Sunny Days in Juneau

Even though it's currently raining (sometimes sleeting) and just a sheet of grey outside, all I can think of right now is the beautiful weekend we just had. I guess that's what you have to hold onto when 80% of the time it's grey and rainy outside, like it was for most of Dad's visit. This past weekend was 35 and sunyn the whole weekend, but ski lessons were unusually stressful (read: moreso than usual), so even with the weather I was feeling particularly angsty towards Eaglecrest by the end of Sunday night. Even the Superbowl commercials couldn't cheer me up, probably because the halftime show was so disappointing. I decided that Eaglecrest and I needed some relationship therapy. I borrowed a car for the day, and headed up to the mountain around 11 on Monday, blinded by the sunlight and beautiful blue skies.

So this is Eaglecrest. Parked in that little teeny parking lot in the bottom right corner and stolled through the base lodge, where I got roped into a meeting with Tristan, Lindsay, Kirk (the owner), and ski patrol about the harnesses we were using on the chairlifts. Finally done with that, I talked Lindsay into a few runs with me before she headed home. "OK fine, but let's go out the ridge" she said. Out the ridge? This was new territory. I had done most of the terrain on the mountain already, but wasn't quite sure how I felt about backcountry on a snowboard yet. If you look at the map of Eaglecrest, follow the Ptarmigan lift all the way up, and then go kind of right diagonally along the top of the west bowl until you reach the red dashed line. Looking back, our path looked like this:

That's the Ptarmigan lift in the center left, and the mountaintop coffee hut in the center. Looking out in front of us, we could see all of Admiralty Island (fun fact: highest population of grizzly bears in the entire world), the water behind Douglas, and even out past Admiralty through to the end of the Gastineau Channel.

That's just one small piece of what we saw, but it was amazing. Lindsay skiied a run and then hiked back out, but I just hung out on the ridge for a solid 45 minutes, taking pictures and soaking in all the sun I could. Luckily, there was no wind and no clouds, a rare occurrence anywhere in town, let alone on the top of Eaglecrest. Needless to say, I didn't want to come down off the ridge. Between that, and the sunrise on Douglas yesterday morning, I think I've got enough good image memories to last me through this next grey stretch.