Monument Creek Ski - 4.16.2022

Last spring, when Scott sent me a picture of Adjutant Peak's northwest face covered in hanging snowfields and seracs spilling from its 8,350 foot summit towards the Spectrum Glacier gorge, my first thought was: absolutely not.

Adjutant's northwest face

Yet, somehow, an early morning one year later found us winding east in the Subaru thru the murky darkness of the Glen Highway towards Monument Creek and, if conditions lined up as we forecast, the giant peaks of Alabaster and maybe Adjutant.

We parked along the highway just before the Victory Bible Camp, added our packrafts to bulging packs, and in the first light of the day skied down the dirty mix of spring overflow and crusty old snow towards the Matanuska River. With the ever strengthening April sun we weren't sure if we'd need to packraft across an open river awakening from winter, and were lucky enough to find continuous snow and ice coverage to the far side of the waterway where we stashed our rafts for our evening return.

Here's Scott demonstrating proper form for skate skiing with an under-arm packraft. Maybe a new Olympic sport???


On the far side of the river we followed the old ATV trail as it wound thru the riparian bottomlands, then followed the wallowing trails of moose thru a black spruce forest carpeted in the classic bottomless faceted snow of the cold interior as we climbed out of the valley and towards Monument Creek. Soon we were on the bench above the Mat traversing up, down, and across ravines blocked by alders and Lincoln Logs of fallen birch as we worked to access our creek.

As we turned into Monument Creek, we could see Alabaster's distant summit lit up by the morning sun where it rose from the head of the basin.