When Eric suggested we go skiing and I immediately said yes, we both hoped to get an early glimpse of next season. It was not there. However, I am quite certain that we left last season back at the beginning of summer. So here we are in between. Photo: Eric Dahl
Termination dust outside Anchorage. The end of summer means the start of something else for backcountry skiing.
“How many months?!”
The woman shouting from across a moraine left a distinct air of expectation in the question—no doubt she had heard of year-rounders racking up unbroken ski streaks measured by the score.
“One!” I shouted back.
She looked confused. Why would someone be up here with skis this time of year if not to tick the September box in a chain of some unbroken Sisyphean task?
I didn’t ski in August this year. This was not so much a deliberate decision, just a practicality of summer. The ski season ended; there were better things to do. So, back on skis just in time for low tide here at the end of summer, I have managed to find myself joining in all the stupidity of year-round skiing without any of the glory.
But wait, isn’t ski season just a state of mind? Maybe it is next year? The early
bird catches the worm! The mornings smell like autumn, and the leaves are changing. Termination dust showed up on the high peaks a couple of weeks ago—a sure sign the season has changed, right? I could be an early bird.
Do you have new batteries in your beacon? Have you reglued your skins and patched the holes in your favorite jacket? These provide signposts on the way to next year. Maybe a ski season ultimately belies definition: you know it when you ski it.
That same first snow quickly melted back to the crest of the Chugach in my neck of the woods, and I am still wearing flip-flops. The USGS’ Water Year’ has another 3 weeks before flipping to the 2024-2025 calendar. Maybe we got ahead of ourselves.
When Eric suggested we go skiing, I immediately said yes; we both hoped to get an early glimpse of next season. It was not there. However, I am quite certain that we left last season back at the beginning of summer. So here we are in between.
By winter solstice, everyone agrees we are solidly and completely in a new ski season. This pagan moment is definite and too conservative by most estimations, as even by the time Canadian Thanksgiving rolls around in early November, it’s hard to cling to the sentiments of last season. The Water Year (October 1 – September 30) is a plausible alternative. Still, I prefer to keep things out of the hands of regulators, so I offer the fall equinox as a reasonable timeline to delineate seasons. This astronomical demarcation still feels too rigid, so I see it more as a suggestion than a clean divide. I think a ski season is more of a concept than a time. Do you have new batteries in your beacon? Have you reglued your skins and patched the holes in your favorite jacket? These provide signposts on the way to next year. Maybe a ski season ultimately belies definition: you know it when you ski it.
Step by step with eternal hope: walking towards winter. Photo: Eric Dahl
Reduced suncups, dirty snow is what it is. Turns are turns. Photo: Alex Lee.
Back to last weekend: The whole landscape felt like an in-between. In between ice age and modern age, the hum of town and the calm of high places, snow and ice, ice and rock, now and then, this year and last, hope and despair, regular and decaf. We were in the clouds above the Girdwood Valley in Southcentral Alaska. We have regularly made a fall pilgrimage in this direction for the past decade. A few small alpine glaciers offer a sort of “lost and found” for winter. Today, we hiked about 4,000 feet for maybe 500 feet of skiing. The glaciers are disappearing. This run used to start on a high ridge and take a smooth fall line down; now, blue ice runs nearly up the mountain ridge, and we needed to trace the side to avoid blue ice, small crevasses, and melted-out rocks. The lower stretches now tac along three distinct fall lines. Rocky edges, hungry these last few summers, have eaten away into the ice.
Wondering about the future, we laughed at ourselves for hiking up, talked about gear, dreamt of the spring, and skied. Maybe we aren’t early birds just yet, but at least we are rolling stones fending off the moss. We looked for winter and saw a glimmer, but it was, at best, a fuzzy image of tomorrow’s turns and a blurred memory of yesterday’s snow. Just clear enough to scrape off the storage wax.
The skiing was actually pretty good. Sun cups were mostly melted down. We managed to trace the edge and ski a fairly long run with decent pitch without too much ice. It wasn’t even that dirty. It didn’t feel like next year, but made next year feel close. A sort of blank canvas, last year’s season had melted away, next year yet to arrive.
I’ll hike back up next month once I can be sure ski season has started. Those winter worms won’t gather themselves.
