Alaska Mountain Wilderness Classic

For most people who run the "classic," it represents the single event around which everything revolves. Stay up to late partying on a sunday night, and your 2 hours of sleep become "sleep deprivation practice" for the classic. Not much else could make me subject myself to rediculous hardships, like not eating for three days, running 14 miles every day after work for 2 months, limiting myself to 4 hours of sleep a night while working a full time job, packrafting 15 miles of the kenai river at midnight every day for a week, swimming in glacier lakes to the point of hypothermia almost daily, skiing every day off all summer long, and the list goes on and on.... The point is that running the classic feels like the one thing that every thing I have ever done was in preperation for.

I would love to tell my partner Craig "chunk" Barnard and I's story here, but a link to Roman Dial's race report can tell the story better:

http://packrafting.blogspot.com/2009/08/wilderness-classic-report-unofficial.html

National Geographic 'adventururer of the year' Andrew Skurka did a great writeup for Backpacking light Magazine as well:

http://www.backpackinglight.com/cgi-bin/backpackinglight/race_report_2009_amwc.html?id=ZNBuBXJH:209.124.128.160

After work Backcountry shortlapping

Heres a few pictures from back in june, when I only had to bushwack for 1.5 hours for excellent skiing (excellent being a very relative term here) in the Chugach national forest.

Here is me adopting the "sticky volcanic ash on top of snow" stance.

Bushwacking home at midnight after 3 solid 800 vert laps after a full day of work (with work the next day nonetheless)

Denied my last ski of august!

So, wednesday morning I got up bright and early with big dreams of skiing my favorite late summer monster ski runs on the harding icefield. It only took a few hours of aproach hiking for the weather to settle in, and for me to realize that perhaps crossing the crevasse-ridden Exit glacier in a white-out wasn't the smartest thing to do solo, not to mention skiing no-choke couloirs in an icy rainstorm. But alas, the "weekend" was salvaged with a beach camping/mountain biking trip to ninilchick. Watching an ashcloud spewing forth from Mt. Redoubt made the trip worth it.