Max’s SW Face

1/24/24

As a ski instructor at Alyeska, you spend most of your days on a magic carpet looking upwards at Max’s Face, the skiers leftmost zone of the resort, and a zone that is subject to infrequent openings. This combined with the fact that you have to traverse from the top, and ski to the base makes Max’s Face some of the best  untracked powder on the mountain. The one big downside of all of the traversing is you don’t get to ski from the top of the face, but like I said, Max’s Face is the boundary of the resort.

Max’s Face is the west facing aspect coming off of Max’s Peak, and if you were to continue traversing eventually you’d end up on a southwest face, commonly referred to as Max’s SW Face. Tree line on this face sits several hundred feet below the tree line within the resort, making for a much more open face. Of course, you can’t just leave the resort by traversing out, this is Alyeska we’re talking about!

The good thing is, there’s a beauty to ski touring that you don’t find in alpine skiing. Experiencing a location through both an ascent and descent combines into a more multimodal interaction with the mountains that gives deeper insight than alpine skiing alone can provide.

With that mindset and enough days clocked at the resort working to be eager to explore what was around the corner, I called up two friends to pitch the idea. Both of them also work at the resort, and both also saw the southwest face from the Seward Highway and wondered what the skiing was like. We agreed on meeting at noon the next day at the virgin creek trailhead where we would begin the short but steep 2 mile and 3,000 foot hike to the summit of Max’s. 

After meeting and gearing up, we soon found ourselves in a beautiful spruce rainforest. We skinned as far as we could, but were met with a boot pack not far into the hike. This wasn’t because of the steepness of the slope; more so about the quality of snow. In classic Girdwood fashion, the last storm had a rain line of nearly 1,200 feet above sea level (Girdwood sits at around 200 feet of elevation), and now it was a cold day with high pressure. When icy rain crusts, heavily wooded rainforests, and a bit of steeper terrain all meet up, it tends to be easier to just put the skis on your back and head straight uphill. 

We switched between skinning and booting for the first 900 feet of the climb, and when we made it into new snow, we swapped to only skinning. We were certain the trees were going to be bad skiing because of how annoying the hike up was, but as the snow quality increased, as did our stoke.

At around 1,400 feet elevation, the trees opened up and we saw the face ahead of us. The skiing was going to be good. 

We had worked past a few other parties at this point, and the last party we had to pass was a group of paragliders. We all stopped for water and I was sure to let my curiosity run free and ask them plenty of questions. One day I’ll have to give it a try…

We passed the final group, and found ourselves in the front of the scurry to the summit. There were tracks on the face from the day before, but this was only the second high pressure day after a decent refill. We saw that a skiers left convexity remained untracked, and from there we had picked our line. 

Once we reached the summit, it took us a moment to get our bearings. I had no idea what was hiding behind the peaks of the resort the whole time. I had looked at Big League and Little League on maps for plenty of hours, but nothing can compare to seeing it with your own eyes. Another trip for another day. Half of this mission was to see what was hiding up the Virgin Creek drainage, and we saw some of the secrets from Max’s Peak.

We spent more time enjoying the views before we began down, hoping to ski right back to the car. We found our line from above, and began our way down. I was given the honors of skiing first through the money pitch, so without hesitation I enjoyed all the fresh powder I could handle and too quickly found myself at the bottom of the best pitch. 

On my way down, I altered my route to let the splitboarder in the group enjoy the goods through a wave like gully. As he came down second, I watched him slash big turns on the sides of the gully and immediately knew I had made the right decision.

The last skier came down, we regrouped, and swapped order for the rest of the skiing. We had about 1,500 more feet of skiing, with 900 of it being nasty ice. I was okay with skiing in the back. 

We all filled our cups with lower angle powder turns and soon re-entered the trees. When the powder turned to a crust, we were all three surprised to have great control and no problem finding an edge. Skiing the trees on the way out was definitely not better than the face, but when compared to our expectations we were maybe more excited about it than the face skiing. Within the trees we even found a pocket tall surface hoar that made for delightful sounding turns. 

A short skate down the road took us to our cars, and we were all happy to say we saw a little deeper into Girdwood. Not only was it a day about exploring town, but also a day about appreciating the mountains and the variety of experiences they give you.