No pay, no prospects, not much pleasure
– H.W. Tilman, from an ad placed in the Times, encouraging climbers to join him on long sailboat journeys to far-off peaks.
My friend and climbing partner The Desert Mountaineer wrote an article a while back that touched on the topic of isolation. The DM, as you probably know is also a peak bagger extraordinaire. And one thing that those guys are renowned experts at is the topic of prominence. The concepts of isolation and prominence each hold very specific meanings in the world of mountains and to those who climb them.
Prominence is simply the distance from a mountain peaks summit to the lowest contour circling it and no other summit. Typically only peaks with a certain degree of prominence are considered as separate and independent mountains. This amount of prominence however is not universally adopted; and different countries and different regions often have their own specific definitions. Prominence is also used with the term cut-off to list what is and isn’t considered a peak in a given range. In some parts of the world such as Great Britain the cut-off is 150 metres. Although one list there actually uses 15 metres.
In the lower 48 of the United States there is a list of peaks that are over 4,268 metres. The so called ‘fourteeners’. For this list the cut-off is 91 metres. While certainly very subjective, the term of ‘Major Summit’ is often associated with a prominence of 610 metres. And there is amother term in common usage called ultra-prominence. This is a peak that has 1,500 metres of prominence.
Closely related to prominence is what is called isolation, or more correctly topographic isolation. This refers to the minimum great circle distance to the nearest peak of higher elevation.
As you can imagine there are lists galore of peaks with the most amount of prominence, isolation and so forth, but I won’t bore you with the details of recounting those here. There is one particular peak I would like to cover though, and that is Mt Keele. Raise your hand if you have heard of it. Mt Keele for any of you that don’t know is located at 63.4311N/130.3236W in the Yukon Territory. It is fairly close to the border of the Northwest Territories. It has 2,161 metres of prominence and 543 kilometres of isolation. Every so often I get a mountain caught up in my imagination, and the current one is Keele.
105-O/8
Not only does Keele have this ultra-prominence and topographic isolation (which ranks it as twenty-eighth and tenth in Canada respectively) it also is hellishly remote. So approach from a mountaineering perspective becomes a major challenge in logistics. The nearest road is the somewhat legendary Canol road which happens to have an unmaintained airstrip near its end at McMillan pass. I have no idea what condition this gravel strip is in. Even if you could fly into this, or possibly drive there, road conditions permitting, you would still be over 25 hard kilometres to Mt. Keele proper. By hard I mean extreme bushwhacking, significant elevation gain and loss, river crossings, grizzly bears, black bears, voracious blackflies, horseflies, deerflies, and endless mosquitoes. It would more than likely take at least two cuss-word filled days to reach the peak from the road. You would be totally knackered and shagged out by the time you got close to the peak. You would have certainly earned the satisfaction you would undoubtedly feel.
Another option would be flying into Keele Lake on the north side via floatplane. This would deposit you to within 5 kilometres of the summit. This can be done by flying out of the town of Mayo. It will set you back a cool six and a half G’s for a drop-off and pick-up at the lake in a Beaver. Getting to Mayo is a challenge in its’ own right, being about 400 kilometres north of Whitehorse. Norman Wells on the banks of the Mackenzie River in the Northwest Territories would also be a possible base of operations for an air approach.
An entry from the American Alpine Journal 1968:
Keele Peak, Hess Momtains. (Sic)This mountain is located on the Yukon-
North West Territories border. George Denton and I ascended Keele by
a rib in its west face on July 2.
– Monty Alford
I could find very limited information on any of the actual climbing of Keele. It is highly likely that because of its inaccessibility that it has seen only a very small handful of ascents. I could only find reference to two. The few pictures I’ve seen of it show it as a very attractive sharp peak that is guarded by a decent amount of ice fields on all sides. It is the high point of the Mackenzie Mountains at just about 2,900 metres in elevation.
The contours on the north and north east faces appear to be pretty tightly packed; whereas the southern aspects are gentler. There appear to be four or five major ridges and several ribs leading to the summit. With Keele Lake being at 1,100 metres there would be 1,800 metres of elevation gain to make the summit; not an inconsiderable amount. I was also at time of writing this unable to ascertain any intelligence about the type or quality of rock. The area however is only about 200 klicks north of the Cirque of the Unclimbable’s which has some pretty damn good rock. What are the chances?
I don’t know for sure but I speculate that it may still be waiting its first winter ascent. That would be something. The trade-off from summer would be interesting. Bugs, bears, and bridges would be no issue. You can approach by ski-plane from Mayo and land on Keele Lake. This will also cost you the same aforementioned six and a half grand. You would for sure need snowshoes or probably better yet good mountaineering skis. But the really big deal would be the cold. I’ll wager in the dead of winter -40C is common and could drop lower than that on occasion. You would be at the mercy of the weather for any flight back out so planning would be critical. It’s totally conceivable that you could approach in winter by snowmobile or dog team, but both of those require even more specialised skills and equipment and equally precise planning.
Now, if you wanted to be 100% bad-ass and prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that you are a double-hard bastard, you could do a completely unsupported ski approach. If coming from Ross River which is probably the closet you can drive to in the winter you would be looking at 209 kilometre ski into McMillan pass and then another 25 to the peak. One way… you still need to ski back out. If coming from the east the closest you could get would be Norman Wells at 363 kilometres!
So… again, a show of hands. Who wants to plan a trip to Mt. Keele with me?
Well you could see it in his eyes as they strained against the night,
And the bone-white-knuckled grip upon the road,
Sixty-five miles into town, and a winter’s thirst to drown,
A winter still with two months left to go.
His eyes are too far open, his grin too hard and sore,
His shoulders too far high to bring relief,
But the Kopper King is hot, even if the band is not,
And it sure beats shooting whiskey-jacks and trees.
Then he laughs and says “It didn’t get me this time, not tonight,
I wasn’t screaming when I hit the door.”
But his hands on the tabletop, will their shaking never stop,
Those hands sweep the bottles to the floor.
Now he’s a bear in a blood-red mackinaw with hungry dogs at bay,
And springtime thunder in his sudden roar,
With one wrong word he burns, and the table’s overturned,
When he’s finished there’s a dead man on the floor.
Well they watched for him in Carmacks, Haines, and Carcross,
With Teslin blocked there’s nowhere else to go,
But he hit the four-wheel-drive in Johnson’s Crossing,
Now he’s thirty-eight miles up the CANOL road.
He’s thirty-eight miles up the CANOL road,
In the Salmon Range at forty-eight below…
Well it’s God’s own neon green above the mountains here tonight,
Throwing brittle coloured shadows on the snow,
It’s four more hours til dawn, and the gas is almost gone,
And that bitter Yukon wind begins to blow.
Now you can see it in his eyes as they glitter in the light
And the bone-white rime of frost around his brow,
Too late the dawn has come, that Yukon winter has won,
And he’s got his cure for cabin fever now.
Well they watched for him in Carmacks, Haines, and Carcross,
With Teslin blocked there’s nowhere else to go,
But they hit the four-wheel-drive in Johnson’s Crossing,
Found him thirty-eight miles up the CANOL road.
They found him thirty-eight miles up the CANOL road,
In the Salmon Range at forty-eight below,
They found him thirty-eight miles up the CANOL road…
– Stan Rogers