Doug O’Harra contemplates where to cross the Placer River/Craig Medred photo

Alaska’s white pavements

PLACER RIVER – The snowpack in this glacier-headed drainage 50 miles southeast of Alaska’s largest city was still at least four feet thick on Wednesday and with the early morning temperatures in the 20s, a fat-tired bike could be ridden almost anywhere across the white pavements.

Global warming might be transforming the nation’s 49th state, but it is a slow process.

Alaska remains the land of ice and snow, and Anchorage saw more than its normal share this year. Climatologists have been warning of this for years, of course.

There is a fine line, they have noted, between the temperatures that bring heavy, wet snow and those that bring rain. The state’s urban underbelly witnessed both this year.

The Anchorage metro area was buried in snow in December and early January only to be hit with Chinook winds that brought warm temperatures and rain roaring into the area in late January, February and March.

That weather so dampened the enthusiasm of the Anchorage outdoor recreationists that friend Doug O’Harra said the suggestion for a fat-bike ride up this river valley sounded like it was coming from someone who had ingested too much “hopeium.”

It was almost as if he’d forgotten what is the best of Alaska, the white pavements of spring.

What non-Alaskans need to understand here is that cross-country travel in the 49th state in the snow-free season generally sucks. Alaska has few maintained trails, and there is a reason the best known of the state’s trails – the Iditarod Trail – is a winter-only route.

In the summer, the Iditarod is swamps, mosquitoes, willow thickets, alder tangles, bogs, tussocks, ponds, lakes, creeks, rivers, rapids, scree, barely passable canyons and the occasional grizzly bear. All of which is a description that describes much of the state.

Just finding good footing on a summer hike can seem like a gift from the gods.

There is a reason that many of the Athabascans who first migrated across the Bering Sea land bridge into Alaska kept going south and eventually settled in the American Southwest where travel on foot is much easier in the warm months.

There’s also a reason one of the best books ever written about Alaska – the late Archdeacon Hudson Stuck’s “Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled” – is about winter travel across the then Territory of Alaska because winter is the best time to travel in-country, and the best of the best is in what the rest of the world considers the spring but is a period that runs warm and cold in Alaska.

The warm can turn the snows that cover the state to near impassable mush during the heat of the day, but if the nights are clear and the cold moves in as it normally does under clear skies, that mush can become a white pavement allowing a human on snowshoes, skis, snowmachine or a modern-day fat bike to go almost anywhere until the snow changes again and you can go almost nowhere.

Glacier City Snowmobile Tours, a business based in Girdwood, Alaska’s only real resort community, was happily leading a conga line of tourists on snowmobiles up the winter-only Placer River trail to the Spencer Glacier on Wednesday.

It is a spectacular trip even in the flat light that makes piloting a snowmobile a whole lot less fun than when you can clearly see the trail ahead.  In such conditions, a fat bike going at 6 to 10 mph can often be a lot more enjoyable than a snowmachine going 10 to 30 mph.

We abandoned the established trail, however, and, under O’Harra’s leadership went exploring for a fabled “western route” up the valley to the glacier. We didn’t find it. There is an area where the Placer braids widely about a mile from the glacier that appeared to be crossable if one wanted to wade an ice-cold river in 20-degree temperatures, but we opted against that idea.

Oh to be young and foolish enough once again to give it a try, but alas we’d had our fun and turned to follow lead-dog Suka back to the Seward Highway with our timing almost perfect.

Near noon, the ride-anywhere snowpack of the early morning was threatening to soon become the ride-nowhere snowpack of midday.

All of which is something of a commentary on the Alaska wilderness in general where when things are good they are very, very good and when they are bad, they can be very, very bad.