sources, and…
That ’s Golgotha.
A huge monument of tan rock loomed into view beyond upper reaches of the fresh glacial valley ahead… both inviting and forbidding, like a merry tombstone. Its upper heights were plastered with snow and ice. A shard of Yosemite, transported to a far-flung corner of the bitter north, or ten thousand years into the past.
Yosemite’s pretty, this is more my kind of country.
By the end of the day, I’d climbed to the headwaters of the Swift River, and camped in a lifeless moonscape, freshly born from retreating snowfields. The Apocalypse reared its black rock head above the ridges ahead, fluted and crusted with alabaster snow. Its low east ridge swept downward 3,000 feet like a drooping batwing, ending at the pass I was bound for.
Visions of the Wilderness Solitaire: Poet, Sage, Madman
I wanted to do something a little old-school, than standard backpacking fare. No close-walled tent. No stove. No GPS, no stack of maps. Just a large-scale map and a compass.
Society has a mixed relationship with men who go off alone into the wilderness. The wilderness has long been viewed by our civilization as a place to find solitude, a retreat for great spiritual teachers, and an arena for personal trials and testing. It’s also seen as a home and source of sustenance, a frontier, a fierce enemy, a retreat, and a battleground… and the wilderness has always been a haven for madmen and criminals. We regard it with caution for good reason. It’s a place where the rules of society no longer apply.
Perhaps it says something that the only “wilderness solitaire shrine” I visited was Dick Proenneke’s cabin. I find Proenneke’s example inspiring, as I find Reinold Messner, Ernest Shackleton, and Miyamoto Musashi. … I’ve never read On Walden Pond. Jack London was always more my speed.
Dick built his famous, master-crafted cabin just a quarter-mile from his best friend Butch’s place, after scouring Alaska for locations. Dick self-filmed the construction of his cabin, and the book One Man’s Wilderness and film Alone in the Wilderness have inspired people around the world ever since. Dick loved the wilderness, but he was also very much a member of society.
Dick also came to feel very ambivalent about the publicity he garnered. A lot of people who came to visit him in his “solitude” - some of them apparently quite crazy. Today, the cabin is one of (if not the) most popular destinations in Lake Clark National Park. In fact, many people come to the park to see Dick’s cabin, and nothing else.
Many people have asked me about the solitude of the trip. What was that like? Often people tell me they’re not sure they could do it; that they might go crazy.
I found it peaceful. The journey was arduous, but it was a beautiful place to spend some time alone.
I also found that community is something we can carry with us. I think I might have thought, at some point, of almost every single person I’ve ever known, while scaling passes and threading my way among eerie boulder-filled thermokarst water-pits in drifting mist.
I was never depressed, or lonely. I didn’t even so much miss people, as I looked forward to future interactions. It was an interlude of solitude, in a life otherwise filled with humanity. For all the spectacle and ardor of our journeys, for most of us it’s our relationships with other people that give our lives meaning. Perhaps that’s why solitary confinement is considered such a harsh punishment.
I’m not much interested in narratives like “Grizzly Man”, or all the movies and TV shows that play up the wilderness as some sort of constant deathmatch. I don’t watch reality TV, which isn’t normally real anyway. The trope seems to be that the wilderness is an irredeemably hostile landscape set to overdramatic music.
Yes, the stakes are very real out there. There are no rules. There are a great many things out there that can kill you, and that you can kill. It is, absolutely, a dangerous place. That’s really pretty pedestrian, like observing that knives are sharp, and pillows soft.
The risks on this journey included grizzly bears, moose, whitewater river crossings, hypothermia, difficult navigation, steep terrain, and more exotic hazards, like snow bridges over rushing canyon torrents. To me, the wilderness isn’t a place to idealize, but nor is it a place to vilify. It’s a place that’s real.
For me, when you get out beyond all the noise of modern life, and get out there… It’s humbling. It’s pedestrian. It’s very, very authentic.
It’s the business of spruce needles down your shirt, fox, owl, vole, and caribou.
It’s getting up in cold mist, putting your wet socks on, and walking into an unknown landscape every morning.
It’s not losing track of a simple calculus of navigation, body warmth, and bear risk, while also being lost in the majesty of the entire northern globe of the sky, as it is torn and lit by shifting clouds and slanting sunlight, for hour after hour after hour.
It’s rooting with every step like a tree into the pebbles and mud beneath your feet, because you’re on a terrain where an unrooted step might take you into the chasms.
It’s lie on the tundra, picking overwintered cranberries with your teeth.
It’s laughing at yourself for some silly bonehead thing you just did, while shivering kneeling on a plain of cobbles and mud, beneath a scenery of jagged peaks.
It’s making bad choices, and dealing with them.
It’s realizing, a couple hundred miles out, how much I’m a product of the petroleum industry.
It’s feeling sick after eating because your body is funneling all available blood into healing the muscles and tendons of your legs, and it’s the patient exercise of self-discipline to set camp in a thickening rain, instead of just crawling under the willows.
Its cold feet, and holding your own frustration lightly.
It’s bringing that full constellation of human experience into focus, arriving where you intended more than 500 miles later, with every cell and emotion like part of fluid machine for living and breathing, not just walking, across the ground.
For the most part, it’s doing what we’ve done, for tens of thousands of years.
The Apocalypse
I woke early, beside a naturally acid stream, and struck up into a long ascent through a snow-choked canyon beneath the mountain. The canyon devoid of life but seemingly vital with strange snowmelt features: suncups, bits of rockfall on snow stems, strange spikes of grit-covered ice.
The canyon turned to steep avalanche chutes, the chutes opened to broad alpine bowls.
Around midday, I crested out into the Pass of the Apocalypse. The full majesty of the Apocalypse itself, suddenly revealed beyond its obscuring ridges: a spire atop sprouting knife-edge ridges, which plunged thousands of feet to a glacier below. Many of the few people who come to the Revelations, come to climb, and they see the Apocalpse from the other side, where it has even greater relief - but from the less-traveled east side, it is nonetheless impressive.
The Apocalypse would be a mountain of note in any other state. In Alaska, it’s just one more crow in the murder: a (feet) fortress of serried cliffs, verglass, and snow. Behind its northern ridge, the Angel rose like a monolith, with two enormous vertical buttresses like wings. Ahead, Mt. Hesperus, the king of range, stabbed into the sky, a strangely carved slab-and-spire of sedimentary rock jutting up nearly 10,000 feet, trailing a banner of cloud.
The pass itself rose into a jagged subsidiary peak on one side, and up into a knife edge ridge on the other, ultimately merging into the summit pyramid of the Apocalypse.
The southern approach to the Pass of the Apocalypse is snowfields, but the northern approach crosses glaciers, and those glaciers have recently retreated. Having ascended the long, rugged ramp to the pass, I looked down over a glacial headwall at the flat white plain of a valley glacier, perhaps a thousand feet below.
This was the crux of the route: a glacial headwall, a glacier, and no certain way through it, and a canyon beyond. I could see the Big River ahead, rolling beneath Mt. Hesperus. If I could make it there, I’d be set. If not… well, I’d go back down the Swift River, and reroute 50 miles up the front of the range.
Headwalls are often punishingly steep. I began to probe for the way down. Most of the routes quickly became impassably steep and icy. I know I can’t claim the first crossing of the recently melted-out pass: I found my way down onto the glacier by following the tracks of a bear.
I cleared the headwall, and still perhaps 700 feet of steep snow slopes above the glacial flats, I sat down - and slid! I hit the flats in what felt like 9.2 seconds, shook the snow from my pants, and strode out: down the glacier, over the moraine, along unstable boulders and a roaring creek; ice-floored streams, snow-choked canyons, a herd of Dall sheep…
By sunset, I bedded down among the delicate flowers of the Big River’s headwaters, within sight of blue-nosed glacier that carved the Big River valley. I was still a couple hundred miles from McGrath, but… I’d made it. Just me, a crackling fire of twigs, the mountains, and a lone wolf track - imprinted in the mud, among rocky ground.
The Heart of the Trip
I found the heart of this journey when I thought it was ending… After sun set on the peaks, and after the last glowing white moonlit mountain dropped over the horizon.
Paddling by moonlight down the Big River, somewhere in the wee hours of the morning, it all coalesced. I was nowhere. Nowhere I could find on a map, anymore. There were no landmarks, no destinations, no frame-of-reference: just thousands of square miles of thick spruce forest, stretching outwards in all directions. I didn’t even carry a map for this section. There was no point: there was 150 or more miles of river, until the Big joins the Kuskokwim.
No one goes out there. The Big River is too shallow for boats. It’s too long and wet for ATVs. Out there, you could walk 50 feet off the river, lie down, and no one would ever find you. Out there, beyond the world that we mark with reference points, destinations, and names, you are at the end of the world.
Before the last peak had dropped over the horizon, glowing in the moonlight, I’d stopped looking back over my shoulder at them. I felt like I’d fallen in love with those mountains. I’d just reached them, and it was time to go. The Revelations are a long ways out. I can’t lie to myself, and say I think I’ll be back… at least not in that way. So it had seemed, in the failing light on the Big River, like I could look forward into the cataclysmic, cloud-riven sunset and keep paddling, or I could keep looking over my shoulder at the beautiful mountains receding into the past - but if I did the latter, and would have to live with that broken heart.
So I looked forwards, and I paddled.
Somewhere out there, in the chill subarctic night, I felt like I finally reached where I had walked 37 days to get.
Created: Jan. 19, 2018