Earning Your Turns, Sitka Style

In Southeast Alaska, you must earn your turns on a whole different level. It tests your physical and mental stamina just to get to a place you can put your skins on your skis or splitboard. In the small island town of Sitka, we have no ski lifts or rope tows or heli operations and our mountains are packed so densely with Sitka spruce and hemlock, they force you to hike up to at least 2000’ carrying all of your gear before you can improve efficiency by skinning.

A winter of good snow is becoming increasingly rare. This season, we were blessed with numerous powder days that make the effort more rewarding. There were only a couple days in there where we hiked up carrying all of our gear only to find crusty or heavy snow difficult to skin on or slide down safely. Our favorite mountain is Verstovia, because it gives us the most bang for our buck. On good powder days, you can choose between the steeper face runs, sweet tree runs, or more mellow turns to be had in the lower bowl and they are all worth it. If you wake early enough and start with the sun, you can get 6-7 decent runs in.

At the end of the day as we ration our last snacks and prepare for the dreaded hike down, the light begins making the snow covered peak glow. We look back at the mountain at our lines and smile. At this point, we know our efforts were worth every grunt and groan and the sore back and knees we’ll be cursed with the following day. We can head down with hearts full knowing we made the absolute best of what we have.