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Published: February 22, 2013 Link provided below:
The wind came from the northwest. It blew down from the glacier-studded peaks of the Alaska Range, through the icebergs of Turnagain Arm and across the frozen expanse of the Twenty Mile River. It was an unrelenting wind, the kind that fells trees, shapes mountains and drives people to their firesides. And there I was among the sculptured snow ridges and frozen grass on the banks of the Twenty Mile, attached to a giant kite, wearing a pair of skis.
When I signed up for snow-kiting in Alaska, I didn't think about how it would feel to be bracing myself against a 25-mile-per-hour wind as I watched my kite flutter in the snow a hundred feet off, threatening to whip up into the air at any moment. All that kept it down was my hand on the rope “brake,” tight against my hip. I could barely hear Tom Fredericks, my upbeat instructor, shouting in my ear, “Now, it’s going to pull real hard when it first comes up,” before the rest of his words disappeared into the wind. Frankly, I was scared.
But then, I hadn’t come to Alaska in winter to take it easy. I let go of the brake. Seconds later, I was flying.
Colorado, Utah, Wyoming — these are the places one thinks of as winter sports paradises in the United States. But Alaska? Too dark, you might say. Too cold. Too, well, extreme. One imagines frostbite temperatures, cloud-scraping mountains and tundra too inhospitable for trees. The numbers bear out the prejudice: in the spring and summer of last year, close to 1.2 million people visited Alaska for vacation; in fall and winter, that number was just 34,000.
But as March approaches, average highs creep up to a balmy 34 degrees in Anchorage, and the daylight hours are as long as anywhere else. Conveniently for winter-sports enthusiasts, most of the 600 inches of snow the Chugach Mountains see each year remains. Still, few people go, leaving one of our country’s largest snowy playgrounds unvisited by any but locals and the few who are savvy enough to make the trip.
What this means is that Anchorage — unlike Interlaken, in Switzerland, Jackson Hole, Wyo., and other winter adventure capitals — has a robust sports scene in which tourists are almost an afterthought. The city is full of young, fit people whose garages are overflowing with snowshoes, ice axes, skis, snowmobiles and other adrenaline paraphernalia. And they play a lot of different sports. Skiing (backcountry, cross-country and alpine) and snowmobiling (called snow-machining in Alaska) are probably the most popular, followed by dog mushing. After that come ice climbing, skijoring (cross-country skiing pulled by a dog) and snow biking. Then you get into sports that no one in their right mind would do, like snow-kiting, winter surfing and scuba diving (in dry suits).
It’s true that these sports can be done elsewhere. Backcountry skiing is all the rage in the Northwest; ice climbing is popular from Colorado to Vermont. But Alaska has more snow, more ice, more wind, taller mountains and lower tree lines than pretty much anywhere else. When it comes to extreme sports in the winter, Alaska is as extreme as it gets.
The sports I chose during my recent trip were snow-kiting, ice climbing and snow biking. I chose these activities not only because I had never done them, but also because they are well suited to the state: snow-kiting for the vast expanses of windy tundra, ice climbing because of all the glaciers and frozen waterfalls, and snow biking because of Anchorage’s extensive system of winter trails.
Since Anchorage and its surroundings are home to more than half the state’s population, I decided to base myself there. If Alaska’s winter sports scene is centered around residents, then I wanted to be where the people were. I found the city itself to be uninspiring, but the city itself is not the point; the surrounding areas are.
AND SO, ON A CLEAR DAY, my sister, Tara, and I drove south out of Anchorage on the Seward Highway toward Turnagain Pass, a stretch of road rightly hailed as one of the most scenic drives in the country. The road stays north of the Turnagain Arm, a vast fjord walled on either side by the Chugach Mountains as if both were carved by the same glacial knife. The peaks of the Chugach Range are not that high, averaging around 4,000 feet, but pressing around us so tightly, their snowy slopes naked of trees for more than half their height, they felt like the Himalayas.
We passed several “seeps,” frozen waterfalls that ice climbing enthusiasts tackle on weekends. We looked longingly at the untracked bowls that are a stamping ground of the Chugach Powder Guides heli-skiing outfit. Rounding the tip of Turnagain Arm, we headed up to the pass; the snow went from nonexistent to several feet in just a few minutes of gentle climbing. The pass is so popular that areas are zoned for certain sports; snowmobilers crisscrossed the slopes to the north and backcountry skiers skinned up Tincan Mountain to the south. We saw all of this in a little over an hour of driving.
We met Tom Fredericks in a pull-off before the highway crossed the Twenty Mile River. He was an energetic man in a green flight suit. As far as I could tell from the Web, he was the only person in Alaska teaching snow-kiting professionally.
All that is needed for snow-kiting is normal alpine ski equipment, a three-plus-square-meter kite, a field of snow and wind. Tom told me of a trip he took last year to a tundra island, hooking a couple of plastic sleds to himself to carry gear and sailing 40 miles to a remote cabin. Traveling over the earth by the force of its own breath — the idea had tremendous appeal.
First, he gave a demonstration using his six-meter kite. He laid out the kite, then hooked its lines to a harness around his waist. Using a two-foot handlebar attached to ropes on either side of the kite, he pulled the kite into the air and rocketed across the field, controlling his speed and direction by tilting the handlebar and making the kite dip and dive. Snow kiters can travel in only a fairly narrow range of directions perpendicular to the wind, so at first Tom just went out and back across the field, an activity snow kiters call “mowing the lawn.” Then he started doing jumps. It seemed impossible in the middle of a flat field, but with a sharp tug on the bar, Tom suddenly flew six, eight feet off the ground, dropping Iron Crosses and 360s.
When my turn came, Tom wisely hooked me to a three-meter training kite. At first I tried controlling the kite without my skis on; even with the smaller kite, the wind tossed and dragged me several feet. Fortunately, I was wearing a ski helmet and plenty of down layers. Tom showed me how to keep the kite in “neutral” by tilting the bar left and right to make it stay overhead. As long as the kite was in neutral, I was fine; but if it dove too far left or right and down — watch out: that was the “power zone,” the kite angle with the power to make you go, but also the power to throw you on your face.
Then came time to put the skis on. I was nervous, as the conditions that day were not ideal. There was too much wind, and the weather had been warm enough to melt most of the snow that had accumulated earlier in the winter. The ground on which I stood was marshland in the summer; on a normal winter day it would be a field of powder. But today the snow was thin enough to see through to the grass and ice beneath.
I survived the first jolt of the kite ripping me forward and rode its strength along the banks of the Twenty Mile at maybe 15 miles an hour. I felt as if I had lassoed a runaway horse and was hanging on for dear life, an unending chiaroscuro of snow and ice disappearing beneath my skis. It was terrifying; it was exhilarating. But then the wind began to gust, and the kite tangled, bringing me to a halt. I freed it only for it to tangle again. When I finally got it going again, the wind sagged. Tom caught up and pronounced, “You need a bigger kite.”
He was right, but who’s to say that, once hooked up, the wind wouldn’t start blowing again like a sandblaster? I had an image of myself hooked to the six-meter kite, bolting over the ice until an edge caught in a tussock and my leg twisted at an unnatural angle. I looked down at my knees. They were still there. I decided to keep it that way. I unhooked my harness and handed it to Tom. He looked sad that his beloved sport had not won another convert.
So on Friday, Tara and I rented bikes from Arctic Cycles. What you notice about the bikes is the fat tires, like motorcycle tires, kept at low pressure to increase their contact area with the snow. Then there are “poagies,” essentially handlebar sleeves to keep your fingers warm. I dumped my bike twice just getting from Peter’s house to the park across the street.
On the uphills on the trail in Far North Bicentennial Park we were lucky if we could walk the bikes without falling, never mind climbing hills on them. On the downhills I had the distinct impression that if the trail turned too sharply I would die but that my obituary would at least make people laugh. Bundled up and riding a bike with comically oversize wheels, I felt like a child sent to play in the snow who saw his plastic tricycle in the garage and thought, hey, wait a minute ... It is no wonder then, that Josh, Peter and I reverted to elementary school versions of ourselves, daring one another to duplicate stupid tricks, only to realize after a while that we had left my sister far behind.
We went back and found her — she had fallen on a turn — and let her go ahead of us. As we rode, I realized we were plodding along at roughly a brisk jogging pace. Once you figured out what you were doing, where was the thrill, the adrenaline rush?
My answer lay just ahead of us. We stopped short, nearly running into Tara. She was looking toward the woods, her eyes wide. “It was on the trail,” she said. “I almost hit it.”
I followed the light of Peter’s headlamp to where a shadowy form, maybe six feet high, moved among the trees. It passed through a clearing, and I saw its giant shoulders brush against a high bough, streaking its fur with snow. A moose. Because in Alaska, even a bike ride in the park can be extreme. We walked our bikes by, and then mounted up and pedaled off, whooping, into the darkness.
http://travel.nytimes.com/2013/02/24/travel/extreme-alaska.html?pagewanted=4&_r=1&ref=travel&
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