Alaska Range

They made Don Sheldon.

He came to Alaska in the early 1940s, worked as a ranch hand near Talkeetna, and fell in love with the Alaska range, the way some men fall in love with something that is completely and obviously wrong for them.

The range was dangerous, unpredictable, it killed people, and it was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.

He learned to fly during the war years.

And after the war, while a lot of pilots were heading home to desk jobs, Don Sheldon bought a used Piper PA-12 supercruiser, hung out a shingle in Talkeetna, and started flying for hire.

Talkeetna in those days was a railroad town.

A few hundred people, a gravel strip, and an unobstructed view north toward the three peaks of the Alaska Range.

Foraker, Hunter, and the Big One.

Part of the answer is terrain knowledge of a depth that is almost impossible to describe to someone who has not flown the same routes hundreds of times.

He had crossed the Alaska Range and the Wrangell Mountains and the coastal corridors of the Inside Passage so many times that the landscape had become interior geography, as familiar as a neighborhood.

He knew which valley offered a corridor through the range and which one closed in on you with no exit.

He knew where the terrain gave him clearance and where it did not.

Very early on, actually, it was like day four or day five out of the 30-day race.

And I'm going across the Alaska Range because that's where the trail takes you that day.

The weather was super, super intense.

You know, there was a windstorm.

Welcome to the Cutting Edge Podcast, back in the ice, rock, and snow of Alaska for this month's episode in the Kachatna Mountains, a western satellite of the Alaska Range, where two young American climbers have put up a first ascent on Kachatna Spire over the course of four days and four nights with almost no sleep, which is why they named the route the Hologram Wall after the out-of-body exhaustion that they experienced on the climb and descent.

We're joined by the climbers themselves, Eli Spitolnik and Michael Telstad, as well as legendary alpinist Conrad Anker and and American Alpine Journal editor, Dougald McDonald.

Before we get started, this episode is sponsored by Feathered Friends.

pushing so far past the exhaustion of most other sports, especially Michael and Eli, who rested so little on this climb that they started to nod off and hallucinate, seeing and hearing things that weren't really there, slowing their progress to a crawl due to pure delirium in order to race a weather window that threatened to close hard and trap them on the mountain for nobody knew how long.

Let's get into it.

Basically made it a goal to try to climb technical routes in the Alaska range.

Wanted to find something that pushed us, but was also willing to fail.

The Kachatnas really tend to attract elite climbers.

And it starts in Big Lake, which is like south-central Alaska.

Then you go over the Alaska Range to the west coast.

And the halfway point is in Nome, Alaska, which is kind of halfway up the state.

And then after that, you turn back around and head about halfway back down the trail and then take a detour to the interior and you end in Fairbanks, Alaska.

So we start off on a big lake and then it's a lot of river riding, which is slightly easier.

You go through a bunch of different rivers and creeks and stuff.

And then we actually went like through the Alaska range.

Explain that.

It contains four major mountain ranges.

the Wrangel Mountains, the St. Elias Mountains, the Chugach Mountains, and the eastern end of the Alaska Range, all converging in a single park.

And it contains one road, one, a single unpaved road, the McCarthy Road, that extends about 90 kilometres from the town of Chitina to the end of the line at the old mining settlement of McCarthy.

where it stops.

Talkeetna in those years was a tiny town, barely a hundred people, a railroad stop at the confluence of three rivers.

From the streets of Talkeetna on a clear day, you can see the full sweep of the Alaska Range rising to the north.

The peaks push up out of the flats and the boreal forest like the spine of the Earth itself.

Denali, the one the old maps called Mount McKinley, sitting at twenty thousand three hundred and ten feet, the highest point in North America.

Your climb rate on the way out is maybe a third of what it would be at sea level, and the walls on either side of you are not going to move if you miscalculate.

And the weather.

The Alaska Range generates its own weather systems.

Storms build in the time it takes to fly from Talkeetna to the glacier and back.

And my time up in Alaska, I really got into the outdoors.

My first ever backpacking trip was a six-day trek in the middle of winter into the Alaska Range, where temperatures never got above negative 40 degrees Fahrenheit.

And I remember thinking to myself, "Holy cow, I love this.

And I love it so much that the summer, oh my God, like this is gonna be incredible." And so I came back to Iowa after that, 'cause I had, I had one more semester of like actual in-class work.

And everything was frozen in the morning.

Everything was wet.

I w- you know, it was kinda miserable, but it was also really cool, 'cause, like, when else do I get the chance to come and backpack in the Alaska Range when I don't know anything, and I have a professor that, you know, made all of our meals beforehand? And so we really just had to show up and walk and, you know, set up the tent, and it was really cool.

I, yeah, I look at my photos and I'm like, "Dang, she was such a noob." But, like, [laughs] that's so cool.