Where the rays found sandy glacial till beneath a rocky overhang, the ground was already melting. Tiny grains of sand freed from the icy hold of winter gave in to gravity and rolled down onto the snow below, leaving tiny trails of water turned to ice as they tumbled.
The melt was a visible reminder that though Alaska has only just begun to emerge from the long, dark hole of winter, it is emerging, and we with it.
Light is a wonderful thing.
It lifts the spirit and paints the land in the way a sled-head or skier can understand as well as an artist or photographer. Maybe better.
At Big Lake on Sunday, the racers in the Tesoro Iron Dog snowmobile race to Nome were thinking a lot about the light, or the lack of it, as they waited for the race to begin in the dimness beneath the clouds that had settled over the lower Susitna River basin and begun to spit snow.
Beneath the overcast, the flat light of winter lingered, and flat light is worse than no light if you are traveling fast, cross country on a snowmachine or rocketing downhill on skis.
Flat light sands the bumps and edges off the terrain. It makes the landscape look, for lack of a better word, flat.
But the land in Alaska is almost never flat. Even on the surfaces of the myriad frozen lakes where the ice should be flat, the surface is seldom that way.
The winds stir snow into drifts. The rare winter rains leaves depressions where water ran and pooled. Snowmachine or ski traffic creates bumps.
When you are riding hard and fast, it is better to see these things coming than to hit them unseen and find yourself airborne like Iron Dogger Mark Brown.
His hopes of riding a snowmobile to Nome and then on to Fairbanks barely got off Big Lake on Sunday. He hit a snow berm hard to see in the flat light, went airborne and crashed his sled. He got back on, but the damage had already been done.
Brown thinks it was the first crash that broke his pelvis not the second when he hit another bump, again went airborne, realized he couldn't stand on one leg to balance his sled for the landing, and subsequently crashed into a stand of black spruce with such force that, in his words, it "blew off my shoes and helmet."
A victim of flat light as much of anything, Brown went to the Providence Medical Center instead of to Nome.
Anyone need a better example of the value of light?
How well Iron Doggers understand this is displayed on the cowlings of their snowmachines. Almost everyone in the race now runs big, powerful auxiliary lights to complement the already excellent lighting from the headlights of modern snowmachines. The extra lights are bolted on the sleds not so much to reach farther out into the dark as to paint some definition into the terrain.
Night skiers at Alyeska Resort in Girdwood know well what a difference this makes. Night skiing there in December and January is usually better than the day skiing because the harsh artificial lighting on the slopes adds definition to the snow.
Granted, skiing Alyeska's classic flat light of winter days will make you a better skier. You have no choice but to learn to ignore your eyes and ski with your feet.
Skiing blind, or essentially so, is difficult but not impossible. In skiing as in snowmobiling or, for that matter, mountain biking, you can kind of get into the Zen of things and let yourself flow through the terrain.
This is easier to do than to explain, although not at all easy.
Ask anyone who has skied fast and unknowingly into an uphill at Alyeska only to stop abruptly and face plant. You can do this without thinking, and things only get worse once you start thinking.
Unfortunately, the human brain evolved to process information and reach conclusions. The human brain wants to think, and most often, thinking is valuable.
There are occasions, though, when it is not.
Thinking takes time. When things are happening fast, this time might be measured in microseconds, but it is still time.
If you are thinking when your body should already be reacting, you will crash, no matter what you are riding. The trick in situations where there is no time -- as in riding flat light -- is to tamp down the thinking part of the brain so the body can react intuitively.
It might be one of the hardest things in sport. It might be, to a large degree, what separates the great from the merely good in some disciplines.
The great don't think about what they're doing; they just do it.
Me, I'm plagued by thinking too much, which makes it so much better to have the light back. It offers up that millisecond in which to see what's coming, mentally process a response and then react.
Not to mention the aforementioned power of the sun to lift ones mood, and in times like these, who can't use that?
Find Craig Medred online at adn.com/contact/cmedred or call 257-4588.
Important warning about e-mails purporting to be from the adn.com staff.