By Gavin Kentch
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In the fall just about everyone’s fancy turns to thoughts of skiing, as Tennyson basically wrote. Which is to say: Who’s already on snow? Find out here.
Venues are arranged in, sort of, decreasing latitudinal and longitudinal order, starting in Alaska and heading south and east, but then sort of north again once we get into Europe. N.b., this is an extensive but not comprehensive list; I elided some locations in Canada and a few more in Norway because I had trouble finding good media to illustrate them.
Fairbanks: Probably the best early-November natural-snow skiing anywhere in the northern hemisphere, as is their wont
Birch Hill: Literally 34km of trails rolled, because Fairbanks. I mean, just look at this map. Also, yes skiers at University of Alaska Fairbanks have been doing intervals on snow already. The Methow was first this year (q.v., infra), but I am certain that Birch Hill has more total kilometers of trails open than anywhere else on the continent right now.
UAF campus trails: Also open.
Moose Mountain: Also open. Shoutout Tabitha Williams for putting lots of good photos in her Strava posts. Science and Environmental Journalism major right there.
Hatcher Pass: Not grooming yet, but getting close. Hopefully, ’cause we’d like to have FIS races there the weekend after next.
I skied there last week, to check off October skiing and keep alive a triple-digits consecutive-months-on-snow streak. It was… not great, and started with a 1.2-kilometer walk up from the parking lot on a plowed road.
Fwiw, here is Nordic Insights photographer Anna Engel on snow last Wednesday, above the historic, roughly century-old buildings at Independence Mine. This shot was taken roughly two hours before sunset lol: Hatcher Pass in the fall is typically home to very flat light and very not-flat trails.
A few more inches’ worth of snow have since cleaned things up a bit, though reading between the lines on these posts I don’t think you can actually put your skis on at the gate yet. Here’s what it looked like Saturday morning:
And here it is up at the mine as of earlier today:
Canmore: Frozen Thunder has been online since October 18
“I had been hoping to find some slushy, deeper snow conditions to practice on and I was thrilled to get all the challenging conditions I’d been dreaming of,” wrote Jessie Diggins of her time traversing the stored-snow loop in a recent blog post. She covered “something like 150 laps” during her time at the venue, she added on Instagram.
The full loop at Canmore Nordic Centre is 3.6km this year, per NordicPulse, with 77m of gain.
Methow Valley: They were grooming at Washington Pass on October 20
So this looks disgustingly nice. Also, good to see that the Greggs are easing into pro-skier retirement by towing a kid around a loop with *checks notes* 34m of climbing over 1.1km.
Sun Valley: Galena Lodge was rolled as of October 29
John Steel Hagenbuch was out in this for two-plus hours. It admittedly seems a little thin in spots, but also, that looks amazing for October. Also Fairbanks has 7.5 hours of daylight today, while Ketchum has over 10, so there’s that.
(Not yet: Grand Mesa, which had had skiing on Halloween every year since 2018; West Yellowstone, which looks distressingly dry right now; most other places in the Mountain West that are on my radar. And now over to Europe:)
Livigno: This year’s snow-farmed loop was rolled out on October 27
Click through to the above post if you would like to see some extremely granular Strava segments from a high-altitude early-season loop that has seen a lot of good skiers on it over the years.
Val Senales: Glacier skiing at 10,500 feet opened up in the first half of October
The earliest Instagram post from the venue that I can find for this fall is from Johanna Matintalo on October 14. Here’s Emma Ribom from earlier this week:
The track is in boustrophedon format to make the most of limited space, and I have to imagine that skiing at 3,212 meters is pretty rough (cite: extrapolating from my experience getting off the plane from sea-level Anchorage and promptly skiing around Soldier Hollow at 1,700 meters). That said, this looks very pretty.
Trysil, Norway: Stored snow loop opened fairly recently
It looks like 1.8km for the outer loop here, plus another 600m or so for the inner stadium. Condition reports, per Strava, from the famously restrained Gabriel Gledhill (his Insta story is screenshotted above) include “slushy and wet,” “really shit skiing,” and “more wood in the tracks here than at a gentlemans club.”
Idre Fjäll, in Sweden, opened on October 17. The American mind cannot comprehend.
Maybe not the longest loop out there — the Strava segment “Snöpremiär 25” is just 1.63km long — but I am nonetheless jealous as I sit here in snowless Anchorage. Also the segment, as of Monday morning, had 11,727 attempts by 331 people, or an average of 35 laps per athlete lol. Shoutout to local legend Edwin Franzén, who has 79 laps. On a segment that opened two weeks ago. Also shoutout to Casper Grindhagen for edging out Didrik Tønseth for the top spot on this leaderboard. Ski orienteering powerhouse Anna Ulvensøen currently has the fastest lap time for the women.
Muonio, in Finland, opened on November 1
(The nordic trail at Ruka is closed till at least November 10 due to warm weather. Sadness.)
Racing in this country kicks off with the Race to the Outhouse outside of Palmer, Alaska, a week from Saturday, if conditions permit. Wherever you are, think snow.
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