Until recently, playing in the snow meant two things: snowball fights and ski trips. But there’s much more happening these days among the snowdrifts.
A few things, such as snowmobiling and Alaska’s Fur Rendezvous, have been around for many years as vacation activities. Others-northern lights and the wildlife, for example-also have been around but nobody thought to make guided trips out of them until recently.
And then, there are those few things that are really out in left field-camping overnight in igloos with the Inuit or hiking among ice spears in a frozen canyon, for instance.
Every one of these experiences now exists in guide tour form. All you need is thick underwear (coats are often supplied) and an urge for some adventure.
Ice cathedrals
You’re surrounded by ice. Translucent, slippery ice covers the ground. Milky, folded ice covers the walls. Glowing blue ice lines a nearby cave.
The ice hangs above you like serrated daggers, and you can’t resist the temptation to ease beneath the sharpest points and crouch there with a ton of potential death aiming at your nose.
It could be Alaska or Antarctica. Instead, you’re on the floor of a canyon in western Canada, hardly 30 minutes from your car, a mere handful of miles from your hotel. It seems like cheating to have reached this eerie wonder so easily. Even so, the spectacular winter sights of Maligne Canyon have been a local secret in Jasper, Alberta, for decades.
Now, though, there are guided tours and the experience is open to anyone with the ability to walk across a room.
The adventure begins in the Jasper office of Maligne Tours, where everyone’s fitted with cold weather Sorel boots and metal-studded shoe covers for walking on ice. From there, it’s a 6-mile drive and a 1 1/2-mile walk along the trail at the top of the canyon while the guide explains the geology of the area.
Then it’s time to climb into the canyon and walk the final half-mile into magic.
In summer, this narrow canyon and its tunnels are filled with a raging river. But in winter, the water table drops, leaving just oozing drips that freeze into fantastic icicle shapes. There are 2-foot-long feathers and 10-foot-long spears, shapes that look like crystals and more that look like knives.
In places, the canyon is hardly 6 feet wide with walls of ice 150 feet tall. In other places, eons of water have carved out cathedrals of stone the size of ballrooms.
Maligne Canyon Tours runs its trips from mid-December through mid-April, conditions permitting. In U.S. dollars, tours cost about $16 (about $8 for children). Contact: Maligne Tours, P.O. Box 280, 626 Connaught Dr., Jasper, Alberta, Canada T0E 1E0; 403-852-3370.
Dogs are back
Eskimos have used dogs to pull sleds for eons but when snowmobiles became popular, dogs virtually disappeared. Then Alaska started running the 1,200-mile Iditarod dog-sled race as a memorial to brave pioneers who rushed diptheria serum from Anchorage to Nome. And, suddenly, dogs were back.
Now, just about every northern resort and town runs some sort of dog-sled trip for tourists. In Anchorage during Fur Rendezvous, mushers run half-hour rides from downtown parking lots. For the more adventurous, there are trips (one day to three weeks) where you get to drive your own dogs.
The gentler versions of these multiday trips give you a chance to try mushing for maybe an hour and then go back to riding. But some trips are hard-core. Each person gets his own team. You harness your own dogs, help feed them and run them for five hours a day.
Running a team is no passive activity. It’s a fine balancing act, with you leaning to counterbalance the sled’s weight around tricky turns and running behind the sled to get up hills. But it is also a glorious way to see the wilderness as frosted trees and snowy mountains and the occasional game trail slip by in a silent blur.
If you’re going to a ski resort, ask around and you’ll probably find day trips. The largest concentration and variety of overnight tours can be found in Alaska.
For general information on mushing in Alaska, contact: Alaska Division of Tourism, Pouch E, Juneau, Alaska 99811; 907-465-2010. American Wilderness Experience (AWE!), a tour operator, also offers a variety of multiday trips elsewhere in North America. Contact: AWE!, P.O. Box 1486, Boulder, Colo. 80306; 800-444-0099.
Fur Rendezvous
This is a celebration of winter as only Alaskans can do it. It’s part county fair, part blowout party, part end-of-winter madness. For 10 days you can watch dog-sled races, parades and Eskimo blanket tossing. You can browse art shows, do carnival rides, peer at ice sculptures and watch ice skating shows, downhill canoe races or fur auctions.
But it’s the native touch that sets this whole thing apart from your average local fair. Rondys’ craft shows are heavy on native carvings-ivory polar bears so realistic you can see muscles ripple under the fur, soapstone scenes of traditional life, wood masks with fierce, colorful faces.
The Eskimo blanket toss is a regular; if you’re not ready to be bounced 20 feet into the air, you can join the dozens of hands holding the edge of the skin blanket.
And, of course, there is the single item that brought all this together in the first place: fur.
From its birth early this century, Anchorage has been the central marketplace for fur trappers to peddle their annual catch and Fur Rendezvous (Fur Rondy for short) is where they do it.
Fur in Alaska is not so much a fashion statement as it is a link to past culture and a matter of practicality. Natural materials still work best when the weather gets really awful and some homemade parkas are true works of art.
This winter’s Fur Rondy is Feb. 10-19. Many Rondy events are free but others have fees ranging from $2 for the wrist-wrestling competition to $35 for the Masque Formal Ball.
For general information on winter activities, contact: Anchorage Convention & Visitors Bureau, 1600 A St., Suite 200, Anchorage, Alaska 99501; 800-446-5352. Fur Rendezvous headquarters is 327 Eagle St., Anchorage, Alaska 99501; 907-277-8615.
Igloo adventure
You lie on your back, looking at the ceiling of your igloo. Each block has its own pattern of mottling, and iridescent blue light leaks around the edges of each square. It’s like being trapped inside a giant, faceted gemstone.
Eventually, you get up and wriggle into your skin clothing-hair-lined socks and moccasins, then pants, parka and huge overmitts. You crawl outside to a breakfast of Indian frybread and steaming mugs of caribou stew.
Martha, the camp elder, is eager to show you how she sews mitts (still preferring to chew the hide edges and using sinew for thread). Silas finishes skinning and butchering a fresh-caught caribou, and Jacob demonstrates how, in the old days, they made sleds by rolling skin into tubes for runners and lining them with frozen, ice-glazed moss.
By now, dressed in caribou skins and standing outside your igloo on the frozen tundra of interior northern Canada, you are truly beginning to feel like Eskimos, or as they call themselves, Inuit.
Needless to say, this is not your everyday trip. It’s four days “on the land” with Inuit families doing the everyday things these people still do-hunting caribou for dinner, building igloos and sewing skins, fishing for lake trout through 7 feet of ice and riding behind a team of dogs.
Camp is 25 miles out of Baker Lake, an Inuit village on the northwest shore of Hudson Bay, 200 miles south of the Arctic Circle. Here, winter stretches into May and, in fact, snow covers the ground eight months of the year.
It is a land hardly a generation from its nomadic roots, and Inuit even now prefer skin clothes and ice huts for long overland journeys. But when Martha, Jacob, Silas and the rest of their generation are gone, so will be our direct link to the nomadic Eskimo way of life. This is a rare chance to not only watch but also experience a unique piece of the past.
Igloo trips run in April and early May. The $1,825 (U.S.) charge covers all gear and guides for four days and nights on the land, plus two nights in Baker Lake; air fare from Winnipeg to the camp is about $700 additional. Contact: Frontiers North, 774 Bronx Ave., Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada R2K 4E9; 800-663-9832.
Northern lights
Prehistoric people thought the writhing lights above them in the winter sky were gods doing battle. And even today, it’s hard to watch northern lights without getting a chill up your spine.
But until recently, catching the aurora was an accidental thing that happened during a camping trip or a midnight drive. Now, though, resorts and small lodges across Alaska have turned the lights into a regular winter business.
And why not. Interior Alaska is where the lights are best. Fairbanks not only lies in the middle of the globe-circling belt where lights are most active, it also enjoys long winter nights and clear weather.
An aurora borealis display often starts merely as a glowing, cloudlike band. Then the band grows stronger, splits, folds and starts dancing. Sometimes it looks like flowing sand above your head. Sometimes it’s like fireworks or a laser show.
Lights come and go all night, but midnight to 2 a.m. is when they’re usually strongest. If you’re in Fairbanks, you can drive out along any dark road. But more and more people are staying overnight at resorts set up for aurora watching.
Chena Hot Springs, 60 miles from Fairbanks, has an aurora-viewing cabin stocked with coffee, cider and soup. It also has a range of other winter activities (sleigh rides, snowmobiling, ice skating, cross-country skiing). Many bed-and-breakfasts just outside Fairbanks also are “doing” the lights. A Taste of Alaska, for instance, has a midnight bonfire and marshmallow roast.
For information on aurora watching (and hotels, B&Bs or resorts that offer special programs), contact: Fairbanks Convention & Visitors Bureau, 550 1st Ave., Fairbanks, Alaska 99701; 800-327-5774.
Snowmobiling
All you really need for snowmobiling is a machine and a snowy trail. But some snowy trails are better than others. And among the finest are those in Yellowstone National Park in the western United States and Labrador in eastern Canada.
These two trips are true opposites-one along an established road to view wildlife, the other breaking trail into the bush to visit people.
In Yellowstone, you travel the main road, which is closed to car traffic in winter. Though four-fifths of Yellowstone’s visitors come in summer, winter is when Yellowstone shows its true character.
Arctic cold combines with thermal steam to form fairyland shapes of ice and frost. The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone becomes a pink-and-white striped piece of sculptured art.
But best of all, there are the animals. In winter, bison, elk and coyotes come down from higher elevations to feed near hot pools. The bison come so close you have to be careful not to run into them with the snow machines. Or you can sit at the edge of a lake to watch a coyote and otter trying to outwit each other over a fish.
Some people stay in the town of West Yellowstone, Mont., and rent snomobiles for the day, but the best way to experience the park is on a multiday tour. A typical tour takes four days, overnighting in West Yellowstone, Mammoth Hot Springs and Pahaska Teepee (where Buffalo Bill built a hunting lodge) before returning to Jackson Hole, Wyo.
Unlike Yellowstone, a trip to Labrador, the mainland portion of the maritime province of Newfoundland, is a chance to meet people. But these are people who live a way of life far removed from today’s city bustle.
Barbara Kitowski, a fugitive from urban Seattle, and her partner Lloyd Montague, a Labrador local, take people along frozen rivers to bush cabins and down Indian and trapper trails to visit remote villages.
Along the way on these “Town and Country” tours, there will be the occasional fox or seal, the starkness of a seemingly endless frozen lake and forest picnics. But the true adventure is the people-the woman who cooks up a whole haunch of caribou for your dinner and then describes what it was like to grow up in a place where you killed caribou for dinner, skinned it for clothes and then hand-tanned and sewed your shoes.
You meet people in their 40s who remember carrying firewood to school and others who remember making their own soap from lye, fat and ashes.
Tours into Yellowstone (three days, $745; four days, $945) run from late December through early March. Contact: American Wilderness Experience Inc., P.O. Box 1486, Boulder, Colo. 80306; 800-444-0099.
The tour of central Labrador around Goose Bay runs March and April and is about $1,130 in U.S. dollars. Contact: Labrador Scenic Ltd., Box 11, North West River, Labrador, Newfoundland, Canada A0P 1M0; 709-497-8326.
Wildlife watching
There may be no place better in North America to watch hordes of wildlife than in the valley of Jackson Hole, Wyo. Sure, there’s probably some remote mountain up in Alaska or northern Canada where larger herds roam. But if you want animals in numbers in an easy-to-reach area, come here.
The valley-just south of Yellowstone National Park-is 50 miles long, 10 miles wide and bordered by two mountain ranges; the valley is also home to Grand Teton National Park.
In the valley are moose and elk, pronghorn antelope and bighorn sheep, grizzly bears, coyotes, assorted weasels and porcupines, eagles and ducks too numerous to count.
In summer, these animals range throughout the mountains and various parks that make up the northwest corner of Wyoming. In winter, when temperatures can hit 50 below, they come down to the valley. And in the interest of conserving heat and energy, they don’t move much.
Which means you hardly can keep from stumbling over them.
You could just rent a car and drive around, but you might not know where to go or what to look for. Instead, it’s better to go with experts. Great Plains Wildlife Institute runs day trips for animal watching with guides who are college-trained biologists.
They not only point, they spend the day explaining. The number of points on an elk’s antlers, for instance, is determined by how healthy rather than how old he is.
In addition to watching, there’s lunch at a local ranch, a chance to try tracking animals using radio transmitters and a couple of hours snowshoeing while the guide teaches you how to identify animal tracks in the snow.
One-day wildlife tracking trips run Thanksgiving through March and cost $150. Contact: Great Plains Wildlife Institute, P.O. Box 7580, Jackson, Wyo. 83001; 307-733-2623.
