Everyone talks about Alaska’s long winters – the short daylight hours, long periods of darkness, and colossal amounts of snow.

Before moving to Alaska, my parents would often talk about what our life would be like in Alaska: building a house; harvesting veggies from a garden; spending countless hours together during the wintertime playing board games, cooking, baking, and reading tons of books. Maybe my parents had talked about sledding or skiing in Alaska, maybe they hadn’t, but over the years I got the impression that wintertime in Alaska would mainly be spent inside, filling my hours with schoolwork, writing, practicing piano, playing boardgames with my family by a crackling fireplace, and sitting in a comfy armchair and reading books by a window as a blizzard raged outside. I also wasn’t sure where in Alaska we’d be living, but presumably thought that we’d live above the Arctic Circle (who wouldn’t?) and that we would not have any daylight for half the year.

Based on those visualizations, when the first snow fell at the beginning of November last year, I was ready to “hunker down,” as my parents put it, and study, read, and write for hours on end… however, that’s not exactly, or entirely, what happened. I quickly learned that “snowing” didn’t mean there had to be a blizzard or snow storm outside. I also learned that although we wouldn’t have as many hours of sunshine as deemed regular, it wouldn’t mean that the entire winter would be spent in darkness. My picture of an Alaskan winter had also been formed by what I occasionally saw on the news, which always paired Alaska with video clips of white-out-condition blizzards and bone-chilling temperatures. In addition, whenever those videos played on the news, my parents would tell us about our trip to Alaska in July over a decade ago when there was still snow on the ground and it was so cold that my mom had to bundle my sister and I in her sweaters and jackets to keep us from getting sick (this was back in 2010, and I only had one sister at the time).

So, based on everything above, you can see why I thought I’d be indoors the entire winter.

On November 5th last year when it first started to snow, my sisters and I found ourselves glued to the windows, watching as snowflakes fell from the sky. I thought it meant the beginning of countless days spent in my bedroom, which I was fine with, since it would mean that I could get ahead with my schoolwork and have less to do when summer came. In reality, it was just the beginning of many, many hours spent outside having a blast in the snow.

Some people hate Alaska’s winters. Others love it. With all the snow we’ve gotten so far, I couldn’t be happier.

Snowshoeing

The first time I ever went snowshoeing was on Christmas Eve last year. We had recently gotten a heavy snowfall, so it was a great time to try snowshoeing. We also hadn’t plowed one of our side roads through the woods since it started snowing about a month and a half prior, so my dad and I decided to test out our snowshoes there. My dad and I fastened on our snowshoes when we reached the road, the snow right in front of and behind the gate rising up to my waist. Eager to see if my snowshoes would work, or in other words, keep me from sinking most of the way into the deep snow, I climbed up onto the piled snow and took my first steps. To my surprise, I hardly sunk in at all. I was temped to see how far down I’d sink in the snow withoutmy snowshoes, but after taking the time to clip them on, I figured I’d save that for later.

Together, my dad and I snowshoed along our road, following the meandering footprints of a moose. I wondered if the moose had been dizzy (hopefully not drunk!) to have walked in such a way. We eventually branched out into the forest and hiked up a hill. After admiring the view from the top, which overlooked both lakes nearby, my dad and I started back on our way home. The funniest part of our walk was when my dad tried jumping off a stack of birch trees and ended up face-first in the snow. After that, he tripped over a branch, and got stuck, waist-deep, in the snow. It gave us a good laugh :).

Ice Skating

The first time I went ice skating was when I was six or seven years old at a crowded outdoor ice skating rink in South Korea’s capital city, Seoul. I don’t remember too much from that outing, other than I was very excited to try ice skating, I thought it was sort of like roller skating, and that I didn’t want to leave the edge of the rink because I feared I’d fall and get trampled over by the crowd of ice skaters.

A decade later, I had the opportunity to try ice skating again. After lacing up my skates and carefully walking over to the ice skating rink, I took my first step on to the ice. My first thought was that the ice was precariously slippery. I didn’t want to fall and injure myself, and I also had no idea how I was supposed to skate across the ice on thin ruler-like blades of metal. My second thought was how big the rink was and how few people were on it – once I started skating, I could actually move forward more than a mere foot or two! Since then, I’ve improved in my ice skating (although I’m not trying any spins yet!) and have enjoyed spending several afternoons skating with friends.

Snow machining

Whereas people in the lower 48 may call this wintertime activity snowmobiling, Alaskans call it snow machining, or sometimes “sledding,” in slang. As with snowshoeing, this winter was the first rime I ever rode on a snow machine. I’ve only gone once, and for a very brief period of time, so I can’t exactly say whether I enjoyed it or not. What I do know is that it’s not my favorite winter sport.

That being said, snow machining is a popular winter sport here in Alaska. Every year, there’s a competition called the Iron Dog Race, which is the world’s longest and toughest snow machine race. The course distance spans over 2,500 miles (2,503 to be exact) of Alaskan backcountry, starting at Big Lake and going as far north and west as Nome. 

Taking walks in the woods

There’s just something magical about taking a walk in the forest when everything is coated in sparkling white snow. It truly feels like you’re in a fairytale winter wonderland! Every bough of every tree covered in glistening snow and beads of ice, every mountaintop painted white, beams of sunlight squeezing through the snow-laden branches – it’s so majestic!

Even better yet is when the weather is nice, giving you a crisp view of the surrounding Chugach, Talkeetna, and Alaska Range mountains against a backdrop of icy blue or deep orange depending on the time of day. Some days, when it isn’t cloudy, we can even see Mount Foraker and… wait for it… Denali! Denali, or Mount McKinley, is the tallest mountain in all of North America, and despite it being almost two hundred miles away from us, it’s so big that we can see it from the top of our hill. What’s really amazing is when the sun slips below the horizon and Denali, along with other high mountains, turn a magnificent orangish-pink – a phenomenon called alpenglow.

The natural beauty of Alaska is invigorating, and it’s hard not to want to spend the entire day outside.

Sledding

Sledding and skiing are my favorite winter sports. Although we haven’t gone skiing yet this winter, my family has done lots of sledding.

We have a few hills where we live that we like to sled down. The closest one is right beside our house, which we used to sled down the most, until we started sledding down our driveway. Our driveway is rather long and has an inclination of ten degrees in some areas (an average of eight degrees, though). When the snow is packed down hard, which usually happens just by driving up to our house, you can actually sled down the driveway at 30 miles per hour (about 48 kilometers per hour)! We’ve learnt how to expertly control our sleds with our hands, but the hardest part is slowing down enough at the bottom. After some trial and error, we found that the trick to slowing down in time is to put both hands and boots down about twenty feet before the mound of snow at the edge of the forest. One of my sisters built a ramp up the mound of snow, and every now and then, she’ll sled down the hill as fast as she can and make it up the ramp and on to the mound of snow. I’ve never done it, but it’s fun to watch her zoom up the ramp as if she’s riding a skateboard, stopping just before the tree line.

We call our longest and steepest hill “El Grande.” We don’t use it often, and if we do, we typically only sled down it 1-3x. Although it may be a lot of fun going down, it isn’t as much fun trudging back up – especially when your boots sink into the knee-deep snow with every footstep… and you look up at the slope you just came down and realize just how many footsteps you have to get back to the top.

Sometimes after sledding, if it was starting to get dark out but we weren’t quite ready to go inside, my sisters and I would try knocking icicles off the roof with very compact snow balls. This became a fun afternoon sport for us, and we’d sometimes compete to see who could knock down the most icicles and who could hit the singled-out hard-to-break icicles first. We obtained quite a collection of icicles this winter!

Chaga Hunting

One day after sledding, my dad, my sisters, and I found a nice chaga mushroom growing on one of the many birch trees around our home, and we decided to get it for my mom as a surprise. Hunting chaga is easier in the winter since the charcoal-black color of the mushroom stands out more clearly against the white bark of the tree and snowy white background. We had to use a hammer, screwdriver, and machete to break it from the tree (making sure to leave a few inches of mushroom on the tree so as not to injure the tree), but it was worth the hard work to see the surprised look on my mom’s face when we brought home a hunk of golden chaga. Now we have to dehydrate it and make it into powder so that we can add it to our smoothies and meals. Chaga mushrooms are well known for their cancer fighting and immune boosting (among many other) benefits; and when added to a smoothie or meal, it doesn’t alter the taste at all.

Winter in Alaska was a lot more fun than I ever imagined. Most people I know can’t wait for winter to be over and for summer to come. As for me, I wouldn’t mind if it stayed snowy for several months longer.

Dare to explore!

Vivienne