AK Powdery Snowy Goodness

After getting very little snow in January and February, the Anchorage area got hit with not only some good snow fall, but also some awesome sunny days.  This just happened to coincide with my buddy Jeff's visit down here for training, and for skiing.  In an 11-day stretch, I ended up skiing 8 of those days.  What follows is the confluence of amazing weather, snow, and people...not all of which was captured photographically.  As usual, Jeff is a much better photographer than I am and took all the pictures.

 Our first schralp was up Flattop's Peak Three.  I'd never climbed it, but it's a well-known post-work ski for people living up here in Anchorage.  Our climb just happened to coincide perfectly with sunset.

The snow wasn't spectacular, but was good in spots.  I was stoked just to have gone from working to 30 minutes later climbing and skiing in spectacular mountains.

We hit up Hatcher's Pass over the weekend.  The snow was pretty sun-baked - we had one run in some pretty tough conditions.  The weather was gorgeous, though, and the mountains amazing.

We met up with this little guy while eating lunch up on Hatcher's.  Not sure what he is exactly, but he digs buffalo parmesan sandwiches.

More Hatcher views.

After Hatcher's we hit up the Turnagain Pass area with a guy I'd met when I was deployed to Saudi Arabia, where we mutually longed for snow and skiing.  This is us hiking up Sunburst, once again in bluebird conditions.

Headed down on our first run.  The terrain down at Turnagain is big.

Really big.

And I was loving it.

I think these are our tracks, but it's hard to say.  The snow this day wasn't super-deep, but its consistency was totally unexpected - 4 to 6 inches of powder on a smooth base that you could just rip down.

Ski train!  Jess, Jeff, and I got tickets on a train that goes for one day from Anchorage up to the abandoned mining town of Curry, stops for four hours to let people ski, then heads back.  Calling it a ski train is a bit of a misnomer - it's more like an 8-hour rolling tailgate interrupted by 4 hours of skiing.

Jeff and I brought our downhill skis for the ski train, which turned out to be a mistake.  There wasn't much downhill to be had.  What was out there, though, was deep.

The only day that could be said to have less than superb weather conditions was our second trip out to Turnagain.  There was some fresh snow down there, though, so we stuck to the trees for a low-vis schralp session.

A shot of our route down through the trees.  Top-to-bottom, Turnagain has lots to offer.

As I mentioned earlier, there were several other days of awesome skiing not recorded.  All in all, a phenomenal two weeks of skiing to make up for what had been a subpar winter thus far.