Skimo Ain’t Uphilling: Bike Trails, Cat Roads, and Mountains
Lacking a local on-piste ski area to “uphill,” no problem: Alex Lee makes the training work in a terrain and conditions smörgåsbord.
Read More
Author: Alex Lee
The Road to Race Day
I moved to Colorado in 2010. I was invincible, as all boys in their 20s are. When a friend asked if I would do the Grand Traverse with him, I said sure without having any real sense of what I’d signed up for. K2 Coombacks and a 4-buckle boot worked great skiing couloirs in Rocky Mountain National Park, so I figured they’d surely be fine… I left Crested Butte a ski mountaineer, 40 miles later I skied into Aspen a rando racer. Man did it hurt, but I was hooked. Skis got smaller, boots got lighter, eventually I found myself in spandex.
Read More
The AK El Niño
A couple weeks back I wore running shoes on Chugach trails, went ice skating, and ignored the broken snow blower in my garage. It was, up to then, a relatively dry fall in the Chugach.
Then it dumped three feet of snow in 36 hours.
El Niño
Read More
Rock Skis
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.
Read More
A Slightly Masochistic Turnagain Pass Day Trip
Turnagain has a magical combination of cold northern air and a wet maritime climate in big mountain terrain. The Seward Highway cuts through the pass, dividing the non-motorized east side from the snowmo west side. Short approaches, steep peaks, and plenty of space make it among the best roadside touring destinations on the planet. Roger’s, of course, has better tree skiing, and Teton Pass has better sheep viewing, but Turnagain provides real-deal, full-on AK skiing just an hour south of Anchorage.
Read More