Skiing

As noted in our Thanksgiving post, it was unseasonably warm here in Fairbanks over the weekend. We had thought about going down to Anchorage, but with the warm weather (and kid health issues) we decided to stay here. The roads can actually get quite scary when it warms up as about 120 miles of the trip south is on snowpack. As the snow warms, the friction wanes. Tires actually stick pretty well to ice once it cools down enough and once we're below zero, grip is quite good but it's pretty slick as it warms up.

Anyway, we had picked the girls and ourselves up some ski stuff at the annual ski swap and decided to take them out for a ride. We went with some friends here over to the ski hill on Fort Wainwright. The ski hill is called Birch Hill and consists of a rope tow, ski lift and tube lift (they have three tracks for tubing down the hill...looks fun). We stuck to the rope tow.

We had been here once before last year and the outing consisted of me pulling up either Beth or Isabel between my legs to the top and then skiing down with them either between my legs or to the side of them as their personal brake. They could ski a little on their own at the very bottom, but really not much at all. I had decided to do some prep work and tried to teach Beth how to snowplow on our driveway over the past couple of weeks. She actually picked it up pretty well. I really only had to take her up on the rope tow a couple of times and she was snowplowing the whole way down on her own! She then decided she wanted to be able to go up by herself and figured out how to grab the handle on the rope and officially became an independent skiier!

Isabel soon followed. She stayed skiing with me perfecting the snowplow the first day. The kids had so much fun, we decided to go back the next day (you really need to play hard whenever the temperatures are this warm). Carol came and I took Owen home (after a couple of runs with him in arms) and at the end, Isabel was also going up and coming down the hill all on her own. The videos below are actually when they both were first starting out, but you can kind of get the idea.

We're looking forward to many more great ski days. It will be fun to get them skiing in SLC when they're a little better (I'm sure they wouldn't appreciate the Utah snow at this point). We're also trying the cross country ski thing which the girls enjoy.