While Waiting for Snow!

NO NEW SNOW YET!  Forecast was wrong and we mostly have hard crusty snow everyplace - and not enough of it.  But we hiked in a new place on Saturday and actually they had a little more snow and there were people skiing - not easily it didn't look like!  We hiked for 2 1/2 hours on a hard-packed snow surface up towards the mountains and on narrow paths through forested land - very pretty and a sunny, though very cold day.  It's been unseasonably cold here and in the single digits at night (until Sunday, it warmed up to 20s again).  Here are a couple of pictures of Brian on the trail we were hiking.  We hiked back on the Powerline trail, which is a wide and open trail that runs along the mountains for quite a ways.  A guy passed us on a bike with the fat tires that must have had a really WILD ride back down, as it's quite steep in parts, and another guy on skis (same wild ride) and their 3 dogs having a ball racing after them. 

Sunday we had heard there was more snow at Eagle River and "excellent" conditions, BUT -- we drove to Eagle River, which is just about 20 minutes north of us and then another 12 miles back into the mountains to the Eagle River Nature Center.  We're still exploring where all of the trails are - there are just about a million of them! We had a good time there and it is just gorgeous -- it is a multi-use trail though, and they haven't had new snow though they've had some since Anchorage did.  Still, it was so walked on that the trail wasn't that great.  We skied for about 1 1/2 hours, checked out the 2 yurts and a cabin that they have available for rentals - it's one of the prettiest trails that we've ever seen.  The last trail that we were on was less used, being further away, and it was pretty good, especially for skate skiing.  But we hurried back to hear a talk on the Iditarod Historic Trail, which one of these trails was a part of.  The Crow Pass Trail was a part of a trail that was carved out to carry mail by dogsled from Valdez, where it would be brought in by boat to the port, to Nome, way up in Northern Alaska, where there was a pretty good-sized city and no access to regular mail through the winter months (which there were a lot of!). 

So when we got home, we had to look up Nome to figure out why so many people would live up there!  It turns out that was another gold rush story.  (I had figured fur trade, maybe?)  In 1898, three Swedes discovered gold there, and within a year or so, 10,000 people had come to try their luck, living in tents anyplace they could set one down and as close to the river to mine as possible.  The history of Alaska, between the gold rush years, the native Alaskan tribes and the infrastructure that was built during WW II, is pretty fascinating!  Hope you enjoy the pictures of Eagle River that we've posted here too.