GIRDWOOD -- Fog on Friday followed the blizzard on Wednesday that followed the volcanic eruptions that began on Sunday as Mother Nature continued to play havoc with attempts to stage the U.S. Alpine Championships here.
Both the men's and women's super-G's had to be canceled due to poor visibility. It was the third straight day weather prevailed over racing -- downhill training runs on were canceled Wednesday and an FIS downhill race was canceled Thursday.
Today race organizers will try to stage downhill training runs in the morning and downhill races in the afternoon, but more snow was falling Friday night.
The super-G has yet to be rescheduled.
Having lost the first four days of training and competition to weather, organizers are now trying to squeeze eight races, plus some necessary training time on the downhill course, into four days. The U.S. Ski Association-sponsored nationals are scheduled to end Tuesday with the men's giant slalom.
Friday's weather was particularly cruel to racers as the morning began spring gorgeous only to be disrupted by a fog bank that moved over the race course just before the scheduled 11 a.m. start of the women's competition. The bottom third of the course remained in the clear, and high on Mount Alyeska, skiers enjoyed sun-kissed slopes above the fog.
But in between the two, the pea soup was at times so thick that not only was it difficult to see gates, it was difficult to tell where one was on the mountain.
Racers lounged around the start shed or napped until a lunch break was finally called around 1 p.m. They came back only to hang around for a while longer before the women's race was canceled, and the waiting began on the start of the men's race.
It looked for a time that the weather might lift enough to permit them on the course, but by 5 p.m., with most spectators gone from the resort and the snow near the finish line turning to mush thanks to steady, day-long temperatures of 40 degrees or more, the decision was made to cancel that race as well.
Jim Elliot from Utah -- who'd come north to watch his son, Jeremy, compete -- spent part of his afternoon sitting on the snow outside the protective fences along the super-G course waiting to see if a race would finally come off, but he wasn't complaining.
"Actually, I got some good skiing in earlier,'' he confessed. "This place is really great.''
Easy for the senior Elliot to say, given he was already on hand at Alyeska early in the week when it started snowing and snowing and snowing. Over the course of Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, so much snow fell that the course for the ski competition had to be remade.
The skiing, meanwhile, was something else in knee-deep powder on the North Face. Elliot said it was some of the best he'd ever experienced. Or at least it was until the winds kicked up and stirred all that loose snow into a blinding blizzard.
At one point, the wind was raging so ferociously that Rebecca Coolidge of the Anchorage Visitors and Convention Bureau, one of the organizations helping stage this event, said she was nearly knocked down as she tried to walk across the base area at Alyeska.
"I've been watching weather for a week,'' she said Friday afternoon as she tried to wish away the fog. "I can't do this anymore.''
"It could be worse,'' warned Jim Renkert of Anchorage, a race volunteer. "It could be ash.''
Redoubt Volcano continues to threaten. It is about 125 miles southwest of the resort. It first erupted Sunday and has been going off periodically ever since. A minor Friday morning eruption was cause for much discussion at the resort, but there was no sign of any volcanic ash.
The morning eruption was, however, followed by a bigger eruption Friday evening, and the Alaska Volcano Observatory again raised the Redoubt warning from orange to red. An ash cloud was reported to have reached 51,000 feet above the volcano. Forecasters were still trying to calculate where the ash might fall.
Meanwhile, snow was falling once again in Girdwood. The National Weather Service was predicting another two to five inches overnight in the area and warning that winds in the Turnagain Arm area could start to pick up to 25 mph today.
Find Craig Medred online at adn.com/contact/cmedred or call 257-4588.
By CRAIG MEDRED
cmedred@adn.com