December 2025 –
From Kirsten Kremer
“Tink, Tink, Tink”….. I watched, but didn’t really understand so many things in that moment. “BT, aren’t you going to put an ice screw in?”, I called up to him from my belay. “Not yet”, he calmly replied from his pigeon toed stance on the delicate pillar which seemed like a frozen Spruce tree. I was learning to ice climb with BT’s mentorship. We had already climbed some of the bigger flows like Greensteps, Raincheck, and Bridalveil. It was 1994 and today we were on a variation of Greensteps on the pillar to the right called Roman’s Candle. I was a fledgling in the school of ice and BT had told me about placing ice screws for protection. It seemed like he was plenty far enough off the ground to warrant one, yet he was still climbing smoothly and methodically without protection. I had seen him soloing the big ice flows before. He was no stranger to running it out, but this seemed hard and technical. As an ice climber in Valdez, I think you had to be okay with climbing by yourself because climbing partners were not always available. High on the pillar he placed an ice screw and soon yelled down, “Off Belay”. He rappelled down after setting a top rope to coach me up my first pillar. “Wham, Wham, Wham,” I slammed my tools into the ice. “Whoa, Jesus, don’t knock that thing down. Be Gentle. GENTLE”, he smiled up at me with that twinkle in his blue eyes. This felt awkward and terrifying realizing the possibility of knocking it down. How in the world did he make it look so easy and why was he so calm? Brian Teale was a master at the craft and he loved pillars.
When I was asked if I wanted to write about BT´s climbing, I tried to think of a list of his accomplishments, but I couldn’t come up with that because he never really talked about himself in that way. (I was happy to see someone else sift through those archives). It seems strange now considering how many hours of time we spent together or talking on the phone. He was always interested in what I was doing or what we would be doing in the future. I do know that he was climbing at [a] high standard in Colorado before he came up to Alaska. I do know he loved being a first ascensionist. I also know he loved to share his craft with others and took a pleasure in taking newbies out on the ice, especially keen girls like myself. I’m not sure how long the list of people BT mentored on ice is, but I do know he loved Sue Nott. He would tell endless stories of her boldness and mimic her high pitched voice. I idolized her through BT´s story telling and would eventually meet her at a Valdez Ice Fest. She gave me two new ice screws after I dropped Paul’s into the only open hole on the first ascent of Fifty Dollar Falls. She told me not to give it to Paul, they were for me and I should keep leading. BT was great at encouraging girls to get on the sharp end. They climbed The Rooster Comb in the Alaska Range together. When she went missing on Mt. Foraker, he would come to Talkeetna to join the search party. I know he smiled and laughed a lot which would make his eyes squint and he loved music and dancing. I can’t recall BT being in a bad mood. I can recall him being sad from losing friends. It’s easy to veer from talking about his climbing because there was so much more to Brian that characterized his life, aside from his athletic prowess, first ascents, river descents and ski descents. Brian Teale was kind and a true gentleman. His network of friends was widespread and overlapped many different types of people. He was a hard worker who started his own business in Valdez called, Crystal Creek Carpentry and Snow Removal. He served his community in many ways including many years on the board of Parks and Recreation where he could calmly walk the line between differing opinions and promote Nordic trails. Upon BT´s death, I would come to realize that many people considered him one of their Best Friends. I certainly did. He was an amazing climber, but he was much more than that. Since my first trip to Alaska, when he was volunteering for The World Extreme Skiing Competition as Snow Safety, he became a close friend. He was a fit uphill athlete and a talented snowboarder. I can remember one glorious sunny powder day when we snowshoed all the way up Cracked Ice together in untracked powder and a Helicopter landed on us as we were on the final headwall to the summit. We braced against the wind and weren’t too surprised to see it was Tony Mann and some other local shredders. There was plenty of powder for all of us and we watched them do flips off the cornice. Odyssey was a regular outing for us and we were together when I chipped my front tooth out snowboarding in the Brooks. We rock climbed in the summer on routes he established around Valdez and he gave me and many others work painting when we needed cash. He always had a couch to sleep on, friendship, and a load of adventure peppered with stability, structure, and purpose.
BT wasn’t just a climber, he was a role model for life, maybe not in his housekeeping…….. luckily G kept it tidy at the Hanagita House. They even had house plants that survived for 20 years. The Hanagita House was also referred to as CMA Headquarters. BT had a guiding side hustle called Chugach Mountain Adventures. Andy Embick and Brian Teale were the original town guides to the local ice. If you wanted to know about ice in the area, it was best to talk to these guys. They would both host visiting ice climbers at their homes in their own styles. Embick was more meticulous about his note taking and would write guidebooks to ice and whitewater that were put in print. I heard if you stayed at Embick´s house, you were required to complete a list of chores before going climbing. Chores were optional at BT´s. Brian kept notes as well and had a long table set up with photos and typed pages of descriptions of climbs that he planned to eventually make a guidebook for Valdez. The table also had sticky notes with driveways that he had plowed and invoices he needed to write. I’m sure that many people got their driveway plowed for free when the notes were knocked off the table by wet climbers. Andy Embick started the Valdez Ice Climbing Festival and Brian carried the torch when he was done. In those days, it was a gathering of ice climbers with no clinics, just people climbing and enjoying a spaghetti feed together. BT´s enthusiasm for ice and life was contagious.
It was a common occurrence for BT to just show up mid climb in the canyon. He really enjoyed climbing with people as well as soloing. One day I had sent him a message to see if he wanted to join my husband, Tim and me on Bridalveil. We didn’t hear from him and started up the climb. Pretty soon we see BT climbing up behind us with his speaker on his harness jamming out to some teenage pop music dragging a rope behind him. Just in time for the killer pillar. “You made it!”, I laughed. He smiled and told me a story about Steve Garvey climbing the killer pillar (3rd pitch of Bridalveil). Garvey had tubular picks on straight shafts and chided to his belayer, “There’s a time to whine and a time to climb, pay attention son, you got a man on the line.” I Loved his stories, especially the funny ones about Chuck Comstock. He said it was common for Comstock to get upset with his partners and just untie on route and solo away. BT would mimic their voices in his telling making it even funnier. We finished the climb together chatting all the way up.
The years I spent climbing with Paul Turecki and staying at CMA Headquarters were the days when BT was working on his guidebook in the early 2000´s. It was also the time period when PT and BT were working on their ice climbing movie called The Real Deal. BT bought a Sony mini DVD camera and they would record and edit it on VHS on the VCR. I would color and write poetry. PT would draw topos for the Planet Ice Guidebook. BT would do most of the filming and show up in random places alongside us on various climbs. On a particularly windy day when they both decided to stay home because anything that could be blown, large trash bins included, were sliding down the frozen streets. I got motivated after a particularly good Sativa and ventured out on my crampons and up the ice climb called Downtown Julie Brown that BT had pointed out from the window in his front door. They filmed it narrating my progress from the warm contours of home. On some of the nasty cold days, we would drive BT´s minivan right up to The Jaws Wall and belay from inside with the door slightly ajar for the rope and the Mr. Heater cranking. One nice day, Pete Lowney joined us there and was leading a pitch of the overhanging ice and got so completely pumped he begged BT to take, but BT wouldn’t do it and kept cheering him on, “Come on Lowney, You Got It!”. Pete got so flamed he fell out of his leashes taking a nice whipper and we all laughed until we had tears in our eyes.
When BT got tired of organizing the Valdez Ice Fest, he encouraged me to do it. I decided to change it up and call it Alaska Ice Pixies and invite all the women climbers. Men were invited to the after climbing parties, but were asked to leave Bridalveil and Greensteps for the girls to top rope. Sometime in this period, I was dating Skine and he and BT teamed up for a first ascent up Wortmann´s Canyon. It took a fair amount of effort to put the trail in, including a wood pallet that BT drug up there to make the creek crossing go on their sleds. One of the perks of me being a helicopter ski guide was that I was able to spot remote ice that couldn’t be seen from the road. They said it was huge and super steep and named it Pixie Pillar in honor of our ice fest. BT would join the ladies at the end of the day to BBQ salmon at the base and pour beers from the kegs that the Moose Tooth donated. One of the Ice Pixie years, BT surprised me with a bound copy of his Ice Planet guidebook Special Edition. It was customized with cut outs form magazines with models in various poses and captions he wrote of what they were saying or who they were intended to be. He and Skine were dapper GQ models with their hair blowing in the wind. I was depicted as a sexy business model legs crossed on the table and hands crossed behind my head captioned Ice Pixie Organizer, Kirsten Kremer. He watched me thumb through the pages discovering his funny special edition illustrations and we laughed so hard until tears streamed down our faces. He had truly outdone himself on this one.
Another memorable first ascent that BT recruited us for was out in Prince William Sound. Skine, Cache, Graffix and I all loaded up into his tiny boat with the kayak strapped to the back and motored over to Gold Creek bundled up in winter gear. BT dropped us off at the shore and dropped anchor about a half mile out and kayaked to shore to prepare for low tide. We walked up the canyon and found an awesome climb. Some mixed moves on rock leading out to a dagger. “Do you want it?”, he graciously asked Skine with a smirky smile. It looked hard and it was, but Skine wanted it, tried hard, and sent. We all top roped it except for Graffix the dog, but she was an excellent climber as well. We were all elated with an awesome adventure and walked back down the canyon to the boat. We were all quite surprised to see it sitting in the mud about a half mile out. “Hmmmmmmm”, a typical BT response. He untied his kayak and proceeded to drag it through the muck as we trudged through the mud to the boat. We all got in, drank our beers and waited hours for the high tide as snowflakes fell around our cold wet bodies. High and Dry would become the name of that one.
Sometimes the climbs would get named after what we watched on the news. We had a little crag with super short climbs that were all named after the Taliban at one point. BT encouraged me to lead there and it was my first mixed leading experience.
BT also got me into the AK range for my first time on an assistant guiding job with him to the Ruth Glacier. We got to take Mark Wellman and two other amputees out for a week of ski touring around the glacier. These guys were tough and funny. The trip started with packing in Jim Sweeney´s yard in Anchorage when I got myself into a wrestling match with the guy with one arm. I couldn’t believe he actually pinned me with that stub! They called their expedition “Gimps On Ice”. I also got to do my first super remote multi day river trip with BT and Rob Durnell down the Nizina river. It was stunning and wild. Durney and BT kayaked and I rowed BT´s Super Puma with all the camping gear. Brian Teale was like a gateway drug for me into my addiction with Alaska. BT, PT and I also went into the Pika Glacier together to climb rock. The Pika is also referred to as Little Switzerland and we had a splendid time together climbing The right Troll. I don’t remember if it was a first ascent, but it wouldn’t surprise me. It was what they both liked to do. Put up routes.
There was a period when it waned and BT was willing to give climbing up for awhile in the wake of sadness from deaths of his friends. “Is it worth it?”, he would consider it might not be. We had conversations about the risk, family, community, obligations, selfishness and life as we knew it. After processing his grief, he would consider that the joy it brought him was worth it. I remember returning to Valdez to climb some ice with BT after this period and we decided on Spring Fling. He said he was out of shape and hadn’t been climbing much so I expected that I might do the leading. I would guess he was in his late 50’s or 60 at this point. I was wrong, he volunteered for the sharp end when it looked like a tricky mixed move on rock to get started to the ice. For BT, being on the sharp end and putting up routes was climbing. We had a great day swapping leads, but when I was following I wondered why he was belaying so slow. We had a long way to go and planned to walk off the top. I would soon find out he was deleting photos on his phone to create more space when he realized he was picking up cell service and wanted to post some Live Photos. I had to laugh and embrace the fact that we would likely be using our headlamps. Eventually Brian would return to climbing with a rejuvenated outlook spiced up with some new young climbers who moved to Valdez. Ryan Simms, August and Kalley would spark the fire and the siege for more first ascents in the Valdez Glacier would be on. It was great to see that sparkle back in his eyes.
In BT´s earlier days, he wouldn’t consider snowmachining because he could ski or hike wherever he wanted. After finding the ice up Wortmann’s and now that he realized the new potential up the Valdez Glacier with the abundance of unclimbed routes, he spent countless hours questing solo on his old used sled to find new lines. The Valdez Glacier would provide him with some of the best and worst days of his life. When he recounted the story of Kalley´s accident his face lit up thinking about the the majority of the day when they were both having the best day of their lives together putting up a first ascent in such a beautiful remote place. If only that moment could have lasted forever. In a tragic accident, the anchor would fail while Kalley was rappelling. BT had gone first and bounce tested it, he couldn’t understand what happened. He was still a pitch off the ground and Kalley and the ropes were on the ground. He down climbed. She didn’t survive. It was horrific. I feel nauseas thinking about it. So awful. We Valdez climbers came together and supported each other as we cried and tried to make sense of it. BT wished it was him. Kalley, so beautiful, young and spirited, she should be alive. As time passed, August (Kalley´s Boyfriend), Ryan and BT would eventually work with the pain to find the joy that Kalley would want them to have in this magical zone.
Most of my time spent with BT revolved around ice climbing. Every year, time was spent at the Hanagita House for a few weeks of ice climbing. We stayed in touch via phone calls throughout the year and occasional visits in Valdez or Chickaloon in the summer. BT was particularly good about calling his friends on their Birthday. I recall him spending loads of time on the phone chatting away with his old friend, Harvey Miller, from Colorado. BT would routinely make a trip to CO every year to help his mother and work on carpentry projects for his family. One year, I was surprised to hear he had changed his routine and travelled solo to Jamaica. He quickly found himself a Jamaican girlfriend and was welcomed into her family. I can picture him with some dreadlocked dudes, his cute young girlfriend and her Mama, smoking spliffs and hanging on the Beach. BT was a great phone conversationalist and their relationship continued for quite awhile. He did several trips there. I called him in February and told him I was coming out to ice climb with him. He had sold the Hanagita house to Mike and Sunny and was now living out at his Robe Lake property which was mostly a shop and a tiny trailer. I wanted to stay with him as it had been tradition for so many years. Drinking coffee together, talking over dinner, the whole program. Laps around town. I was in it for the whole experience not just the climbing. “Can I crash on your couch?”, I asked. “Hmmmmmmm…..ahhhhh… I’m not sure about that, my girlfriend wouldn’t like that”, he responded. “Oh, is she there?”, I asked. “No, but I talk to her every night”. I laughed, “I’m coming over.” He managed to work around my visit without his girlfriend getting upset.
In the summer before Mike Hamilton died, Valdez Boat Club was an active after work river running social event. On this evening, we were running Keystone Canyon on the Lowe river. BT was an active and talented boater in his earlier years and had surely run this section many times, but it had been years since he was kayaking. Mike told BT to show up and he would provide him with all the gear. I begged BT to come and reminisced about our earlier river trips. BT showed up, not fully convinced he would go, but willing to check out the scene. Mike blew the packraft up for him, handed him a drysuit and BT sat in the boat on dry ground making a few paddling stokes. He climbed into the drysuit and put his slip on Merrill leather work shoes because it’s all he had and joined the gang on the river. Watching him paddle was like watching him climb. He made it look easy. After he absolutely aced the run with silky style, he got out of the water and smiled with that twinkle in his eyes and said, “I’ve still got it.” I answered, “Of course you do!”.
Tim and I were all packed up and driving to Talkeetna to fly into the Kitchatna Spires for a month when I got cell service and heard the messages declaring that BT was in critical condition at the hospital in Anchorage. We dropped our plans and headed straight there. I hardly recognized BT with all the swelling and tubes. He had taken a super bad fall while working on scaffolding. I spent the remainder of his life with him swapping into the night schedule when his sister, Charla, arrived. Many of his friends came to visit and spent long hours at his bedside for days. A Covid outbreak prevented anymore visitors which was really sad. After 10 days, he died while I was holding his hand and listening to reggae in the night. I was asleep and thought I felt the nurse tap my toes and I opened my eyes and no one was there. I looked closely at BT and saw that he stopped breathing. I’m sure he was the one who woke me and let me know it was time to go. I’m still working on letting go. Slowly we spread his ashes in beautiful places he loved. Some went in the Prince William Sound at his Memorial, some on Odyssey, some in Keystone Canyon, some on King Mountain, some in Colorado, and some just traveling around with me in my car. We are still doing town laps together and I don’t think I can fully let him go. I bought a plot at the Valdez cemetery to build a cairn in his memory next to our friend Mike Hamilton. A trip to Jamaica is still on the mission list. I think a piece of BT would appreciate that hot beach, smoking Rastafarians and sexy girls strutting through the sand.
So many good memories and changes throughout the years with BT. No more straight shafts and leashes, no more belaying out of the van, and no more kegs at the base of the climbs at the Ice Fest. What will last forever is the hole in my heart from losing my beloved friend. As the years go by, the light and memories he gave me slowly creep through that hole letting me value life even more. As BT once said, “Everyday is a Gift”. Now go get after it.