Saturday, June 26, 2010

Skiing in Alaska on Summer Solstice!



I decided to do a spur of the moment to Alaska to see my good friends Brooke and Mike! I had no expectations, so it turned into one of the most amazing trips. On summer solstice a friend Jake and I decided to hike up a mountain behind cooper landing, it still had a nice strip of snow the entire way down. I borrowed Brooke's telemark setup, which was quite interesting because I am not a tele skier. I had her little race skis so just arced some alpine turns tried to drop a knee, but was not totally successful. Hiking up we had amazing views of Kenai Lake and the Kenai river. Mountains just went for days as far as the eye could see. Alaska is really beautiful in the summer time very green, but not super warm, which made for great skiing. On the way up we saw some pretty large grizzly bear tracks, which made me a little nervous. I was also informed that there was a bear kill in the drainage that we had to walk out, but it was a few weeks old. As we walked down the drainage we started to see pieces of a moose, this was not a small moose either. There was definitely not much left to him besides legs and bones. We made is safely past the kill and onto the road for the walk out! It was perfect spring skiing and made for a great summer solstice day. Nothing beats being in AK for the longest day of the year. It never really got dark that night, we ended the day with some fishing!!!

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