The Tordrillo Traverse

2:30am (day-of)... Wheels down at Anchorage International.
6:30am ... Alarm blares. Brutality. How is all of this crap supposed to fit in a backpack?
11:00am ... Arrive Lake HooD. Game Time. Load up the Bushplane.
12:30pm ... The first pontoon touches down on Frustration Lake. WE're GO FOR TORDRILLO.

45second teaser video by Bikis Productions. More to come!

The Tordrillo Mountains have long been this nebulous dreamland of ice looming large in the distance, readily visible from the streets of Anchorage, but seemingly worlds away. You can always look, but never touch. By comparison, the Tordrillos are actually just a fraction of the height of the great peaks of the Alaska Range, the Wrangells, and the Chugach, but their prominence, proximity, and raw inaccessibility has fueled nothing but intrigue in me for many years.

Drawing Lines on a Map

Years ago I found myself daydreaming, as I often do, and reviewing maps and imagery of Alaska and trolling for an adventure. Coming off some successes in the Wrangells and the Brooks ranges, I thought I’d try my hand at a new area. The Tordrillos had previously caught my eye on a nice day from Kincaid Park in Anchorage. I was looking for some relatively straightforward valley glaciers, ideally snow free in late summer, to link some lines ideally with a packraft component. It’s easy to draw lines on a map. It’s a lot harder to make those lines become reality.

Here’s what I drew that day:

Think it actually goes?

After copious review the potential route above, using every trick in the book I could think of (topographical data, satellite imagery, shaded relief, slope angle data, multiple years of Sentinel Satellite imagery, elevation profiling of the Trimble and Hayes rivers, Google Earth & Fatmap renders) I was pretty confident of the following:

A landing at Beluga Lake would be straightforward on floats
The Lower Triumvirate and most of the Trimble glaciers were pretty cracked up, but likely navigable with some effort.
The high point, ~4500′, was almost certainly going to have some degree of snow in mid-august. So….bring rope and crevasse gear.
The Trimble River, excluding the top 2 miles, loses 13.5ft/mile in elevation, looked pretty friendly compared to other glacial rivers I’d paddled in past years, and likely represented braided Class 2.

Who goes out there?

The internet doesn’t reveal much about the Tordrillos, although it was readily evident that some very wealthy people pay great sums of money to the Tordrillo Mountain Lodge to be flown around in a helicopter in this seemingly private playground. Interesting, but does anyone actually tromp around out there?

Joe Stock (2008), and later Luc Mehl (2014) had completed long winter style ski traverses of the area, even including the Triumvirate Glacier that we would later ascend. Outside of that, there wasn’t much to find… besides maybe an old book about historical mountaineering trips. I think folks go out there to peak bag some of the volcanoes too??

To my knowledge, packrafts have been employed in a pretty limited manner out there. Luc Mehls “IRS Traverse” had escaped the Tordrillos by way of Beluga Lake on packrafts and out to the inlet. North of the range, people semi-regularly fly into to paddle the Happy River, draining to the Skwentna Watershed. What about the Trimble or Hayes River??? Crickets…

As a side note: The TML website featured a number of images that I painstakingly georeferenced using Fatmap and Google Earth to discern their locations where they taken. For that I am grateful because those pictures represented some of the only tangible, boots-on-the-ground, information that I found about the area.

Roadblock…

August in SouthCentral Alaska is a wild card. It’s known for rain which the last place on earth I want to be during a week straight of downpour is up on the icefields. Nonetheless, I reached out to a couple air taxis when it seemed like this trip might pencil out for 2023. I quickly heard back but hit a not insignificant hurdle: I needed a permit. A PERMIT?!?!? HUH? IN ALASKA?!?!?Apparently the land between the Beluga Lake and the Triumvirate Glacier (~ 1 mile of alluvial, post glacial, stream) is not Federal or State land, but rather owned by Cook Inlet Region Inc (CIRI). i.e. tribal land. I promptly applied to CIRI for a recreation permit, however, in the end wouldn’t hear back for nearly a month, (a week after getting back from the trip). Back to the drawing board…

Frustration Lake

After two weeks I hadn’t heard back on the CIRI permit application. Radio silence.

No CIRI permit = no air taxi. No air taxi = no trip.

I’m not entirely sure when the moment the idea struck me, but a pair of lakes on the flanks of the Triumvirate glacier caught my eye: Strandline Lake and Frustration Lake. These are curious anomalies in that it’s rare that a lake on a lateral moraine of a large valley glacier so far advanced from the terminus. Iceberg Lake out near the Tana Glacier in Wrangell-St. Elias NP is a fine example of where a perpendicular valley T-Bone’s a glacier and it’s run-off begins to build up into a lake. From time to time, ice deep in the glacier will fracture and suddenly allow Iceberg Lake to drain down to it’s lakebed leaving previously bobbing icebergs stranded on sand. Strandline Lake appeared to be a similar story and after reviewing updated satellite imagery, it was evident that Strandline was currently without water. I would later find out that planes have landed on the dry lake bed of Strandline Lake. In any case, Frustration Lake, was full of water. It is about 1.2 miles long and 2000ft wide. This seemed within capability of a DHC-2 Beaver on floats??? Icebergs calve off the sides of the passing Triumvirate Glacier and in past years have entirely choked the lake, but interestingly, this year the ice was relatively scant. After some imagery review, the ice appears to blow from side to side with whatever direction the wind seems to be traveling and clear part of the lake for landing. Eureka?

Two days before the prospective trip, I emailed a few more air taxis about this hairbrained new plan: Frustration Lake. Two of the three air operators didn’t even bother returning my email but the guys at Trail Ridge Air came to the rescue! As careful pilots are, they made no promises but offered to go out and take a closer look and, at pilot’s discretion, make an attempt. As we later discovered, our pilot had seen Frustration from the air on previously occasions and wondered about it. Days before I emailed him, he had been specifically discussing Frustration Lake with a friend. Here’s his chance, and ours!

A Smash and Grab Operation…

August is a notoriously rainy season in Alaska and 2023 had been, thus far, an uncharacteristically rainy summer. I was a bit hesitant to plan anything during a month that could make for a pretty wet experience. It rained for nearly 2 weeks straight immediately preceding our arrival. I drug my feet as long as I could before booking an air taxi, weighing the benefit of getting an accurate forecast versus the possibility of loosing vacancy on an air taxi’s schedule.

2 days out to the projected start of the trip all the stars aligned: Weather window, Air Taxi vacancy, landing location, conditions. The clouds parted and there it was: The Tordrillo Traverse. It was going to be a smash and grab operation.

Uncharacteristic good weather moved into the area for essentially the exact dates of the proposed trip. I’ve never traveled to Alaska for a traverse with just a optimistic forecast.

Game Time…

An unfortunately late night flight to Anchorage landed us at Ted Stevens International at 2:30am, day-of. By 11am that same day, our bags were being loaded on the DHC-2 pictured below. Evidence of the extraordinary rainfall Anchorage had been recieving was everywhere. Every lawn was the greenest green. Anchorage streams were at flood stage. Lake Hood was bursting it’s banks and migrating up into nearby parking lots. But here we were… with the sunniest sunny day and the calmest of calm air, ready to rock: Smash and Grab.

After once again discussing with the Air Service, we were all under the agreement that a landing at Frustration Lake was far from guaranteed. Pilot’s discretion would dictate whether the trip was moving forward or not.

We took off from Lake Hood at around noon that morning, crossed the inlet and quickly the Triumvirate Glacier began to dominate our field of view. We flew over Beluga Lake, the walking to the terminus of the Triumvirate looking more straightforward than I had anticipated it. Owing to an ignored CIRI permit application, here we were flying right over the top of a whole lot of difficult terrain. Frustration Lake quickly came into view. There was a mirror finish on the lake that morning without a lick of wind. Robert and I immediately drew opposite conclusions on how the day would proceed: he estimated a 0% chance of landing. The pilot circled the lake twice, descending a bit with each pass. Many more smaller icebergs, just a couple feet across, that were too small to show up on the Sentinel Satellite imagery dotted the lake, any of which could cause utter catastrophe. Radio silence. Our Pilot’s eyes were glued on the lake as he was clearly evaluating optimal landing vectors through the icebergs. On the third pass it was pretty clear this was happening. The mirrored finish on the lake, made it hard to discern where the water actually started and the sky ended. The pilot came in low, right over the top of considerable iceberg, and the first float touched the lake just beyond it. Discussing the landing later, he explained that with the deception of a mirrored lake, the only usable reference features were the icebergs themselves, for which he intentionally got close while still in the air.

Landing this far advanced on the glacier, skipping the light bushwacking of the outflow river, the ugly moraine travel at the terminus, and about 10 miles of hard walking through some considerable crevass country. This was 100% cheating.

Out on the Ice

The Triumvirate Glacier was rather unlike many other valley glaciers that I’ve been on in Alaska. It’s Southern tributary, represent around 2/3rds the width of the lower glacier, was conveyoring a considerable amount of rocky debris down towards the lake almost to the degree that it was a un-ending moraine field (i.e. super UGLY travel). The Northern 1/3rd of the mid- Triumvirate, the “white side” of the glacier, looked far friendly and hence we gravitated towards it. This was fairly consistent with the pictures that I had gleaned from the Tordrillo Mountain Lodge. Interestingly, they’ve installed a via ferrata for their particularly well off clients in a particularly climby-looking area of ?granite? alongside the southern aspect of the glacier.

We jumped numerous crevasses on the clean ice side of the Triumvirate as we ascended. The glacier featured numerous “ant hills” that looked like piles of finely pulverized rock but were in actuality a thin layer of black dust on top of a cone of solid ice. Presumably the rock was insulating the ice and hence modulating its rate of melt compared to the ice around it??? We speculated about the origins of these ant hills for the next several days as they increased in frequency until on the upper reaches of the Northern Branch the glacier was nearly 100% ant hills.

The Rio

One of the big unknowns of this trip was the packraft leg. The plan was to tromp for 4 days across the icefields to arrive at this very remote river in the middle of nowhere that potentially hasnt been paddled before. What happens if it’s not feasible to paddle it? I couldn’t find ANY information or pictures specifically of the Trimble River other than satellite imagery. The problem with satellite imagery is you dont really know what time of year it was captured. What I knew was this:

Excluding the top 2 miles of the Trimble River, the river gradient was a loss of 13.5 miles per mile. That’s pretty friendly! I was betting on braided class 2, if that.
The top 2 miles were around 50-60ft of elevation loss per mile. That seems like a lot, but it’s actually consistent with some of the other rivers we’ve paddled in Alaska. I could see whitewater on the satellite imagery in this upper section. I was betting class 3 whitewater.
I knew the the satellite imagery suggested that beyond 2 miles on the river, there likely was only wave trains (no whitewater). Cant be certain….

After a very long day on the ice that involved some poor decision making and even poorer route finding (excluding accidentally finding a sweet glacial cave), we arrived at the terminus of the Trimble Glacier….or at least the top of the cliff that it ends at. Everyone was cold, tired. It was nearly 7PM. The idea of camping on the ice again was not particularly palatable but we were struggling to 1) want to continue and 2) see a suitable place to camp down by the river. The team voted split 2 vs 2 as to whether to camp again on the ice or attempt to dismount the glacier so late in the evening which could end in hours more of brutal moraine travel. A “wilderness coin toss” broke the tie and we picked our way down the moraine to the river for camp and it went far smoother than anticipated. The glacier actually continued in earnest to our left for another mile at least, but it petered out on the right side allowing us to escape the ice early. It was relatively evident the initial phase of the river, directly from the mouth of the glacier (see below), was very consequential class 4 whitewater. NOT SAFE. The next morning we walked another half a mile or so to find the river gradient moderating, likely class III whitewater (but still very consequential), and unfortunately obstacle after obstacle preventing further (easy) foot travel. In 2017, coming off the Nizina Glacier in Wrangell-St. Elias NP, we got lazy after struggling with terminal glacier travel. We decided to blow the packrafts up a bit prematurely. That ultimately resulted in a pretty ugly swim and a packraft pinned against an iceberg.