The potential for a decent weekend in the Valdez area upon my return from a three-month roadtrip to explore the terrain, snowpacks, and avalanche programs of Canada, Montana, Wyoming, and Utah motivated me to make quick work of the drive from Lake Louise, AB to Taylor’s place in less than 2.5 days solo.

The Central Chugach was coming out of Alaska’s deep freeze of January 2020, but was still cold AF.  A big storm had just deposited a few feet of snow in the mountains, with a copious amount of that making it all the way down to sea level.  On top of a healthy sea level snowpack for early February, and all waterways being frozen about as solid as they get, it was great to come home to an “old school” Alaskan winter.

I spent the first couple days taking advantage of the generally short annual window for skiing from sea level out of the Port of Valdez.  The Comstock, Embick, Francis area is a fantastic zone for this with a very short drive from town.  My first day out the storm system departed with clearing skies by midday.  Conditions were typically maritime: extremely dense and wind buffed pow.  Despite the big storm on top of extremely weak facets that developed from the dry and very cold weather of January, storm snow on the coast seemed to be bonding rapidly. As usual, the full clear out to high pressure came with the typically atrocious outflow north winds that rape the Thompson Pass to Valdez corridor.  Nevertheless, there was still good sheltered skiing in the Comstock, Embick, Francis area and I was able to tick off another new couloir on day two. Day three, another storm system was rolling in with decreasing visibility.  While it had warmed significantly, wind chill values were still at subzero double digits everywhere.  We nixed skiing in the alpine due to flat light, and ice climbing due to the cold.  Luckily, Taylor always has creative options in mind.  We were able to ski some incredible couloirs in Keystone Canyon that were relatively sheltered.  The emphasis is on relatively, as I almost got frostbite in a private place when I relieved myself but didn’t get my fly fully zipped due to climbing harness.  The wind was so intense we were transported without effort from couloir one downstream to two via the iced-over Lowe River.  The wind blew us over the ice with such rapidity, skiing the icy river was the most thrilling part of the day.The first couloir we skied is the Love’s Way ice climb approach gully.  With less snow this is more often a WI2 gully.  We followed it for ~2000′ to above the Trans Alaska Pipeline road near brush line.  It can be followed even higher into upper elevation glaciated terrain. After being blown downstream, we then climbed the gully next to Hung Jury for about 1000′.