We were so committed in this climb in a way that's not normal even for the Alaska Range. Part way up we had a bivouac that we got crushed and avalanched over the night. It was just spindrift, but it just completely crushed the tent—and that was the good part. It got a little worse after that. Later on we dropped a rope, after that, on the descent, I got hit in the head by a piece of ice, and we ended up leaving every single piece of gear and all but the last 30 feet of our rope to get off and traverse to the Kahiltna base and get a flight out.

In the main part of the Alaska Range, Isis was the first major new route I did. I remember Kenny and I skiing around the corner of the north face of Huntington, where we could finally see the face, and it was this Himalayan-scale face that neither one of us had ever stood underneath anything that large... this 8000-foot face. I went back again in '82 with Dave Stutsman and we climbed this 76-pitch face. It was my first real big route in the Alaska Range, and it predicated me having a lack of imagination and only going climbing in Alaska over the next 30 years.

The Cobra Pillar is this beautiful crack climb, which is a bit of an anomaly in Alaska. It's on the east face of Barille at the head of the Ruth Gorge. Jim Donini and I spied this on earlier trips into the Ruth, and the idea was just do a rock climb. I'm not known as a rock climber, but I actually figured out how to not only lead hard alpine cracks on this route, but I ended up placing one bolt in the middle of this 90 or 100 foot traverse pitch that linked up these two cracks and got one piece of gear in, which was the bolt. I like to think this redeemed me in the world of not being a good rock climber.

Went there in '78 the first time to just do an established route, and 17 years later Jack Roberts and I went back to Mount Kennedy to look at a face to the right of the north ridge that previously we hadn't had any real interest in because it didn't look possible. What had happened in the meantime, in that 17-year period, was mainly people's perspective of what was possible went through this huge transformation about mixed climbing and steep alpine climbing on this kind of 6000-foot face. One of the favorite parts of the route was this traverse that Jack led and this shot here showing Jack doing a combination of thin ice, rock, back and forth, and in 1996 this was sort of, you know, leading edge kind of alpine climb for this kind of sustained, steep mixed ice climbing.

The Elevator Shaft on the north face of Mount Johnson had a bit of a mystic within the climbing community in Alaska, and the first time I tired it we were unsuccessful. But I went back with Doug Chabot and we were able to get good conditions. This 2500-foot gash that runs up the north face of Johnson through monolithic rock provided this avenue to a later crux headwall of really bad rock but nonetheless we figured our way up it. And it turned out to be the second ascent of Mount Johnson and it's actually the only route in the Alaska Range that I've done that hasn't seen a second ascent.

Back in the early '90s I did some climbs on Mount Hunter with Doug Chabot and I looked across at this amazing face and saw what became known as the north face of Thunder. And it wasn't until 2009 that I went back with Jay Smith. We led in blocks and he pulled the heavy lifting on the crux pitches. We climbed for 67 hours total, tent-to-tent, slept a total of nine hours, and the descent was right at the top of the list of the worst possible snow conditions. We ran out of fuel, ran out of food, and the only thing that got us back to the tent was the bottle of tequila.