Outdoors/Adventure

Warm Anchorage weather on Black Friday makes 'opting outside' a challenge

Normally, the exhortation by outdoor gear company REI to spend time outside on Black Friday rather than shop would be an easy sell in Southcentral Alaska.

A solid snowpack on the vast network of trails in and around Anchorage usually draws cross-country skiers, snowshoers and fat-bikers. Frozen ponds and lakes attract ice skaters -- and skiers, too, if there's enough snow cover.

But relatively warm weather this week turned many winter sports enthusiasts like Mike Miller, a board member for the Nordic Skiing Association of Anchorage, into homebodies.

Instead of heading out for a ski to burn calories accrued on Thanksgiving Day, Miller planned to spend all of Friday cleaning his garage and painting the trim on his house.

"I put my bikes away in early October and I can't run anyway because I have a new knee," said Miller, who maintains trails for the skiing association. "I'm cautiously optimistic we're going to get snow one of these days."

The popular Hatcher Pass snow sports area, about a 90-minute drive north of Anchorage, remained closed to the public due to hazardous avalanche conditions and bad weather.

The danger is serious enough that the search for skier Liam Walsh, who has been missing since Sunday, is on hold.

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"If there isn't a break in the weather, then there isn't anything we can do today in terms of active searching," Megan Peters, a spokeswoman for the Alaska State Troopers, wrote in an email. "It isn't a good situation, I am afraid."

Parts of Alyeska Resort were open for snowboarding and skiing Friday, but an all-day downpour in Girdwood made conditions less than ideal.

"It looks like it's still raining pretty steadily," Terry Kadel, deputy fire chief in Girdwood, said late Friday afternoon. "The roads and the Seward Highway have significant amounts of standing water because piles of snow plowed off the roads are preventing it from draining in places."

REI customer service employee Dean Campodonico managed to stay true to the company's #optoutside campaign, which closed all stores and the website on Black Friday and gave all employees a paid day off to get outdoors on what may be the busiest shopping day of the year. Campodonico had wanted to hike Wolverine, a peak in the Chugach Mountains overlooking Anchorage, or ski the Middle Fork Trail, also in the Chugach, but decided against those options because of poor snow conditions.

Instead, he and his partner walked and jogged in Bicentennial Park and on other trails in East Anchorage.

"Yes, the weather is a little dreary and my first two choices of getting out were vetoed but ... no rain and thank goodness for Icebugs!" he wrote in an email, referring to a brand of studded running shoes.

The few who braved Kincaid Park after sunrise encountered light rain, plenty of bare ground and, on the upside perhaps, relative solitude.

James and Lynn Kendall, both of Anchorage, were taking their son's French bulldog, Remy, their own dog Schooner and their two grandchildren for a walk in the world-class cross-country ski area.

They stood behind Kincaid's shuttered chalet overlooking the usually popular sledding hill, now an empty slope of green grass patched with melting slush and ice.

"We were hoping to take the grandkids sledding, but it's all gone," Lynn Kendall said.

"It's still better than being in a store," James Kendall said.

But Kincaid's near-empty parking lots indicated the Kendalls were likely in the minority.

Even outdoor enthusiast Faye Tanner, camp host at Kincaid, decided to take a break from the soggy conditions.

"If the snow had been good, we would have gone sledding and skiing," she said before driving out of the park. "Instead we're heading off for Black Friday shopping and taking the kids."

Jeannette Lee Falsey

Jeannette Lee Falsey is a former reporter for Alaska Dispatch News. She left the ADN in 2017.

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