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I had been waiting for months when I finally got a call from Alaska last month: The wild ice was here.
A high-pressure window of about two weeks of cold, sunny weather has frozen over Portage Lake, the terminus of the Portage Glacier, about 50 miles southeast of Anchorage, and it’s solid enough for ice skating on wild — or natural — ice.
“Skating on A-grade ice under a bubble is pure fun that makes you want to get straight to the point, even for those of us who live in Alaska,” said Paxson Woelber, owner of Anchorage-based skate manufacturer Ermine Skate.
A few months earlier, I had purchased a pair of Ermine Nordic skates, long blades similar to speed skates that attach to the bindings of cross-country ski boots. This compatibility allows skaters to hit remote wild ice, then switch to blades for skating without changing shoes and, as Mr. Woelber, “take you out of the arena.”
While figure and hockey style skates are designed for maneuverability, including direction changes and tight turns, Nordic skates are designed for distance. This longer, faster blade requires less effort to push, and its stability makes it more tolerant of natural conditions such as jagged or snowy ice.
But the problem with Nordic skating or any type of wild skating — defined as off and on naturally formed ice, regardless of the style of skating used — is finding good ice. Wild ice lovers credit late fall and sometimes spring for freezing conditions without snow, which damages the ice.
“That’s why it’s so magical: it’s ephemeral,” says Laura Kottlowski, a former competitive figure skater based in Golden, Colo., who I contacted in my quest for wild ice. Her TikTok and Instagram videos of her jumping and spinning in high mountain lakes have gone viral, and Ms. Kottlowski teaches a combination of winter climbing and ice skating as Learn to Skate Outside.
It’s Liar 101
I’ve been skating outside since childhood, mostly on lakes and ponds in the Midwest that I know well. But the kind of wilderness that Ms. Kottlowski and Mr. Woelber requires advanced knowledge of ice and safety equipment.
Preparing myself for the wildest ice skating of my life, I spent several hours watching videos in an online class on wild ice ($149) created by Luc Mehl, a stern water safety instructor who grew up in Alaska and switched from cross-country skiing to sledding several years ago as a way to avoid the risk of avalanches. Based in Anchorage, he is known for his skating safety training and amazing social-media videos of himself and other skaters sliding on remote frozen lakes.
When I contacted him by phone to discuss my skating plans, he had just returned from Tustumena Lake on the Kenai Peninsula, where, in an overnight trip, he had done eight miles of cross-country skiing and then about 50 miles of skating.
“Part of why skating is so rewarding is because there are no guarantees,” Mr. Mehl. “Because of its rarity, it feels special.”
He advised me to try out my Ermine slide at Westchester Lagoon when I got to Anchorage. There, about a third of the skaters don Nordic blades to ride around a large ice oval cleared of snow with long straights.
Accustomed to figure skating, I found the extended models to be fast but awkward. I mastered the technique of controlling a snowplow with the skis to stop before I attempted full speed. Surfing long side-to-side strides sent me drifting down into the pool, angled to the knife edge for turns in preparation for more remote ice.
Slide down a glacier
“The indoor arena has the atmosphere of a grocery store,” Mr. Woelber when he, Mr. Mehl and I set off with his stringy samoyed, Taiga, from Ermine’s workshop in a modest office complex in South Anchorage for Portage Lake the next morning.
There’s nothing grocery store-like about Portage, a lake about five miles surrounded by snowy mountains separated by glacier-filled valleys in the Chugach National Forest. Under bright sunlight, the clearest patches of ice reflected the landscape with the addition of a few skaters in the distance.
After carefully descending the rocky slope and over the broken ice near the shore in my cross-country skis, I clicked my blade. Luc lent me a pair of plastic-covered ice sticks that I could wear like a necklace, which—if I fell through the ice—I could use to puncture the ice, creating a handle to pull myself out. He also gave us a stick with a sharp tip, called an ice probe, to test the ice as we continued our journey.
“Two strong thrusts of the elbow,” he demonstrated by stabbing the ice, “and I knew it would hold me.”
On an ice scale from A to F, we skied on what my guide estimated as clear, black, class A ice with layers of class B like orange peel, and some class C patches of frozen snow. The cracks showed the ice was between seven and nine inches deep; Mr Mehl explains that four inches is safe. In the middle of the lake, a frozen iceberg locks up, used as an ice slide by local children.
We connected the smoothest sections as we descended onto the glacier, connecting the unscathed sections of ice in such a way with reflections so much like the adjacent mountains that the lake looked as if it had been surfaced by a Zamboni.
Winding around a point of land at the far end of the lake, we faced Portage Glacier rising in a milky blue block nearly ten stories above the frozen lake. After much gawking, we continued to the south side, gazing at the new greenish color of the ice, glistening and crinkling with the sun.
Because the glacier could break at any time, we didn’t get closer than 200 feet from its face while tensely watching a climber reach the glacier’s end point, or glacier terminus, and snap a bunch of selfies.
On the return, I tried to hide from the strong storm behind the neck belt of the polar and worked much harder on the pace. When I reached the beach, the parking lot was full of skaters, fat tire bikers and families with strollers.
As we passed, dozens of skaters were now heading up the glacier, most on hockey skates, but about 40 percent on commendable Nordics. One novice Nordic skater called it “scary.” His friend had learned ten years ago from Norwegian friends who, he said, “knew how to deal with winter,” calling it a “significant change” in terms of speed, distance and ease.
“I could never do all the turns,” he said with a laugh.
Ice is like glass
The next day we had another, in ski runner terms, powder day — meaning perfect conditions and hard to resist — prompting Mr. Mehl to suggest we test Kenai Lake, a long, deep, winding body of water on the Kenai Peninsula about 100 miles south of Anchorage, which he said was already starting to freeze.
There, beneath the floating glaciers on the mountain scales and beyond the moose tracks in the snow that lead to the shore, is ice that is rated A-plus: smooth as a windless day on the water, with the surrounding peaks reflected in the green surface mirror-like sea.
“Yesterday, we had a view,” said Mr. Mehl, however, was just as happy about the situation. “Today, ice!”
We could see open water about 100 yards ahead, but we stayed away from it, testing the ice in the occasional cracks. In some areas, small waves look as if they are frozen in motion. Others gently undulate like sand dunes. As we explored it on a calm, windless day, the lake began to respond with the roar and belly of a non-threatening aquatic peseindexatishan, which Mr. Mehl said it shows the natural expansion and contraction of ice. Occasionally, hairline cracks cut through the ice with a laser-like ‘zing’ and at least once the lake imitated the sound of a cow, adding sonic magic to our tour.
In October, Mr. Mehl started posting social-media videos of skating on clear, wild ice on snow-free lakes around Anchorage. But if Kenai Lake is my last wild skate of 2023, at least I’m skating towards sunset on an ice peak.
Elaine Glusac is a columnist for Frugal Traveler, focusing on money-saving and travel tips.
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2024-02-20 12:40:50
#Skating #Torrential #Clouds #Alaska #InfosrkClub
