A Weekend Outdoors!

More snow, more mountains, more skiing -- we know, you're tired of hearing it, right?  No pictures of the Northern Lights we finally saw on Thursday night for the first time since we've been here, but we do have pictures of snowshoeing and skiing this weekend.  Friday night we skied after work on the Chester Creek Trail, our usual just down the street from our house.  Only one moose sighting, just off the trail, and we diagonal skied about 10k.  Saturday morning Judy always does a yoga class early, and we decided to drive down to Girdwood, about 45 minutes or so south of here and a gorgeous drive along Cook Inlet and right through the Chugach Mountains.

We snowshoes the Winner Creek Trail, which goes out to a hand tram, unused in the winter but active to pull yourself over a gorge in the summer.  It was a beautiful sunny day, about 16 degrees or so, and enough work on snowshoes - they'd had lots of snow!  In fact, this is at the Alyeska downhill ski resort, and they've had a ton of snow for the winter!

After snowshoeing, we made our way to the Silvertip Grill in Girdwood for a late lunch - it's a little place with great food -- and right at the corner we bought fresh shrimp and frozen scallops from Kodiak!  Ahhh - it's been a while since we had shrimp freshly caught - we brought those home and ate a little more than a pound by themselves for a later "snack" or dinner - boy, were they good!  We can't wait til Brian and Carl are out on Prince William Sound pulling those in again.  They picked up the new engine for our Prince William Sound boat on Friday -- plans are progressing - now they have to fabricate new mounts for the engine to fit back into where the old, useless one came out.  

Today we went back to Girdwood after the usual grocery shopping, laundry, all those necessary but unwelcome tasks, and skied.  After skiing we met our landlords for dinner -- today was Mary's birthday, and we met them at the Double Musky, another favorite of ours when we're in Girdwood. These were different ski trails than we've been on before, and it was hilly but fun - the downhills anyway!  Again, temperatures probably around 18 degrees. 

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Tomorrow back to work for Judy and for Brian, back to work on the boat.  Wednesday we're going to Fairbanks for a few days, and we'll see the Ice Carving Championships there -- and go to Cheena Hot Springs . . . more pictures, more blogging!