In the Spring of 2007 Darrell Finlayson and I had plans to fly to a very remote Alaskan range to spend a few weeks freezing our asses off and skiing. The weather had other plans for us and our pilot couldn’t fly us in. I learned it’s always good to have a plan B and C when in Alaska. We had spent 2 weeks sitting around and our time was running out, we just wanted to ski.
Our next option was to fly into the Chugach from the Matanuska Valley with Mike Meekin Air.
Waiting to check in my luggage on the air strip.
We lashed our skis to the wing and crammed 130lbs of gear into the tiny Super Cub.
We didn’t really know where we were headed, but Mike said he had dropped one other party in this area and that they had reported that the skiing was excellent. That was good enough information for us at this point.
The regal Darrell Finlayson surveying our surroundings.
There was a lot to take in. We were camped in a long glacial valley that had countless chutes on all aspects.
We jumped on it and skied the blue line below at sunset. The red line was skied later in the week.
The snowpack revealed itself to be stable. The booting revealed itself to be deep.
We hung out topside and mapped out our surroundings and picked out lines to ski.
The turns were perfect for 2000ft in this 40 degree pow chute.
We moved camp the next day to get us closer to the upper head-wall of the glacier.
Our luxurious accommodations.
Next on the to-do list was the chute lookers right of the sun. It was 1500 feet long with a huge bergschrund and a 50+ degree entry.
Darrell named it “Naptime for Bunny”, it’s the line in red.
Deep snow made the booting slow.
We ridged out, ditched our skis and scrambled to the summit.
I can’t recall ever skiing snow that steep and deep. As usual, the pics don’t do it justice.
Drying out the gear at camp. The weather was excellent for most of the trip.
We brought a satellite phone so Darrell could call in to unemployment and report on his job search. He didn’t find anybody job opportunities on the glacier, but we looked all over. Here I am working out “issues” with the girlfriend at $2 a minute. Ski expeditions can get expensive!
Headquarters was near the arrow. The red line is a big traverse we did up onto Turtle Flats and back to camp.
This was the ski back to camp off Turtle Flats.
We took a rest day and moved back down to our pick-up location.
Most of the chutes in this area were S facing. We called this thing the Candy Mtn. Couloir. The walls were all chocolate and caramel covered with a rich nougat filling. It was delicious!
Darrell took all the stills on this trip. I shot some video, but not much. The filming season had been long and this was more of a vacation than a film shoot.
It snowed that night, just enough to freshen things up.
We spent our final day playing around on a mellow glacier.
We had a great time and skied some fun stuff, but we laid off the real serious business. Mike Meekin had flow by several times and taken photo’s of our tracks from the air. He was really impressed and said he’d never seen tracks on any of the stuff we skied. It would be fun to return and tackle some of the bolder possibilities. Like the shoulder below.
And this head-wall above the traversing ramp.
And anything here would be sporting.
We named this chute of the highest peak, the South Serpent. It taunted us all week, but we couldn’t figure out how to get to the base.
I’ll put together the video at some point and put it on the blog.
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