The First Snowmachine Ascent of Mount Wrangell
Photo by Martin Helkenn. A bird’s eye view of the Copper River Valley from the top of Mount Wrangell, 1996. The photo is currently hanging in the entryway of the Kenny Lake School. Thanks to Jamie Fletcher-Gilbert for assisting Allison Sayer with the photo of the photo.
Michelle McAfee - CRR Staff
On April 6th, 1996, Martin Helkenn made the first ascent up Mount Wrangell on a snowmachine. He put the gas to his Ski-Doo, picked up speed, and crossed a narrow area of softer snow beyond the glacial moraine onto the rugged snowpacked slope of Wrangell.
He rode up the hill for a bit, then stopped and waited for his friend Bill Sutton who skidded up beside him on another snowmachine and said, “You know, that crevasse broke out from underneath you back there.”
The first modern “mountain” snowmachine was made in 1994: The Ski-Doo Summit. It was the machine that inspired all others that came after, with a modest 108 horsepower engine, low handlebars, weighing in at 485 pounds riderless.
The snowmachine was equipped with the first altitude compensators, making it possible to ride in high altitudes without frequently adjusting the carburetor to keep it running smoothly in thin mountain air.
Helkenn and Sutton each had the idea to summit the 14,163-foot mountain volcano on snowmachines and decided to make the trip together. It took four trips to scout the route up the mountain.
Helkenn said, “The first trip I did was by myself in late January or early February. Looking at the maps, I thought Long Glacier looked like a good way up, but I didn’t know if I could get from the trail onto the glacier.”
The glacier grinds to a halt near the terminus, leaving ridges of rocky moraine before becoming a tributary running into the Kotsina River. “We accessed the glacier from the Kotsina Trail. I took my six-year-old son to scout it out that day, but we didn’t make it very far. He didn’t hold up too well.” said Helkenn.
Bill Sutton joined Helkenn on the second trip to see if they could find a way to get from the moraine onto the mountain. They drove the machines beside the glacier as far as possible, then had to cross the moraine to find a route onto the ice. Helkenn said, “It took some doing and was quite a bit of work because we couldn’t drive over the ridges. We had to drive up to them, then climb off and look over to see if it was passable and make sure there weren’t any sinkholes.”
There was enough snow to cover most of the rocks on the moraine, but they had to pick their way through. It was physically demanding with a lot of walking, checking the trail, backtracking, and getting off the snowmachine to scout. Helkenn said, “We’d get up on a ridge then have to drive the machine back down and turn it around to keep going. That’s pretty normal when you’re breaking trail. You have to spend a lot of time walking, checking out the terrain.”
They finally made it onto the ice, and the going got a little easier. Helkenn and Sutton made it to an area where they could get off the glacier and onto the slope of the mountain.
“As soon as we got off the ice, we had to climb a hill. I made it up on my machine, but Bill couldn’t make it. He was too tired at that point to go any further. So we turned around and went back home.”
A week later, Helkenn tried again with a group of guys. The weather wasn’t the greatest, but they made it across the ice onto the slope of Wrangell.
“It socked in on us, and we had to turn around at the 12,000 ft range. It only took us an hour to snowmachine up to that point,” said Helkenn.
The weather was bad for quite some time, and Helkenn gave up on making it to the summit that year. Then a nice stretch of clear, decent weather came in the first week of April. Bill Sutton talked Helkenn into it when he said, “The weather’s good. Let’s go for it!” Helkenn said, “Okay, let’s do that.”
They traveled light, wearing normal riding clothes with long johns underneath, and only packed the usual emergency gear, nothing else. They each carried five gallons of extra gasoline. “We definitely wanted a little extra gas,” Helkenn said. Somewhere along the moraine, they topped off and left the gas jugs so they wouldn’t have to bother with them on the climb. It was a slow process that pushed the snowmachines to the edge of their capabilities.
Once they made it onto the slope of the mountain, it was all glacial. The snow had some contour to it because of the way the wind blows on Mount Wrangell - frequently gusting over 100 mph. The wind and temperature fluctuations on the slope made the snow rock hard, and the skis on the snowmachines barely cut a track.
Helkenn said, “I led the way, always looking at the ground and the contours. Up around the 12,000 foot level there was a big ridge we were going to cross with ice that had fallen off on each side. It opened up a few hundred yards above us into a 10-foot wide crevasse. We had to follow the ridge back down until the crack was only about two and a half feet wide. I kept up some speed and drove across it, and it broke out underneath me.”
Helkenn parked the sled and crawled back down the trail to peer into the exposed crevasse. “I could see maybe 40 or 50 feet down, then it got so dark I couldn’t see any further. It wasn’t a place you’d want to fall into. If you were hiking or skiing up the mountain, you’d be in much more danger of falling in. The snowmachines spanned it pretty easily.”
They continued cruising up the hard pack glacial slope but felt the lack of oxygen at that altitude. Helkenn said, “I remember Bill hit a drift and knocked the machine off the trail at one point. It didn’t tip over, but it was leaning pretty good. He tried pulling it back down out of the drift. I was thirty feet beyond him when I realized he was in trouble. He was just sitting there on his snowmachine.”
Helkenn parked 10-12 feet above Sutton and walked down to help him heave the sled out of the drift. Once free from the snowbank, Sutton took off up the slope, and Helkenn started walking back uphill to his snowmachine but couldn’t do it. He had to sit down and rest. “It was only like twelve feet or something, but I couldn’t walk that far without resting. We couldn’t do a lot of physical exertion because the air was so thin we couldn’t get enough oxygen into our lungs.” They were at the 13,000 foot level at that point.
With both sleds back on the trail, the upper leg of the route was smooth. The snow up that high was ultra hard making the going easier with no crevasses to fall into. It was a warm, sunny, clear day on April 6, 1996 when Helkenn made the very first ascent on a snowmachine to the summit of Mount Wrangell, followed by Bill Sutton.
“The view was awesome! I took pictures of it. A panorama is hanging in the entryway of the Kenny Lake school. We could see the Copper River Valley, Kenny Lake, and the surrounding mountains. It was a beautiful day. We were looking down on Mount Drum, and it seemed pretty small, which is funny,” said Helkenn.
Helkenn and Sutton parked on top of the 14,163-foot peak and saw the hillside steaming. There was snow up there, but also bare spots. Helkenn said, “I pushed my hand into the dirt about six inches deep and could feel the warmth in the ground. It was a pretty cool experience. I put some dirt in a ziplock bag and brought it home to my wife. She put it in a container and kept it on a shelf. It looked like hamburger. We probably still have it.”
They drove over to the main volcano crater that steams all the time, and Helkenn said, “I could hear a sound, like boiling water down there below all that steam coming out. We didn’t go too far down into the crater because we didn’t know what kind of vapors were coming out of that volcano. We spent an hour up there and drove by the old University of Alaska site. They still had a bunch of junk up there then.”
When Helkenn made it home, he nursed a terrible headache he attributed to altitude sickness and took some Excedrin. Altogether, it took twelve hours from the time they left until they returned home. “That was the only time I made it to the summit. I always thought I would go back, but I never got up there again,” Helkenn said.
“It definitely takes some planning. You have to put in the work to get up on top. I guess that’s how it is anyway, no matter how you climb a mountain. It takes some planning and work to do it.”