Backcountry Skiing..Your Winter Window Into The Chugach.
It’s been a complicated progression of vehicles to get to trailheads in search of powder. I arrived in Valdez cruising over Thompson Pass in a 1975 Ford Galaxy 500 sedan. And, as I write this story, I can’t help but chuckle at the fact that it was white! Since that time, I have been through a Ford Bronco, Mazda, Ford […]
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This summer I had an interesting conversation with a lady from Canada researching her grandfather who lived in Valdez in the 1900’s. He crossed the glacier a few times. Later he operated the local sawmill whose remnants are still visible poking out of alder just to the east of the bike trail across from the road to Old Town off […]
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Nice hike up to the Solomon Lake last night. The trail/road is in good shape. Looks like a great place to a take a pack-raft and paddle south into Chugach National Forest. At the end of the lake, some remains of a copper mining operation might still be found. At one point a tram ran from the present location of the […]
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My fascination with maps began in the Coast Guard where I was trained as a ship’s navigator in Orlando, Florida by the Navy. This was followed by a couple of years at sea in Alaska before washing ashore in Valdez in 1979. During that time I had plotted the ship’s location on charts using various means of determining our position, […]
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Before it became known as The Books, it was called Mind —k Basin. That name was attached to the entire mountainous cirque of the Heiden Glacier by an intrepid pair of local mountaineers in 1982. During that first ski trip to the basin, a clear sky at night greeted the pioneering pair outside their tents. Enhanced by their drug of choice […]
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Last month I caught up with Chris Larson, an old friend who lives with his wife Kellie in Hawi on the Big Island of Hawaii. Chris is a teacher at his church’s mission school and is still super fit. We began the day together paddling long and far looking for whales, occasionally spotting the telltale rising mist on the horizon. […]
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This is perhaps the largest documented avalanche to hit the city off Town Mountain. It completely buried the parking lot to the street and the entry way. Pretty impressive now as it was then. Read on about the possible trigger of such a massive slide!
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