Training ground: Early snow makes Hatcher Pass the ideal place for top skiers

HATCHER PASS — Beginning in September, the worlds of meteorology and cross country skiing collide in the Talkeetna Mountains north of Palmer.

It all begins in late summer, when typhoons forming off the South Asia coast start making the long trek up the North Pacific Ocean toward Alaska. When these monster storm systems finally spin into Southcentral Alaska, they slam into coastal mountain ranges and deluge the area with rain. When the mountains cool in early Autumn, the heavy Asian rains turn to snow.

It’s a phenomenon that some of the nation’s top athletes are taking advantage of at Hatcher Pass, a cross country skiing Mecca north of Palmer that has emerged as the premier early winter skiing destination in North America.

“We have some of the best skiing in the world right now,” Alaska Pacific University Ski Team coach Erik Flora said during a training session in the pass last week.

As he spoke, members of the elite ski program — which currently includes the top three female skiers in the nation and several former Olympians — took laps around a 5-kilometer loop through the remnants of the Independence Gold Mine, a turn-of-the-century mine that’s now a state park.

The APU ski team has grown into the premier program in the nation, thanks in part to the squad’s ability to ski nearly year-round. Between the team’s Lowell Thomas Jr. summer training facility on Eagle Glacier in the Chugach Mountains and Hatcher Pass, Flora said he believes gives his program a huge advantage.

“Most people would be pretty jealous of what we have up here,” Flora said.

The program has attracted some of the nation’s best skiers, including the top three-ranked female skiers in the U.S. and two of the top six men in the country.

“We have a high-firing team right now,” Flora said.

The team’s top skier is Kikkan Randall, a two-time Olympian from Anchorage who added a third-place finish on the World Cup circuit to her resume last season. Randall said the skiing at Hatcher Pass has played a significant role in her emergence as a world-class competitor.

“It’s huge,” Randall said after completing a training session in the pass. “It really just takes what we’ve been working on all summer and gives us a whole month ahead of the world.”

APU began training in the pass the final weekend in September, and Randall said the early skiing also helps keep her motivated and excited about the sport after a summer’s worth of roller skiing and wet glacier skiing.

“A lot of people get on snow for the first time and it’s the really scrappy stuff, but here it’s like perfect conditions right off the bat, so you’re like, ‘yeah, I like being a skier,’” she said.

APU skier James Southam is a former Olympian who is currently the sixth-ranked male skier in the U.S. Southam said another advantage of the pass is its proximity to Anchorage, which is only 45 minutes away.

“You can sleep in your own bed. You’re not having to drive four hours from home,” he said.

Ski trails in the pass are open to the public and groomed by volunteers. Usually, the volunteers are members of the Strabel family, whose patriarch, Ed, is a longtime area ski mentor and former Colony High School ski coach. Strabel lives at the base of Government Peak, just over a ridge from Hatcher Pass, and grooms trails near the Independence Mine on an almost daily basis.

Without Strabel’s hard work, Erik Flora said the cross country ski scene in the pass would likely be much different.

“We’re really thankful to have Ed up here,” Flora said.

Strabel grooms the trails on a beat-up old snowmachine pulling a weighted sled, then finishes up by spending a couple hours skiing on his own. He’s pretty sure that the loop at the mine is five kilometers, but thanks to a quirk in his machine’s odometer, he said he’s not quite sure.

“It could be five miles,” he said, laughing.

Strabel’s old sled and the rustic setting provided by the crumbling mine structure are also part of what makes the pass such a gem. It’s not uncommon to see Olympic-caliber skiers skating side-by-side with recreational skiers up for the day from the communities that lie in the valley below, taking in the epic views below.

Combined with the jagged peaks of the surrounding mountains and low-lying fog in the valley below, James Southam said the pass can sometimes take on an otherworldly quality.

“It looks like Mordor,” he said, referring to the mythical mountain-ringed land from the Lord of the Rings movies.

Hatcher Pass isn’t an entirely unknown commodity in the world of cross country skiing. In fact, some APU ski team members said their counterparts from Outside have already heard enough about the area’s top-notch ski conditions.

“I read on a couple Web sites back east that people are just tired of hearing about the great skiing at Hatcher Pass,” ski team member Peter Kling, of Vermont, said. “They don’t want to hear any more or see any pictures.”

But Kling’s teammate, Anchorage’s Anders Haugen, said that’s not happening.

“We’re gonna keep posting them anyway,” he said.

Success at the national and international level, combined with the ability to train year-round, has made for a tight-knit community among the APU skiers.

“It’s so motivating when you have 25 people out there working hard,” Kikkan Randall said.

It’s a recipe for success that is paying big dividends not only for the U.S. on a national scale, but for Alaska-grown skiers as well. Along with Randall and Southam, more than half of the team is made up of skiers who grew up in Alaska, including Talkeetna’s Taz Mannix, a 2004 graduate of Susitna Valley High who is currently ranked second among U.S. women behind Randall.

Randall said the emergence of Alaska skiers as a force nationally isn’t a surprise considering the sport’s massive popularity in the state as both a recreational and competitive activity.

“I think what you see is a lot of kids who grew up on snow for a big part of the year, they grew up in the ski culture and decided to pursue skiing,” she said. “It’s easy to see why we’ve had so much success.”

Randall said the sport’s growth in Alaska has helped fuel a change in attitude among U.S. skiers. Where in the past, cross country skiers were content to share the same snow as their more accomplished rivals from places like Scandinavia, she said Americans are no longer shy about fighting for space on the podium.

“The American mindset in the past we haven’t’ been there, we haven’t been mentally thinking we can challenge. But now we think we can do that,” she said.

Randall said that, with continued year-round training and a solid team attitude, there’s really no limit to how far American skiers can go.

“We can win Olympic medals,” she said. “There’s no doubt.”

Contact Matt Tunseth at 352-2265 or matt.tunseth@

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