Weekend

Friday evening sunshine at Abercrombie

 Some pretty pictures from the weekend - it was a busy one! A weekend of weather highs and lows. Friday was glorious, and Saturday unbelievably stormy.  But the weather cleared off Saturday evening and it got glorious again.  Best of all the storm brought snow.  Enough snow low down that on Sunday morning Nora and I got to go skiing at the golf course.  First time skiing at the golf course in 2 months!

I am chagrined to admit I brought Nora Stuey's skate skis to the golf course by accident.  I was wondering why she was having a hard time climbing hills.  It is pretty hard to classic XC ski with no wax or scales on the bottom of your skis!  Sorry about that Nora!  Afterwards Nora laughed when I pointed it out to her, 'I was wondering why it was REALLY hard to go up the hills'.
Patrick

Sunday afternoon dog hike

Saturday storm waves at Termination Point

Arthur Rackham trees at the golf course

Saturday's rain was Sunday's snow

Liquid Sunshine

Yesterday morning it was lightly raining and the weather outside looked pretty grim.  The weather report called for clearing skies but it took a leap of faith to pack up the skis in the car when I left for work.  It was cold enough that I knew it was all snow on high.  I had my fingers crossed that it would actually clear off as predicted.  And it did!  Thank you weather gods!

It was still lightly snowing as I climbed up the mountain after work.  But the sun was poking through and I could see wide swaths of blue sky.  The falling snow lit up in the sunshine was quite a dramatic visual.

Up on top the snow was dry and fast.  Totally worth the climb up!  Patrick

Back to Downhill Skiing

With the Tour of Anchorage completed there is no longer any need to train on XC skis.  Life returns to normal and I don't have to ski 'desperation' snow on my skinny skis.  The snow is still pretty desperate, but now, at least, I can use hardy downhill ski gear to negotiate the ice and slush.  A couple of days ago I realized that I had not gone downhill skiing in almost 2 weeks!

Yesterday it was snowing pretty hard for my after work skiing and while the ski conditions were actually pretty good - it was hard to see where I was going!  Down low I had the trees, exposed ground and bushes to create points of reference but up high it was all white.  A total whiteout.

On the way up I looked closely at all the alpine plants poking up through the snow.  It looks like the crowberry is actually blooming - or are those mummified flowers from last year?  Hard to believe an alpine berry would bloom so early - even the high bush blueberries in the park are just barely budding out.  Patrick

Tour of Anchorage 2019

Brian, Ray and I just before the start of the race

This past weekend I visited with my friends Ray and Julie and their family and raced in the Tour of Anchorage ski race.  The race was on Sunday and I spent the first part of the weekend in a heightened sense of nervousness about the race.  Then the last few hours after the race it was all euphoria that it was done and I survived.  But for a couple hours there - 2:43:07 to be exact - it was pretty painful.

It was a painful race because while I was in great shape, I did not have a lot of time on snow.  Basically I skied about as fast of a race as I usually do but my muscles were not ready for it!  I also did not get to draft behind anyone at all until just before Westchester Lagoon when I hooked up with the guy in yellow seen in the photo below.  We skied the rest of the race together alternating who lead.  Unfortunately he beat me at the end - he is also 34.

 I checked my old times and I was only 11 minutes slower than my first race in 1998 - and I was 6 minutes FASTER than my 1999 race.  But 1999 is the race where I bonked and almost did not finish.  It remains my slowest time.  So time wise, I had a good race.  And I even got third in my age category.

But my favorite parts of the trip were the beers immediately after the race in the beer garden and hanging out with Ray and Julie.  The first night, when it was just Ray and I, he cooked a gourmet meal with lots of kale in it for just the 2 of us!  Patrick

20K to go and it looks like I am HURTING

In the beer garden shortly after the finish

Smiling through the pain

Brian and I in the beer garden

My Tour of Anchorage Goals

This is me 21 years ago in my first TOA - I still wear the same suit and might even ski the same skis!

It's time for my annual trek to Anchorage for the Tour of Anchorage cross country ski race.  I'm entered in the 50K 'freestyle' category.  There are other distance categories, but I'm in the one that starts at Service High, goes up to the top of the Hilltop Ski area, and then all the way down to almost downtown Anchorage and then back out past the airport on the coastal trail to finish at Kincaid.  It is a very fun race and kinda cool that it is a point to point ski marathon that takes place entirely within an urban setting.  I do not believe there is any other ski marathon quite like it.

I only do the race to force myself to get into good shape for at least one point of the year.  Knowing that I have to skate ski for 33 miles against a whole bunch of Anchorage dudes forces me to train hard.  And this year it has been hard.  Kodiak has had no snow below 1500 feet since early January.  Meanwhile Anchorage has been having an epic snow year - so the Anchorage skiers will be FAST.  That said I am in good shape - I certainly have been climbing a lot of mountains to find snow - but my time on snow in XC skis has been limited. Mountain biking and mountain climbing do not make up for snow time!

So this year my goals are a little more modest.  First and foremost I do not want to embarrass myself - I got to finish the race!  If I finish the race under 3 hours I'll be happy!  Top five in my age category would be nice too.  This year, like last year, it has gotten much harder to get an age category medal at the tour because they condensed the age categories from 5 to 10 year increments.  Last year I was 4rth in the 50-59 age class.

Anyway, no matter what happens, come Monday I'll be happy and in shape from training for the Tour.  The 'getting in shape' goal has already been achieved!
Patrick

Kodiak snow conditions

Putting someone in the landscape

Yesterday I posted a panoramic landscape picture of Heitman lake.  There was no one in the photo and consequently it was sort of boring. Without anyone in there it was also really hard to assess the scale of things in the picture.  The lake did not look very big.  So yesterday I decided to put someone in the photos, and since I generally ski alone - it had to me.  More self timer, ski selfies!

But for these pictures I created a number of pictures to stitch together and used the one with me in it for just one of the frames.  I set the camera to take 3 photos in succession and I was kind of hoping that if I stitched all of them together you would see multiple copies of me skiing away in a rapid fire sequence.  But it was not to be - the panoramic stitching software chose the closest picture of me every time and obliterated my clones from the other frames.  Oh well.

The resulting panoramic pictures are still not all that exciting but I think they are more interesting with someone in them!  Patrick

More Snow and Skiing

Shelly Lake cirque

Some more pretty Kodiak snow pictures and a video from the past week.  They make it look like Kodiak is a winter wonderland when it most definitely is NOT.  Not this winter anyway.  All these places took a lot of work to reach.

The bottom photo is of Heitman Lake and I was really happy to discover it has good XC ski conditions. It is only a half hour hike up from the road, and it only takes a 20 minute drive to get there.  So that is actually pretty convenient!  The top two photos are from Sharatin - I went back up there on Sunday.

I also tried to post a 10 second video of Nora skiing on Sharatin Saturday.  I hope it works.  I seem to remember that in the past videos did not work very well on the blog.  I like the video because you can see the sea behind Nora as she skis down.  It looks like she is skiing above Lake Tahoe or something.  Patrick

The big bowl on Sharatin - that's east side side snow trying to get over the summit to the west side

Heitman Lake - and my beat in 'gerbil' XC ski track