beyond bounds

After falling for AIaska in the summertime, David Amsden returns to ski its soft-powder snow, explore melting ice shelves, and learn what the locals have always known the 49th state is truly amazing in winter

- David Amsden

it was the first week of April, the dawn of spring in most of the Northern Hemisphere, but in Anchorage it still felt very much like winter. Snow was everywhere: piled high on rooftops and cars, lining the sidewalks in colossal embankments, floating in clumps in the Cook Inlet, and shellacking the nearby Chugach Mountains, which form a fierce and jagged amphitheater on the city's eastern edge.

I'd come to AIaska in part to ski those mountains, thanks to a chance encounter I'd had the previous year. While visiting the state for the first time in the way that many do-on a midsummer cruise-I met a guy from Anchorage at a bar. After recounting how I'd fallen for the state after a day spent hiking imagination-defying landscapes, I made a predictably naive remark about how the winters must be brutal.

"Oh no," he said. "Winter here is the absolute best."

He described jaunts to a ski resort with surreal terrain and no crowds, weekends spent holed up in cabins reachable only by bush planes that land on frozen lakes, and weather that (at least around Anchorage) was less punishing than you might think. Go after February, he advised, when the sunlight is back but the snow is still deep.