Rock Skis

Delta Mountain—Alaska

It smells like snow and I love rock skis. 

I fixed a broken boot buckle, ignored a missing skin tail, and freshened up the beacon batteries. Snow line In Alaska still requires a bit of a walk or even more of a drive. The point isn’t really the turns or the vert or the line. It’s about cold fingers and premature seasonality. When I was a kid, I used to wake up in the middle of the night before my birthday to see if midnight had arrived—Fall skiing relies on the same neuro-receptors. 

A  week ago two friends hopped in the truck just as the sun came up and 35 minutes later we were heading up a dirt road into the Chugach. Rock skis on our packs and sneakers on our feet, we left the Crow Pass trailhead feeling like it was the first day back at school. I mean both the excitement of a new year and the somewhat sluggish feeling of returning from summer vacation. Snow on these peaks meant we were reunited once again with our friends—a familiar horizon hidden by tundra, dirt, and rock since melt out. A couple hours later we were skinning up the Jewel Glacier into the clouds. According to the United States Geological Survey, the water year runs through September and resets every October 1st. So we decided we were safely skiing a couple weeks into the 2023-2024 season. Given the trailbreaking through shin-deep snow, this should have been obvious, but we were on a glacier that’s no stranger to summer snow.  

Thin cover and wind-buffed. But the turns in the Deltas were fine. Photo: Alex Lee
Thin cover and wind-buffed. But the turns in the Deltas were fine. Photo: Alex Lee

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