If you're after big mountain, consequential adventure, you head to Alaska. Proving ground for elite mountain athletes (and their hopefully elite gear). Just as the choicest lines rise in such proximity to the ocean, powder is abundant, but so is the famously horrendous marine weather. Beringia athlete and mountain guide Ty Guarino and friends head north to Alaska for some legendary AK conditions.

Story and Photos by Spencer Harkins

Here is the math on our Alaska Range trip this spring: 14 days on the glacier, two actual days of skiing, and two bonus windows where the clouds parted just long enough to hike up for about an hour before the weather remembered we were there. Two of our crew have a combined 25+ years of Denali guiding and Alaska Range ski trips between them, and their verdict was "officially the worst weather trip we’ve ever had." So that is the trip. Thanks for reading.

Kidding. Sort of.

The crew was Ty Guarino, Aaron Diamond, Mali Noyes, and me. We had our sights set on a key objective on the Northeast Fork of the Eldridge, plus whatever else the zone offered. What the zone offered, mostly, was snowfall, strong winds, and impossible light.

We sat in Talkeetna for two days waiting to fly. When we finally got on the glacier, it took days to establish our high camp: haul sleds when the weather allowed, sit in the tents when it did not. Mostly it did not. And then, at high camp, we sat some more.

Tent life in sustained weather becomes its own discipline. Some nights we woke up in shifts to dig the tents out, sometimes more than once. We broke every tent we brought, all three, through some combination of wind and negligent shovel technique. And we practiced recreational shoveling, which is when nothing strictly needs digging out but you dig anyway because it is something to do with your arms. Ty was the undisputed king of this. He shoveled for hours a day, purely for fun, and eventually engineered an underground poop cave with full standing height, arms over your head. Maintaining it required excavation roughly twice a day plus frequent complete redesigns, which suited him perfectly.

Everyone develops their own storm-day practice. Mali read nonstop. Diamond finished an entire audiobook in three days and just kept going. I did a bit of everything: some reading, some sitting, some staring, some shoveling for sport. And then there was Ty, who arrived for a three-week Alaska expedition with no books, no audiobooks, no movies, no downloaded music. Just two podcast episodes, and both of them were Sounds of the Caribbean. You know, the three-hour reggae radio broadcast from Selector Jerry’s "Dub Bunker" in New Jersey? We all heard each episode four or five times. Ty must have heard them 20.

On day nine the weather finally gave us something, at 9pm. It caught us at our lowest. Camp chatter had died down and talk of home had quietly overtaken talk of sending. We had just finished dinner and were headed for our bags, muscles sticky from a week of lying down, when the clouds pulled back for the first time in days. Nobody wanted to go except Ty, and Ty would not let it die. His positivity pulled all four of us into cold boots and out of camp. The objective itself was mundane, something we would have overlooked on any other day of any other trip, but we skied it in glorious, windy sunset light, the first light we had seen in days. It broke the spell. That was the night the trip actually started.

When the weather finally gave us real days, we got two. The first we spent approaching our main objective, which was wearing a giant lenticular cloud we chose not to argue with, so we bailed onto its smaller neighbor, Mount Crescent: up the SW Ridge (Adams Carter & Co, 7/1/1958), down 3,000 feet of perfect east facing powder, a first known ski descent. The second day we went back for the main line and got turned around halfway up the mountain by surface conditions and weather that was, once again, pushing it. That day’s consolation was a lap on a perfect dome nearby, and it needs no asterisk: it was legitimately sick skiing. Those turns in full sun are most of the photos you see here. And that was the skiing. All that remained was one more one-hour window, an 18 kilometer ski back to the strip, and the plane home.It would be easy to file this trip as a loss. We did not ski the line we came for, and we spent roughly 80 percent of the trip horizontal. But other crews saw the same forecast and never flew in, and they came home with nothing but a better-trained confirmation bias. We came home with a probable first descent, less sunburn than other trips, an advanced degree in snow removal, and six hours of Selector Jerry’s favorite hits committed to memory. You cannot make the sky open. All you can do is be standing under it when it does.