Snowboarding In Alaska

Jonathan Snowboarding

Sunday my friend and I made our way up to the Moose Mountain Ski Resort for a bit of snowboarding. Oh and before you get the wrong idea the word resort is used very loosely here. Continue story. We were both new to snowboarding so we rented our gear and bought a pass for the bunny hill, aka Moose Meadow… how cute. Well, as it turns out it’s not so cute for beginners! More on that later. One of the interesting things about this particular ski resort is that they didn’t use ski lifts. They used big greyhound buses to run groups of skiers up the mountain. Seemed odd to me and not very financially efficient given gas prices, but whatever works.

Well, we’re at the top of this bunny hill and neither one of use has had lessons. Nobody offered us any pointers either. We strapped our snowboards on, way too far from the slope the first time as it turns out. So we ended up being tired and wore out just trying to scoot our ways to the slope. Of course when we got there the hilarity ensued for many laughs. Both of us had some really exceptional wipeouts. I’m usually a pretty quick student so I caught on pretty fast and was doing quite well by the third trip down. The problem was I think I peaked (pun intended) too early and it seemed that I just got worse. Oh well, I still had a great time.

The views from the top of this mountain were really quite breathtaking. Just beautiful! We were there for the sunset also and the colors that filled the sky were amazing. I got a few pictures which you can view by clicking the header photo above, however they really fail (miserably) to capture just exactly how great the scenery was. Too bad… guess you had to be there!

At the end of the snowboarding day we were both extremely sore and very tired. Dinner at Chili’s and a couple of tall, ice cold beers helped to mend some of the wounds. However the true testament to the physical stresses and exercise came the following day… and actually still to this day. My everything hurts! I smacked my shoulder pretty good on one of my falls and it’s just getting to where I can comfortably raise my hand over my head again. My abs hurt, my backside hurts, my chest and arms hurt, my legs hurt…. I hurt! It is however a small price to pay for such an experience as snowboarding in Alaska.

Oh, and speaking of experiences. During our snowboarding extravaganza I had the rare opportunity to use an actual outhouse at the top of a mountain in Alaska in below zero weather. Nice.