This was my seventh trip to the Wrangells and more than anything, it confirmed my suspicions from the previous six outings that this place is indeed the greatest skiing on earth. Of course the greatest skiing is all relative, but to me this means the area with the most terrain, most options, best views, best chances of finding good snow and the fewest number of people. The area is the size of Switzerland and for the first week of April we were sharing it with maybe 100 other people, although we never saw any other ski tracks aside from our own.
It’s impossible to put this this place into scale with photographs, but here are 4-5 turns out of several hundred more to come on the same run. “Spreading out” means everyone gets their own clean line.
I call it “the Wrangells” because I’m too lazy to type out Wrangell-St.Elias National Park & Preserve, and technically I’ve done the majority of my skiing in the St. Elias range. The park is made up of parts of three mountain ranges (Chugach, Saint Elias and Nutzotin) and all of the Wrangell range. The Wrangell range has some of the highest peaks, but also gets less snow than the Saint Elias range, which is right on the coast of southeast Alaska. At 13.2 million acres, the park is too vast to explore on foot, so it helps to have friends with planes, especially a Turbine Otter like the Ultima Thule Lodge has.
The Turbine Otter getting into its PJ’s after a big day of flying skiers around.
For a variety of reasons, I only got in five days of skiing on this trip, which is like taking a single lick off of a five-gallon bucket of ice cream. I’ll often allocate 3-4 weeks and even then you are blown away by how little terrain you skied when you see what you missed on the flight out.
This trip was the forth annual Wilderness Ski Week which was organized by Wild Alpine and based out of the Ultima Thule Lodge, which is buried about 90 miles into the park itself. The lodge is located right on the Chitina River, so you can see the St. Elias range out the front windows and the Wrangells out of the back. Ski Week is traditionally held in the first week of April, which seems to be a magical time for snow quality. A common weather pattern that time of year is cold nights and clear days, which results in endless recrystalized powder on all aspects. A catch to this masterplan is that you can often get milky weather, but by landing on flat lakes, the plane access is usually quite reliable. In twenty days of Ski Week over the last four years we have only missed half a day, and with long daylight hours, we were able to stay out late and make up for it. You get a butt-load of skiing for sure!
Heading out across a lake to climb and ski the peak in the distance. It was good.
While this area has some of everything from steeps to mellow cruisers, what I really like up there is the huge, monster runs that you might only be able to find in Europe, except there are no cigarette butts, huts or trams. Towards the end of this trip we skied a run whose first pitch alone rolled on for a good 5-10 minutes of solid turns, and on a previous trip when we thought we were going to be late of the plane pick-up Tyler Reid and I nonstopped a run for a solid 28 minutes of powder. It is a surreal experience to go from a high peak through a headwall, into a bowl, across the aprons, down into a gully which leads to an even tighter chute which then eventually turns back into an apron before ending up on a massive braided river valley. It is like floating through eco-zones on skis and in powder.
This is the first commercial week of the season for the Ultima Thule Lodge and although it is fully staffed up, they are also busy getting their various systems back up and running after going through a winter hibernation. Although it was around last year, I was able to sneak into the guest hot tub and sauna this year, which are are wood fired, hot to the point of pleasurable pain and deluxe beyond words. The view across the Chitina River to the endless mountains beyond isn’t too bad either.
Back at the lodge after a day of skiing… hot towels and cider are served.
The itinerary for Ski Week is to load up the planes at about 10:00am, fly out to a remote location and spend the day touring, then get a pick-up around 6:00pm and fly back to the lodge for dinner. Repeat five days in a row, or until your legs liquefy.
A photo gallery from Wilderness Ski Week 2015.
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