Outdoors

Celebrated climbers Alex Honnold and Tommy Caldwell summited Devil’s Thumb in late August. But they couldn’t pull it off without the counsel of a local climber who’s had a decades-long love affair with the mountain.

Standing outside his little cabin on the edge of the rainforest, Dieter Klose gazes out at the ocean. He built this place in the shadow of this giant rock. On this day, a wall of fog blocks his view. But Klose knows exactly what’s behind those clouds.

“It looks just like a German beer stein that’s a little wider at the bottom, so it doesn’t tip over when you’re drunk,” said Klose. “There’s only room for one person at the top, and you can just barely stand — if you have the courage.”

Klose stood there himself, twice. He can’t even count how many unsuccessful climbs it took  — his best guess is a dozen. He’s the only person to make it halfway up the unclimbed Northwest face — and come back alive. Klose has been climbing since he was a kid. He moved to Petersburg in 1982. At first, he lived behind a cemetery in a borrowed tent.

“It got torn up by a bear,” said Klose. “A friend of mine told me, ‘Hey, there’s a boat for sale for 200 bucks.’ And I thought, ‘Great! Then I can look at Devil’s Thumb.’”

Klose said it wasn’t love at first sight — or first summit. His enchantment with the mountain grew over the course of his life.

“It had everything I wanted, everything that satisfied me by climbing,” said Klose. “It’s difficult by any side, and it’s not super high altitude, which is great. We’re totally alone. And it’s a wild looking thing.”

Klose is a home builder by trade. He hurt his back at work a few years ago. The injury all but ended his climbing career — but he’s still known to climbers in the region as the godfather of the Stikine Ice Caps.

“I mean, Dieter is key to anybody who comes here to climb,” said world-class climber Tommy Caldwell.

Caldwell came up north recently to climb Devil’s Thumb and shoot a documentary about it. Dieter advised him and his climbing partner, Alex Honnold.

“There’s just nobody else that knows nearly as much about Devil’s Thumb,” said Honnold. “He’s like, the local custodian — just, like, managing the mountain.”

Klose also helped draft their route. It tags every peak up and down the whole massif; over the twin summits of the Witch’s Towers, the slender Cat’s Ears Spires — and then the looming cathedral of Devil’s Thumb itself. Caldwell said those features were as wicked as the sound of their names.

“All of the summits are like incredibly pointy,” said Caldwell. “You climb up it and you’re sitting on the summit, and there’s like thousands and thousands of feet drop on either side of you. It’s one of the more exposed-feeling summits I’ve ever seen in my life.”

Hours before they left Alaska, both climbers came by to write in a book that Dieter Klose keeps about the mountain. It contains the names of everybody to ever summit in living history. Alex and Tommy sketched out a map of their route that took up two whole pages.

Back in front of his house, Klose gazed across the sound. He said the view is actually better from down here.

“You’re not necessarily enjoying yourself on difficult climbs — you’re getting tired and thirsty, hungry, all of that,” said Klose. “It’s not until you get back into the valley and look up at that mountain, and then you get some real joy out of it.”

Climbing Devil’s Thumb today would be difficult for him. But Dieter Klose still dreams about one last summit.

Trail advocates gathered on Tuesday morning at Eklutna Lake, a glacier-fed, turquoise, oblong body of water nestled in the mountains of Chugach State Park, to celebrate a legislative victory.

Lawmakers in May approved $234,000 in state funding to fix the 13-mile trail that runs along the lake, repairing and shoring up the numerous spots that have eroded and become difficult to travel.

Those fixes will help make the trails around Alaska’s largest city more attractive to visitors and to locals, said advocates at the Eklutna Lake Trail “Golden Shovel” celebration organized by the nonprofit group Alaska Trails.

“People who come to Alaska want to see real Alaska,” said Matt Worden, owner of Lifetime Adventures, a company that offers kayak tours and rentals at Eklutna Lake, and one of the trail supporters speaking at the event. “When I see people put out that Anchorage isn’t a good spot and they got to go, they have to go somewhere else in the state to see real Alaska, it’s not true.”

The Eklutna trail-improvement project is one of three within Chugach State Park that were approved this year by lawmakers. They are all part of a broader plan, now called the Alaska Traverse, that would establish a connected trail system running about 500 miles from Fairbanks to the southern tip of the Kenai Peninsula. The plan had until recently been known as the Alaska Long Trail.

The other projects approved are a $1.1 million rerouting of the 5-mile Indian Valley Trail, which is part of a longer route linking Turnagain Arm to Arctic Valley, and $100,000 for a study on ways to restore access to a high alpine destination north of Eagle River called Ram Valley.

Altogether, the $1.4 million for trails approved by the Legislature was far less than the $9.5 million, 14-project Alaska Trails wish list prepared earlier this year. But none of the trail items approved this year by lawmakers were vetoed. That contrasts with last year, when Gov. Mike Dunleavy vetoed $10.5 million of the $14.75 million in trail projects that lawmakers had approved.

The three trail projects put into this year’s capital budget were chosen through careful compromise and strategic targeting, said Sen. Bill Wielechowski, D-Anchorage, one of the legislative champions of the Alaska Traverse concept.

“We worked really hard with the governor and got a lot of people writing in to support them,” said Wielechowski, who was among the public officials at Tuesday’s trailside celebration.

The $1.4 million was a relatively modest sum and part of a modest capital budget, but it represents progress toward the ultimate goal of a Fairbanks-to-Kenai Peninsula trail system, he said. “Every year we’re getting a little bit more,” he said. “We’re getting there.”

The new Alaska Traverse name was chosen earlier this month by Alaska Trails officials and their partners at the end of a deliberative process that started last year. The Alaska Long Trail name had been a placeholder while public input was gathered, said Mariyam Medovaya, the organization’s Alaska Traverse project manager.

Alaska Traverse emerged as the winner for multiple reasons, she said. There is a nice acronym, AKT, she said. The new name does not conflict with another name in the Lower 48, Vermont’s Long Trail, she said.

Perhaps most importantly, the new name is more reflective of the envisioned trail system or network, which is more than a point-to-point route, she said.

The Eklutna Lakeside Trail fits into that network concept. From the soon-to-be-fortified trail, hikers can reach a route allowing them to ascend Bold Ridge Overlook and, if they are ambitious, continue on to 7,522-foot Bold Peak. Even more ambitious travelers could work their way north to Pioneer Peak Ridge in the Matanuska-Susitna Borough.

“It’s possible for people who want more adventure,” she said.

It is no coincidence that the three projects funded this year are clustered in Anchorage, Wielechowski said.

Among the trail projects that were vetoed last year were those in the Fairbanks area and in the Matanuska-Susitna Borough, he said. Although governments at the borough and city level and numerous business groups have supported the connected-trail concepts, there was pushback from certain other groups in the Fairbanks and Matanuska-Susitna areas, he said.

That skepticism or opposition appeared to be at least in part about concerns that motorized trail use or uses like hunting would be curtailed, Wielechowski said. But those concerns are misplaced, he said.

The Alaska Traverse is not strictly about non-motorized travel, he said. The Eklutna Lakeside Trail project is an example, he said, as some of the improvements will benefit the section of trail designated for all-terrain-vehicle travel. And hunters and trappers are likely to benefit as well from trail expansions, he said.

“If you build the trails, they’re going to allow more access for everybody,” he said.

As much as they want to extend the work beyond Anchorage, Wielechowski said, he and other lawmakers will be reluctant to fund projects in areas where there might be opposition and “if the governor’s just going to veto it.”

Nonetheless, preliminary work is proceeding on one project that would connect Anchorage trails to those in the Matanuska-Susitna Borough.

Among the projects that did win funding last year is a $300,000 study of how to create an 8-mile connection from Edmonds Lake, a scenic spot near Chugiak, to the community of Palmer, said Beth Nordlund, executive director of the Anchorage Park Foundation, the organization that received the money.

The foundation has a contractor to do the study, though any connection that would be created would likely be done by the state Department of Transportation and Public Facilities, said Nordlund, who was also at Tuesday’s Eklutna Lake celebration.

“It’s not going to be the Anchorage Park Foundation that builds this connection. It’s just to get the ball rolling,” she said. “If you don’t have the study, you can’t have the first step.”

This story originally appeared in the Alaska Beacon and is republished here with permission.

Correction: Matt Worden’s name was misspelled in the initial version of this article. 

Two weekends ago, a canoe from a Haines guiding company took on water at Chilkoot lake. Its seven passengers and two guides spent a substantial amount of time in the lake’s cold water as they swam to shore before being rescued. We spoke with Haines Fire Chief Brian Clay about the incident, and the department’s response.

The accident happened on a windy Sunday afternoon at the far end of Chilkoot lake. The group was on a canoe tour with Haines guiding company Alaska Mountain Guides.

It was blowing probably 15, gusts to 25 up there,” said Haines Fire Chief Brian Clay, who was at the lake fishing with his granddaughter. “My understanding is they started taking on water and as it swamped, they couldn’t bail fast enough and it just swamped itself.”

As the canoe took on water, seven elderly passengers and two guides found themselves swimming for shore. All reportedly were wearing floatation devices, but they spent about half and hour in the glacier-fed lake before reaching shore.

Another boat front the guiding company reportedly picked them up from the beach and brought them to the parking lot, where Chief Clay met them.

“They all had hypothermia, and three were critical,” he said. “Three were walking, or green as we say in our business.”

The three critical patients were sent by private vehicles to meet with ambulances on their way from town. The other four were escorted to the clinic in fire and police department vehicles.

At least five of the patients were later medevaced, according to Clay, and ambulance volunteers were busy late into the night shuttling those patients between the clinic and the airport.

Clay says once activated, the emergency response went smoothly. But the first call to 911 was directed to the wrong dispatcher.

“I believe the initial 911 call went to Fairbanks regional office for the sat phones, and they didn’t know where Chilkoot Lake was,” Clay said.

KHNS could not check directly on the health of the patients. Alaska Mountain Guide owner Sean Gaffney did not respond to multiple requests for comments.

Jonas Bare and longtime friend and travel partner Cynthia Hovsepian set out for a day hike from Chena Hot Springs Resort, east of Fairbanks, on Aug. 10.

“By simple bad choices, a three-hour hike that lead to an eight-day survival,” Bare said.  

He said they followed a loop trail that took them into a burn area, where they lost the path and got disoriented.

“You can’t tell between the burn marks and the actual trail,” Bare said.

They ended up hiking through jumbles of fallen trees and marshy tussocks that Bare compared to giant pillows. 

“As soon as you step in, you have to take all your energy just to pull your foot back out and step up again,” he said. It’s exhausting.”.  

They ate the few snacks they carried by Aug 12, and they were cautious about eating wild berries. But the main issue was thirst.

“Food was never an issue. We never thought about it. We never dealt with it. We never felt the hunger,” Bare said. “We just wanted to keep moving, but water was so — we just seemed like we could not drink enough water. We were so thirsty all the time.” 

Bare said they mostly stayed along a creek for access to water, but they made forays away from it to look for a way out. He said they built fires to warm up and get dry after the frequent rains.

“We made camp over those eight days, four different places,” he said. “We ran across a couple bears — nothing that was really scary for us, but we were very vigilant about our surroundings all through the night. You can’t sleep. You have to keep the fire going. You just take little breaks here and there and you just keep pushing.”    

Bare regrets not bringing their cell phones or some other communication or signaling device. He calculates that they were no more than about 6 miles from the resort at any time, and they saw search aircraft. 

“They were just miles away in another range, and there was no way we could ever get to them. We made a smog fire to try to smoke them out, nothing would seem to work,” he said.        

By the night of Aug. 17, Bare says they were weak and becoming hypothermic.

“We knew that if we didn’t get out of there on their own accord, we were dead,” he said.

He says Hovsepian, who is visually impaired, was faring worse.

“She’s physically done. She can’t see. She can’t climb. So I made her a huge safe area with firewood backup, and I said I’ll be back in five hours,” he said.  

That was Aug. 18. Bare says he hiked north.

“We had a general idea it has to be this way because we eliminated all other options at this point,” he said.

Bare says he eventually found a trail, ran into two people walking, and made it back to the Hot Springs.

“There was all these people here. My dad was there from Ohio,” he said. “He didn’t even recognize me, and that’s probably the picture a lot of people have seen in the media.”

Bare says he guided searchers, who used a helicopter and ATV to find and bring Hovsepian back to the Chena Hot Springs. He thanks everyone who participated in the week-long search effort.

“There were so many people, and you’ve got to understand we were dazed and confused Friday night. I could not interact with everyone enough to get everybody’s names and all that, and faces, but these people have to be recognized,” he said. 

Bare and Hovsepian spent the weekend recovering before flying home to Tennessee. He says Alaska is the fiftieth state they’ve visited together. Getting lost kept them from seeing some other parts of the state, so he says they plan to come back.

Devils Thumb sits just across the water from Petersburg, a monolith of ice and granite. Until recently the mountain had never been climbed by someone born and raised in Petersburg. Kyle Knight reached the summit after a lifetime of watching the mountain, dreaming of the climb.

Devils Thumb rises to nine thousand feet above sea level, part of the  Boundary Mountains of the Stikine Icefield. Mountaineer Dieter Klose has spent more time exploring the Thumb than anyone else. He came to Petersburg to climb it in 1980, and eventually made Petersburg his home.

“Like my son said, Petersburg wouldn’t be the same without Devils Thumb” said Klose. “I think for everybody, we kind of relate, we see this beautiful thing. It’s inspiring. It’s daunting, it’s aberrant. And it just instills this wonder in climbers and non.”

In cloudy, misty Southeast Alaska, the peak isn’t visible most of the time. So it’s a shorthand – when people say “you can see the Thumb” that means good weather, blue skies.

The mountain’s remote location and extreme conditions make it notorious among rock and ice climbers. It’s been summited fewer than 50 times since Fred Beckey first climbed it in 1946. The “classic” Eastern Ridge is sometimes referred to as the “easy route.” But that’s only in comparison to the icy Northwest Face, which remains unclimbed. Three people have died in the attempt.

To locals, the Thumb is as much a part of Petersburg as the rain and the smell of fish in summertime. That’s part of the reason 35-year-old Kyle Knight wanted to climb the mountain.

“It’s been part of the landscape since before I can remember,” he said. “And I think that’s what makes it so special or significant to me is that that’s a peak that’s been dominating the skyline from a very young age. And you know, it’s totally striking. I know that everybody has some sort of relationship with that skyline.”

His interest started in middle school when he found an old climbing magazine from the ‘70s in his parent’s library. It had an account of Bob Plumb and Dave Stutzman’s first ascent of the Northeast rib of the North Face of Devils Thumb in 1977. “I was just totally enamored with that story of their adventure in the landscape,” said Knight.

But when Knight was young, and even after he started climbing in his teens, summiting Devils Thumb seemed more like a dream than a realistic goal. “I felt like that was sort of the realm of the world class alpinist, and a different challenge at a risk level that I wasn’t going to be able to develop the skills to be comfortable with,” he said.

But the skills came. Knight became friends with people who had climbed Devils Thumb. After high school he moved to the Lower 48 and climbed constantly. The dream became a stated goal.

It would take another 15 years to achieve the goal. That’s partly because the best time to climb the mountain is May through August, when there’s less chance of avalanches and rockfall. Knight is a fisherman and spends summers in Bristol Bay. But this year a close friend with lots of experience on the mountain was visiting Petersburg. They decided they would attempt the climb in August after Knight returned from fishing.

Even in summer, storms can make an ascent of Devils Thumb impossible. The pair lucked out, with a tight window of good weather within days of Knight’s return. They took a helicopter to base camp where they spent the night. At about 7:00 a.m. they roped up and began their climb of the Direct East Ridge.

Knight said he often tried to block out the view on the way up. “It’s scary,” he laughed. “So by focusing more just on the moves themselves, you can avoid being negatively affected by that fear.”

They reached the top around dinnertime. “I totally felt satisfaction,” Knight said. “But also I know that getting to the top is only halfway, because you gotta get back down and you never want to feel so satisfied that you lose that sense of focus.”

Knight said the summit is a boulder about the size of a van. “The actual top of it is just big enough for one person to sit astride with 6000 feet of exposure down on either side below your feet,” he said.

They spent about two minutes taking in the view and snapping photos. “And then my partner went up and slapped it and said ‘okay, let’s get the heck down.’” It was two in the morning before they were back at base camp.

Knight said their slow speed could have been due to his training, or lack thereof. He had a very specific training regime in the months leading up to the climb. He explained, “Bristol Bay – sockeye salmon fishing. Lots and lots of crawling in and out of the engine room.” 

But it took longer than expected for another reason. There’s a lot of newly exposed rock at the very beginning of the climb where in the past there had been snowfields. That rock hasn’t had time to settle, which means it’s loose, and dangerous. Knight said the descent in the dark was a risk that he was comfortable taking once. “Yeah, I did it once. I don’t really want to do it again,” he said. “Which like for a fisherman, you might think about, you know, that big storm that you ran through, that you didn’t really want to, but you got stuck in. It happens, but you don’t try to make a habit of it.”

Knight said that he’s always thinking about the conditions of the route when he’s climbing. He’s constantly calculating risk. But that risk doesn’t take away from his enjoyment. “In a way that’s part of the appeal,” he said.

But trying the Thumb again? Knight said he gives it “a solid maybe.”

That’s because “a big part of wanting to do it is looking at it for all these years, now I can look up there and know that I have been up there.”

Veteran climber Dieter Klose is thrilled that Knight summited the mountain.

“He’s the first person that grew up in Petersburg and climbed Devils Thumb. Born and raised,” he said. “And I lived here so many years, I was the only climber. I had to go climbing alone, unless I brought somebody up. And so for Kyle to do it…in my mind, that’s the beginning of a legend in Petersburg.”

One thing is for sure. It’s not the last mountain Knight will climb. He plans to keep fishing every summer, and climbing the rest of the year.

The U.S. Forest Service says it will build 25 new recreation cabins in the Tongass and Chugach National Forests.

The cabins won’t all be built at once. The first seven cabins are out for bid and will be constructed next summer. That first wave of new cabins will be spread across Southeast Alaska and the Kenai Peninsula. They’re all on the road system, except for one, which is a rebuild of a cabin at the Anan Bear Observatory near Wrangell that was crushed by a tree during a storm over the winter.

Other sites in the Tongass will be at Mendenhall Campground in Juneau, Signal Creek Campground at Ward Lake in Ketchikan, and El Capitan Interpretive Site north of Naukati on Prince of Wales Island. In the Chugach, cabins will be at Trail River in Moose Pass, at Porcupine Campground in Hope, and at Meridian Lake in Seward.

Dawn Collinsworth is deputy director of recreation lands and minerals for the Alaska region. She says the Forest Service received over 1,000 comments on where the cabins should go.

“Where we’re siting these cabins is really where the public would like to see them,” she said. “Because that just means they’re going to get more use, which is the goal.”

Collinsworth says the new cabin sites are more accessible than many of the existing ones, which are only reachable by boat or plane or extreme hikes.

“What we wanted to make sure that we’re doing is providing cabins that are more accessible and reach sort of a broader cross-section of the public who would like to recreate, but perhaps don’t have the physical capabilities of taking a long hike up a mountain,” she said.

Congress appropriated the money for the cabins. Over $14 million for the years-long project is coming from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law passed in 2021. The Forest Service is also getting around $3.7 million from the National Forest Foundation for the cabins project.

After building the first seven cabins next summer, the agency plans to build 18 more over the coming summers. They don’t know where all 18 will go, but they plan to have at least one in every district – that’s eight districts in the Tongass and three districts in the Chugach.

The agency has an interactive map of the chosen cabin locations and some of the proposed ones.

Rachel Weston is the regional recreation planner for the Forest Service.

“The cabins that were selected for this first round were the furthest along in the planning process,” Weston said. “They were kind of the most ready for construction. The remaining cabin locations are still being ground truthed to determine if it’s viable to put a cabin in that spot. And the districts are still working through that.”

Districts with higher public demand might get more than one cabin, depending on the viability of the locations.

Forest Service cabins in Alaska rent for $35 – $75 a night.