April 10, 2010: Mount Edgecumbe: My second-favorite ski day ever
- edwardsbushnell
- Sep 10, 2022
- 4 min read
Updated: Nov 30, 2022
After graduating from law school in 2009, I spent a year in Sitka, Alaska, clerking for a Superior Court Judge. Southeast Alaska is beautiful, the people were wonderful, and the job and area offered tremendous opportunities. But Sitka is rather remote (compared to the lower 48, anyway), situated on the west side of a large island accessible only by ferry and airplane. I was burdened with school debt, uncertain of my future after the clerkship, and trying to help support a young and growing family (my younger daughter was born in Sitka, which I'm thinking gives her bragging rights for life). With our tenuous financial situation I was pretty stressed, and certainly wasn't traveling at all.
So I was thrilled when three of my closest friends came to visit in April 2010, hoping to explore Southeast Alaska and find some decent backcountry skiing. The visit coincided with the end of the spring humpback whale season and the middle of the annual herring spawn.
We spent the first several days of the trip winter camping in the interior of Baranof Island, dealing with unsettled weather and considerable avalanche danger. I'll save details of that trip for a later post.
Shortly after our return from the island's interior, we were treated to a series of rare sunny spring days accompanied by a drop in temperature. The four of us spent a day exploring the docks and waterfront trails of Sitka, then made a last minute plan to hire a boat to take us across Sitka Sound to nearby Kruzof Island, where we would stay in a Forest Service cabin and attempt to ski Mt. Edgecumbe.
Boats on the Sitka docks
Every year thousands of tons of herring lay tens of thousands of eggs on the kelp, on shore, and anywhere else they can. The male herring release milt, or sperm, in the water which turns it a milky color. Alaskans collect the salty eggs and use them for snacks. One imaginative Alaskan suggested I put them on popcorn, though I prefer Lawry's.
We made the boat trip on the afternoon of April 9, arriving in the mid-afternoon at the Fred's Creek Forest service cabin on the east coast of the island. At the time, the cabin was newly-renovated and extremely comfortable - so much so I would return with my family and other guests just a few short weeks later.
After getting situated in the cabin we had several hours to explore the tide pools and enjoy the alpenglow on the mountains to the east of Sitka at dusk.
We left the cabin at 6 a.m. on April 10. The route from Fred's Creek Cabin to the summit of Edgecumbe is about 7 miles, traveling through a muskeg (Alaskan swamp) through the interior of Kruzof Island. I became intimately familiar with muskegs during my year in Southeast Alaska; I found them beautiful and maybe a little mysterious. The muskeg we crossed on this approach was particularly beautiful but I couldn't help but be reminded of the Dead Marshes from Lord of the Rings. Fortunately, I found no dead soldiers in the bogs.
After about 5 miles, 2 hours, and several hundred feet of elevation gain, we were able to put on our skins and proceed on skis.
It was a fairly quick skin up the eastern slopes of Mount Edgecumbe to reach the crater rim. Edgecumbe, at the time considered a dormant volcano (reclassified in May 2022 as "historically active" after hundreds of small earthquakes were recorded the month before), is only 3,200 feet above the surrounding ocean. As we reached the rim we were surprised to see that the crater of the volcano seemed to be hundreds of feet deep and very skiable. I hadn't even suspected skiing into the crater would have been a possibility. We had ascended on the eastern flank of the volcano, but here we saw a beautiful slope heading to the north-northwest toward the Pacific. We could hear the surf crashing against the rocky shore 3,000 feet below.
The summit of the volcano is on the western edge of the crater which is several hundred feet higher than the eastern rim; we realized skiing into the crater and skinning back out would be almost as quick, and far more fun, than skirting around the crater's steep and rocky northern edge.
The first run into the crater was boot-deep powder, the pitch was mild and the snow was stable. I've never skied into a crater before - probably not a recommended habit - and it was eerily still at the bottom. It was wide and flat enough that I didn't feel claustrophobic, though it was odd seeing no place to go but up.
Although I know I wore an altimeter around this time, I don't recall noting the vertical drop into the crater. To my best estimates and recollection, I'd guess it was about 500 vertical feet into the crater from the eastern rim, and maybe 750 vertical feet from the west rim into the crater's bottom. In any case, a 30-minute or so easy skin (easy for me, anyway, as Brian broke trail) brought us to the summit. Here we had an incredible 270-degree view of the Pacific.
Feeling fairly comfortable with he snow stability, we decided to drop into the crater again from the west rim, which was significantly steeper. There seemed to be about 4-6 inches of powder on a fairly firm base: basically, hero snow. The run down was so enjoyable we immediately decided to skin back up for a third run into the crater.
After the third run into the crater, we set a new skin track out to the southeast rim of the crater, where we took in the view one more time before enjoying a long run down the southeast flank of the mountain.
We enjoyed a mellow hike back to the cabin in the afternoon sun, arriving just before our scheduled pickup time. The wind and seas had come up bit, making boarding the boat from the beach probably the most difficult and stressful part of the day.
