Army Mountaineering in Alaska, 1981

In 1981 I attended a course at the Northern Warfare Training Center in Fort Greely, Alaska as part of my work as a cadre member of the 1st Ranger Battalion's mountaineering team. The Junior Leader Orientation Course - Summer was designed as a 3-week overview of skills required to get around in the mountains of the north in the summertime.

My fellow Rangers and I arrived in Fairbanks, Alaska after a 14-hour odyssey by air from Savannah, Georgia across 9 time zones. We arrived at 11 PM, thoroughly disoriented from consuming all of the beer and wine on the plane we could get from the very accomodating stewardesses, and also from the fact that the sun was shining brightly in the middle of the night.

Dozing on the bus on the way to Ft. Greely, we were awakened by a loud crash - the result of our bus hitting a 400-pound cow moose that was standing in the middle of the road. Within what seemed like minutes, a half-dozen locals had appeared out of nowhere and were negotiating over how they were going to divide up the meat. Welcome to Alaska.

The first week was spent on rock climbing, knots, rappels and suspension traverses on the lower mountaineering area on Ft. Greely. For most of us this was all review, but any chance to play with ropes and climb rocks was a welcome change for us, and we did learn some new techniques. At the end of the week we climbed Gunnysack Mountain, a 7000 foot peak near the base, skipping across talus fields and laying in fixed ropes for the practice.

Week two was Riverine Operations, and we traveled around in 20-foot boats powered by 25 HP Evinrude engines. One of the unique features of this rig was the "jackass handle," a steel bar that you could push down to the deck to raise the motor up over deadfall that was prevalent throughout the area. It was called a jackass handle because if you were holding on to it and didn't see a piece of deadfall, the motor would ride up over it and handle would pull you to the deck - making you look like a jackass. The weather was perfect and we caught a lot of fish, which were consumed after cooking over fires on the banks during our rest stops.

Week three was ice climbing and glacier movement, an area which I had no experience in. We learned to cut steps, put in ice pitons and other anchors, roped-up movement along glaciers, and my personal favorite - crevasse rescue. All of this was performed with ropes and gear that the Army hadn't updated since World War II, and we wore wool and leather as the Army hadn't gotten to Gore-Tex yet either.

The course instructors were all members of the Army's high Altitude Mountaineering Team, and they all were very experienced climbers who had been all over the world. We were lucky to have them and they were a wealth of knowledge. It was the first of many military mountaineering courses I was to attend in my career and a welcome break from the brutal pace we were used to as soldiers in a Ranger battalion.