Outdoors/Adventure

Even if the northern lights are a no-show, there’s plenty to experience on a night-ski at Hatcher Pass

“Have you guys ever night-skied before?” my friend asked as we were sliding along in the dark up in Hatcher Pass.

I thought about it.

“We’ve gone skiing at night but only on lit trails, or at the very least with headlamps,” I said.

Our little Saturday adventure came about because we wanted to see the aurora. The safe bet is if the aurora forecast is high and my friends and I have made any kind of a loose plan attempting to see it, it’s not going to happen.

Still, we hold out hope.

At 8 p.m. my husband and I tugged on all the usual layers, loaded up our truck with our classic skis, grabbed our headlamps and drove out to meet our friends. We parked at the Archangel Road lot off Hatcher Pass Road with a full view of the sparkling orange Glenn Highway framed by dark looming mountains on either side.

As we’d climbed up into Hatcher Pass, we watched the temperatures tick down. What started at 20 degrees at our house dipped to 15. By the time we parked it was 8 degrees.

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Our truck is a bit of a drama queen. When I got out, it didn’t feel like 8 degrees. Maybe, my husband remarked, more like a balmy 10.

I hadn’t brought enough layers. I zipped my jacket a tad uncomfortably over my mouth to protect my lungs.

Typically when I’m meeting friends for an outdoor adventure, I climb out of my low-light car into full daylight. This time it was the opposite. The truck’s garish indoor lights dimmed and turned off after we shut the doors behind us, and we entered into an encompassing darkness.

We switched on our headlamps and tried to be polite about it by not looking directly at each other.

No one else was in the usually busy Archangel lot. After the usual shuffling around and retrieval of awkwardly tall skis and poles, our cars chirped as we locked them and we all crossed the street.

The trail was groomed. A beautiful thing. I clipped into my skis and shuffled over to lock each ski into place in the rigid grooves of the classic track. Everyone else took their preferred spot on the trail. It was another funny feeling, this ritualistic sense of beginning a ski, only at night and in a place with no lights to guide our way.

We started sliding forward, in a kind of unison I would like to think was graceful if a little hesitant.

There really is something a little eerie about only darkness ahead.

Then, one of the pools of light on the snowy trail ahead of us went away when someone turned off their headlamp. It was just a little darker than it was before, and suddenly I was more aware of the stars. I turned my own headlamp off.

We chattered about the darkness and the trail amid the loud sounds of skis on snow and humans trundling forward. Everyone turned their lights off, and it was completely dark as we continued to move.

The zipper on my jacket that was tightly against my face was cold against my teeth when I craned my neck to look around, but I didn’t much notice or care. We were now facing away from the light pollution behind us, with only the sky ahead — a sky that was a different, more subtle kind of bright. There was the kind of sharp, open clarity that showcases an almost fuzzy array of distant stars amidst the brighter pinpoint stars and planets.

Someone said the sky was too crowded to find the Big Dipper, until he did. The handle pointed down toward the giant, faintly white mountains jutting into the sky all around us.

It’s noisy moving forward on skis in a group of five. There are the crunching, whoompf-ing sounds of planks on snow, the “squiggle” when a pole braces firmly into the trail momentarily, and the swishy sounds of my own clothing against my body and up against my ears. It was comforting to be out there with people.

There was not, of course, any aurora. After about 40 minutes of skiing, a slight breeze picked up and whisked away any warmth we were carrying with us. Maybe my truck isn’t such a diva after all and it is actually 8 degrees out, I thought.

We paused for a long few moments, facing up toward the expansive, star-filled darkness. I felt pleasantly tiny and awed. But also cold. Reluctantly, I turned around back toward the cars.

I’m not going to wax poetic about the many joys of pandemic life. But it would also be disingenuous for me not to acknowledge that I’ve learned new ways to enjoy Alaska and be with friends. Instead of sitting home on a Saturday night, we tried something completely new.

The experience wasn’t aligned perfectly with our intent — again, the northern lights flee the sky when they see us coming — but that’s not the point. I’ll always remember this brief, immersive night-ski in the big expansive darkness with my friends, so unlike countless other nights indoors that fade into sameness after a while.

Alli Harvey lives in Palmer and plays in Southcentral Alaska.

Alli Harvey

Alli Harvey lives in Palmer and plays in Southcentral Alaska.

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