Survey 44 · Winter

Six weeks on the Kenai ridgeline, mapped by hand

Altitude North sends two cartographers into the field each January. They carry a plane table, a laser rangefinder, and roughly eleven kilograms of paper. Everything you read here was drawn before it was typed.

The approach begins at the Sterling turnoff, where the road stops pretending to be maintained. From there it is fourteen kilometres of braided riverbed to the first cache. We move at night because the crust holds; by noon the snowpack turns to sugar and a fully loaded sled sinks to the frame.

What follows is the working dossier for Survey 44 — the reduced field notes, the instrument log, and the six plates that came out of it. The plate stays fixed on the left. The record scrolls on the right. They are two documents that happen to share a viewport.

• Party size2
• Days in field41
• Plates completed6
• Total ascent18,430 m

Relief drawing

Cirque of Nine Falls

The cirque is a bowl roughly two kilometres across, closed on three sides by walls that run between four and six hundred metres. In summer the meltwater exits through nine distinct chutes. In February there are two, and both are frozen blue-black and audible from the floor.

We drew the headwall in three sittings across four days, working from a fixed station on the moraine so the shading would stay consistent. Hachure density on the final plate encodes slope angle, not shadow — a convention we have kept since Survey 12 and will keep arguing about.

A contour is a decision, not a measurement. Somebody chose where the line goes, and that somebody should sign their work.

Station log

Method

Instrument discipline

Cold makes liars of instruments. The rangefinder drifts about 0.4 % per ten degrees below freezing; the aneroid barometer lags a storm front by nearly forty minutes. We correct for both, and we write the uncorrected number down first so that a future reader can disagree with us.

1. Take the raw reading and record it verbatim, including any suspicion about it.
2. Note instrument temperature from the strap thermometer, never from ambient.
3. Apply the correction table on the inside cover — never from memory, never in the tent at night.
4. Re-shoot any bearing that disagrees with the previous station by more than two degrees.
5. Ink the plate the same evening. Pencil under a headlamp becomes fiction within a week.

Observed data

The snowpack column

Every third day we cut a pit to the ground and profile it. The plate on the left is a literal transcription: bar height is layer depth, and the break at the base is the depth hoar that has been quietly ruining the season since November.

• Total depth, mean214 cm
• Depth hoar layer31 cm
• Weak-layer depth168 cm
• Compression testCT12 SC
• Pits cut this survey14

None of this is a forecast. It is a description of one column of snow at one moment, which is all any pit has ever been. We publish it because descriptions age better than predictions.

Route plate

Route of the traverse

Three waypoints, forty-one hours, one unplanned bivouac at the col. The dashed line on Plate 05 is the line we walked, not the line we intended — a distinction that we mark on every route plate and that our subscribers tell us is the most useful thing we do.

Waypoints

Closing

Return, and the ledger

We came out on the twenty-eighth, four days later than filed, into a thaw that took the road surface with it. The plates travelled in a flat aluminium case that has now survived nine surveys and one river crossing it should not have survived.

Altitude North publishes twice a year. Each edition is six hand-drawn plates, letterpress-printed in two colours, with the working dossier bound separately. Nothing is available digitally except the page you are reading, which exists mostly so that people can see what the plates look like before committing to a shelf.

• Edition size400
• PressTwo-colour, Vandercook
• PaperSomerset 300 gsm
• ShipsSeptember

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End of dossier · Survey 44 · Altitude North