"I felt impossibly tiny, overwhelmed by the quiet": The visceral appeal of late winter in America’s wild, frozen north

It was the first week of April, the dawn of spring in most of the Northern Hemisphere, but it still felt very much like winter in Anchorage. Snow was everywhere: piled high on rooftops and cars, framing the pavements in colossal embankments, floating in clumps in the Cook Inlet. It covered the nearby Chugach Mountains, which form a fierce and jagged amphitheatre on the city’s eastern edge. I’d come to Alaska, in large 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 many do, on a midsummer cruise, I met a guy from Anchorage at a bar. After recounting how I’d fallen for the state following a day spent hiking imagination-defying landscapes, I made a 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) is less punishing than you might think. Go after February, he advised, when the sunlight is back but the snow is still deep.

I began my first day by exploring Anchorage, mainly because I’ve long been intrigued by cities that seem overlooked – or, in the case of this one, tend to be cast more as entry points than desired destinations. Alaska’s largest city, home to nearly half of the state’s 730,000 inhabitants, has a fascinating history and heritage. Indigenous cultures here date back to long before it became a tent encampment of frontiersmen. An earthquake levelled the place in 1964, four years before oil was discovered and opened a spigot of money that shaped today’s mini metropolis. Anchorage feels somehow both brand-new and dated, consisting primarily of a downtown of utilitarian towers and a sprawl of strip malls that resemble those towers tipped on their sides. Everyone in the state knows the quip about Anchorage’s best feature: “You can see Alaska from there.”

“We are definitely due for a revamp,” joked Rachel Pennington, part of the family that owns Fire Island Rustic Bakeshop, a local staple where I stopped for breakfast on my first morning. “But that’s part of the fun. So much here is hidden that you have to be willing to look for it.”

Take, for instance, the James Beard-nominated bakery itself. Occupying a former medical clinic, the space now houses an artisanal liquor store, a produce stand and a coffee shop hawking potted succulents and oat milk lattes. After a flaky house croissant, I drove around the city at random, eventually settling in for a tasty lunch at the Midnight Sun Brewing Co, one of the many craft beer spots peppering an industrial swathe of town. By evening, my apprehension had morphed into fondness, helped by the martini I nursed at Club Paris, an old-school haunt that is one of the few establishments remaining from before the earthquake. Around the corner I found excellent whisky cocktails and ramen at a place named, aptly enough, Whisky & Ramen. Newly opened in a sleek two-level space, it would not have been out of place in my Los Angeles neighbourhood. But by then I was feeling gloriously far from home.

The next morning, I steered my rented four-by-four out of the city and onto the Seward Highway, where the full magnitude of Alaska’s wilderness hit me. Hugging the Turnagain Arm, a narrow saltwater inlet where pods of beluga whales congregate in summer, the road is framed by mountains that shoot skywards from the sea, as if being launched. It is the kind of natural majesty you absorb not so much with your eyes but with your cells.

My destination was Girdwood, a former mining colony 45 minutes from Anchorage. Today it is centred around Alyeska, the state’s premier ski resort, which rises with imposing elegance in a forest of evergreens. I planned to stay for the next few days at the resort’s on-mountain hotel. Having not been on skis in a year, I thought I’d start by clocking some downhill hours on the mountain’s 2,500 feet of vertical terrain before attempting something I’d long been both intrigued and intimidated by: backcountry (off-piste) skiing, which Alaskans speak of with religious fervour.

But the weather turned out to be so right – bright sun and a bluebird sky – that it would have been a mistake to miss the opportunity for a backcountry outing. And so, with considerable nerves, I opted out of the groomed runs at the resort to meet up with Mike Welch, operator of an independent local outfitter called Sundog Ski Guides, who had offered to take me out for a tutorial. Tall and limber, with the crow’s feet that come from spending most of the year squinting into alpine sun, he projected an easy confidence that was a balm for my jitters. “The only thing I love more than skiing in this part of the world is introducing it to people for the first time,” he said. After a brief lesson on how to use the avalanche beacons in case things got hairy, we put skins over the skis and began walking up into a valley framed by downy slopes.

We covered some 2,000 feet of elevation over four miles. Halfway up, as an avalanche precaution, Welch had us separate by about 100 yards for the remainder of the hike. Following the path carved by Welch’s skis and poles, which resembled a seam stitched through fabric of otherworldly white, I felt impossibly tiny, overwhelmed by the quiet. Time and space took on dreamlike properties. So did my thoughts. By the time I reached Welch at the summit, I could barely remember my own name. “Weird shit happens out there, doesn’t it?” he said with a sage grin.

We stood at the top of a mountain known as Tincan Peak, the enormity of Alaska’s famed backcountry stretching before us, range after range interlocking like an M C Escher woodcut. Because the tree line ends at 1,500 feet, unlike in the Northeast or the Rockies, the view consisted only of icy cornices, peaks and gullies sheathed in a penetrating blanket of snow. After admiring the panorama over sandwiches, we removed the skins from our skis and tipped in, slaloming down a steep section that levelled off in a small saucer-shaped valley.

I thought I’d skied powder before. I thought wrong. This stuff was chest-deep, humbling and, at first, produced in me foul language rather than euphoria. But once I got the hang of it, I had as much fun as I’d ever had on skis in my life. Carving our way back down the mountain felt not so much like skiing but floating through an alternate reality.

Returning to Alyeska, I wondered whether I would ever again be able to enjoy resort skiing. The next three days dispelled this concern while presenting another: would I ever want to ski anywhere else? First conceived in 1959, when a crew of locals pooled together money to develop the mountain, the resort does not have the size or frills of its glossier counterparts in the Rockies. But it offers the sort of luxuries that make for transcendent days on the slopes: terrain to satisfy the palate of just about any skier or snowboarder, with no lift lines or elbowing through the gear-cloaked masses for that afternoon beer. Because of the lack of trees, most of the mountain is an open bowl, with the named trails acting mostly as suggestions, unlike the defined runs that cut through forest in most ski areas. This makes the experience about as close to backcountry skiing as you can get while still having the convenience of lifts – with the surreal bonus of staring at the churn of ocean water from the Turnagain Arm, visible on every descent.

The vibe in Girdwood, a woodsy little hamlet, was much like that on the mountain: unfussy, ripe with tumbledown charm, ticking all the essential après ski boxes without the manufactured authenticity of so many North American ski towns. One evening I kicked back with a pint at the Girdwood Brewing Company, with its airy taproom, outdoor fire pits and rotating food trucks. Another, I ate weathervane scallops from the Gulf of Alaska at Jack Sprat, a mainstay with buttery lighting run by Frans and Jen Weits, a couple originally from Michigan. Chair 5, a low-key restaurant-bar, does gourmet burgers that have become a cult among local skiers. It was refreshing to not encounter anyone from outside of Alaska. Where the bar-stool chatter at Vail in Colorado might turn to stock portfolios, at Chair 5 I talked to a rowdy group of local skiers about the incoming “bore tide”, a phenomenon in the Turnagain Arm that creates a single wave that breaks for miles on end. They discussed plans to surf it the next morning with the nonchalance of New York cyclists considering a loop through Central Park. “Wanna join?” one asked.

It all adds up to a world-class ski destination that, improbably, is still primarily the realm of the locals. But this may be changing. In 2018 Alyeska was purchased by Pomeroy Lodging, a Canadian company that is spreading word of the property to people across the whole of the USA. This season is Alyeska’s first as part of the Ikon Pass, which covers more than 50 ski areas, mostly in North America but also a handful in Europe and Japan. The hotel has been making various upgrades, most notably a new 50,000-square-foot Nordic spa that debuted in 2022. Set in the forest adjacent to the main gondola, with a slick restaurant of floor-to-ceiling windows and blond wood tables, the facility is a transporting oasis with outdoor hot tubs and cold plunges, steam rooms, an exfoliation cabin and a semicircle of barrel saunas built from cedar and tucked into a glade. This is not, needless to say, the Alaska of frostbite and frontier lore, though the no-phone policy happily prevents it from being pure influencer catnip. During my three days of downhill high jinks, it proved a welcome respite that left me primed for more adventure.

Leaving Alyeska, I drove through light flurries back towards Anchorage, then hooked northeast along the foothills of the Chugach Mountains and headed deeper into the interior. After about three hours, I found myself far removed from anything resembling civilisation but still a long way from the centre of a state nearly three times the size of France. My destination was Sheep Mountain Lodge, one of many off-the-grid hideaways in Alaska. Consisting of cosy single-occupancy log cabins fanned out along the foot of a mountain, it has the benefit of being reachable by car and close to the Matanuska Glacier, a 27-mile-long cathedral of ancient ice.

Pulling in, I was met by Mark Fleenor, who runs the property with his wife, Ruthann. He grew up in Tennessee and spent years flying planes for NGOs in Afghanistan, before settling in Alaska because few other places could sate his appetite for adventure. Inside the lodge’s main building, I saw a photo of him ice climbing the glacier and another of him scuba diving inside it. “People think we’re bundled up in this barren, inhospitable land half the year, when really we’re just having an insane amount of fun,” he told me. Then, with earnest bluster: “You ready to get intimate with the glacier yourself?”

With that, he handed me off to his buddy Ryan Cote, who runs snowmobile tours out of the property. Soon I was piloting one of these machines along a frozen creek towards the base of the glacier. After 30 minutes, we stopped at what I failed to immediately recognise as a wall of ice, because it looked almost soot-stained. But what came into focus was extraordinary: the surface as clear as a cut diamond, the black projected by the stones suspended inside it. It was a frozen snapshot of a seismic shift tens of thousands of years ago. “It’s called basal ice,” explained Cote. “It’s essentially the base of the glacier, the part that moves along the floor until it reaches this point.” In just a few weeks, as the weather warmed, where we were standing would be water and what we were looking at would vanish into it.

The next morning, my last before heading home, I rose from a deep slumber, the result of a second snowmobile excursion that took us through the powdery hills above the property, a superb dinner of local salmon back at the lodge and the fine bottle of bourbon Fleenor had brought out for a nightcap. Now Fleenor was whipping up espressos for us in preparation for seeing the glacier from another vantage point: the seat of his cherry-red helicopter. Minutes later we were hovering above its lines. There were sections that resembled vertebrae, others waves crashing into each other. The scale of it only became more incomprehensible the more I stared. Eventually, Fleenor landed the helicopter atop the glacier and handed me a pair of ice cleats to slide over my boots. “Ready to go inside?” he asked.

Every summer, explained Fleenor, he spends hours flying over the glacier in search of such spots: worm-like caves formed by meltwater moving through cracks in the ice. In late autumn, when freezing temperatures stop the melting, he explores them, looking for any he can bring guests to. “You know the slot canyons in Utah? This is basically that,” he noted. “But rather than taking aeons to form, here we get new ones every year that only exist for a few months. Pretty rad, right?”

I followed him down the shaft, a narrow passage that opened up to a world of sublime and ethereal beauty: curving, swooping walls of ice that reflected the sun in vivid shades of aquamarine and cobalt, everything perfectly still while somehow seeming alive, as if breathing. As we ventured in further, the cave darkened, tapering to a point where interlaced ice crystals, fine as silk, dangled and seemed to dance. We were the only humans inside a glacier twice the size of Manhattan, our feet atop 900 feet of solid ice. In a corner of my brain, I felt a flicker of gratitude towards the man I’d met the year before – and the few simple words that had brought me to Alaska in the winter.

Where to stay

Alyeska Resort

Essentially a single-property resort at the base of a mountain with 76 named trails, the family-friendly Alyeska has the feel of a wholesome hunting château, albeit with a new Scandinavian-style spa with a series of hot pools and barrel saunas surrounded by forest. The five restaurants include Sakura, which offers handcrafted speciality rolls and Alaskan-sourced sushi, and the Bore Tide Deli with its panoramic views of the seven “hanging” glaciers. The area is known for its backcountry skiing, with options for heli-skiing, and there’s great hiking and lift-accessed mountain biking in the summer.

Sheep Mountain Lodge

With its cosy log cabins, Sheep Mountain Lodge, northeast of Anchorage, is a proper Alaskan escape fantasy, run by suitably adventurous owners Mark and Ruthann Fleenor. It’s a base for snowmobile and helicopter rides over ice caves, glacial canyons and crystal clear blue pools on valley glaciers, spotting wildlife along the way before returning to feasts including local produce such as blackened halibut, often served with Alaskan craft beers.

Guided trips

For those looking to go deeper, Sundog Ski Guides takes groups and individuals into the Chugach and Talkeetna ranges, with all-local guides able to introduce the area even to those with no backcountry skiing experience. sundogskiguides.com