Keith Conger and my dog Lucy are but specks in my primitive iPhone 4 as they race down the west face of 3870.
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| Looking east from 3870, May 7, 2016. Lucy is standing at the top-out of the North Face route. |
The vernal equipose when the roads around Nome are open for driving while the snow yet lingers in the mountains... Tailgate parties on the Kougarak Road... great convoys of snow-machine trailers lining the shoulders... big gully skis on firn in T-shirts...
Time for the Greg Stoddard Annual Memorial Yahoo Field Trip To 3870, our annual ski descent of that most iconic of Teller Road hills, to celebrate both the renewal of Spring and the athletic debauchery of ski mountaineers everywhere, including the arch-powder fiend himself, Stoddard, who departed Nome long ago...
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| "Solar Sidewalk" Ski Route on Thirty-Eight-Seventy. A strip of drift-snow lingers into May and provides a continuous sidewalk from car to summit. Note the secret parking area north of road, shortly after the Woolly Lagoon sign. The yellow arrow shows where Nils Hahn and I descended a few hundred feet down onto the north face in June of 2004-- any further down the ridge to the east and we would have needed to rappel a hideous cliff. |
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| KigBonus Pic: Lizzy and Raina ski touring up Grand Central Valley, May 1, 2016 |
