Brief holiday escape

I am in Whitehorse for Christmas Eve and Christmas Day - a short trip with a lot of traveling, but worth it. I have never been to the Yukon in the winter, and what I saw (and felt) on White Pass before darkness fell was simply breathtaking - and unphotographable because of bad light: Black spruce painted white with rime, big mountains and hard blasts of wind. The wind chill was forecast to bottom out at 39 below. I don't think it was nearly that cold, but I guess it's possible.

My friends here have a big Christmas dinner planned. I spent most the evening helping my friend Sierra assemble several complicated and stress-inducing Norwegian delicacies. I finally perfected the Lefse by pretending I was making tortillas. We made three kinds of increasingly complicated cookies, which Sierra admitted were really all just elaborate versions of the sugar cookie I grew up frosting with food-dye powdered sugar paste. "Really," she said as she held up a pillowy wafer of batter that had been whipped up, dipped around a metal mold, deep-fried into a golden rosette and coated with sugar, "they're all just vehicles for butter and sugar that take a long time to make, which makes sense, because Norway is like here and it's dark and cold and there's not much else to do."

Tomorrow we tackle Lutefisk, but not before copious amounts of Pugsley riding on hard, frozen trails.

I worked on my writing project during the entire seven-hour (somewhat delayed) ferry ride between Juneau and Skagway. I made enormous progress, and feel encouraged by it. Not sure if I worked past my block of if writing for me is simply a matter of being trapped in a place where it is impossible to ride my bike.

But on all fronts, it's been a great trip so far, and I haven't done a lick of biking yet.

Solstice with wolves

Sunrise came at 8:45 a.m. on the shortest day of the year. The highest mountain peaks glowed apple red in the morning light as I drove my car to Foreign Auto to finally get my studded tires installed. I dropped off my car, hoisted my backpack and hoofed a half block over to Heritage Coffee. The frosty dry air outside hit me like a wall. "Dang, it feels like Anchorage out here!" I thought. It was probably single digits. Certainly not cold enough to cancel, well, anything ... but the air inside of Heritage swirled with warmth. I cradled my massive cup of coffee, nibbled a cheese bagel, and wondered about the simpler joys in life ... like spending a lazy morning lounging at a coffee shop while holiday shoppers and harried commuters and school children suffering through the short days before holiday break all moved through the hard air outside.

My friend, Bjorn, shattered my comfort illusion by walking in the door. We ducked into his car with the ice barely scraped from the windows and drove to the Thunder Mountain trailhead. I looked at my watch. Four and a half hours until I had to be at work; five and a half hours until sunset. We started up the trail and it wasn't long before I was down to my base layers. I don't think it matters how cold it is — everything feels like a sauna when you're gaining 1,500 feet per mile. Shadows stretched long over the white snow, and the mountains reflected the warm gold of the winter sun. "You know," I said to Bjorn, "The thing that bums me out about solstice is that it means less and less of this amazing light." The more the sun climbs high in the sky, the more it washes out everything, like a florescent overhead light versus a single dim bulb in the corner of a room. The summer solstice is overwhelmed with light to the point of hollow gluttony. Winter solstice forces you to savor every taste.

Not that I am complaining about the coming of the light. But as I enter my fifth winter in Alaska, I find more every year that I have a deep appreciation for the gifts and challenges of the season. Including the final pitch of Thunder Mountain, a snow wall that's a serious challenge for the likes of me. I took my sweet time axing my own steps out of the crust, breaking through the ice glaze on top only to watch my carved step collapse in a hole of unbonded powder. It's the kind of condition that raises alarms for those of us who haven't worked beyond the basic tips of Avalanche 101 yet, but I figured Bjorn knew what he was doing. And, anyway, he was long out of sight and the wall hadn't come down on me yet.

As I finally crawled over the lip and walked tentatively over the glaze ice surface, I saw Bjorn sprinting toward me. He grabbed my shoulders and thrust my whole body sideways. "Wolves!" he said. "Six, maybe eight, over there!" And sure enough I heard low, short barks echoing through the still air. I turned my head to see their sleek bodies bounding along the crest of the ridge, less than a quarter mile away. We both stood still, frozen as though by not moving we could hide our existence, as the pack of wolves congregated from several points along the ridge. They continued to call out, "Woo! Woo! Woo!," which we interpreted to mean, "All right, everyone, time to get out of here." We watched in awe as they peeled down the ridge and out of sight, and then Bjorn put his arm around me and said, "Now that's solstice!"

We waited a few more minutes to see if they were going to come back and then decided to follow their tracks a ways down the ridge. The tracks confirmed that there were at least six wolves, running together in long paths across the open plain. As we traveled tentatively toward the site where we had spotted them, it occurred to me just how special the moment really was. Wolf sightings are rare, even in Alaska. Even Bjorn, who has more Alaska and mountain backcountry experience than anyone I know, only claims a handful of them. I have but two, which are both slightly dubious in nature - one is Romeo, Juneau's half-domesticated glacier wolf, and the other was a scrawny gray youth that I saw staggering up the Alaska Highway in western Yukon as I was moving from Homer to Juneau. I stopped my car to take his picture and he turned and started walking toward me, with this creepy, crazy demeanor that made me dive back into my car and drive away. As Bjorn told me, "Wolves decide whether or not they're going to let you see them."

And these wolves let us see them. It felt like a moment of grace, and it's these simple joys that are worth climbing for.

Snowmobiling, sans motor

My friend Abby and I were planning to go for a hike/run today. Because of recent snow, wind, avalanche concerns, her lack of snowshoes, etc., we planned to head up the well-traveled Dan Moller Trail. She called this morning with a sore throat and cancelled, but since I already had my head set on that trail, I decided to head up there anyway, with my bike.

Juneau has but two areas where people can ride snowmobiles, and one of them is the Dan Moller Trail. As a purely human-powered winter enthusiast, I am actually pro-snowmobile, within the realm of responsible use. Modern-day machines aren't the gas hogs they used to be. And yes they're loud and yes they smell, but only when they're fairly close to you, which they don't tend to be for very long. And snowmobiles pack down great bike trails. Great, fun, swoopy, powdery bike trails. Trails that don't leave a permanent imprint on the backcountry, unlike summer bike trails (which I also support, of course, within the realm of responsible use.) But, yes, I think snowmobilers get a bad rap from other human-powered types. And it's really the place of only a few of us to criticize. Yes, their sport - and mine - is dependent on motorized use. So is Nordic skiing, which requires machines to set trails. So is lift-served skiing; resorts are an enormous energy drain not to mention a blight on the land. Even backcountry skiers generally drive, sometimes for hours, to their favorite powder stashes. If you walk out your back door, strap on a pair of skis, and skin up the mountain and ski back down, then you may criticize me and my support of snowmobiles.

That said, my own snowmobile is fairly low-impact. It presses gently into the snow and emits only tiny amounts of carbon dioxide and salt through the breath I exhale and the sweat I release. Powered by oranges, Chex cereal and copious amounts of coffee, it carries me slow but true up the long climb to the ridge. Sometimes I have to push it along. Often, I have to push it along. But I know once I reach the top, I will be rewarded with wind-scoured crust riding, steep rolling trails and views that never fail to make my jaw drop.

I rode as far as the bottom of a couple of crazy-steep high-marking lines, dropped the bike and followed the ridgeline on foot up Mount Troy. These are some of the hoodoos of Mount Troy; finding the route around them is a maze of puzzles, trying to climb while not post-holing up to my neck.

The summit of Mount Troy. On my way back down, I ran into a couple of high-markers who had both rolled their machines. A thin trail of oil marked their tumble down the hill, and I picked up a couple small broken bits of plastic as I approached them. They were huddled beside one of the machines with the hood open, and when they saw me they burst into an endorphin-charged story about their narrow escape from death as they summersaulted downhill in front of several hundred pounds of metal and plastic. I could hardly understand their burst of words, but I surmised that the driver of the broken machine panicked and bailed, downhill of his machine, near the top of the curve, and his friend went to his assistance only to panic as the out-of-control first machine tumbled toward him. I tried not to project a disapproving grimmace as I asked them if they wanted me to hike back up to the peak, where I could get a thin cell phone signal. They told me they thought they could fix the machine themselves, and I continued down, hoping I could manage to ride off the ridge before they caught up to me.

As I said, I only advocate responsible snowmobile use. Idiots should stay home. :-)

But my human-powered snowmobile use turns slightly less responsible as I start down the steep stuff myself. The trail loses 2,500 feet of elevation in something less than five miles, down a dramatically rippled, sandy-powder-coated, narrow line in the snow. All I can do is hold on tight, throttle the sometimes useless brakes, occasionally throw my right foot down as a ski, launch off the whoop-dee-dos and hope the rubber side stays down. Whee- (bump) eee- (bump) eee- (bump) eee- (bump) eee! It's a wild ride, tear-jerking and breathtaking, and can strip away three and a half hours of climbing/ridge riding in less than 30 minutes.

On a different note, and sorry I never posted this earlier, but I still have yet to receive my order of books. I am very sorry about the inconvenience. Basically, I can't believe Fed Ex screwed me again. My publisher used to ship USPS priority, and I wasn't even aware they had made the change to their basic shipping service until after I received my tracking number, and by then it was too late. Otherwise, I would have never bothered to order the books, or at least looked into the viability of an expedited service. The contractor that deals with Fed Ex Ground in Juneau is super sketchy. The last time I used them, my snow bike disappeared into the Fed Ex void for two weeks ahead of my first Iditarod race. Days before the race, I had no idea where it had gone. Luckily, at the time I had a regular interview spot on an NPR program called the Bryant Park Project, so I had the whole angry power of public radio and a fair number of helpful blog readers behind me, and at the 11th hour my bike was hand-delivered from the back seat of a small car to its destination. This time, I have no such power, and the company has completely written me off. As I said before, if you were depending on these books for Christmas, just e-mail me for refunds. Otherwise, I will send them off as soon as I possibly can.

Until then, bah humbug to Fed Ex!