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Story by Sarah Torey
Photography by Morgan McGlashon and Carly Casternovia
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It was snowing again in Talkeetna, Alaska. In early April, Morgan McGlashon and Carly Casternovia fired up the camp stove in the yurt they were staying in just outside of town to make some dinner. There was no running water or power at the yurt, which belonged to Morgan’s friends, and the driveway wasn’t plowed — almost like winter camping, they joked.
“Might as well eat our trip food,” said Morgan, since going out to Talkeetna’s lone restaurant was expensive. They had packed enough food for a two-and-a-half-week climbing expedition in the Alaska Range, a serrated spine, 600 miles long, in the south-central part of the state. But it was day four and they were still in Talkeetna.
From the yurt, they watched the snow fall — snow that was preventing planes from flying and ferrying them into the range. At 8 a.m, the next day, they made the usual call to the air taxi to check in: Would any planes be flying today? Their pilot, Paul Roderick, was going skiing, they learned.
Not a good sign, they thought.
Morgan and Carly, both accomplished guides and Arc’teryx ambassadors, had met climbing splitters in Indian Creek a few years ago. Immediately, they connected over a shared passion for guiding and their struggle to find other women with the skills and motivation to go on big mountain adventures.
“It's not a lack of partners,” Morgan told me. “Like, there's an infinite amount of dudes.”
This trip to Alaska was supposed to change that. Instead of seeking out bold new lines or unclimbed peaks, they were focused on learning from each other’s complementary skillsets and forging a strong female partnership in the mountains.
Morgan, born and raised in the Tetons, was the stronger skier. She had competed on the world freeskiing tour and was the youngest woman to ski the Grand Teton before becoming a full-time guide for Exum Mountain Guides and working toward her IFMGA certification.
Carly was the stronger climber of the two. Originally from New Jersey, she started climbing in a gym when she was living in Boulder. She spent all her money on an REI starter kit and Z-clipped her way up sport climbs. A few years later, she had moved to Telluride, Colorado, and was guiding on rock and ice in the San Juans, Utah, and the Black Canyon, among other places for part of the year, before taking off in the spring and fall to climb in bucket-list destinations like Patagonia or the Wind Rivers.
For this Alaska trip, Carly and Morgan had their eye on four climbs in the Ruth Gorge: Ham and Eggs (V 5.9 AI4) and Shaken Not Stirred (V WI5 M5) on the Mooses Tooth, the standard route on Peak 11300, and the Mini Moonflower (IV AI 4) on Mt. Hunter.
For Carly, it was a chance to get some mileage leading in steep alpine terrain to prepare for future guiding opportunities in the range, and learn from Morgan about assessing and managing the often hazardous Alaska Range snowpack. For Morgan, it was a chance to develop her ice climbing skills, which she needed for her alpine guide exam.
But as they would both learn, sometimes the mountains have other plans. Like so many climbers who head to the Alaska Range, the real challenge of the trip would not come from the physical challenges endured high on a remote peak, but in the not-climbing — the days or weeks, as John Krakauer writes in his essay, "On Being Tentbount," spent enclosed in a small space with a partner, “forced into such inescapable intimacy.”
Back in Talkeetna, their chances of getting to do any climbing were looking slimmer by the day. No other parties had yet flown into base camp on the West Fork of the Ruth Glacier — the same camp they would use for their climbs — and the weather window they needed was not appearing anytime soon.
Paul, their pilot, started asking if they had a backup plan.
Finally, after six days, the skies cleared. But with less time now and a still iffy forecast, they pivoted: Instead of the West Fork, they would fly into the Great Gorge of the Ruth Glacier, which had more options for at least getting out on a few ski tours if they couldn’t climb.
On April 12, Paul dropped them off in the Ruth Gorge, a 3,700-foot glacial valley flanked by mile-high granite walls, the largest of which, Mt. Dickey, rises more than 6,000 feet above the ground — the equivalent of two El Caps stacked on top of each other.
Though the mountains were literally right above them now, Morgan and Carly felt as far away as if they were still stuck in Talkeetna. Before they could consider climbing anything, they needed at least one full day of sun to force an avalanche cycle. But the snow kept piling up. And piling up. And piling up.
So they waited.
Out here on the glacier, they didn’t even have a yurt window from which to watch the snow accumulate. Their base camp consisted of two 58-square-foot nylon tents: one their sleep tent, the other their kitchen tent. The tents were blue — a bad choice, they learned. It cast their living space in perpetual gloom, like a dark basement apartment.
Yellow would have been better, she noted in her journal. “That way it would look sunny inside no matter the weather.”
As the days passed without any possibility of climbing, there was no shortage of potential friction between the two women. Carly, the entertainer and the optimist, was always convinced the weather would improve. Morgan, the detail-oriented realist, had been skeptical from the moment they arrived in Talkeetna that they’d ever get to climb.
Days melded together: Shovel their way from sleep tent to kitchen tent. Make coffee. Shovel some more. Make breakfast (their favorite: pancakes with coconut flakes and strawberries). Check the weather forecasts. Deliberate about weather forecasts. Read. Play ukulele. Organize cook-offs with the group of Germans camped near them on the glacier. Nurse mugs of tea and coffee. Sleep. Repeat.
If climbing was the original foundation upon which to build their friendship, the time not-climbing was its true measure. Instead of discussing what rack to pack and who was leading, they chatted about past epics, shiver bivvies, and friends lost to the mountains; the perils of guiding and the fickleness of building a life around mountain weather.
Occasionally, it seemed like the weather might be improving. For a few hours, the sun would crack through the clouds and Morgan and Carly would rush outside the tent with their camp chairs. Then they’d watch while avalanches cascaded down the surrounding peaks — fun to observe, but also a sobering reminder about what they would face if they tried to climb. A few hours later, these teasing weather windows would close. Clouds crept back in, whiting out the mountains once again.
The irregular pockets of sun posed another challenge. Harder than actually climbing, they learned, was the constant deliberation: to climb or not to climb.
The Germans made their decision. They started up Ham & Eggs, a classic climb ascending a couloir that splits the iconic Mooses Tooth and one of Morgan and Carly’s original objectives, only to have a falling serac and the resulting slab avalanche nearly take them out.
“Spooky!” Morgan wrote in their journal.
Both women agreed their decision to stay put was the right call. But it wasn’t easy. Time was running out and Morgan and Carly felt the weight of all they had invested in the expedition. More than the money, it was the time –- time spent organizing the trip, time not working, time away from their normal lives.
“It's a bummer to be like, ‘We didn't even get to leave the glacier,’” said Morgan.
Nearly two meters of snow had fallen in the eight days they’d spent on the glacier and their time in the Alaska Range was up. From the outside, their trip might have looked like a failure. They hadn’t climbed a single day, let alone achieved any of their objectives. But they came away from Alaska with something more elusive than a successful summit.
Near the end of the trip, Morgan and Carly filmed a rendition of “Saving Myself for Jesus,” by Birdcloud, a female country duo with a penchant for crass lyrics. In the middle of the Ruth Gorge, Carly strumming on her ukulele while Morgan sang — likely the most scenic backdrop the song has ever seen.
In the end, climbing with someone is the easy part, said Morgan. Hanging out in a tent with that person for a week and getting along? “That’s way harder,” she said.
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