Snow

Matt points his phone towards the stars over the mountains in the southern sky. “You’ve got to line it up with the satellite,” he says. “That seems to work best.” Apparently, iPhone 14 and newer have built-in satellite messaging. I ask him what he’s up to and he tells me he has a buddy back home who is sending him …

  I step from the truck among 20 other cars, and an arctic wind knifes me within seconds. Weather always funnels like tides through this bottleneck, one of few gaps in the Alaska Range. My brow hurts with an ice-cream headache, and my hands are numb. I forgot my down jacket and borrow a flowery fleece from a friend who …

I had a dream that lasted 24 years, one that drifted in my subconscious like a satellite in orbit revolving patiently, waiting to be activated. Only now can I see how round and symmetrical the dream was, how it would inevitably return to its origin. I was nineteen when I first saw it. After four days of driving westward to …

I am not a gambler, but I won the lottery this past March when I was invited to spend a week at the Asulkan Cabin on the British Columbia/Alberta border. The cabin is renowned for being situated in the heart of excellent ski terrain and sits at treeline (7000 feet) next to several large glaciers. In winter, it is accessed …

If you’ve ever driven from Snoqualmie Pass to Seattle, you’ve probably seen it. Counting truckers, families, hikers, skiers, newlyweds, kids driving home for spring break, grandparents, and State Troopers, the people who’ve seen it probably number in the millions. There must be several thousand, just counting the skiers traveling back and forth to the pass. I bet that if someone …

  Matt and I threaded pieces of cord through holes we had drilled in makeshift footbridges and tied the bridges to the backs of a couple of old snowmobiles we had purchased for Baker Mountain Guides. The goal for the day was to drag the bridges up to the trailhead for North Twin Sister and place them over numerous creeks …

Ski huts are ubiquitous in Europe. They’re common in Canada. But here in the USA, not so much. The Rendezvous Huts, located in the sublime mountains that rise above Washington’s Methow Valley, are a time-honored exception to the rule. Enoch & Shandra Kraft built the first two huts—on the Methow’s Diamond T Ranch—back in 1980. Today, there are five huts …

A lot goes through your mind while lying on the floor of a sushi restaurant in downtown Anchorage. Stuff like, “somebody needs to clean the underside of this table,” and, “why doesn’t anyone ask what I’m doing on the floor?” and, of course, “this is gonna make a great story if I live.” But I digress. Five days prior, I …

The Mt. Baker Highway is unusual. As one of Washington’s few high mountain roads that remains (mostly) open in winter, it provides access to the alpine that otherwise just isn’t feasible in other parts of the North Cascades due to a combination of snowed-in roads and the abbreviated daylight hours of winter. The Highway, officially known as SR-542, is plowed …

“April is the cruelest month,” wrote T.S. Eliot exactly one hundred years ago in the opening stanza of The Waste Land. The famous first line reads like an indictment of the fourth month as Eliot yearns to stave off vernal rebirth and remain in the stillness that precedes spring: April is the cruelest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead …