With winter back at Kincaid Park, high school skiers experience a brand-new world

After a couple of snow-challenged winters during which they raced in circles on a short loop of ground-up ice or man-made snow, high school skiers encountered a brave new world this weekend at Kincaid Park.

A bumper crop of snow has made the park's many trails skiable again. Trails that in recent years were brown and mostly bare are packed with snow this year.

Blessed with kilometers and kilometers of groomed trails, organizers of the Cook Inlet Conference cross-country championships had their pick of where to send skiers for Friday's individual classic race and Saturday's freestyle relays.

What they came up with were courses loaded with challenges — the long climb up Stairway to Heaven, the arduous ascent of the Lekisch Trail, screaming downhills, sharp turns, and hills, hills, hills.

"Easy peasy," said Dimond High coach Nate Normandin, who designed the courses.

A perhaps more realistic perspective came from John Christopherson, a longtime volunteer for the Nordic Ski Club.

"This is the biggest, toughest course I can ever remember for high school students," Christopherson wrote in a pre-race email to other race volunteers. "We have good snow and we will be on many trails not skied in years."

And while plenty of skiers collapsed in exhaustion at the finish line, and while many of them fell down during the race, racers not only accepted the challenge, they embraced it.

"I thoroughly enjoyed this. This is so much better than skiing loop after loop," Dimond senior Kelsey Darrell said after the girls 7.5-kilometer race on Friday. "In all my four years, this was the first time on those S turns and my first time ever going up (the Lekisch trail)."

The boys spent half of their race on Lekisch Trail, which has taxed some of the nation's best skiers in the years when Kincaid Park has hosted big races like the national championships and the Olympic trials. Back when winter made annual appearances in Anchorage, that trail and others in use this weekend honed the skills of Anchorage's many world-class skiers.

Luke Jager, a West High junior who won the boys 10K on Friday, relished the opportunity to trade the gerbil loop of the recent past for race trails that are steeped in history.

"This was maybe my second race off the snowmaking loop in high school," Jager said. "All of the legends of skiing from Anchorage, all of the Olympians, they all skied on what we were skiing on, so it's pretty cool," he said.

Jager and Gus Schumacher, a Service junior who placed second on Friday, both spent part of this season competing outside Alaska. Both were part of the U.S. team that competed in Norway at the Nation's Cup international race series and both raced at the U.S. national championships at Utah's Soldier Hollow, which hosted the 2002 Winter Olympics.

Schumacher said the Kincaid courses more than measured up to those places. He said he liked getting the chance to do an entire 10K race on a single loop, especially after making do with the short loop of recent years.

"It was pretty amazing just being able to stride and not just double-pole," Schumacher said. "Some of these parts, the last time I skied on them was (10 years ago) in Junior Nordics, before I even knew how to skate ski."

Brooks Miner, a South High freshman, experienced the Lekisch Trail for the first time, "and I wasn't expecting it to be that fast," he said. "It's kind of shocking."

He pronounced it a hard but good course, with bonus points for the moose standing on the side of the trail.

Carolynn Pype, a Bartlett senior, had no idea what to expect for Friday's individual race — it was the longest race and hardest course she had ever skied.

"Some of the downhills were super-steep," she said. "They were pretty hard for me."

The uphills were no picnic either, according to South freshman Madeline Goolie: "Stairway to Heaven and the Dipper trail were pretty insane. You had to duck-walk them."

Caleb Vanderburg of Eagle River welcomed the downhills, because gravity helped make up for what he said he lacks in form. He's a sophomore who learned to ski last year when he joined the high school team.

"A girl I had a crush on was on the ski team," he said, "and here I am back for a second year of skiing."

Alas, there won't be a third season for Vanderburg. He's from a military family that is leaving Anchorage soon.

"We're going to Florida, of all places," he said. "I doubt if they've ever even heard of cross-country skiing."