By Gavin Kentch
Skiing at this point in the winter occupies a space squarely in the margins. It is now the second half of May. Few people on the continent are still nordic skiing on groomed trails. Athletes anywhere outside a few small pockets of Alaska, Oregon, or the Rocky Mountains have turned to running, bounding, rollerskiing, or cycling; it is a season of transition for us all.
But here’s the thing: For those fortunate enough to be on snow right now, the skiing is really good! Take a look at this recent post from USST spring camp in Bend, or this one, or this one — that’s some good skiing.
In Alaska, meanwhile, there are nearly 18 hours of daylight in Palmer today. In the Talkeetna Mountains above town, Mat-Su Ski Club continues its yeoman’s work to extend the ski season well into spring, grooming three times a week on a snowpack that still measures well north of four feet. The trail network around the buildings at Independence Mine is not expansive, measuring roughly 3.5 kilometers total even if you include the grinding climb up from the parking lot to start the ski… but athletes have flown across the country to race on less, and the trails are more than hilly enough that the small loop punches way above its weight qua training stimulus.
Plus it is gorgeous up there. A decade ago, local skier and writing professor Shannon Gramse, describing the trails winding through historic mine buildings, intoned of the setting, “Imagine skiing through an Old West ghost town turned collectible Christmas village.”
I can’t, and won’t, improve upon that line, though I will also note that I am always put in mind of John Updike’s famous description of Fenway Park as “a lyric little bandbox of a ballpark.” And heck, I could go further here vis-à-vis Updike. Do the trails around the mine also “seem[] in curiously sharp focus”? Do they similarly present “a compromise between Man’s Euclidean determinations and Nature’s beguiling irregularities”? Reader, they do.
All of which is to say that I played hooky from Wednesday’s USSS Spring Congress meetings took a Very Serious business trip yesterday morning to bring back the deeply insightful firsthand reporting you find here. I began the day by waking up my children, and feeding them breakfast, and ensuring that their backpacks were packed, and driving them to school. And then wrote a few work emails on my phone before leaving town for the 80-minute drive up to the mine. So I was not on snow until 10:50 a.m., by which point the sun had been up for nearly six hours and the trails were baking.
But it had been cool overnight, and the trails were surprisingly firm, and, well, this is the most Masters-ski-quiver line ever, but I had both my Rossi clear base skis and my Fischer Speedmax Helium plus skis in the car with me, and it was definitely still Helium-plus warm out there, not clear-base slush yet. (Although my Heliums are officially plus skis, this particular pair has run super warm in my experience. Fascinating stuff, I know.)
The athletes present on the trails on a midweek late morning were precisely those you would expect: members of the APU Elite Team not currently in Bend; several folks from University of Alaska Anchorage; a 20-something sub-elite with APU Masters; a few local kids who had finished up the school year skiing Outside, then returned to the homeland for some May kilometers. There was this reporter, literally the only athlete out there in the gap between age 30 and age 70. And, finally, there was the incomparable trio of Kathy Christy, Berit Flora, and Sam Flora, somewhere between M9 and M11 (i.e., 70 to 85 years old), who had elected to spend their retirement driving an hour-plus to a venue that immediately greets one with a 139-meter climb from the car up to the main ski trails. If you were looking for a model for skiing at various stages of life, you could probably find it on the mine trails yesterday morning.
I skied for about two hours yesterday, which was good for embarrassingly few loops between sun and moderate altitude and the fact that there are literally only two 50-meter flat stretches of trail in the whole place, before heading back down to the car, and thence to spring in the valley below.
My time on the final long descent was 2:04, per the Strava segment (“Dog dodging downhill,” 1.31km long, from 1060m elevation down to 949m). It takes a 1:35, or an average speed of 50 km/hour, to crack the men’s top-10 on this segment, which features names such as Gus Schumacher, Adam Verrier, and Sigurd Rønning. There are a lot of good skiers in Alaska, and if it is May or November — notably the only two months represented on this top-10, which is shall we say atypical for a nordic ski segment — you will likely find them up crushing at Independence Mine.
Please enjoy some photos from May 15’s iteration of same. Click on any shot to enlarge and bring up a slideshow.
Skiing at the mine continues each spring until the snow gets too thin to make continued grooming feasible or State Parks plows the access road, whichever comes first. Here’s hoping that the State of Alaska Department of Natural Resources, Division of Parks and Outdoor Recreation, is a little slow on the uptake this year, because my goodness but this is nice skiing right now.
You’re reading this on Nordic Insights, one man’s labor of love dedicated to publicizing American nordic skiing. Last season’s GoFundMe is literally the only reason why I turned a profit in year one of Nordic Insights, and in turn the only reason why there is a year two of Nordic Insights for you to be reading now: I was okay with working for very little money to get this love letter to American cross-country skiing off the ground, but I didn’t want to lose money for the privilege of doing so. If you would like to support what remains a brutally shoestring operation, this season’s GoFundMe may be found here. Thank you for your consideration, and, especially, for reading.
