By Tim Smith
It is hard to believe that it has been a whole month since I put pen to parchment and sent a missive off to the upper valley.
I was out recently with Running Club North, for their Wednesday night, “Fahrenheit Be Darned” run and was thinking about how much light we now have because, well — Spring is coming. Despite the temperature displayed at the entrance to the University of Alaska campus.
(There is something in Fairbanks called the “Forty Club”. Stand in front of this sign when it is -40F, in a bathing suit, and have your picture taken. I’ve seen people line up for the privilege.)
This has actually not been a great month for my running. I’ve been busy with my wife’s rocket campaign and missed a lot of runs. But I have been skiing. So I thought I would write about that instead. I have been watching a number of you (via Strava) and know that many of the miles logged by UVRC runners in the Upper Valley have been on skis. So a few words about skiing may be well received.
Before I came to Alaska for the first time, about three years ago, I mentioned the trip to Dorcas and she immediately responded, “Oh! — Birch Hill”. Birch Hill is part of the Fairbanks North Star Borough park system. But this park has effectively been taken over by the “Nordic Ski Club of Fairbanks”. The club grooms about 40 kilometers of trails for skate skiing. This includes about 10 km which also have lights for nighttime skiing. They have hosted a number of national championship and even a few international races here. And in my opinion, the grooming and the trails are up to the task.
Mid afternoon the place reminds me of Ford Sayer, swarming with kids. But in the morning I can have the place to myself; I’m often the first one to mar the perfect surface left by the groomers. But, ironically, it has been too cold to skate much. Some people tell me they put away their skate skis at about 0 F. I’ve tried skating at -28 F, it is like running in loose sand. It is a lot of work, with out much glide.
On the opposite side of Fairbanks, and near where I live, is the University of Alaska – Fairbanks (UAF). Most of the campus, 1,100 acres, is forested and filled with 23km of groomed trails, some of which are also lite. A friend of mine who is a professor at UAF list on his calendar that from 12:00-1:00 he is in the “White Conference Room”. Which means that if any student wants to talk to him at that time, they should be wearing skis.
I’ve had a few delightful night time outings here. Down the “T-field Road” to Smith Lake. Smith Lake itself is pitch dark, illuminated only by the stars and moon, and sometimes the aurora. A great oval, about a kilometer around, has been groomed on the lake. And then back home via the “Potato Field”.
But what I really want to talk about is backcountry skiing, because this is very different then what I do in the Upper Valley. There are a lot of places to go, including out the front door and down to the Chena River, but I’ll primarily write about three places I enjoy.
Goldstream Creek (yes I know, creek seems redundant after the word “stream”) in the summer will be a black spruce bog, or a “muskeg”. Marshy, meandering streams, beaver dams, ponds and pools, and (I expect – but I’ve not been here in the summer) a zillion mosquitoes. In the winter it is a labyrinth of trails shared by snowmachines (snowmobiles), skiers and dog-sleds. The snowmachines tend to keep to the old rail bed, leaving us skiers to follow moose tracks and musher trails.
I always like meeting a dog sled team. The dogs seem to be enjoying there run, like the exuberance of high school cross-country runners who are in shape and beyond the view of parents or coaches. The musher seems to have only a secondary, almost incidental role in the team. There is only the occasional call from the musher to the lead dog; “Gee” (right) or “Haw” (left) and a few more. But most of the time the lead dog is just running down the trail; the captain of their squad.
Another of my favorite places to ski is Murphy Dome. A “dome” is either a very large hill or a small mountain, which is rounded off on top.
If you head west by north west out of Fairbanks the roads get smaller and windier, then they start climbing to a ridge line. And then it stops. Behind you, to the east, is an old radar station, a precursor of the DEW line, but I’m here for the other direction. When you look west you see that this ridge, in half a dozen miles, drops into a broad expanse of muskeg called Minto Flats. Beyond that are mountain ranges, rivers and more muskeg. And 400 miles away, is the Bering Sea. Between that sea and this dome, there are no roads!
There are villages, dog sled & snowmachine trails, and occasionally an “ice highway”, but no roads. Murphy Dome is also wide open, an alpine tundra with miles of horizon. Down the ridge line is a place where you can see Mt. Denali, 180 miles away! This is the most wild place I know of, which I can get to within half an hour of our cabin.
Because of the wind, the snow can be very hard and crusty and I’m glad that my backcountry skis have steel edges. The snow is packed by the wind, and then eroded and sculptured by that same wind into “sastrugi”, hard ridges which can be tricky to negotiate.
Last week when I skied there it was -38F with a fierce wind. When I had my gloves and over-mittens off to take the below photo, I seemed to have gotten a little bit of frost bite on my finger tips.
My newest favorite spot to ski is on the Yukon River!
I spent a week in the native village of Beaver. Beaver is one hundred miles north of Fairbanks and seventy miles from the nearest road. You have to fly, snowmachine or dog sled to get there. About sixty people, mainly Native Alaskans, live there.
I was there to take care of radios and cameras for my wife’s rocket launch. She launched two rockets up and over an aurora. We spent most of the time waiting for perfect conditions. And during the day, when there was no aurora, I had little to do and so went out skiing. Beaver is on the banks of the Mighty Yukon River.
I started on a snowmachine track which headed up stream towards Fort Yukon – about 75 miles. But I was enchanted by the open river, so left the track — and found myself in 2-3 feet of powder! Which was not a bad things; since it was bitterly cold (about -35F). By wading through that powder I worked up some heat and kept warm.
Eventually I learned to read the surface of the river a bit better. But it still can be tricky. Sometimes I’m on ice, sometimes on sastrugi, sometimes on a crust which breaks through leaving me knee deep, and occasionally waist deep, in really dry snow. And sometimes I’m on “jumble-ice”. This is ice formed in the early season, which broke up when the river level dropped. Then that ice flowed down from the head waters and refroze here into a solid mass.
The Yukon River is not actually a good place for skiing, so why do I like it? I was thinking about this once while half a mile from shore and no signs of humans anywhere in sight. The sun was setting in that hour long golden process of the far north. The wind was howling and my fingers were aching due to the cold. But all I could think was, “This really is the Yukon!” Calvin and Hobbes have a book called, “Yukon Ho!”. The “Call of the Wild” and many of the other adventures I grew up with invoked the Yukon. As a boy, the Yukon ment adventure. And from wherever I was reading those adventures the Yukon was about as far away, and as mystical, as Timbuktu or Shangri-La.
And here I was, skiing on that mighty river, complete with wolf tracks!
I have had people wonder about my venturing out into that wilderness. Why do I think I can venture out in that weather and that wild, and feel perfectly certain that I’ll come back unscathed? Well, the simple answer is, I’m a Runner. We train to do things which are not easy, but are — in a way which maybe only fellow runners can understand — incredibly delightful and sublime!
If you would like to read more about my travels in Alaska, see my blog:
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Photos
1) Running Club North / “Fahrenheit Be Darned”. Note, Ryan Buttrick of UVRC is on the right, in yellow.
2) Night skiing at “The North Campus” of the University of Alaska – Fairbanks.
3) Dogsled encounter at Goldstream Creek.
4) “Sastrugi” on Murphy Dome.
5) Sunsetting over the Yukon River.
6) Skiing on the mystic and mighty Yukon River.
