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[April
4, 2004 Anchorage Daily News article by Craig Medred entitled "Nordic
Trail in Girdwood Mostly a Memory"]
History dies young in
Alaska. Skier Jim Renkert knows this all too well after a
couple of years hunting for the Girdwood trail on which the 1969
Junior National Cross-Country Ski Championship was contested.
Back then -- only five years after the Good Friday earthquake
flattened Anchorage and devastated Southcentral Alaska -- the
junior nationals were a big deal. A first for Alaska, the
nationals came at a time when the state was looking for a tourism
boost.
The skiers, The Anchorage Times would opine after the event,
"absorbed in their brief week here at least a flavor of
Alaska and an acquaintance with some of its people. They have an
idea, at least, what Alaska is all about ...
"And we hope the word they carry home about Alaska will be a
good one. We would like to have them back again -- along with
their parents and brothers and sisters and all their friends.''
Were they to return today, they would find amazingly transformed
alpine slopes on Mount Alyeska, spectacular accommodations at the
Alyeska Prince Hotel and artifacts of the Nordic Trail -- if they
found that.
Bela Bodnar, then a junior nordic racer and now an Anchorage high
school ski coach, remembers the trail fondly as one of the best in
the area. But he can't remember how it passed away. Sometime
when he was off at college, he said, it just seemed to fade back
into the forest northeast of where the Alyeska Prince now rises.
As a boy, Renkert strapped on wooden skis and explored the network
of trails through these woods. Then he wandered away, as Bodnar
did before him and as so many young Alaskans do now, to see
America and the world. Over the course of a couple of
decades, Renkert never lost touch with his Alaska roots, but he
strayed far from the hills that run up the valley between Glacier
Creek and the north face on Mount Alyeska.
It wasn't until about the time he became trail coordinator for the
Alaska Division of Parks and Outdoor Recreation that he began to
wonder what ever had become of the old Nordic Trail.
Eventually, he found a map of where it ran. But when he returned a
few years ago to explore the old trail system, he was surprised to
find it nearly gone. The map was of limited use. So much had
changed in 30 years.
The hotel and its parking lots had been built over part of the
trail. New downhill ski runs coming off the recently opened north
face concealed more. An old avalanche had swept to the bottom of
the valley, knocking down spruce trees that once held trail
markers and clearing the ground for a thicket of alders near the
1-kilometer mark on the old trail.
Bodnar remembered the avalanche well. He was on the Nordic Trail
when the resort shot it down. He was skiing with a young man from
Texas. They heard the snow come rumbling down the north face and
thought they were going to die.
"We heard these big, old hemlock trees coming down,'' Bodnar
said. "The air was so full of snow you could hardly breathe.
We could barely see each other. It sounded like it had our
number.'' For terrifying seconds, Bodnar was convinced that
he would either be crushed by a falling hemlock or smothered in a
wall of snow. But he and his friend sought safety in a stand of
trees that survived. "It missed us," Bodnar said.
"(But) we were a little hot. They didn't even think of
clearing the cross-country trail in those days.''
The alder-scar of the old avalanche is still easy to find today,
but Renkert notes Alyeska avalanche control work has become a lot
more sophisticated, knocking down potentially dangerous snow much
earlier. The lower station of the Alyeska Tram sits several
hundred feet from that old avalanche scar.
In summer, when the snow that now covers the alders melts, Renkert
said it's hard to determine where the old Nordic Trail went, but
it wouldn't be hard to cut a new trail through the alders into
where the Nordic Trail joins what is now part of the Winner Creek
Trail. Winner Creek shared part of the old nordic route, and
somewhere in time absorbed the collective memory of the community.
When a Girdwood-area trail plan was revised some years ago, Winner
Creek was high on the list, and the old junior nationals trail was
left out -- a forgotten remnant from the days before fiberglass
skis, nylon-plastic boots and skate technique. Signs
depicting nordic skiers nailed to trees in a forest with quickly
regenerating underbrush faded.
Bodnar thinks it may be time to think about bringing it back.
"They need more ski trails there (at Alyeska),'' he said.
"They need a cross-country ski school there. They need a
place to rent skis at the lodge. Cross-country has gotten a heck
of a lot more popular worldwide.''
He is right about that. In the West now, cross-country resorts,
built in the fashion of downhill resorts, are springing up.
The Los Angeles Times has cited this as part of a trend,
pegging nordic skiing as one of the fastest growing winter sports.
The Cross-Country Ski Areas Association reported visits to member
resorts were up 20 percent last year. Alyeska could have an
opportunity to join the trend.
"It was a pretty nice trail,'' said Barbara Britch Craig of
Delta, a former Olympian from Alaska and another of those who
skied junior nordic races here in 1969. "It wasn't really
terribly hard. It was a nice trail.''
It still could be.
Armed with the old map, an ample dose of determination and a
historic curiosity, Renkert has -- over the course of the past
couple winters and part of a summer -- rediscovered most of the
old route. On a sun-kissed Friday last month, when the
heavens simply seemed to be beaming on the snow-covered mountains,
we skied much of the trail. Some of the course was obvious from
the few marking signs left from the 1960s. Old blazes were left on
tree trunks here and there. Other parts were discernible in
the unnatural openings through the forest. And some of the
old route was lost beneath the snow.
Renkert confessed he
had been forced to come back in summer to find old tree or brush
cuts, connecting some of the twists and turns in the snaking
trail. This clearly wasn't a trail constructed to skate-technique
standards, as most trails are now. Some of the uphills and
downhills, though short, are steep enough to be challenging on a
groomed trail. Some of the corners are sharp, unlike the wide,
sweeping turns on the heavily used nordic trails at Kincaid
Park. Trail width is narrow, more like a trail meant to be
maintained by snowmobiles than with a Piston Bully.
"They were setting it with Ski-Doo Alpines,'' Bodnar said,
"just a single track.'' The Alpine is no longer made,
but an Italian firm makes a modernized and much-improved version
called an Alpina Sherpa. The $20,000 cost is hefty, but a fraction
of what a Piston Bully goes for these days. With that
machine and a drag to smooth the snow behind, it would take almost
no additional effort to renovate the old junior nordic trail. A
tree might need to be cut here and there and a few limbs trimmed
back, but it would be amazingly easy to restore quality nordic
loops of 5- and 10-kilometers to the Girdwood Valley.
Maybe it's time to take a step back to the future.
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