On Sunday, the local adventure racing club was having a low-key 8 hour adventure race.  Since the weather wasn’t great and some of my desired summer trips are on hold because of lots of snow in the mountains, it seemed like a great way to spend the day and beat myself up a little bit.

Ian and I paired up to compete against 5 other teams.  Darren’s course consisted of various controls around town, with each control worth a certain number of points depending on the difficultly/time involved in reaching it.  The object was to get as many points as possible. The course involved mountain biking, hiking in the Chugach front range, ‘ reverse orienteering’, and paddling Campbell Creek. 

It was a lot of fun. I managed to flip my packraft in Campbell Creek (with my bike attached to it), which was quite stupid and embarrassing.  Mental note: Do not try to step, feet first, into a packraft in moving water. The hiking part (in the Williwaw-Wolverine-Long Lake area) was a bit trippy because the mountains were completely enshrouded in low clouds. We ended up coming in late (and losing some points) because we chose to get the high-value control at Long Lake.  But no matter, we still did well in the points and we were glad we pushed out to the Lake.  You can view the results here. The point values aren’t quite right, but they are close enough. Our team name was ‘Ask Cory’ because when Darren asked Ian what the team name was he said - yep - “Ask Cory.”

For many of the controls, we had to take a picture to prove that we made it there.  Thus, I have a few photos from the event. And because I’m a geek, I also drew up a map of the controls and plotted our route.  Check it out:

Thanks to Darren for a fun, challenging course, and thanks to Ian for hauling my ass around town.

I know that many of the people who read this blog live in Anchorage, so here’s a little self-promotion…

I am organizing the orienteering meet this Wednesday evening, June 4, at mile 2.2 of Campbell Airstrip Road (north side of Bivouac Trailhead).  There will be courses for all abilities, including people who have never orienteered before.

Come on out and give it a try.  You can show up anytime between 5 and 7 PM.  If you’ve never done it before, I’ll help you get started.  All you need to bring is yourself.  Long pants (beware devil’s club!) and a compass are recommended for any of the intermediate or expert courses.

To get you fired up to do some orienteering, here is the RouteGadget race from last week’s meet.  I had a very good day!

Post-Meet Follow up

The meet was a success (at least I think so).  It was probably a little on the easy side for the experts and a little on the difficult side for the novices.  I thought that might happen, as a side-effect of me deliberately trying to find the best terrain for running.  Watch the Routegadget

On Friday, Tim K, Tim M, Benji and I went to Culross Island in Prince William Sound in search of crust skiing. The weather forecast was for clear skies and calm winds, both of which are required in order to create crust in PWS this late in the season. Even though there were high overcast clouds on Thursday evening as we motored out to Goose Bay, we remained hopeful that it would clear off.

The next morning the conditions hadn’t changed and the snow was still soft. So we grabbed our waxless skis instead. Touring around on waxless skis was fun, but a lot different than crust cruising. As Benji said, it only takes a few Fahrenheit degrees to change pretty-boy crust cruising into wanker tourist shuffling.

We reached the ridge and headed south. The terrain was just starting to get interesting when low clouds moved in quickly and enshrouded us in fog. We had no interest in blindly skiing off a cornice and plummeting to the valley below, so we were forced to turn around and follow our tracks back through the fog. After we dropped off the ridge, we were below the clouds. So we explored a little bit in the valleys down below before heading back to the boat.

No crust, no sun. But we were skiing in Prince William Sound (on a work day no less) so I can’t complain!

[Click the photo above to view this photo album.]
You can check out all Tim’s photos here.

I don’t like racing when I am out of shape.  After years of training being priority #1, its is hard to come to terms with no longer being at that level of fitness.  It is frustrating to ‘push the button’ only to find out that the button is broken.  Or even worse, to lose the button completely.    So I haven’t done much racing the past few years, except for the really fun stuff (orienteering, Tuesday Night Races).  I keep saying “Once I start getting back in shape, I’ll start doing some races.”

Well, I’m starting to realize that racing needs to be part of journey to get back in shape, not the destination.  Races provide the motivation to get out and train, even in the face of all the other life responsibilities. And nothing is better training than hammering on yourself for an hour or two, which I rarely do unless I have a bib on.

So to that end, I entered my first running race of the season - the Turnagain Arm Trail Run - on Tuesday night.  The race starts with about 12 minutes of uphill, and I was pleasantly surprised to be feeling pretty good at the top.  Then the wheels fell off.   The downhill pounding, the fancy footwork to avoid rocks and roots, the mental battle to keep pushing even though I was careening slightly out of control - it was exhausting.  It was also embarrassing.  This stuff used to be second-nature to me, yet I felt like a road runner on his first trail run.  Am I out of shape?  Yep. Getting old?  Yep.  Not much running off pavement this spring?  Yep.  Mentally, I packed it in and decided to just enjoy the run.  Towards the end, when the trail got smoother and went back uphill, I picked up the pace just enough to avoid getting passed by the first couple of women.  yeehaw.  congratulations.

After all that, I was surprised to find out that my time (1:03:34) was only a minute and a half slower than last year.   I guess I was out of shape last year too.  No matter, it was a good workout and it provided plenty of motivation to improve.

2008 Turnagain Arm Trail Run Results

I bounced back with a pretty good showing in this week’s orienteering meet on Wednesday.  It was a fun course with more controls and shorter legs.  I finished second, only 1:18 beind Ian.  Of course, Ian raced without a compass, just to keep things interesting.

Dan and Anne’s O Meet

Flashback to April 20, 2008: After a great weekend of crust skiing to Grandview, Skookum, and Bear Valley, with tons of snow and plenty of sun, it appeared that our crust ski season was finally kicking into high gear. I was looking forward to a few more weekends of great crust.

Now, here we are a month later, and I haven’t been crust skiing since (other than at Glen Alps) . What happened?? Our 2008 crust season was largely swallowed up by a freak two-foot snowstorm in late April, and subsequent cloudy weather. You just never can tell what the crust gods have in store.

As early May turned into mid-May I was finally coming to terms with the fact that the crust was not coming back and it was time to move on to summer. Of course, the crust gods threw another curveball last night: a clear, cold night followed by a sunny day. So, back on the horse.

This morning, Tim, Tim, Benji and I attempted to ski a place we hadn’t been before, but were thwarted by poor snow conditions at the trailhead. To be expected in May, I guess. So instead, we hit Turnagain Pass, which was as good as I’ve ever seen it. You know the day can’t be too bad when when your backup plan looks like this…

[Click the photo above to view this photo album. I didn’t take many photos, so I borrowed some of Tim’s. You can check out all his photos here.]

In the past few years, I’ve really gotten into orienteering. I love the challenge of trying to think critically about navigation and route choice with an oxygen-deprived brain, while at he same time running full-steam dodging Devil’s Club and deadfall. Hmmm, when I describe it that way, it sounds more like torture. But I assure you, it is a blast. Except for those times when I make a mistake, then it is incredibly frustrating. But most of the time it is fun. Really.

Another reason I enjoy orienteering is that I am still improving, unlike skiing and most other sports where I am already several years past my prime. My navigational mistakes seem to be getting fewer, which makes up for my lack of fitness. But on the other hand, each mistake I do make is now even more costly and aggravating. For instance, in the first meet of the season, I ran really well, and was almost keeping pace with Ian (easily the fastest guy at our meets). But near the end I made one mistake that cost me about 15 minutes. Ouch.

Another great aspect of orienteering is analyzing route choices after the fact. To that end, a few of us use RouteGadget to compare our races virtually.  We keep track of our split times during the races, then draw our route into RouteGadget after the meet.  Since we never see each other during the meet, this is the only way we can ‘race’ head to head.  It’s a little bit geeky, but it’s also pretty cool.

Here’s how you can watch our race from this week:

1. Click this link for Wednesday’s meet
2. Select the “Red” course from the “Select class/course” dropdown menu
3. Select all the names, using Ctrl-Click
4. Check the “Names on/off” checkbox
5. Click “View Animation”
6. Click “Start”

View all recent RouteGadget courses here.

View all Orienteering results here.

Back in January, while we were getting a bunch of snow, I bought a used bike on eBay from some guy in Utah. It arrived a week later, all boxed up. For the next two months, I kept thinking “I need to put that bike together before the winter is over.” Meanwhile, I muddled through the rest of the ski season, which consisted of a few nasty thaws, followed by cold temperatures and no new snow. The skiing wasn’t great for the last half of the season, but spring still seemed a long way off. I kept thinking that I had another month, at least, before I’d want to use the bike.

When the first week of April arrived, and with it a few warm sunny days, I realized that I was never going to get around to building the bike myself, especially during crust season. The roads were getting dry and the snow in town was disappearing quickly. It was time to get ready for summer. So I dropped the bike off at a shop, they built it for me, and I picked it up a few days later.

Well, that night it snowed about a foot. A few days later it snowed again - eight inches. Then, this past Friday it snowed again - 20 inches at our house. That Friday storm produced the third-most snow Anchorage has ever received in one day. It is snowing again as I write this. This is now the snowiest April on record in Anchorage, and this winter, despite mediocre skiing from November to March, is now the 6th snowiest on record. Crazy.

Clearly this is because I prepared for spring by putting my bike together. Now I wish I had put my bike together when it first arrived. We really needed the snow back then, when it would have lasted two months, not two days. Oh well, now I know what to do on November 1st - buy a new bike!

On my old XCSkiRacer.com site, I used to do a lot of Top 5 lists.  Maybe it is my competitive nature, but I have a compulsive tendency to rank things. This is in spite of the fact that I often look back at my lists months or years later and cringe (what was I thinking!).

This morning our week of perfect crust skiing weather took a turn for the cloudy, rainy, and snowy. So probably no epic crust this weekend.  Instead I must feed my addiction by recalling past crust cruising glory.   This was a tough list to create, because if I was ranking my favorite outdoor experiences of all-time, every crust ski would be near the top.   So here is my best attempt to whittle the list to my five favorite crust skis of all time (so far!).

1. Around Bard Peak This ski had everything: perfect crust, sun, glaciers, powder, Prince William Sound, great company, and a trecherous decent into Whittier on rotting snow!
2. Center Creek I’ve done this one three times now and its always one of the best skis of the season
3. Broad Pass The skiing on this one was a little bumpy, but the scenery was great and it was a really fun road trip.
4. Around Avalanche Mountain - My first real Alaskan crust ski adventure, although I wouldn’t do it again.  Skiing up an avalanche chute was dumb, dropping down over Powerline Pass on skinny skis was dumber.
5. Carmen Lake and Twentymile Glacier - An early season (February) treat from the crust ski gods.

[Click the photo above to view this photo album]

In Anchorage, if you tell someone you went skiing in Bear Valley, they assume that you were up above Anchorage in the Bear Valley that leads towards McHugh Peak. But there is another, less known Bear Valley. If you’ve ever waited for the tunnel to Whittier, you’ve seen it off to the North. It doesn’t look like much - especially in summer when it is a tangled mess of brush and swamps. But in the winter, with plenty of snow, it makes for a fun place to crust ski. Nobody goes there, probably because it is across the street from Portage Lake, which is the mecca for southcentral crust skiing because of its spectacular scenery and easy access.

On Friday, fresh off our ski to Grandview, Tim, Benji and I were discussing other places that would be good crust skiing right now. The consensus was that the Portage area was the place to be for the weekend. Tim suggested Bear Valley as a good bet if I wanted to go some place new.

So on Sunday, Ian and I skied up Bear Valley. The route finding on the first part was tricky - the river was washed out so we had to navigate lots of brush. But eventually it opened up into some really sweet skiing and great views.

The entire ski took less than two hours, so after we were done, we decided to drive down the road to Placer and ski up to check out the ice cave at Skookum Glacier. I could not believe the crowd of people out in Placer on Sunday! We saw about 50 people - and we didn’t even go up towards Spencer Glacier! We had a hard time finding a parking spot. What were all these “lycra-clad NSAA skate skiers” doing out there? Didn’t they know that Hillside was groomed last night? (Full disclosure admission: I think I was the only NSAA skate skier who was actually wearing lycra out there. Guilty as charged.)

Is crust skiing joining the mainstream? It’s hard to see why it wouldn’t when we get perfect days like Sunday.

Today Tim, Benji and I headed south to Portage hoping to finally find some crust in the Placer River valley. We’d received over two feet of snow at home in the past two weeks (in April!), but the Portage area didn’t get as much. Plus the sun has been out for the past few days, so we were hopeful that we might find some crust. Our goal was to ski up past Spencer Glacier, then up and over the ridge to Grandview. I’d crust skied at Grandview before but I’d never crust skied to Grandview before. Getting there is a little tricky. The train gets there by going through a tunnel next to a river gorge. Not willing to risk our lives by using the train tunnel, we had to go up and over a ridgeline, which actually wasn’t that bad if you know where to go (which is why we go with Tim). It turned out that the crust was bomber most of the way, and the ski was spectacular. If you want proof that I actually was on this trip, check out Tim’s photos.