Snowbird Glacier Season Opener

10/25/26

I truly thought late September was going to provide new snow on the glaciers behind Girdwood or Hatcher Pass, but as the month came racing to an end, I had to settle on suncups above the Raven Glacier. I told myself that early October would bring the snow, but as the days began to pass by I began second-guessing if we’d ever see termination dust. Luckily, just before the last weekend of the month, Hatcher Pass received a bit of snow. Assuming that the glaciers received more, I saw my opportunity to be reminded what floating on snow feels like. I recruited Jake and Aaron to join me in the hunt for powder, and they both were excited to take a long walk for a little skiing.

Early season storms are a great time to ski the Snowbird or Bomber Glaciers given the Archangel Road stays open until the road begins to see snow. With the nearly 3.5 mile road wide open, we were given a substantial headstart to make it to the Snowbird Glacier comfortably. We began our long walk over the dry tundra and boulder gardens in our tennis shoes, making progress faster than we could ever hope for on skis. We made it beyond Snowbird Mine easily before we transitioned to skis and launched assault on Glacier Pass.

We skied off of Glacier Pass, finding the thinnest layer of dust over the top of brick-hard summer snow. While these conditions may not sound inspiring, after months of skiing junky snow, I was ecstatic to feel trace new snow under my skis. From the backside of Glacier Pass, we jaunted up the main lobe of the Snowbird Glacier and began to find about six inches of new snow sitting on top of the glacier’s permanent snow. Being the only bit of powder to be found around South Central Alaska, the glacier was already rather tracked out. This pushed up towards the untracked chutes midway up the glacier.

We quickly booted up the best looking chute as it happened to be much shorter than we hoped. We skied one by one, happy to feel something steep with powder on it for the first time since last spring. Even though we were happy to ski powder, we all agreed that the dust on top of the crust did not leave us itching for much more. At the bottom of the chute, we debated going to the top of the glacier for an extra lap, but the lack of slope angle and marginality of the snow motivated us to begin our trek out.

We skied the remainder of the glacier and enjoyed what we could before reaching the flats of the ice. Without much more to prove, we took our time climbing out of Glacier Pass and skied what we could before we found more rocks underneath our skis than snow. We donned our soggy tennis shoes, and continued down the frustrating boulder fields. Using old mining cables as hand-rappels, we stumbled our way down back to the car where we enjoyed hot cocoa and laughed about how we just put in a 10-mile day for a dozen or two “powder” turns. If I wasn’t such an obsessed skier, I would say the day was not worth the effort, but any excuse to slide on snow is enough to get me out of bed in the morning.