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Alaska
Performance Backcountry Skiing Photos
2009/2010
by: Tim Kelley
| Oct - Dec | Jan - Feb | Mar - Apr | May - Jun | Summer |
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| Early March
2010: Balance.
It's a good thing when it comes to your spouse. Pretty
much for every ski adventure I do by myself, and post on this
web site, I do another adventure of my wife's choice. And
because I have a tough and fearless wife from an old-time
Alaskan homesteader and Alaskan Native background, her
adventures often make mine seem very tame. Recently my wife's adventure call was to snowmachine 100 miles out off the road system to pick up some moose antlers at a remote fly-in hunting cabin. I had been to this place before, in the foothills of the Tordrillo Range - when there was a trail. This time - no trail. Not even a hint of a trail. After 6 hours of GPS assisted traveling we couldn't find a way over the last steep glacial moraine ridge just before the cabin. After many attempts to get over the ridge we found ourselves wallowing in chest deep snow trying to get our snowmachine unstuck, for the 17th time. Soaked in sweat I said: "Ya know, it's getting late, we're 98 miles out in the middle of nowhere ... this doesn't look that good, we should think about heading back." Her response (that did not surprise me in the least): "Come on. We're almost there. We can make it." As you can see from the picture, we made it. And because this picture is posted on the web, we made it back. Man, I need a break. I gotta do something easy like a long ski trip, before my wife comes up with her next adventure idea. ;-) |
| Early March 2010: After over 20 years of ski-rambling the Lower Susitna Valley I'm still finding, and skiing, more trails that I had never skied before. | ||||
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| An old-timer used to live here until his cabin burned to the ground last winter. Then he moved to Anchorage and died a couple of months after he got there. Anchorage will do that to you if your heart lives in the bush. Now his property has a trail across it, which makes for some new ski loops. Funny how that works. | This is an old river channel turned to swamp. When these sloughs, as the locals call them, are aligned north to south they are usually wind-swept and good for skate skiing. | Sign on the front door of a cabin I once found 15 years ago, but hadn't been able to connect trails to "re-find" this place until recently. Lots of trails in the Su Valley. It takes many years to learn them. I've been learning then for over 20 years, and I still have a lot of trails to learn. | I used to laugh and chuckle about the redneck paranoia of "secret government agents in black helicopters" coming to get ya. But then about 10-12 years ago a Blackhawk helicopter filled with automatic weapon toting FBI agents descended on this remote cabin (which is now abandoned) looking for a meth lab. They didn't find one, so then they flew around the area interrogating people as to where the guy was that owned this cabin, a guy that most everyone in the community really liked. So I now have to admit - the redneck legend of jackbooter feds in black helicopters is no myth. It's reality. | |
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| Alaska Performance Backcountry Skiing |
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