Skiing Blithely in a Blizzard

In my self-proclaimed role as the Lenore Skenazy of the Midwest, I got my kids bundled up to go play in the blizzard. After a couple of ground rules--yes, you must have a neck gaiter & no, you cannot wear gloves with no wind-resistant material--we headed out running and laughing down the street. No cars are out in these drifts, so yes, we can run in the middle of the street! I had my skis, the kids had the kicksled with dog attached, and I ran ahead so the dog would run and follow me. Over the dike, and down the bike path we went, laughing all the way. I tried to trick the dog into pulling the sled away from them when they weren't paying attention, so they would have to run after it, and they took every opportunity to fall in the snow and roll around like crazy people. We had a blast! I showed them how to check each other for frostbite & when Max got too much snow down his back, I sent them home.

It was really blustery on the bend of the river by the water treatment plant, so I thought I would just ski to the rocks and then turn back, but once I got into the more protected area on the next oxbow, it was just so pleasant and peaceful that I kept going, and going, and going.

What drew me on were the sounds. I could hear the wind gusting above me, and the trees were talking about it, some in a high screechy voice, some in low moans. Several times I heard a sharp cr-ack! Then I would check above to make sure I wasn't standing under a rotting branch--those do blow down in storms like this. Once I heard a deep knock from within a thick, scarred elm. The knots dotting the trunk looked like a face in agony, like a spirit was trying to get out of the tree. Strangely, I heard a kitten meow (though I couldn't find it), and faint murmurings that sounded like a conversation. The whole river corridor was a chorus of strange vocalizations, punctuated by these eerily intimate periods of quiet, when the horizontal snow fell vertically for a few moments. Then I could hear the birds--tiny sparrows nibbling on seeds, woodpeckers busy on the elm trees. I felt enclosed in a safe, special place at those times, and looked around in wonder, barely skiing straight. Enchanted, I skied much farther than I intended, stopping only when I came to the I-94 bridge over the Red River.

Turning back, the enchantment continued--I was amazed by the way the snow had driven itself into the vertical indentations of the bark on the elm trees until the side facing the storm was nearly all white. I was further amazed that I could be out in this weather and feel so warm myself. I'm accustomed to the heat produced by skiing, but this was unusual. I felt like I was enclosed in an electric blanket--that is how toasty I felt. It was deliciously cozy, like being wrapped in a quilt while looking through a window at the snow. But I was out in it. I stopped and bent down to stretch--snow that had blown against my legs had started to melt from the heat of my body, forming ice, snow had then collected against the bumps of ice--I was beginning to look like those elm trees.

Do the trees feel as toasty inside as I do? Many of the trees are riddled with small holes. What creatures are nestled in there? Do they feel warm? Or has their blood turned nearly to ice with the aid of some antifreeze-like chemicals? I paused and just let myself feel completely in and of the moment, like any other tree or plant or animal in this protected river corridor in the middle of a midwestern blizzard.

Cold gently tapped me, so I continued on. After nearly two hours, I was nearly back home, and as I rounded the last curve, I emerged from the protection of the trees at the same time my direction of travel became straight into the wind, and I bent my head as that wind drove particles of snow into my face, stinging me like hundreds of tiny needles, Mother Nature reminding me that she is not always as benevolent as she had shown herself to be earlier.

When I arrived home, I suddenly felt famished and exhausted.

A companionable ski with my son

After watching both boys play in the state orchestra, I went classic skiing with my younger son this afternoon. It was warm--30 above--and special purple wax was perfect. We didn't hurry and just talked the whole time. He tried explaining what "jailbreaking" your ipod is and other tech stuff. I learned a lot from him. It was pleasant gliding along side by side. All those winters of dressing him up and lifting him when he fell and cajoling and etc have paid off and we can just have a companionable ski together without me having to "teach" anything.

We saw a fat rabbit disappear into its den and a young squirrel and 8 other skiers. 

Dusk+ski=duski

Headed out on the trail in the late afternoon when my productivity at work was waning. The skate bed had settled and temperatures were warm, making for solid and fast conditions. I tried to keep the brakes on to let my body warm up properly, but every muscle was straining for release, so I gave up and indulged my need for speed. Ahhhh!!!!

I just kept going back and forth until it got so dark I could not see the trail anymore. Just like when I was a kid, playing outside until the street lights came on and it was time to come home.

It is a wonderful time of year, for tomorrow is another ski.

Exposed to the Elements

FAIRBANKS — Alaska State Troopers believe the 23-year-old woman found dead Tuesday in Fairbanks froze to death.

Blog readers: All my blog posts up until this point have been nonfiction, so you should know that this posting begins with a recent news story from the Fairbanks Daily-News Miner as a prompt for launching into a fiction story I'm experimenting with. Comments are welcome, since this is a first for me.

Fairbanks Woman Found Dead Tuesday Likely Died of Exposure

March 5, 2011 Fairbanks Daily News-miner

Kimberly Marie Rychnovsky was not dressed for the weather when her body was reported outside a home at 11:33 a.m, trooper spokeswoman Megan Peters said. Foul play is not suspected.

Troopers are doing a toxicology study, which would determine if Rychnovsky was affected by drugs or alcohol when she died, Peter said. As best as investigators can tell, Rychnovsky was outside on her own will, she said.

The temperature at the Fairbanks airport was 14 below zero at about the time Rychnovsky’s body was found, according to the National Weather Service.

Rychnovsky was a student at the University of Alaska Fairbanks at the time of her death and worked at the campus post office, university spokeswoman Marmian Grimes said.

In reading this article, I was reminded of a similar story from 20 years ago. I always wondered what led up to this woman freezing to death. I heard little bits of her story third- and fourth-hand from friends of mine that I skied with. You see, when I lived in Alaska, I had a social life that revolved around cross-country skiing in winter and bicycling in the summer. In my 20s, planning to meet a friend (or friends) to ski on a Saturday was as much about socializing as getting a workout.

Meeting up at the ski hut on West Ridge was a common plan because then no one had to wait in the cold for the others to show up. We'd wax our skis in the hut, drink some water--"filling the internal water bottle" as it was called, then when the group was together, we'd head out. We agreed to get going without talking until we were warmed up, and then we'd ski side-by-side, chatting about life. By the time we had started up the road leading to the T-field, we'd be all warmed up, our internal engine now producing enough heat to balance the heat lost to the elements.  The entrance to the T-field was a great place to stop and talk for a few minutes. From there, one could survey the whole field except for the steepest part near the top, but if you waited a few minutes, if anyone was on that section of trail, he or she would emerge at the top of the trail.

We'd lean on our ski poles there, looking around and talking until the cold reminded us to keep going. Another stop at the top of the T-field was de rigeur, both to catch our breaths, enjoy the view, finish our conversation, and also to decide who would go first on the descent; the first 90-degree turn to the right didn't lend itself to side-by-side skiing.

It was in the T-field that I first met Anna, though I didn't know her name at the time. She was skiing the inner loop of the T-field at a good clip.

"Who's that?" I asked. No one knew.

I scrutinized her technique and pace without even realizing I was doing so. I was what some people might call "competitive," but I didn't think so. My reaction was subconscious. If I had been alone, instinct would have kicked in, and I would have found myself gradually speeding up, reeling her in, without even intending to. That's just the way I was then--I couldn't help it.

I didn't understand that about myself until years later when I got my own dog. We skijored together. He loved to run & I loved to ski, so we flew across the snow. It wasn't so easy at first, though. He went crazy when he saw a rabbit or a squirrel and just had to chase them. His instinct took over, and there he went. Watching him, I realized that is just how I was back then when I saw another skier on the trail--I had to chase them.

But this time I was with my group of friends, and the call of the pack was stronger than my individual need to chase. We regrouped near the bottom of the field, not stopping to talk this time because we were chilled a bit from the descent. Instead,  we entered the narrow that led to Smith Lake. I loved this part of the trail because it was surrounded by black spruce. Sometimes I would catch a whiff of the mouldering bark and memories of my grandmother's basement would be triggered in my brain. I felt at home here, connected to relatives, perhaps even some more ancient than my grandmother.

 .     .     .

Later, in the spring, when the snow was melted off of the roads and trails, but still lurking in the woods,  I met Anna on a bike ride. She was dating a mutual friend by then, Ben, and my boyfriend, who was friends with Ben had a arranged an weekend bike outing near the mountains to the south of Fairbanks. Anna was tall, and blond, with icy blue eyes that narrowed when she looked into the distance. I wondered if she would be racing this summer--but she didn't say much. She was agreeable and friendly and smiled, but she was not talkative, and one had the sense that her thoughts were elsewhere at times--maybe back where she came from, maybe further down the trail.

.     .     .

In the fall she was gone (or so I thought), and I forgot about her. I was busy with classes--reading Milton and Chaucer were challenging. Chaucer, especially, because it was almost like taking a foreign language--so many words to look up. Frustrated, I grabbed a newspaper in the student union on my way to the upstairs cafeteria, where I heated up my bowl of rice and beans. I read the newspaper as I ate hungrily, barely chewing. I now lived 13 miles from campus, and in the colder weather I really burned up the calories on my bicycle commute to school. We had had our first snowfall on October 1st, and now that it was early November, the temperatures had been plummeting to twenty below on some days.

I paused mid-bite, when an article caught my eye. "Died of exposure . . . West Ridge . . . Anna . . ."

Could this be the Anna I met last winter? I felt sad--a young woman, strong and beautiful, just gone, like that. How could it happen? She seemed outdoorsy--how could she die in the birch trees on a hill so close to campus?"

A couple of years later, I was on a multi-day ski trip in the White Mountains with a couple of friends. On the third night we had made it to the furthest cabin, and we were exhausted after sleeping out in the twenty below weather the previous night. We made a fire in the woodstove, enjoyed a meal of hot food, and then lay on the bunks telling stories.

"Remember Anna?" asked Scott. "She told me the weirdest story once."

Scott told us the story. Anna decided to ski all the way to the Colorado Creek Cabin and back in one day. Alone. She had two bottles of water in her fanny pack--a liter bottle and a half liter bottle. On the way out, she drank all of the liter bottle. We nodded. The way out to Colorado Creek involved a steady uphill climb to a ridge just before the descent into Colorado Creek. At the top of the ridge, she decided to head back. It had taken her a few hours to get there, and the light was already fading. She didn't have a headlamp. It was her first winter in Alaska, so she wasn't used to the short days.

The descent from the ridge is trickier than the ascent--there are a couple of tight turns lined with trees. In the dimming light, Anna didn't quite make the first turn and ended up clipping a tree, which caused her to take a tumble off the trail into some deep snow. In the struggle, she didn't realize that her other water bottle had fallen out of her fanny pack. Her attention was on her knee, which must have been twisted in the crash, for when she put her weight on it, it nearly collapsed.

To make matters worse, it had started to snow. She had been sweaty when she had fallen, and the falling snow was chilling her. She stopped to take a drink of water, and then realized she did not have her other bottle. She calculated--turning back she would lose a half hour, but if she didn't have any water, she could become dangerously dehydrated. She turned back. The spot where she fell was easy to find because of the major turn in the trail, but finding the bottle in the deep snow was difficult. She dug with increasing panic--where was it? Finally, her hand found the hard surface and she lifted it up. It was so hard to open the lid, though--it had frozen shut. She shook the bottle, not sloshing. Of course, she realized--it had frozen. This bottle was smaller, and froze more quickly than a larger bottle would have. She threw the bottle down in disgust and resolved to begin the long trek back to her car.

But by then, enough had accumulated to make the skiing much harder going than it was on the way out.  She followed her tracks, until they began to fade from view in the near darkness. She blinked, holding her eyes shut for a second longer than necessary to try to melt the snowflakes accumulating on her lashes. When she opened them up again, her tracks were gone, and she saw enormous paw prints in the snow. She gasped, stopped, and examined them carefully. Wolf tracks, she thought. But they were headed toward her, and she had not seen the wolf.

The long winter twilight was nearly at its end, she skied on, mesmerized by the wolf tracks. When she got to the point where she had turned back to get her water bottle, the tracks abruptly stopped. She skied on, but begin to scrutinize the shadows. When she felt a chill travel up her spine, she quickly twisted around to look behind her.  There was nothing there, but strangely, the tracks were right behind her and were now pointed in the same direction in which she was skiing.

A shot of adrenaline sped through her body, and she sprang forward at thrice the speed she had been skiing. She could no longer see in the darkness, so she quit trying to see the trail and just let her feet feel the trail. Her mind shut out the hurt knee, the deep thirst, and she just flew. When she arrived back at the trailhead, she suddenly collapsed and found herself crawling the last few yards to her vehicle.

Fortunately, her thermos still contained a few ounces of now-cold peppermint tea and she gulped it down. She started up her truck, and when the headlights came on, she saw another vehicle--her boyfriend, Ben's blue Subaru. What?! She got out and went over to it. The hood was still warm--he couldn't be too far away. She lifted up her chin and screamed as loudly as she could, "Ben!!!"

She waited, then heard a returning shout. After a few minutes, Ben emerged from the same trail she had come in on.

"Didn't you see me ski by?" she asked.
"No," he answered, puzzled, "But I saw the most amazing gray wolf run past just a few minutes ago."

Early morning polychromatic ambience ski

Alarm sounds, and I stumble downstairs to make some coffee. I let my younger son know it is time to get up for his weekly early chamber orchestra practice. He groans and doesn't move, so I make him breakfast, then try again. I go back down and start drinking coffee. Wait a minute... Enrico must have changed the time on the coffeemaker--it says 5:17. I look at the kitchen clock. Also 5:17. Um, ohhhhh. Right. Enrico must not have changed the alarm from the day before when we had to get up at 5 to take our older son to early morning swim practice.

Ugh. But it is too late to go back to bed. I tell my son he can sleep for another 45 minutes, then I drink my coffee and get ready for my day. After dropping my son off at school, I head out for a ski.

Although it is very early, I can see just fine, thanks to what we used to call "Fair-glow" in Fairbanks--the reflection of city lights off the clouds or ice fog. I guess in Fargo we can call it "Far-glow," right? The bright orange light makes it easy to find the skate trail.

It is warm today and the trail is firm and fast. Fun! I fall into a pleasing rhythm and begin cogitating on the English education program. Then I am in Lindenwood Park, and I don't remember getting there, that is how lost in thought I was.

Now I notice there has been a change in ambient light. The orange Farglow has been replaced by a deep blue. It feels like night. I drift off in thoughts again, but a fluttering of my heartbeats brings me back to the present. Now the sky is white, and soon it will be pink, for dawn is approaching. But I don't have time to witness that last color change--I stop after just one circuit so I have time to shower before heading to Davies High to observe my student teacher.

I feel refreshed, all my muscles are warm, my blood has circulated around and been freshened by breaths of morning air. I am ready for my day. 

Sunday Ski Lessons

Today I went up to Edgewood golf course to help out with Sunday ski lessons. I love doing that. I got to work with the kids, and it is so neat to see how they improve so much, just in one session.

John Pfund and I took the kids to the field first, where several pairs of parallel classic tracks allowed us to keep and eye on the group while leading them to practice their kick and glide without poles, double-poling, and regular striding. A couple of girls were really gung-ho about going out on a loop. One said, looking off into the distance with a wistful eye, "I want to go ski on my very own trail." Hold onto that dream, my dear!

I led them off on the little loop, with the little girl in front. She was quite a dynamo! On the loop, I got the kids noticing the various tracks we saw and trying to identify them. "A bear, " "moose," "snake" were some of the answers. What fun!

After we completed our little loop, I led them up the hill and had them take turns going down the steep side to practice their downhill technique. They loved that.

Photo taken by Nick Carlson

After lessons, Jeff, Arnie, John, and I went for a classic ski around the outer loop. It was very pleasant skiing and socializing. 

Life's Little Rewards

On Saturday I decided to skate ski for two hours. It was a bit cold out, and there was new snow on the skate trail, but my thinking was, "Just dress warmly and go slowly." To lure myself out, I made a thermos of Yerba Mate tea with honey, which I stashed next to the trail. Each time I went by, I had a nice hot drink of tea. That was six times, as I skied back and forth on the the Dike East-Lindenwood Trail. I made a new, 2-hour playlist to keep me going.

Why?

Well, the Korteloppet is this month, and I wanted to see if I have anything close to the endurance for it.

I managed, though I was not speedy. Near the end, I was mainly looking at the snow right in front of me, and then something caught my eye--a large bird to the northwest. I stopped and squinted as it flew closer. Could it be . . .?

Yes! A bald eagle, confidently winging its was to the southeast. I thanked the bird because it felt like a little reward for finishing the ski.