Jake Fojtik

In 2018, I travelled to Kamchatka with a ragtag team of skiers and snowboarders to try to climb and ski some of the largest volcanoes on the planet. As a part of the team, I was responsible for images, medical care coordination, and as a former ski racer - skiing really, really fast. My words and images will never be enough to describe the full expedition experience, but I've here tried anyways. 

Ganaly / Bakening - discovery days

Our first steps into Bakening and the surrounding zones. 

It started on the side of a dirt road, 30 - 40 hours after Andrey and I touched down in Petropavlovsk. We met up with the crew, our fixer, bought food, fuel, and alcohol for our time in the tent. Then we went out, first to Harat's, an Irish Pub, then a dance club called Max Dance. After a few hours, we got kicked out of Max Dance. Then back to our AirBnb, by cab, with drunk Russians we met at the bar in tow. We stayed up for hours, drunkenly shout-talking until 3am in the apartment. Andrey was the only one who could make real conversation with the Russians that followed us back to our apartment. The next day, between hangovers and jetlag, we bought more food, and went to the dirt road. 

The crew:

We met our fixers, with sleds, on the side of the dirt road. They towed us in, up the river valley towards Bakening, 2,278m of black volcanic rock and white powder snow, the jewel, and most prominent peak, of the valley. We set up camp a few kilometers from its base. 

The first days were easy - digging pits on different aspects, exploring new zones. We poked and prodded layers, looking for weaknesses in the snowpack. We watched weather, the clouds, sun and aspects, and how they related. We found cold, soft, winter snow on north-facing aspects, corn-cycle snow on low-elevation, south-facing slopes, and residual windslab anywhere exposed to the elements. 

On the second day, we went for Bakening. We skinned and booted for hours, approaching from the south, and climbing a wind-scoured rib above a gully of wind-buffed pow. After getting hammered by the wind for hours,we turned around some 2,000 vertical feet above the valley floor, less than halfway to the top. The gully beneath offered us a nice consolation prize, low angle soft stable snow for what had to be a mile plus of continuous skiing. 

Andrey, Luke, Tom, and I tried for Bakening again. This time, we approached from the north, gaining a pass separating our valley from the next one over. On the far side of the pass, we could see another world of possibility – dozens, if not hundreds of uninterrupted, 5,000 vertical-foot-plus faces and couloirs. We could spend weeks in our valley alone, and not ski everything. This new area expanded our potential by several orders of magnitude. This range, I think, requires years to fully explore, as every peak or high point we reached only opened our eyes to how little we could see & ski from our current camp. 

The wind swelled to meet our ascent. From the pass we booted up the mountain from the north, again following a rocky, windswept rib perched above a snow-filled gully. These gullies began as lava flows from Bakening’s peak; they now trapped and sheltered errant and windblown snow.  The rib dissipated into a hard blank white face. I remember driving my front points into the board, only to find millimeters of purchase under the aluminum points. The wind ripped across the face, glazing and solidifying the surface, while we fought for purchase. We traversed towards the gully, and found easier climbing in softer snow.

A few hundred feet further, we found relief from the blistering wind beneath a cliff band. Under the rocks, we talked; Andrey and Luke wanted to keep going, Tom and I wanted to stop. It was 4pm, and we had spent the last several hours beaten by the wind, inching up the volcano. We compromised: Andrey and Luke would continue for 30 more minutes. Tom and I would wait under the cliff.

Andrey and Luke climbed. Tom and I watched for a few minutes, while we could still see them. They soon disappeared, and Tom and I waited in silence– the wind devoured any words we tried to exchange. 25 minutes passed, I put on my skis. 35 minutes passed. Andrey came first, a hooded figure through the smoke, skis slicing through amorphous sistrugi blobs, trailed by a plume of white. Luke was next, surfing, carving, arcing clean toe-side turns, ice axe in hand. We met, high-fived, and dropped in the 35-40 degree slope, leapfrogging each other to the base of the volcano. The snow was soft, slightly consolidated wind-swept powder, a few inches deep, with a delicate wind board on top – enough to give the surface texture, but not grab a tip or jar any turns. We skied for nearly 5,000 vertical feet. 

Ganaly / Bakening - grey days

Storms rolled in, and grey clouds swallowed our nearby peaks. Wind, snow, and visibility kept us from the high alpine. Hot laps on the hills, valley, chutes, trees, and cliffs near camp held our attention while we waited for the weather to settle. 

One of the smaller ridges near camp featured wind lips, chutes, and spines. Herder and Luke threw backflips off the wind lips and tree stumps, while Tom negotiated some difficult snow on the technical spine lines. I found a steep chute with soft snow, and skied it with speed. Andrey sought out the ‘freeride’ lines – looking for cliffs and wind lips to incorporate into his skiing. 

Ganaly & Bakening - Glory Days

Once the storms broke, we found soft, stable snow in the high alpine. 

As we exhausted our local playground of hills and features, the storms broke, and we set out, ravenous for high alpine lines. Our first was the “Vertebrate,” two parallel prominent couloirs on either side of a chain of rock outcroppings and cliffs, resembling a spinal column.  Andrey, Luke, and I climbed to the top, and found blasting winds on the ridge. The descent offered variable snow, and delicate skiing, with a mix of bulletproof wind board near the top of the line, with more forgiving snow further towards the base. Andrey setoff a small wind slab during his descent. 

After the Vertebrate, we met with Elliot, Herder, Layman, and Tom. Herder and Elliot explored an alpine area dubbed “Patagonia,” due to the prominent and bizarre rock pillars that pocked its face and flanks. All seven of us skinned up towards the “Honey Hole,” and found cold, soft, stable, wind-protected snow, late in the day. From the top, another view into another valley showed again, how much more there was to ski. Over 12 days, we thoroughly explored our own valley, but still left lines undescended. One valley over in any direction held dozens of peaks and scores of lines; we’d only scratched the surface. I ripped giant-slalom style turns down the open faces and forgiving snow.

The following day, Andrey, Layman, and I set out for an area called “Mini AK”, named for its committing lines protected by massive cornices and cliffs. We warmed up on smaller couloir, then worked our way up to Mini-AK. Elliot joined our party on the ascent. He and Layman tagged a beautiful north-facing line in pristine snow. Andrey and I took another option with a small cliff band to air off. We all met in the valley, and skinned up to the Honey Hole for another serving of late-afternoon pow.

That evening, Andrey and I skinned up for a sunset lap on a south facing slope just outside camp. The south-facing, low-elevation slopes were in a melt-freeze cycle. We caught the snow as it re-froze, giving us some of the worst snow conditions of the entire trip. Despite the snow, this was one of my favorite runs of the trip. It capped off an incredible day of skiing in an incredible location with some incredible people. The last rays of light caught the ice-spray off Andrey’s skis, illuminating the snow pellets neon-orange against the cool-blue refrozen ground. Bakening, bathed in pink alpenglow, stood defiant against the growing shadows of the valley below.

Ganaly & Bakening - Departure days

During our last days in the Bakening River Valley, Andrey, Layman, and I tried our luck on a massive, committing couloir close to our camp – only to be turned around before the peak due to wind. Herder set up a tree-jib in camp, and we watched and took photos his jibbing. Tom sent and stuck a massive drop in variable snow outside camp. We were towed out, and left on the side of the same dirt road. Ivan, our fixer for the second part of our trip, would pick us up. 

We waited for hours. Ivan didn’t pick us up. 

His girlfriend arrived, and waited on the side of the road with us. Hours had passed since Alexei, our fixer for the initial part of the trip, took his sleds and left us on the roadside. A Russian passerby stopped, and showed us pictures on his phone – Ivan’s truck lost a wheel, and couldn’t contact anyone by phone. Herder, Luke, and I loaded up in Ivan's girlfriend's car, and set out to find Ivan and his wheel, some 50 kilometers south. 

We found Ivan, and his wheel. We watched, with equal parts disbelief and skepticism, as Ivan gave a handful of rubles to a construction worker doing road work to weld his wheel back together. The repairs held, and we drove north for the rest of the boyz who had been on the side of the road for several hours now. 

Esso

Ivan informed us weather shut down access to Klyuchevskaya, our next volcano objective for the next few days. We diverted to Esso, where we found skiing and hot springs. At our hostel, we drank and danced to loud music with Russian locals and visitors. The first night, one of them yelled at Luke, and approached him brandishing a fork. His friends took the fork away, and sat him down for the night. We skied the next day – teeing off mini-golf style lines, white rivulets etched between cliff bands in the Esso backcountry. Ivan showed us one of the huts he’d help build in the area, told us about the terrain, and what options we had if Klyuchevskaya shut us out. After, I drank deep from a tall, cold Tuborg in a warm hot spring. 

Klyuchevskaya Sopka

After a few days, Klyuchevskaya cleared. We left Esso for Klyuchi, our launch pad to the volcano. In Klyuchi, Ivan brought us salmon roe and smoked salmon, caught and cooked by his father-in-law. 

Klyuchevskaya towers at 15,000 feet. It rises the entirety of its 15,000 foot prominence at a near-perfect 40 to 45-degree slope floor to summit. It is not a part of a larger range, group, or massif. It has no counterpart, no contemporary, no peers, no equals. It is isolated, with no other mountain, range or massif nearby to compete or provide a launch point. 

Local reindeer hunters – acquaintances of Ivan – towed us into a research hut at the base of Klyuchevskaya. Heavy weight, variable snow, difficult terrain and route finding slowed our tow-in. We found the cement bunker derelict, and filled floor-to-ceiling with snow. As the sled drivers shuttled our gear, we excavated our shelter. We filled out the hut completely,and had to sleep staggered head-to-toe. Even still, in our -20 and -40 degree bags, the cold bit at our noses and toes during the night. 

At the hut, black bits of pulverized rock and volcanic dust lingered in our snowmelt drinking water. Our stoves, sick from burning unleaded gasoline rather than clean white gas, sputtered, spat, and leaked at random. Unleaded fumes from cooking permeated into walls, sleeping bags, clothes, and lungs. Ash leaked from the volcano, everyday coating a new part of the mountain in a thin, grey layer. We watched wind rip clean white snow from the mountain’s upper third as we approached on the sleds.

On the first day, we checked crevasse rescue systems, and scouted potential routes through the glaciers, to the summit. Already, my throat was raw, and I had trouble breathing as I struggled to keep up with Andrey and Luke on the skin track. Later that day, I felt shaky and feverish. The crew found a potential route through the glacier, and spent the night planning for a summit bid, depending on weather the following day. By nightfall, I knew I wouldn’t be apart of the summit attempt. 

The next morning, the weather looked good, and six boyz set out for the summit. Too sick to leave my bag, I stayed in the hut. After a few hours, I made it outside the hut and vomited my Mountain House meal onto the white snow. With the furthest zoom my camera, I could see the crew creeping up the volcano. Under a bluebird sky with no wind, this was the warmest weather we’d had on the volcano so far. I sat on a rock in the sun, wrapped in every layer I owned and shivered. Not long after, I couldn’t tell the boys from the rocks through the camera. 

Layman came back first – his toes turned blue on the ascent, and he descended. Then, a few hours later, the rest. They climbed hard and far, and turned around shy of the summit. With no major topographic, geologic, or geographic features, no one was sure how high they climbed. At a certain point, cold, conditions (at a certain elevation, the snow turned to ice and rock, ripped off by the wind), or something else (Herder’s insulin froze and he snapped a needle trying to inject himself) forced a turnaround. They told me about the climb, about the cold and wind, the different routes they took, and the hours – hours – they spent skiing down. 

That night, we watched the golden sun wrap around the far side of Klyuchevskaya, and melt into the plains, lakes, and mountains far below. No one said it, but our trip felt finished. We discussed another summit attempt the following day; some of the boyz wanted to finish the climb, and take the ride from summit to floor. Also, for my sake – with another night I might be well enough to go up the mountain, and share in the same transitive experience. But, on a peak so brutish and dominant as Klyuchevskaya, you don’t get to ask for seconds. The boyz had safe passage, and came damn near close to a full descent of a spectacular and dangerous volcano in a remote, far-off land. That was more than good enough.

Later that night, the debate concluded when our stoves finally, after some 20 days of abuse and unleaded, gave out. The next day we called Ivan inthe morning and skied out at noon. We left Klyuchi that day, and pulled into Petropavlovsk at 3am. 

I spent the final days in Petropavlovsk still sick, but recovering. We went back to Harat’s with Ivan and met some of the Kamchatka Freeride Community. We drank with the locals, my god did we drink. The Russians treated us exceptionally well – everyone wanted to talk to the weird Americans in their bar. I don’t remember paying for a single drink that night, I don’t think any of the boyz did.

I remember dancing to Russian songs and English-language songs in a heavy Russian accents. I remember one of the boyz passed out and vomiting over the railing outside Harat's. I remember talking to a Russian about metal, and his favorite band, Panterra. I remember Herder fell asleep in a ski bag. I don’t remember how I got back to the apartment.

The next morning, I woke up violently ill, and spent the day vomiting into the toilet. I couldn’t even keep ramen down. Ivan took the boyz – the ones that were physically able – to Avachinskii for one last volcano. Andrey, Elliot, Herderand Layman went. Luke, Tom, and I stayed, all to tired, sick, or hungover to leave the apartment. They came back around midnight, after a pseudo-epic, and after successfully skiing another volcano. They summited the peak late in the day and skied down at sunset. I wish I'd gone with them.

Andrey, Luke and I flew out first. Elliot and Herder got tattoos the day we departed.

As we flew out of Petropavlovsk, the mountains of the Kamchatkan Peninsula unfurled like a carpet below us. Looking north from our window, we could see the unmistakable Bakening massif, and our zones: the cliffs of Mini-AK, Patagonia, the Honey Hole, and miles upon miles of untouched valleys and volcanoes waiting to be explored.