A summer solstice traverse in Sitka, Alaska

On night one, dark never arrives. Instead, a deep pink and orange glows along the horizon in limbo between endless dusk and tomorrow’s eventual sunrise. It's summer solstice in Southeast Alaska; far enough south that we are less “Land of the Midnight Sun” and more “Land of the Midnight Sunset.” My friend Annika and I have decided to drop our packs, cook dinner, and roll out our sleeping bags under what few stars do shine through. I lean my splitboard facing the traversing sun. Annika does the same with her skis.

We are on the island mountains of Shee, the Indigenous Lingít name of what a map would tell you is Baranof Island. On its western shore, facing out to the Pacific, sits Sitka or Shéet’ká, a small fishing community on the edge of Alaska’s rainforested panhandle. Sitka is where I have called home for the last ten years and Annika has spent time visiting and living on and off since growing up in nearby Juneau. This island of rugged forests, craggy peaks and small glaciers is part of the roughly 17 million acres of what’s known today as the Tongass National Forest. Our goal is to cross the island from Sitka to the small warm springs community on the east side of the island via a popularized hiking and mountaineering route. With any weather luck, we will traverse back across to Sitka via a separate, lesser-traveled route to the south, making a full loop.

We start the trip with a seven-mile drive to the southern end of Sitka’s road system. We bike three more miles beyond a locked gate on a gravel road that winds along the ocean. When we reach the mouth of the deep, cliff-lined valley, we don our packs and set off into a dense forest.

As we climb higher, we find that we’ve also climbed into the marine cloud layer that has properly seeped up valley. “Please let the veil be thin!” I call out to Annika. “I hope it's clear further up above!” she says. As afternoon shifts to evening, and we push further up through patches of snow, I fret that the cloud is going to hamper our progress.

The snow eventually becomes connected enough to start skinning. We breathe deep in relief to have skis and boots off our backs and onto our feet. Not long after, we break through the cloud layer to a brand new sunny day. We get our first snow turns of the trip just above the clouds at around 7:30pm, hooting and hollering through the mush of old snow, knowing that we might actually have a go at crossing over the island after our first attempt a month earlier was hampered by weather.

My phone pings with a text from Annika. It reads, “I guess if you have cake you might as well eat it!” She’s referring to the forecast. After weeks and weeks of rain and clouded mountains, the forecast finally shows a few days of half sun, half cloud icons with light precipitation. We’d hoped to launch earlier in April, but the weather never showed up and now we’re chipping into May. I watch the weather window creep closer in the forecast hoping for more solid confirmation that this is the right time to go. My eyes are tired from refreshing web browser tabs to compare forecasts. From town, I haven’t been able to see the mountains deeper on the island in more than a month.

The seed for this trip was planted six years ago, over a clear and sunny May weekend, when my friends Jason and Meredith invited me along to cross the island with our splitboards via a lesser-traveled southern route. These two bold and imaginative splitboarders had shown me how to earn turns in the fickle-weathered rainforest, and around them I’d come to know Sitka’s tiny backcountry ski community. They have since left town, but in their inspiration, I’ve sunk my teeth into getting scrappy turns in Sitka with the dream of splitboarding a full loop traverse of the island, utilizing part of the route they’d shown me.

In the following years, I worked to acquaint myself with the more established cross-island trekking route to the north, hiking it each summer since, always dreaming of the splitboard link up, and always remembering that first trip with Jason and Meredith, sleeping out on the glacier and soaking in hot springs. I realized if I could do any dream trip in the entire world, I would choose to stay right here and go deeper into the island I call home. I sought the Jones Backcountry Adventure Grant as an opportunity to dream big, the accountability to launch and give it a go and the buffer of a stipend to carve out time and space for this goal—that and a lighter splitboard couldn’t hurt.

Even so, this year may have had different plans. It was one of the warmer, rainier winters in a while. Whenever someone in town asked me how the snow was looking up high, I was practiced in responding, “bleak.” Sitkans started to express concern about the amount of snowpack available to melt into the streams and creeks for summer salmon runs. It’s almost as if winter never actually arrived this year.

You won’t know unless you go, I repeat to myself anxiously as we pack up for the trip. Dense clouds still hung tight to the interior mountains. We shoulder our enormous packs for our first attempt and set out with equal amounts excitement and apprehension. We’ve chosen to start on that same southern crossing route from years ago. It includes a 3-mile-long flat water crossing on each end. With Jason and Meredith, we were able to use a stashed canoe on one side and a Forest Service row boat on the other, since we’d be returning the way we came. In order to do the current loop, Annika and I would need to strap packrafts and paddles to our packs in addition to splitboard, skis, avalanche gear, and glacier rescue equipment.

The initial paddle across flat water is joyous as the clouds finally part and the sun shines down on us. We reshuffle all of our gear and begin the hike up to snow. It is not long before our packs begin to weigh on us. “Untenable” is the word Annika uses, and I can’t shake the word as we make labored steps upward. Once we are skinning above treeline, we get a view of the mountains to the south, and I feel myself deflate. Untenable, I think to myself.

I see peaks streaked with multiple recent avalanche crowns on north-facing aspects. “Wet slabs from the warming weather,” Annika suggests. “Yep,” I agree and add, “Hate to say it, but a lot of our route is on similar aspects above major cliff bands.” Annika says, “Even just from today, the snow is already really warmed up.” We agree to tour to the highest point we can reach before entering avalanche terrain. We set up camp and eagerly look higher at the headwall we will need to go up tomorrow. We agree to an early start the following day to cover ground before the sun starts warming the snow.

In the dark of the early morning, we peek our heads out of the tent to find that we are in an opaque snow globe. Where mountains previously were, we see a wall of white. We get out and stomp around to see if the snow had refrozen overnight; our boots sink in easily. “No overnight refreeze,” Annika says. “No visibility either,” I say, “and those avy crowns we saw yesterday.” With those three strikes, it’s an easy no-go decision for us. “We’ve got some days to wait and see,” Annika says, “plus it’s fun just to be up here in the snow this late in the season.” We agree to hunker down.

Visibility never arrives over the next couple days, but we keep ourselves entertained with mellow laps down wet, sticky snow to the tree line. The forecast on our satellite device reads partly sunny, yet the rain, sleet and snow pattering our tent walls tells us we’re stuck in a cloud. As we plan for our third day of waiting it out, we get a message from Annika's dad on the extended forecast. “Wind and rain coming for the foreseeable future.” In the morning, we pack up to head down and make the day-long trek back to Sitka knowing that this won’t be our last try.

We wake early on day two to sidehill across a hanging, remnant glacier along the mountainside before the day’s heat arrives. Having hiked this route several times before, I’ve seen wet slab avalanche crowns as deep as I am tall in this section, so we move hastily. Once we traverse out from the shadow of the mountain, the sun from the east blazes on us as if it were high noon, not early morning.

If the marine layer of clouds gave us pause on the first day, the unrelenting heat and sunshine of the longest day of the year gives us apprehension about the stability of the snow today. We’ve got a length of relatively safe ridgetop travel to continue to contemplate our journey forward, but even so the exposure feels high with both sides of the broad ridge falling sharply away thousands of feet to forested valleys below.

We keep moving. The sun beats down. We put ski in front of ski and slide onward through the hot white mountains. The sun stays suspended in the sky like a broken clock. The views are panoramic and incredible. We’re surrounded by snow-covered island peaks and ridgelines. We can see the ocean channel below to the east, more islands and the mainland coast mountains off on the horizon. We spy a couple mountain goats traipsing away from us to the south. The ridge eventually drops off into a long glacial basin.

We drop in and descend 800 feet to the glacier below, avoiding the aesthetic couloir line and opting instead for the more conservative, mellow descent with less snow ready to slide. At the bottom of the descent, we drive a probe down into the snow searching for the glacier’s surface underneath. At three meters deep, the probe still doesn’t strike ice. We’re surprised at how much snow is left at the end of June. “It must be a bit colder this far into the island. Maybe the last months of rain was still snow up here?” We wonder. Given the snow depth with our maritime snowpack, we proceed onto the glacier unroped, continuing to top out our probe, testing as we go.

What was once a single stretch of ice in the 80s is now two separate receding glaciers, leaving a lake depressed into the middle. On the long sloping descent to the lake, I opt to split ski, getting turning reps in on a few hundred feet of bunny hill slope angle. To climb from the lake is much steeper. We skin up sun-baked snow, making sure to stay spaced out in the event anything releases.

Another hour of slogging along the second half of the glacier and we reach the end where a headwall stands along our route before we can top out and begin descending properly onto the east side of the island. We opt to boot directly up the wall since skinning would put us on the warming slope longer and inevitably have our skis sliding out from under us on loose wet snow. At the top, we exhaustedly high-five, holler out in excitement with new views and fill our water bottles from meltwater trickling down the rocks.

With one last descent before we reach the end of the snow, I lock my splitboard together and speed down the slope, slashing old windlip features and weaving through rocks on tired legs, thrilled to be through the many cruxes of the route. We camp up high by an alpine lake for the night. It’s here that we make the final decision that the weather window feels too warm and the snowpack too deep at the center of the island to safely traverse back to Sitka once completing the crossing.

The next day, we work our way down through bushes, sunshine, and the swarm of bugs to remind us it is nearly July. A final, steep thousand feet of forest, brush and cliffs separates us from the small hot-springs community below. We’ve arranged for a float plane to pick us up in the afternoon and fly us back to Sitka. After picking our way down from the mountains, we drop our gear, dip in the cold lake and enjoy a soak in the springs. Up-valley, the second half of the traverse glimmers in the heat of the day, evading us this time.

I reflect on how riding in Sitka is a humbling endeavor, and after a winter of scraping what we could from endless squalls and thick rain clouds, I’m at ease to soak in the springs and feel the sun shine down. I have gratitude for Annika’s steadfast friendship, to be onboard with the trip from the get-go and to give it two tries. Before we’ve even dried off, we’re already asking, “well what about next year?” and I know we’ll be back sliding on snow together in no time.

Until then, we’re grateful: the Jones Backcountry Adventure Grant gave us the opportunity, gear and motivation to attempt an objective multiple times despite a tricky season of snow and weather. Each trip into Sitka’s backcountry was an opportunity to deepen our relationship to this place, regardless of conditions. With my splitboard and skins packed away for the season, I know that we will be back to try again on the there-and-back traverse of the Alaska island I call home.