Eklutna Traverse

Like two weeks after doing the bomber traverse, Drew left again for another week long ski tour.  This time he did the Eklutna traverse.  More glaciers, which means more skiing while roped to other people, which was understandably a little more difficult.  Less experience, a bigger group, and not the nicest weather made it perhaps not quite as fun as his first trip, but he still loved it so I guess that's what counts.  

They did group dinners on this trip.  They voted on what to eat each night.  If your dinner sounded good than you got to cook it sooner and then you had less to carry for the rest of the trip.  So Drew spent the whole week before the trip dehydrating different things and buying already dehydrated peanut butter and everything else.  He really wanted to create a lightweight but good meal for backpacking.  I got to try everything and let him know what was best.  In the end he made pasta carbonara, tomato basil soup, and these little chocolate and peanut butter pudding layered desserts.  

I'm glad he went on these two trips because before he went on them he was so upset that it was getting lighter, upset that the snow was starting to melt, etc etc.  He hadn't had enough of winter yet.  Skiing for 7 and 8 straight days seems to have gotten him the fill he needed to make it until next year.  Now he is all about the kayaking season.  And just in time too, he went and dug the boats out of the snow this past Saturday.  A few pictures from his trip:

Spring is coming!

Planes landing on the glacier below.

Rest day with mini avalanches in the background.

Their last day they were trying to descend in severe wind and white out conditions.   You can just barely see 4 little black marks on the hill.  That's the second rope team making their way down.

Denali for the Day

Drew and I thought it would be fun to take an overnight camping trip up to Denali earlier this month.  We packed up all our camping gear, put the cross country skis on the car, threw the snowshoes in too, and headed up to Denali National Park.  Man did we choose a beautiful clear day to visit!

Denali from the south viewpoint in Denali State Park

Though it was pretty warm with the sun on us, there is still a lot of melting to go.
We would have practically had to  lay on our stomachs to look out those scopes.

 We drove four hours to the park and got there in mid afternoon.  Although some of the park road had been cleared, we could only venture up the first 13 miles or something.  The ranger at the visitor center talked us out of camping.  When we arrived the visitor center was filled with backpacks and camping gear.  In a few minutes about 40 or 50 eighth graders came bounding out of the adjoining room.  She explained it was "camp with the rangers night."  All the rangers looked really thrilled.  We decided we didn't want to join the fun, so she filled us in on the good things to do in the park that afternoon.  Drew was questioning and teasing her about wolf sightings, skijoring to Wonder Lake, and possible injuries he might incur while in the park.  Generally just being Drew.  At one point she looked at me and said, "You must be a very patient woman, ma'am."  That's my baby.  Inspiring other women to wonder just how I do it... :)

Anyways, she pointed us to this hike, which really we didn't need snowshoes for.  Just a pair of icebreakers would have done the job:

The hike was along a river that was breaking up.
Drew loved the icicles hanging off the ice into the river.

Oh Denali National Park...how I would love to see you not in snow.

 So in the end we drove four hours to Denali and four hours back, and we spent probably less than 3 hours at the park.  I was just saying on the drive up how the drive is half the fun.  We really didn't mind at all.  Drew and I love a good road trip.  There's always interesting conversation as we drive, and beautiful scenery along the way.   We had to pull over on the way home for a few more shots of Denali.  It just looked like a backdrop in a play or something.  So perfect:

We saw so many other beautiful landscapes along our drive.  Every time we cross over this one bridge it seems that the sun is always setting over the river there, and the sunset is always spectacular.  We both agreed that really we know of no other place that manages to be this ridiculously beautiful constantly.  Granted break up is probably the least beautiful of the seasons, but if you look up to the mountains or out to the water you don't notice the dead grass and trash poking through the dirty snow at all.  We have lived here for almost a year now and we still haven't managed to get over it.  It is just so majestic.  So mighty.  We love being surrounded by so much grandness.

Bomber Traverse

Wait!  I am going to post at least one post in April!  I promise!  These are going to be largely picture posts, but Drew has been taking some gorgeous ones, so here you go.  Drew went on the Bomber Traverse at the end of March/beginning of April.  It's a ski tour at this time of year so he was basically backpacking but on skis.  He was gone for 8 days and did a really good job of leaving me with lots of Tupperware to keep me eating while he was gone.  He even left me a list on the fridge with ideas for what I could have for different meals.  It lasted me the whole time he was gone and went pretty well.  I worked a lot while he was gone...maybe too much.  But it's nice when you get the paycheck!  So I'll post some pictures from his trip.  I will have to bug him to get some of himself when he exchanges pictures with the other club members.  He had beautiful weather, got along with the group of 5 really well, and came home pretty sunburned.  I know 20 pictures is a lot, but I had to cut it down from 160.  I feel like I'm sorting through wedding pictures or something!  Enjoy:

This is the first hut when they found it...

...and here it is all dug out.

This trip went more or less, ski to a hut one day, spend the next day skiing and hiking around the hut for fun, ski to the next hut the next day, and so on.

Too steep to hike with skis and skins.

Probably the nicest hut out there.  All these supplies have to be helicoptered in or carried in.  

Love the scenic shot with the outhouse.

Yay for downhill!

Drew's new friend John.

Hut #3

Since these are MCA huts and it was an MCA trip, the huts got a little repair work done on the rest days.

Love that our days are getting longer...

John after digging to the door.

An avalanche they set off.

Hanging in the hut.  Seems like they did a lot of reading on their off time.

Alaska in snow...so pretty.

There's Nothing Quite Like Winter in Alaska

We've been having a really good time here the last month or so.  Now that the daylight is back in full force winter is so much fun.  Here's what's new with us:

• The icicles along our roof have been getting awfully long lately.  We love them and we were kind of bummed when the missionaries came over to eat the other day and promptly opened our window and snapped the biggest one off.  You can always rely on 19 year old boys to destroy anything. :)  We have been happy to have the missionaries over more often though.  It's neat to be the member family feeding the missionaries after so many people fed us on our missions.
• Our stake had a road show night this past weekend.  Our branch did at little skit based on the book, "You Are Special."  I wrote the script and Drew played the main character. Everyone put lots of dots on him to mark him as bad because nobody thought he was special.  By the end of the play he had learned that what others think doesn't matter, he just needs to remember that he is a child of God and that makes him special.  All his little dots started to fall off, one by one.  We did really well and it was kind of fun to get together in a huge stake.  We haven't been actively involved in an family centered LDS group that large since before Italy- really since high school.  It was kind of fun to be a part of such a big group...once in a while at least. :)

• The moose are loving the streets of Anchorage more than ever as the snow is so deep now.  Often we come around a corner in our neighborhood and find the moose have climbed up on snow piles to reach the branches.  Unfortunately sometimes they end up climbing up on cars, and one baby moose even climbed up the snow mounds to get on someone's roof the other day.  I keep thinking I might have a close encounter with one while I'm walking to and from work, but so far I can usually see them from far enough away that I can take a detour to avoid them.  
• Finally saw Mt. McKinley the other day.  Even when we were in Denali National Park it was too cloudy to see it.  Sometimes on clear days while driving into Anchorage I have looked for it.  I would always wonder if maybe I saw it.  I finally did see it from the summit of Flattop when we hiked it the other day.  It was just peeking through the clouds but it was so drastically bigger than any other mountain, it's funny I ever questioned if I had seen it or not.  You will definitely know it when you see it.

• Drew is still skiing as much as he can.  This past week we had a sunny, warm day at Alyeska and even I went along.  We are lucky enough to have some hook-ups, so the entire excursion was free.  I remembered a lot from the few other times I have been skiing and I think I am doing a lot better than I did before.  Hopefully we'll go again together sometime next week.

• The absolute highlight of this last month was finally getting to see the aurora borealis in real life.  I have been trying to catch it ever since we moved to Alaska.  Apparently March is a great time to see the aurora, and this March has been one of the best in a long time.  (Record breaking snowfall?  Best Aurora viewing in years?  How lucky are we to be up here this winter?!)  Not only does a good solar storm have to be going, but it has to be a clear enough night to be able to see it, and the moon can't be to bright.  Then Drew and I both have to not be working so we can get a little ways out of the city to enjoy it.  Everything came together the other night though, and we were treated to a spectacular show.  We pulled off the Old Glenn Highway north of Anchorage with several other people, bundled up, and watched for as long as we could stand the cold.  I don't even know how to describe it.  When you first catch a little bit of it you just think, "Is that it? Am I really seeing it?"  But then it just grows brighter and bigger and it starts moving just like you've seen on tv sometime.  It just comes out of nowhere and goes absolutely crazy, then vanishes as fast as it appeared.  Right when you think, "Ok that was cool, but I'm freezing.  Better get in the car and go home,"  that's when it just starts going absolutely ballistic again.  I had seen pictures and video of the lines sweeping back and forth over the sky, but I had never known that the entire sky can be filled with the aurora, and you can actually look straight up into the eye of it.  It's like beautiful colored light is just raining down on you.  There is just no real way to describe it.  You just have to be lucky enough to see it yourself.  The pictures below are not ours.  We definitely don't have a nice enough camera to get decent pictures of the northern lights.  These are pictures other more talented people have taken in the last month or so around the state.  I tried to choose ones that looked similar to what we saw.  The neat thing about seeing the northern lights is that even jaded old timers here still go crazy when the northern lights come out.  Wildlife? The Iditarod?  Fur Rondy?  They don't care.  But everyone loves the aurora.  

•  The ice is melting on the Turnagain Arm.  I've decided my favorite view of this road is when the ice is just a thin rocky layer broken up with pools of glass-like water, reflecting the sun as it rises over the mountains.  Snapped this one on the way to church:

 What can we say?  We love living in such a beautiful place.

Iditarod Ceremonial Start

 Just as Fur Rondy is wrapping up, the Iditarod gets started.  We bundled up and headed right to the starting line on 4th Avenue for the ceremonial start.  It was snowing...of course...but we managed to get pretty close to the starting line and watched a few of the first teams take off.

 Later we headed farther down to watch them go around a corner.  While we were walking we stopped while a dog team crossed the street and got to be right up near them.  The ceremonial start is a lot of fun.  The mushers are waving and the dogs are so excited to get started they weigh them down more by adding a second sled and letting a person ride in the basket.  The next day they do the restart a little farther outside of Anchorage and that's when the real race gets started.

 I've been reading a lot about the Iditarod and I found out that when they round the corners of downtown streets in Anchorage a lot of times the dogs are going too fast and at least one of the sleds turns over.  We were lucky enough to get to see one flip.  They got going again soon enough.

It was fun to see everyone treating the Iditarod like a football game.  There were lots of people tailgating in the snow.  Some of the mushers even stopped and fed their dogs hot-dogs people were cooking.  It was a lot of fun.  We followed the Iditarod in the newspaper and it was exciting to see that the winner was Dallas Seavey, the youngest musher to ever win the Iditarod.  He's 25 years old and both his dad and his granddad competed this year as well.  His dad is a former winner and his grandfather competed in the very first Iditarod.  It's such an intense race...we felt lucky to actually see it start.  It really is the last great race on earth.