Day 28 – 11/13/07 – Seattle Vs. The Blog

We had arrived at a critical point, 13 days behind in the blog, 7 days until the looming specter called “home” was to become a reality, a rare sunny day in Seattle beckoning to us through the windows of Alex’s apartment. Does one pay their debt to past glories or suck the marrow from the now? Give in to the willfully imposed burden or throw it all to the wind? This is how it played out for us:

I got up a bit early to get my blog on and pose for this painting by 17^th Century Dutch master, Johannes Vermeer:

The others began to stir. Actually, Gordon got up and jumped around a lot, Bryan got up and turned on his computer, and Brad kept sleeping. We made an agreement to get out of the house and hit the streets by 12:30. 12:30 rolled around, then 1:00, then 1:30…Brad, Bryan, and I kept typing, while Gordon sat in the kitchen stewing with anger, carving pieces out of the wooden table with a kitchen knife and making little stick dolls of the three of us, which he then burned in effigy with a lighter. Bryan was the first to smell the smoke, so he deftly disarmed Gordon and got him to calm down with no less than 4 karate chops, 2 spoons, a bottle of Jameson, and a shiny metal badge.

We ended up leaving Alex’s place around 2pm. The blog may have taken our morning, but the night belonged to Seattle, or so we thought. We walked from Alex’s house on Capitol Hill all the way into downtown Seattle. We went to Pike Place Market, home of the flying fish, Shoulder Cat, Remy & the Belting Hobos, and plenty of other weird shit.

We then headed to the Space Needle, a mecca for intravenous drug users since 1962. Just kidding, the Space Needle was built for the 1962 World’s Fair, and its top is an example of Googie Architecture. As if the name wasn’t enough to make you not take it seriously, Googie Architecture is a futuristic style from the 40s, 50s, and early-60s during which atoms, spaceships, and boomerangs comprised the creative muse. Not to be outdone by a bunch of sky-scraping futurists from the 60s, Frank Gehry designed his own metallic blob of insolence to complement the Seattle skyline. It takes a lot of chutzpah to poo out a baby blue, shiny purple, and gold train wreck onto Seattle’s most prime real estate, but Frankie G. ain’t afraid of nobody. Perhaps this quote from his wikipedia bio will provide a glimpse into the mind of this mad genius, “As a child, he would observe his grandmother every Thursday putting a live carp in a bathtub full of water to later make gefilte fish. Frank would observe the movement and form of these fish, which later would be an enormous influence and underlying theme in much of his work.” Other childhood events had equally large influences on Frank’s work, like when dad drank a bit too much Manischewitz that one Passover and decided to hide the afikomen in his ass. Oy vey!

This building houses a science fiction museum and a sort of interactive music museum called the Experience Music Project. Though we were warned about the hefty price of tickets from the locals, Let’s Go’s rave reviews spurred us on to this mysterious place. In an ongoing saga of lies and betrayal, Let’s Go told us that it would be open until six; it closed at five. Maybe they should call it Let’s Not Go or Let’s Come Back Tomorrow. The latter is what we decided to do.

We then parted ways. The guys headed back to Alex’s place to freshen up before going out while I staked out Antioch College, awaiting the emergence of my friend and former drum teacher, Justin Tomsovic. In the meantime, I headed to Starbucks and got a lesson in how to speak Starbuck from the girl behind the counter. Did you know that Starbucks is named for the pull-no-punches first mate of the Pequod? Did you know that Moby Dick was written down the road from my house in Pittsfield? and that the inspiration for the white whale was my high school Algebra teacher? Now that Interstate 90 connects Boston and Seattle, the circle is complete and Herman Melville will rise from the dead to terrorize the world with more 800-page books about whales. Sure, you laugh now, but when it happens and you don’t have a tattooed cannibalistic savage (or Maori warrior, as in the Patrick Stewart movie adaptation) to watch your back, you’re gonna bow down and call me Ishmael!

So Justin found me and we shared a bus ride to his home in northern Seattle. There we talked of music and life over a delicious meal prepared by his beautiful wife, Laila. Then I caught a bus back downtown to meet up with the rest of the crew. While waiting for a bus, I observed a street kid asking to bum a cigarette from an old black dude, who responded with a “Haaaaaeeeeellll no boy, you ain’t but nine years old…askin’ me for a cigarette, what I ought to give you is an ass-whoopin.” It was funny, in my head I pictured the man then pulling a 5-foot inflatable cigarette from his pocket and beating the kid over the head with it. (Disclaimer: despite the power of imagination, 9-year olds living on the street begging people for cigarettes is actually not funny at all).

We all met up at Smith’s Pub near Alex’s house for a few beers and some good laughs. Rachel Krefetz, another camp friend currently living in Seattle, was there to join us. We enjoyed the décor of light taxidermy and failed oil portraits, and it turns out that Alex Saunders is a master of African drum-making, who knew?

We then walked back to Alex’s place, on the way he told us about a local coffee shop where a man with a pierced, sweater-wearing iguana was one of the locals. Had I not just been introduced to Shoulder Cat, I would not have believed him. As it turns out, nothing is too weird for Seattle, because Seattle invented weird. As the rest of the guys went to bed and visions of sugar plums (wtf is a sugar plum anyhow?) danced in their heads, I stayed up until 4am writing a post for the blog, just like I’m doing right now. So which side won? Seattle is but a colorful, surreal memory; but the blog my friends, the blog remains…

Day 27 - 11/12/07 - Escape from Vancouver

Attempting to sleep off the seafood/driving induced fever, we stuck around the hotel for a good portion of the morning. Once our stomachs were settled, we ventured into the city to see Stanley Park and the aquarium. Stanley Park is absolutely the most beautiful city park I have ever seen. It is like a rain forest within a city. Tall trees, bushes with lush leaves and vines abound. The drive to the aquarium took us around the perimeter, where we looked across the bay to the city and the mountains on our right while admiring the forest on our left.

By the time we found a parking lot, we felt like we were in the midst of the jungle. With our eyes to the canopy, we wandered into what looked like the set of some twisted claymation slasher. A commanding Mrs. Gingerbreadman stood victoriously on the second floor of her house, rallying the gingerbreadman troops who surrounded her house. In the fields, there was an army of slain Santas. This little park was probably for kids, but it seemed that it would make any normal child break down in tears.

Convincing the aquarium ticket-salespeople of our student status, we immediately began ogling sponges and small fish while hordes of screaming seven-year-old girls made oral communication temporarily impossible. We split up for the afternoon exploring the shark tank, giant Amazonian river fish tank, bat cave (with a camera we could manipulate), rainforest (with sloth!), and the outdoor habitats of sea lions, harbor seals, dolphins, sea otters, and beluga whales. The otter feeding was adorable (they eat ¼ of their weight per day!) and the whiteness and smoothness of the beluga whales looked unreal, like accomplished CGI.

From Stanley Park, we found our way to Kitsilano, the crunchy corner of the city. Brad and Bryan were still plagued by the seafood pasta, so we found a vegan place "Sejuiced" to chow down. We silently filled our bellies hoping that the Salvation Army we saw on the drive in would be open for us to finally purchase our cheesy Canadian tourist t-shirt. Apparently I was the only one harboring such hope, as I wailed in disappointment while Brad simply stated, “I don’t think the lights were on when we drove by.”

We drove out to Wreck Beach by the University of British Columbia before our descent to God’s country. Darren and Brad were tired, so they took naps.

Bryan and I descended a couple hundred steps through tall trees to emerge on a strange beach. Old felled trunks were strewn about as if they had been placed there for benches. Many of these trunks were standing erect in the sand, in the night appearing like sunken masts. Bryan went for a stroll while I meditated, thinking that this setting was straight out of Myst or the Legend of Zelda or Pirates of the Caribbean. We then climbed back up, drove to the U.S. border, and were greeted with an enthusiastic, “Welcome home!” America, fuck yeah.

Day 26 - 11/11/07 - Vancouver

The sun rises on a normal day in Vancouver. People hop on the bus to go to work, parents kiss their children before sending them to school, birds sing, cars honk, and the west coast Canadian symphony is in harmony. Tympanis rumble as a green speck meanders down the long highway leading into Vancouver. Cut to hotel concierge quietly filing papers. In the background, a car rolls into the parking lot. Obscured by shadows, the faces of the two potential guests perplex the concierge. She leans forward, asking, “Can I help you?” Gently swaying, the faces suddenly spring into the light, revealing ashen complexions and jaundiced eyes. They lunge towards the concierge, who screams in agony as they sink their rotting teeth into her pulsing neck…

Finally, after 44 hours of time-transcending, mind-warping madness, we roll into the Ramada hotel at noon. An epic round of rock-paper-scissors determines that Bryan and Darren will check in, leaving Brad and I to stretch and fantasize about an existence at under 60mph. Taking our time to wash the dirt still caked under our fingernails from Anchorage, Fairbanks, and 2000 miles of Canada, we check e-mail and lie down. Around 4pm, our stomachs determine that it is time to re-visit the “real world,” and so we wander in search of food. Smelling pizza, we enter a clearly recently-opened establishment. Bryan is doubtful of the quality and suspicious of tourist-gouging prices, but when the kindly joint matron offers a deal on two pizzas and a two-liter coke that were undeliverable ($9 for the whole shebang!), his complaints are silenced. Enraptured by the ranch dipping sauce, we enjoy our view of the Safeway across the street and begin to plan the night’s adventures.

Vancouver has a number of interesting neighborhoods, and some jaunts are suggested by Bryan’s friend. We decide to park in the poorer part of downtown, near Chinatown, and make our way to the piers and the main drag: Granville St. Deciding on this plan, we immediately take a wrong turn out of the hotel and spend an hour and half finding a place fifteen minutes away. Safely parked across from the police station, we walk through a neighborhood filled with condemned buildings and homeless people. I don’t think I’ve seen that scale of poverty in a city in a long time. One guy on a bike asks if we are interested in sampling the newest line of valium. We respectfully, and for Brad and Bryan’s stomachs, regretfully decline. We find our way to Gastown, an “area is notable for its distinctive late-Victorian architecture, and for some superbly appointed stores and restaurants” (thanks, worldweb.com), I find a coffee to ease my headache. Walking through Gastown, we find Canada Place, which looks like a mall on the water. It is too late/we are too lazy to investigate more closely, so we begin our stroll down Granville St.

Packed with high-end shops and restaurants, Granville appears to be the Newbury or 5^th Ave. of Vancouver, though it also has the characteristically Canadian occasional porn/adult toy store. After strolling up and down, we decide that we really need more rest. Darren and I decide to have a beer at The Landing, which Darren had been to once before and found the waitresses to be among the finest in Vancouver. Upon meeting our hostess, we immediately agreed. We caught the end of a football game and observed the incredible percentage of Asians in the place. Darren and I finish our pints, Bryan and Brad wait in agony to GTFOH, and we make our way back to the Ramada.

Darren and I decide more food is necessary and find a Korean barbecue place next door. The waiter is the friendliest we have ever met (second only to the Vietnamese waitress at Ray’s), as he explains to us the medicinal properties of Korean food and how to properly dry clean. Satiated, we arrive back in the room to find Bryan and Brad feverish and watching The Negotiator, starring Samuel L. Jackson and Kevin Spacey. Though a mediocre movie, the experience is made infinitely more entertaining by the fever-dream induced stories Bryan and Brad would later share. Sitting on the bed, I was laughing at a number of things from the movie, and Brad was convinced the bed had a coin-operated vibration device, as it seemed never to stop shaking. Bryan, meanwhile, understood the pharmaceutical commercials on TV to be mandating him to buy drugs that would boost his negotiation skillz.

Day 24 & 25 - 11/9 & 10 - Southern Flights and Northern Lights

In the morning, we sat around for like two hours before finally leaving the Browns' wonderful cabin.


We drove into Denali National Park in a vain attempt to see the peak of Denali. Instead we were able to check up on the park’s team of sled dogs which lead teams of rangers into the park during the winter off-season to make sure things are okay in the middle of the park.

After that quick detour, we hurried north to the horrific shithole of a city known as Fairbanks. This was the most disgusting, depressing place I think I’ve ever been in my life. The city is a dark, grey maze of strip malls and highways and gas stations. We dropped the car off for an oil change and went for a crunchy, frigid stroll through the fields of asphalt and concrete until the car was ready. As the sun set at 3 pm over this morose cemetery of a town, we took a leaf out of the birds’ book and flew south for the winter.

3:30 in the afternoon in Fairbanks

With me in the driver’s seat, we reunited with the Alaska Highway and meandered southeast at breakneck speed as the early northern night set in. The skies cleared amazingly as we went, and the enormous audience of the stars took their seats high, high up. We flew down through Tok, where we first split off to go to Anchorage, and continued nearing the Yukon border as the hours went by. We finally crossed back into Canada after a meaningless exchange with the customs officer and we were back in the Klondike wilderness.

When we left Alaska, I was sad that we hadn’t seen the Northern Lights during our trip. It was an almost impossible task, when you didn’t know what you were looking for, waiting for both the Sun’s and the Earth’s weather to synchronize with a solar flare-filled cloudless 18-hour night, every second of which you spend staring for amorphous, glowing clouds. It seemed significant to me that this night, the last night we’d be in the right latitudes, was utterly without moon or cloud. From the driver’s seat, I had a view out the left side of the car looking North and East, and I spent almost every minute of the drive looking out at the sky, swerving into the wrong lane of the dark, empty road. Because Darren had already seen them once before, and Gordon didn’t care at all, Bryan and I were the only ones who really wanted to see the Lights. We’d stayed up late on all the cloud-free nights, outside in the freezing air waiting, while Darren and Gordon slept in the tent or cabin.

Unfortunately Bryan was on the wrong side of the car and Gordon was behind me, so I asked him to keep a look out so that I didn’t go off the road, but he didn’t really care, so he rolled his ice-covered window down once or twice every four hours. I opted to keep looking then, and tried to not go insane every time I saw anything, not anxious to repeat another episode of screaming about a cloud caught in the light of a maintenance shed. I had to keep myself under control when I thought I saw a peculiar glow along the Northern horizon. I had everyone look, and they said it was just a city or town on the other side of the mountains there. We kept going, but I kept looking, and kept thinking that glow looked stranger and stranger. I realized suddenly that there are absolutely no towns and cities of that magnitude in the Yukon territory, and decided to swerve to a stop on the side of the road. I got out of the car while everyone else sat waiting, wondering what I was doing. From outside the car, the glow was much, much brighter. It was too high in the sky to be a city. I then saw that the ‘horizon’ which I thought were the dark mountains against the sky, had stars all over them, and that this was just the sky itself UNDER the bottom of the lights. I stepped back and saw the light curving in an absolutely mind-destroyingly massive curve from east, south towards us, then back northwest, curving around what I knew, far in the distance, was the earth’s northern magnetic pole.

This all took place in about 20 seconds, and I ran back to the car and started shouting in a hoarse whisper, “I think this is it! I think these are them! I think this is it!” Everyone got out of the car and joined me on the other side of the road, and before our eyes, this colorless glow against the sky, turned a vivid sea-green from the bottom up, like 100-mile-tall flames that licked the stars. There was some quiet gasping, then about a full minute of complete silence, followed by laughter and deafening screams. We shouted into the frozen wild and listened to the echoes, and reached out for the giant green curtains and danced across the shoulder of the road to keep warm. Gordon immediately went back to the car and slept because it was cold. Darren, Bryan and I were out in the below freezing air for at least an hour, just watching the Aurora shift and glow and fade. I thought it would only last a few minutes, but it kept going once we decided to get back on the road, and as I drove, I could still see it shining and burning against the big dipper.

This is pretty close to how the northern lights looked that night:

This is how my camera thought the northern lights looked:

This is us dancing along with the lights to stave off frostbite:

Our plan was to try to drive as far as we could that night before camping somewhere, or to at least get back to Whitehorse. After I’d been driving for 13 hours, I switched off and the plan became to drive through the night. After our last stop at a Timmy Ho’s at 4 am in Whitehorse, we set off for British Columbia.

We developed some really innovative ways to deal with the blinding light of the morning whilst driving 24 hours a day, which involved some combinations of hoods and pillows and jackets. My best two were putting my head inside my pillowcase while laying on the bare pillow, and my specialty, pulling my hoodie drawstrings tight enough so that it left a hole just big enough for my mouth and nostrils. In this way, we absolutely careened down the west coast of Canada, going over 900 miles in less than a day.

We had to stop at a gas station because one, just ONE of the billions of tiny rocks we drove over, decided to be a dick and puncture our tire, so we ended up using the first of our two full spare tires, deflated the loser one, smashed it into the back and continued.

That night we ended up stopping in a town called Smithers in British Columbia and treating ourselves to a nice restaurant meal as we were about to drive through the night and into our third day in a row. It was a very nice restaurant, and we got some lovely beverages, and I, in the worst decision I’ve made in my life since the time I tried to break up a bar fight in an Edinburgh sports bar, ordered something called ‘Seafood Pasta’. Bryan got the same thing, and it was great at the time. About 4 hours later, whilst en route to Vancouver at about 2 in the morning, Bryan suddenly did the “I don’t feel good” thing. Having my 2^nd vision of the car covered in puke in the last two weeks, I had to keep asking him if he wanted to pull over, and he gave so many non-descript non-committal answers, that I finally just pulled over, and watched him squat in the red glare of the taillights for ten minutes, with his hood over his head, not saying or doing anything. With no gastro-intestinal expulsion occurring, we still blamed the Seafood Pasta even though I felt fine, and he finally climbed back in the car and we kept driving. Bryan was supposed to relieve me of driving, but was in no condition to do so, so Gordon was nice enough to fill in that post, and I settled into the backseat, trying to ignore the horrible feeling in my stomach, and lay there not sleeping for the next 8 hours. I felt terrible when I ‘awoke’ in the late morning of the next day as we were pulling into Vancouver. The combination of seafood pasta and no sleep for days had taken its toll. We pulled into the parking lot of the hotel we’d decided to stay at, checked in, had some pizza, and immediately Bryan and I were both terribly sick for the next couple days.

-Posted By Brad

Day Twenty-Three - 9/8/07 - Denali Cabin

We finally said goodbye to Nick and friends this morning, leaving them chocolate, a note, and the Dior scarf from Ray’s cabin (see 11/4 post). With a bittersweet LGTFOH, we left Anchorage behind and headed north toward Denali National Park. As we left the city, snow fell harder and by the time we arrived in Denali, at least six inches had accumulated. The park itself is larger than the state of Massachusetts, and contains the largest* mountain peak in the world. *Everest is technically taller from sea level, but rests on a plateau, so from base to peak is about 6000 feet shorter than Denali's 18,000 foot vertical rise. The mountain is known to most Americans as McKinley, named by some random guy on the U.S. Geological Survey before William McKinley even became president. Then McKinley was elected president, was fatally shot, and the name stuck. The original name from the Athabaskan natives is "Denali" meaning "The High One." Today, Alaskans all call the mountain Denali. Early Russian explorers also called it "Bolshaya Gora," meaning "Wicked Big Ass Mountain."

Although the peak is difficult to see because of the swirling precipitation it attracts especially during the winter, we hoped to catch a glimpse before we left Alaska the next day. Our view at our lunch break more closely resembled an elephant’s hide at close range and so we kept on. Our lunch break was saved by a riveting debate on whether Brad should pee in the toilet or the woods. We declared the location had high human traffic and so we should concentrate our use to the toilet, Brad retorted that he and other humans are animals, and other animals don’t have toilets. Our argument was settled by our decision to pee everywhere.

Hours later, we pulled into a cabin at mile marker 229.8 with a large pile of split logs and a grey pick-up, as per our directions. The woman who answered the door informed us that the Brown’s (our hosts for the night) lived next door, at which point we realized that large piles of split logs and grey pick-ups are par for the course up there. Diane Brown (Jim Brown’s sister-in-law) greeted us and showed us into a cozy one-room cabin with a bed, stove, refrigerator, small TV, and excellent movie library.

We settled in our free, heated abode with our friend Sam Adams and eventually cooked a glorious pasta dish before admiring the stars. Dave Brown stopped by with the kids to say hi and wish us well. We closed out the night with "Glengarry Glenn Ross," an overly dramatic adaptation of a play about salesmen starring numerous big stars and featuring every combination of curses imaginable. We dreamed profane dreams as we prepared for the big haul to God’s country.

Day Twenty-Two – 11/7/07 – Living the Dream

The two longest constants in my life besides my family have been Camp Becket and snowboarding. I first went to Camp Becket when I was nine and I first went snowboarding when I was ten. I consider them my first and second loves, each giving me blissful respite from the unavoidable drudgery of the school year and allowing me to be a kid. I pretty much spent every fall drooling over snowboard magazines and watching snowboard videos, procrastinating on my homework, pretending my skateboard was a snowboard, daydreaming of that momentary silent weightlessness promised by the coming winter. After the snow had melted, I tuned out my teachers while visions of windsurfing on Rudd Pond, cabin chats, and playing Escape From Becket danced in my head. Long before I’d heard anything about Zen or the benefits of “living in the moment,” I experienced that first hand through snowboarding and the Becket Way. It’s really hard to be concerned about the past or future when careening toward a jump or trying not to get tossed off of your kay-board into the frigid lake by your counselors and cabin mates. My M.O. hasn’t changed much over the years, I still love snowboarding and Becket, though my impending adulthood has threatened my commitment to both; I still like to do what makes me feel good and brings me a little closer to my own mortality:

Fast forward to now…Only in my wildest dreams would I have thought that I would be in Alaska with three other Becket guys about to go backcountry snowboarding in the Chugach Range. I’d been hearing about these mountains for years and I couldn’t believe I was actually there. I also couldn’t believe that my punk-ass bunkmate from Cabin Mohawk (summer of ’94) who made fun of my girlfriend and tried to get me kicked out of camp was there with me.

Que ridiculo es esa?!?

I could hardly sleep the night before, I was so excited. That made it easy to wake up at 7am (when it’s still completely dark) and head to the grocery store for cereal, milk, coffee, and OJ. It was bizarre to see the local grocery store full of people before there was even a hint of light in the sky. I got back to the house, woke the boys up, and soon enough we were on our way down the Seward Highway to Turnagain Pass, about an hour south of Anchorage.

We had been turned on to Turnagain Pass by Eli, a lanky Oregon transplant who worked at the local ski store where Gordon and I rented our gear (Bryan and Brad opted to go with snowshoes, which we already had, thanks Dad!). Our original plan was to head north of Anchorage and do a similar sort of adventure in the Talkeetna Range, but Eli convinced us that Turnagain would have more snow, be safer, and easier to hike up. So we were sold.

There were about four other cars full of people getting ready to go when we got there. The advantages of backcountry riding are readily apparent: no paying for tickets, no $10 hamburgers, no crowds, no rich white kids pretending to be gangstas, and the guarantee of fresh tracks even days after the last snowfall. So you have to earn your turns by hiking, it’s worth it. We began our hike toward the summit at 10:45am. Though it was overcast, we could see the top of the peak we were about to climb.

It was a balmy 35 degrees Fahrenheit. We soon realized just how much we had overdressed and shed some layers. The track to the top was well-packed from previous traffic, making it relatively easy for us to navigate through the knee-deep snow. We had been in Alaska for over a week at this point, and we were tired of looking at the mountains through the car windows. This was our opportunity to get into some real Alaskan wilderness and experience it first-hand.

The hike got gradually steeper and the air thinner. Bryan, Brad, and Le Baguette turned around about half way up and Gordon and I resolved to get to the top of that mofo.

One of the things I love about the wilderness, mountains especially, is that one seems to naturally shed their trivial day-to-day B.S. when in such a remote environment. Gordon and I got above the treeline and had a great conversation about college, knowledge, and the looming question of “where do we go from here?” We seem to have had opposite and complementary experiences in college, so we both gained some insight from our time up on Turnagain. We kept a good pace up to the top, even though it was getting harder and harder to breathe.

We ended up arriving at the summit at 1:15pm, the same time as four other guys. They were really nice. They dug us some snow benches and we sat around chatting for a while. One guy, called “Crazy Craig” was from Vermont, so we had a little east coast connection. Crazy Craig, donning one of those perfectly round, grey Bollé helmets from the late nineties, was obviously the ring leader of the crew. He was talking about front-flipping off of the cornice, to which one of his winded, less-daring companions replied “Yeah, if you do a frontflip, I might do a method…maybe.” Another guy, who I’ll call “Pudgy Pete,” pulled out a plastic bag in which he had moose meat in the form of a large slim-jim. He began to munch on it gleefully as he extolled the supremacy of moose meat in the kingdom of tastiness. Gordon and I ate our frozen vegan Clif Bars amidst talk of hunting using one’s car as a weapon…yeah. We admitted that it was our first time in the backcountry and that the visible avalanche-remnants and holes in the mountain had us slightly nervous for the way down. The guys offered to ride down with us in a big group, but they were rearing to go, so I told them to go ahead because we wanted to savor the ride down after the two and a half hours it took us to hike up. They told us to follow their tracks, assuring us that if there was an avalanche waiting to be set off, they would surely trigger it before we did. They disappeared over the ridge amongst hoots and hollers, and I could not help but feel envious of these guys, for whom this was only the first of many fresh Alaskan tracks to come this winter.

Gordon and I readied ourselves, put on the layers we had shed earlier, and devised a sort of strategy for making our way down without losing one another. A wrong turn out there can mean spending the cold night with the bears, so we were very careful not to get lost. I cleaned the snow from my goggles. The clouds had rolled in during the short time we were up top and the snow was beginning to pile up as the visibility steadily decreased. We remarkably had cell phone service up there, so I called Alex Soroken, the friend who got me into snowboarding and sold me my first board, to let him know that the dream hatched in the backyard during 5^th grade was coming true.

I headed down first, trying to get a feel for my rental board before I hit the steep stuff. Those first few turns felt so good, I arched my triumph all over that thing and though there were no trees and I couldn’t really see anything, I spotted a little cliff and decided to fly off of it as fast as I could. I straight-lined it and jumped off of that fucker as hard as I could, letting out a rebel yell that would make Billy Idol proud…this is the stuff I live for. The snow was so soft and deep and the slope so steep that I couldn’t even tell when I’d landed. I flew over a few more mounds that I couldn’t see at all and managed to stay on my feet, it was absolutely exhilarating. I reached the next ridge and waved Gordon on. Gordon took a couple turns, went over the handlebars, and yard-saled the contents of his still-opened backpack all over the mountain. Then he gathered his belongings, put his skis back on, took a couple turns, and did it again.

As I watched Gordon’s boot tumble down the slope in front of him, I noticed the snow starting to fall harder and felt my quads starting to seize up from the cold and lack of motion. I began to worry, thinking to myself, “I’ve skied with Gordon before, as I recall he’s pretty good, why is he not staying on his feet? We’re the only ones up here, this could be bad.” I yelled out things like “lean back!,” “trust yourself,” and “it’s just like any other place you’ve skied.” To be fair, the guys at the rental shop should have given Gordon some wider skis, ones capable of floating in powder. Instead he got some ice coast slalom skis which cut through the snow like a hot knife through butter, not what you want in Alaska. Gordon soon adjusted and rocked the bottom half of the uppermost face. I breathed a sigh of relief once he got down to me and cited the awkwardness of the backpack and the inability to see anything as the reasons for his pokiness.

We continued on, section by section, trying to follow Crazy Craig & Company’s tracks so as not to get lost. We came across two guys who had built a jump and kindly directed us towards it. This was an unexpected treat. It was pretty small, but it had a nice lip on it and an ever-so-soft landing. I hiked it a couple times even though my legs were begging me not to. I spun off it and fell both times, but the landing was nice and fluffy so it didn’t hurt. Gordon took some pictures of it:

We wound our way down through the trees as the snow turned to rain, the snow on the ground got slushier, and the visibility increased. We kept going with the strategy of me guinea-pigging everything, jumping over the rocks and riverbeds, and then directing Gordon around such obstacles as he followed me down. In keeping with the dinosaur theme, we found a frozen brontosaurus on the way down.

It took us about an hour and a half to get down and hike back out to where the car was. We were wet on the inside from our sweat and wet on the outside from the snow/rain. We smelled…bad, but it was a glorious and triumphant odor. We found Brad and Bryan in the car, dry and comfortable. After slapping some five and shedding all of our wet clothing, we mixed small doses of ibuprofen and Jameson to give ourselves a remote chance of not being horrendously sore in the morning (kids don’t try this at home, desperate times call for desperate measures). Given that this expedition was preceded by three whole weeks of road trip sloth in which the farthest we walked was from the car to the gas station, our bodies held up remarkably well.

So we drove back to Anchorage, narrowly avoiding running out of gas, and decided on a celebratory dinner at our old haunt, the Bear’s Tooth. Given that we were in Anchorage for less than a week in total, it is absurd how many times we went to this place, it was beginning to feel like home. The food and drinks were delicious, our waiter was a ninja with a pepper-shaker, and there was no better way to end our magical time in Anchorage.