Lunch & Learn: The Rise of Wild Ice Skating in Alaska, 4/17/26, 12pm

Good afternoon, welcome. I'm Kai Holland. I'm the House District 9 representative. House District 9 is the area of South Anchorage from essentially Huffman south to Girdwood and Whittier. And we're also home of some amazing wild ice skating.

If you're familiar with Potter Marsh, Rabbit Lake, and Portage Lake, These are areas that have been attracting people from around the world that are coming to Alaska to enjoy the outdoor recreational opportunities that we have in Alaska and in particular in this district. When I came back to Alaska about 25 years ago, I'd spent a good part of my early career working in manufacturing, and I've come to have a deep appreciation and put a high priority on manufacturing as an area of economic development for our state. Manufacturing, from my experience, is a really vital part of an economy. It's where we do value-added work, and we take things of lower value and turn them into products and services that are valued both in the local economy but also become exports. And in doing that, we also create amazing jobs.

Manufacturing creates shop jobs on actually running machines, but it also creates jobs for accountants, marketing folks, engineers. Logistics and operations, you'll see a greater diversity of jobs in a manufacturing plant than you'll find in other sector types of jobs. It's an amazing way of creating opportunity for our state and our future. So I've spent the last 25 years since coming back here supporting manufacturing and the different programs that we've had, as well as trying to support our manufacturers becoming globally competitive manufacturers. One of the examples— I'll take just a second— is a manufacturer in Palmer, um, Triveris or Tri-Jet, that was manufacturing products for me in one of the businesses I had that when I sold that business, the assumption was that the manufacturing being done in Palmer would go to Texas along with the rest of the business.

Well, that company that's an international Fortune 150 company, after acquiring our core business, realized that the Palmer manufacturing was world-class And they not only took the manufacturing from Houston and brought it back to Palmer where it was before because they realized it was better than what they were getting in Texas, they started taking the manufacturing that they were doing from China and bringing it up to Palmer, Alaska. We have amazing world-class manufacturers in Alaska that are doing critical work to support people that come up with product ideas and businesses up there. And to that end, this organization, Alaska Manufacturing Association, I want to give them a plug. They're doing a wonderful job of building a network of manufacturers and bringing those folks together and bringing people that have product ideas and are trying to figure out how to get it made, helping them get connected with manufacturers that have the know-how, the equipment, and the experience to be able to create these new products for different industries, whether it's oil and gas industry, outdoor recreation, fishing, and so on. So I want to put a plug out there if you're interested in that or if you know of people that have product ideas and are trying to figure out, well, how do I build this?

Can I build it in Alaska? The answer is, in most cases, yes. We assume that manufacturing isn't a part of our economy. It's absolutely a critical part. We've got hundreds of manufacturers that are doing all sorts of innovative work for their local community as well as for our industries and, in many cases, for exports.

So today, though, we get a chance to learn about both a manufacturer, Erman Skates, but also get to learn about a really interesting and growing part of our outdoor recreation economy, wild ice skating. So I'm going to turn it over now to Tim and let him do a better introduction introduction of what we'll be hearing about today.

Um, thanks, Representative Holland, and thanks also to Representative Fields, who's the sponsor for this Lunch and Learn we are also co-sponsoring. Um, so why wild ice skating? You heard a bit about manufacturing opportunities, um, uh, and in a minute we'll hear from our speaker about how this is, you know, an explosively growing activity in Alaska. It's got implications for attracting especially low-season tourism, but also branding Alaska as a world-class destination all year round for visitors. But I also, I can't resist being a little self-indulgent for a second and sharing a personal story.

So I grew up in Alaska, left for college at 18, and that whole time I was growing up here, fall was my least favorite season, least favorite time of year. Is when you cross your fingers and prayed for snow. And I spent more than a decade outside, spending more time outside of Alaska than in it, pursuing a career in academia. And I ended up having to make a tough choice: follow those professional dreams or move back to the only place that ever really felt like home. And made that choice.

I'm back here. And since coming back, I've not regretted it once. And a big part of that is just the unparalleled quality of life that's available in Alaska because of things like wild ice skating, and actually especially because of wild ice skating in particular. But also, see, packrafting, fat biking, things, activities that weren't even on my radar as an 18-year-old. And now fall is my favorite time of year.

It's when we look over forecasts and satellite imagery and track freeze-ups from literally the top of the state and the tops of mountains all the way down to where we live in Anchorage. And, you know, that starts in early September. And I know I'm not alone feeling this way.

And, you know, as we think— my boss talks a lot about breaking the mindset of managed decline in Alaska and building more economically A vibrant future. And I unironically think that we need to keep quality of life activities like wild ice skating front of mind. Um, there's tens of thousands of working-age young adults in Alaska now and across the country that are on the fence about coming here or staying here, and something as simple as wild ice skating can make the difference in that decision. I know it did for me. Okay, stepping off my soapbox, I am super proud to introduce my friend Paxton Welber.

Paxton is a born and raised Alaskan. He's an absolute pillar of the Alaska outdoor recreation community in more ways than one. He founded and runs a company that I don't think we're actually supposed to name, but you may have heard a slip of the tongue earlier, but it's in this space. He—. What he's going to focus on is his Some of the things that he's done as co-founder and outreach chair of the Wild Ice Skate Club of Alaska, or we also call it WISCA, the Wild Ice Skate Club of Alaska.

WISCA hosts regular community events that fill breweries and other event spaces around Anchorage all through the winter. It has a Facebook group that's grown close to— I think the last count was, what, 12,700 members or something like that? And that started just a few years ago. With background in graphic design, Paxson runs numerous websites including winterbear.com where he posts trip reports, guides, maps, and equipment reviews. He is a tireless advocate, and there have been few people that have done more to democratize access to wild spaces in Alaska than Paxson.

Paxson's gonna tell us a bit more about wild ice skating, what it is, why it's so great, and why it matters to Alaska. All right. All right. Yeah. Yeah.

Really appreciate the introduction, Tim. And thank you to Kai, too, for encouraging me to come and do this. And thank you to all of you for showing up to this this week. This was supposed to be last week. So, yeah, appreciate— I wasn't able to get into Juneau, so I booked another ticket to come down and do this.

So thank you for showing up. I'm sure the food helps. Too, but I'd like to think you're all future wild ice enthusiasts. All right, so I'm gonna go to my first slide here. So what is wild ice skating?

This was a surprisingly interesting question, something that— oh, is it helpful for me to— okay. So this is something that we actually discussed a lot when we started the Wild Ice Skating Club of Alaska. What should we call the club? One of the original ideas was to call it the Nordic Skating Club of Alaska, after the type of skates that are sort of best suited for skating on outdoor natural ice. But the reality is a lot of people skate on outdoor wild ice with other types of skates.

We thought about just calling it the Backcountry Ice Skating Club, but a lot of the skating that we were doing was, was actually in Anchorage. It was on, you know, Sand Lake and out at Potter Marsh and that wasn't exactly the backcountry. Also, just the fact that it's outdoors doesn't quite capture what we're doing. After all, you have pickup hockey outdoors, and a lot of speed skating is outdoors. Like, long— there's a long track speed skating course, one of the few in North America, in Midtown Anchorage.

That's outdoor skating. So none of those really quite captured what we were going after. We ended up settling on wild ice skating because it kind of captured this feeling that the ice itself is, um, is, is wild, natural, kind of untamed and unmaintained. And that really gets at the core of what this sport is. It's about going on ice, going out on ice that's just formed naturally on its own, um, without a Zamboni, without any hot mopping, without any shoveling.

Um, it's just kind of what's there. It's what forms, um, naturally. And you're working with the materials that you, the natural materials that you have, rather than trying to change the environment to suit your equipment. You're changing your equipment to suit the environment or just doing the best you can with it. I think there's also a really important element to what wild ice skating is that involves the purpose of the sport.

So in long track speed skating, for example, you're going around in a very tightly constrained, very well-defined loop. The same is kind of true for pickup hockey or when people clear outdoor ice rinks to figure skate on. These are really small constrained spaces and your focus is kind of turned inward on a sport or an activity in a fairly narrow space. When you're doing— when we're going wild ice skating, the whole purpose is covering distance. It's adventuring.

It's going from point A to point B to point C, you know, getting your leg wet and then going back to point A. It's really going out and exploring. If you think about like walking around a track, for example, nothing wrong. I was a track athlete in high school. There's nothing wrong with running around a track.

But nobody would ever call that hiking, for example. And what wild ice skating is, is kind of the skating equivalent of hiking or mountain biking or something where you're going out and you're having an adventure and you're kind of heading into the unknown rather than just playing a sport or something. So it's the medium, and then it's also kind of the intention of what you're trying to do with that medium. So we settled on wild ice skating. When we started Wiska, By the way, that term was not super widely adopted.

We certainly did not invent it, but I think by founding WISCA, we've actually helped that term reach broader adoption, which is kind of interesting. I think, I think our club has had a sort of semantic influence on the sport, just kind of a cool, fascinating side thing.

So every time there's an article or any kind of media about wild ice skating, the comments always fill up with people saying, Like, back in '82, I strapped hockey skates on and I skated the pond outside. You know, back then we just called it skating. Why are you calling it wild ice skating? So I thought it'd be helpful to kind of clarify what's happening here because it's actually far beyond, you know, what I'm here to talk to you about and why you guys are here beyond the sandwiches or chips or whatever. Is there something really exciting going on in the wild ice skating space?

And I'd like to sort of clarify what that is. So there's been a, a sort of process of growth in the sport over the last— I would say over the— especially over the last 10 years or so, and that's progressed really steadily and strongly in the last 5 or 6 years. So a lot of activities like this, they start as individual activities, and it's, it's the kind of thing where, for example, when I was a kid, I would hear about that one time Portage Lake froze and you know, a guy on his way to Whittier saw it and happened to have his hockey skates in the car. So he skated all the way to the face of Portage Glacier. And you'd hear a story like that.

You're like, that sounds amazing. But it's almost living in this realm of like myth. It's this one-off experience. Like it's these individual, really cool sounding, interesting sounding experiences. But you have no idea.

Like you couldn't really— you wouldn't really replicate that for yourself unless it was right in front of you. You know, you go to a cabin and the lake just happens to be frozen over. You're driving along Turnagain Arm and you see some ice and you have some time to kill and you think, you know, could I skate that? So that's the kind of individual activity stage that the sport starts with. You know, these people having these isolated individual experiences.

The next stage I defined as group activity. So this is when suddenly it's not just one person or a couple people who have kind of had a one-off experience. Suddenly you have, a friend group where you have a few people who say, you know what, if you hear about ice coming in at Portage, like, let me know. I think that'd be really fun. This is the brewery phase of a sport where you have a little group of people, usually just friends, and they go out and they have this really cool experience.

In this case, it was skating up— that is Portage Glacier. You know, skate up to Portage Glacier and afterwards you go out for dinner and drinks in Girdwood. Like, and this is where the social aspect of the sport is really activated. There isn't a broader community, you don't really know what you're doing, but you have a few people with you and you know you're having fun together. And, um, you know, people are just kind of social creatures and we like doing things in groups, and that adds a lot of meaning to the experience.

So now you're not just doing something cool on your own, you're having a meaningful experience with friends. And I think that for wild ice skating, I really saw that happening maybe like 2016, 2017, 2018, you were starting to hear more and more of like these little individual outdoorsy social groups where one person kind of discovered wild ice skating and got their friends in it. In this particular group, half the people are on Nordic skates, you have some people on hockey skates, you know, things are a little janky, but it's like you're going out with your friends and you're having fun. The third stage is the really exciting stage, and that's the sort of culture and scene stage where it's not just individual, it's not just individuals and it's not just social groups of friends. There's sort of infrastructure building up around the activity.

So this is really exciting because this is when people start sharing information and they start learning from one another and they start kind of codifying rules for making the activity safe. This is the stage where the press starts to notice things and say, hey, like, this is really interesting. There's like a lot of people going out to Rabbit Lake, or there's a lot of people going to Portage. And this is where, when people start sharing information, this is when things really, really blow up. This is also the stage where it starts supporting commercial activity.

Nobody's gonna start a company based on 5 people skating out to Portage Glacier. But when you see a packed room like that and realize there's actually kind of a broader movement there's, there's more going on. That provides a lot of encouragement to companies to maybe take a chance on the commercial aspects of the scene. And that's beyond just production of Nordic skates or ice skates or skating equipment. That also means maybe tour groups or industry groups, or like I said earlier, the media.

This is kind of when everything really takes off. So I kind of think of these three stages as sort of spark, flame, fire. So we're in the fire stage right now, or we're just starting to enter it. And that's part of what makes— has been really exciting with, you know, my unnamed company, but also WSCA, is seeing more and more people get pulled into this sport and learn about it. And they're excited about it and they, they show up to events.

I mean, we meet people at all of our WSCA meetings. People come and they say, I see what's happening, I see you guys skating, but I don't really know what to do, I don't know anybody doing it. And, you know, introduce them to some people and get them involved. So that's the stage that we're at right now. So I wanted to share just a couple of comments about how I got into Nordic skating personally.

So I moved back to Anchorage in December 2014. I just really missed the outdoor access, the parks and trails. I especially miss just biking, you know, getting off work and biking on the Chester and Campbell Creek trails. Just, I was living in a bunch of big cities. I lived in New York, Chicago, and San Francisco.

And just, you know, was wandering around Chicago one day thinking like, why am I here? Like, I just, I just want to go biking. I just, you know, want to be outdoors. So I moved back to Anchorage because of the outdoor access and because of the outdoors and the outdoor culture that I was I was just really missing. I bought a pair of Nordic skates from AMH kind of on a whim in 2016.

I was actually pretty guilty about buying these because I really didn't know what they were. I had Nordic skates work with a cross-country skate ski boot and binding, and I already— I'd raced at West, so I had the boots. But I bought the skates because it just, it 'You did the sport?' I'd heard a little bit about the sport and it seemed cool and I was looking for something else to do. So I bought them and just instantly fell in love with the sport. It was really fast.

It was fairly easy. I mean, my technique was terrible when I started, but you didn't need to be good to have fun. And my experience prior to this with skating had been trying to jam my feet into poorly fitting hockey skates back in high school. And this was so different. I was in my warm, comfortable cross-country ski boots, and I was on these skates that were really fast and stable.

So my first experience was at Ocean View Bluff Park, just skating on overflow from the ocean. And, um, you know, terrible ice, terrible technique. Um, the skates in retrospect, you know, were not the best either, and I was mounted on them horribly. Um, so I was way too far forward on them, but I still had such a great time and Nordic skating became kind of my primary winter activity and the thing that I was really, really, really passionate about pretty much immediately. So these two other photos, if you can see them there, one of those is from the sort of pink one is moonrise over Wasilla Lake.

And then the smaller one was skating the lagoon at Sheridan Glacier down in Cordova. And those were both really formative experiences for me with skating. Everything was just new. Um, like I said, I really didn't know what I was doing. I was just kind of going out and having fun and got to experience all these things for the first time, like watching, just looking down into the ice and seeing, you know, 3 feet of bubbles disappearing down into the darkness, or, you know, you all these beautiful sunsets, um, on, on lakes in the winter.

Um, wild ice is a mirror, so you're performing this sport on like the most beautiful surface imaginable, and you see all these incredible colors and textures and forms in the ice. And it's, it's just a really, you know, it's, it's bright because it's reflecting the limited light of the, of the sun in the winter. And everything was just so new and so exciting, and the ice was really beautiful and captivating. And it's really cool now seeing people who are just getting into the sport have those same experiences that I got to have back in 2016. They go out for their first time and then they're all over social media talking about all the amazing vapor figures and beautiful crystals and everything in the ice.

But this was such a fun, a really fun time getting to know the sport. And one of the core things that I thought from the beginning was like, other people need to know about this. This is so cool. And it's just, it's such a beautiful, aesthetically beautiful sport. As somebody who was really heavily involved in outdoor media, I thought, this is the most amazing subject matter.

I mean, I love ski movies and stuff, but there's a million ski— I mean, you guys have all seen ski movies. Like, there's a million photos of people skiing and, and, you know, dog mushing and snowshoeing, like all the other really cool Alaska stuff. Not knocking it, but I thought, hey, as somebody who, you know, loves the outdoors and loves outdoor media, this is an opportunity to really take charge with some really cool subject matter. So I called my friend Cale Green, who I'm sure plenty of you know. He does a lot of political work.

He had just bought his first drone. And he was really terrible at videography back then, which was fine because my skating was really terrible too. So we went out and Cale's kind of janky videography with my janky skating, we decided we're just going to make a skating movie. And we drove around the state whenever we had a free day. We flew down to Cordova that one time.

And then we called our friends to kind of participate and we just got a bunch of cool clips and set it to music. And we got to the next season and we looked at it and Kale was like, ah, my videography's improved a lot. And I looked at it and I said, oh my gosh, my skating is humiliating. Like I'm pumping my arms. Oh, this is so bad.

And we thought maybe we should just not even do this or do something else. But it was like, well, we already did the filming. And so Kale took, We settled on a piece of music and Kale edited together his clips really quickly. And we put this video out and it just blew up. It ended up being in National Geographic.

It was in the Washington Post. It was on Outside TV. We entered it in a bunch of film festivals. It won one, which is like, I mean, think about how crazy this is. Again, for the third time, I'll say my skating was terrible.

Like, imagine you went to Alyeska and you get on the bunny hill and you pizza down it and then you fall on your face and somebody filmed that. And then suddenly that's being shown as like Teton Gravity Research. Like that, you know, that's how it felt. But people all around the U.S. And really a lot of people around the world just saw this video and they were— they loved it.

And that was really kind of reassuring to me in a lot of ways and just really exciting because it's like we discovered It's not like we invented outdoor skating or Nordic skating, but we've found this niche that has been massively, massively underappreciated. And there's a huge amount of public interest and hunger in what we're doing at a terrible level. So imagine how cool it could be if we're doing it at a decent level. So can we pull up Wild Ice? It's like 3 minutes long.

I didn't ask if I was allowed to show a film or not, but I feel like I could describe it for 5 minutes or you could watch it in 3 and— Might be easier.

Yeah, I think I heard somebody say, oh yeah, like maybe you'd seen it before. But yeah, it was, it really got so much attention. It was just, yeah, really, really rewarding as a media production person. You know, when people appreciate your media, that's great. But just the fact that it was this subject matter that I'd really fallen in love with too was so incredibly rewarding.

All right. What's that? So over the years, these are all from the years after we made, Cale and I made Wild Ice. And this just, I'm just gonna go over 4 different trips that I've done very, very quickly, that kind of exemplify different aspects of wild ice skating and why I love it, um, and sort of why it's so different from other— maybe some other outdoor sports or other rink-type sports too. So this top, um, left photo, that's actually Tim here skating out, uh, up the Twenty Mile drainage.

Um, when you think of skating often on a rink, you're thinking of big open space, and any kind of barrier is going to be sort of an impediment to what you're trying to do. But with wild ice skating, a lot of the time what you want, what you're seeking out, is these really scrappy, squirrely, difficult, winding, interesting places to skate. So we're not always out on really big lakes. I mean, I love laying out on Mendon Hauler, which is actually the bottom left photo there. But a lot of the type of skating that we're seeking out here in— or not here, but in Southeast or up in South Central is actually more challenging skating.

So if you think about like downhill skiing, for example, that sport started with a lot of emphasis on these big lazy groomers. And you go to some of the original Colorado areas and they just have miles and miles and miles of very low-grade groomers. But the more you get into the sport, the more you want to seek out adventure and challenge and just interesting areas. And interesting terrain. And that's a lot of where the Nordic skating culture or wild ice skating culture in Alaska is oriented now.

People don't necessarily just want to go to the pretty places. They want to go to these really intricate, difficult, challenging, interesting skating spots. So we have these amazing kind of coastal or intertidal lagoons all over the greater Anchorage area. Rabbit Slough is a really well-known one. That's kind of the gateway.

But then the Palmer Hay Flats, everything up at the head of Turnagain Arm. So 20 Mile drainage, Placer drainage, you can skate miles up those drainages by connecting lagoons and little channels. And, you know, there's thin ice, there's thick ice, there's all kinds of weird funky stuff. But one of some of my favorite skating is when you get on these narrow little corridors and you're just zooming like through the grass and through and the trees and the grasses and everything in the mountains are just kind of flying by as you're racing down these little narrow areas. So definitely seeking out the challenge is part of the wild ice skating scene that's developing in Alaska, which is actually a bit different from the original Scandinavian scenes.

They place a lot more emphasis on skating over big open spaces, especially oceans. They do a lot of ocean skating. So, you know, big wide open spaces covering distance. Alaskan wild ice skating tends to emphasize challenge, intrigue, interest, novelty. And this sort of difficult small-scale skating.

The top— or I'll go to bottom left next, because that's Mendenhall from a few years ago skating with my friend Dana Kerr.

And I think that captures the absolutely just glorious, amazing scenery that we're often skating around.

As I said, I was quoted in an article saying, when you skate, ice rinks have the ambiance of a Costco. I'm sorry, I stand by it. I mean, indoor rinks are— you're skating in a warehouse. And I respect the sports and everything, but that could not be farther from a warehouse-type environment. So we just get to skate around really beautiful features and just with the most gorgeous backdrops of really any sport you could imagine.

We're not necessarily interacting with the backdrop. I mean, we're not playing around on the face of the glacier or anything, but it's just amazing to have that scenery all around you and behind you and just get to see so much spectacle in the winter, especially because a lot of the Nordic skating or wild ice skating season, it's on the coldest, darkest days of winter. So it's really cool to be able to get out and sort of maximize the, the beauty that you get to see on what are otherwise a lot of the hardest days of the year. The bottom right there is skating on Skilak Lake. That's also Tim actually testing that, that kind of open lead there.

Skilak Lake, I ran the numbers like a couple of weeks ago when I was doing some writing. Skilak Lake is— it's on the Kenai Peninsula. It's the second biggest lake on the Kenai. It is 55,000 times the size of a hockey rink. So that just gives you a sense of the absolutely immense scale of some of the water bodies that we skate.

Skilak was one of my— it still is one of my favorite places to skate in Alaska. It has these huge cliffy headlands that makes you feel like you're in a fjord or something. It has these groups of islands and these channels and waterfalls. And I like that. That photo and just wanted to mention Skilak because it really captures Nordic skating being, and Nordic skating specifically, wild ice skating more broadly, being about adventure and covering long distances.

There was a period in time when skating was actually the most efficient way for a person. It was the fastest way for a person to move on earth. It was faster than a horse. And it was, there was a very famous race between a pair of skaters and a, a locomotive in the UK, and the skaters won. So I'm not saying this period lasted for a long time, but I think that speaks to the fact that skating is an incredibly efficient, fast way to cover big distances.

And it's really exciting to go out on your skates, go out to a place like Skilak, and you can cover 20, 30, 40, 50, 80 miles in a day.

You know, without a huge amount of— I'm not saying it's easy to skate 80 miles in a day, but it's dramatically faster and more efficient than, than hiking, for example. So you just get to see a lot and cover a lot of distance and see a lot of stuff. Top right is a photo from the Susitna Flats Wetlands. That was from last year. We had this really interesting weather event in, at least in Anchorage.

I don't know if it also kind of hit Juneau, but it got incredibly warm in January and it knocked down all our snow and then it refroze in late January and early February. And what that did is, is hugely raised the level of the ice in a lot of wetland areas. So if you had gone out to the Susitna Flats in November, the level of the ice would have been very low. But because all this snow built up over the winter and then it melted and then it refroze, the level of the ice was literally like a foot or two or three higher than in the fall. And it just blew open this enormous zone where we could go out and go on these incredibly, like truly epic days of skating where we were covering 30, 40 miles in a day navigating through this enormous network of kind of terraced wetlands that are on either side of the Susitna River.

And that to me, it's kind of hard to like convey, you know, we saw a lot of stuff with a single photo, but I think this kind of shows, I hope that captures at least a little bit this feeling of moving down this kind of highway of ice that was connected and interconnected with all these other lagoons and corridors of ice. And we really just got to kind of COVID a huge amount of, ground and do really interesting, kind of unique backcountry adventures. Yeah? [Speaker:AUDIENCE] About 3 minutes would be good. [Speaker:CHRIS BROADFOOT] Oh, OK.

I totally thought— Tim was like, you need to fill a lot of time. OK, luckily this can be the last slide if you want. This photo, this is from Byers Lake this fall. That's my friend Allie, who I do a lot of skating with. And she rented the Byers 1 cabin.

And in the morning we went out and onto the lake, a group of us, and Denali was just fully out and just absolutely gorgeous. The ice was beautiful, beautiful gray day, what we call gray day ice, like a really good mirror. And we were just kind of, I mean, we took some photos, but we were just in awe of the experience. And I think this just, this photo just really sums up for me, like, this is why we skate in Alaska. Like we're skating the best ice under the biggest mountain in North America.

And that's just, that's just, it's such a cool thing to do. It's free and it's just there. You just need to drive up to the edge of it and go. I mean, I've talked a little bit about Nordic skates. You don't need Nordic skates.

You can go out on your old hockey skates, like go out on figure skates. Like this experience is very accessible and available to a lot of people. And yeah, this really captures like why I love the sport. And I hope it encourages all of you to think about wild ice skating too, and kind of how it's become part of the culture in Alaska, and what an exciting and positive development it is. Tim, when Tim was planning this trip down here, he was saying you should think of asks, of like, what would you ask?

What could improve this? And I mean, I would love to see support for Alaska small business and, you know, encouragement of our tourism and everything. But really, I think the message, the overall message I would love to give is just like, this is an amazing thing that's happening. And I want to make sure everybody, even if you're not part of the skating community, I just want to make sure everybody is aware of this. Like, this is really cool and it's just good.

It's just a positive thing. Like, there's nothing wrong here. It's just something that's great that's happening in our state. And I think it's just going to keep— it's going to keep improving and keep becoming more and more a part of life in Alaska. I think the door is kind of wide open.

The community is there. The companies are here to support it. And it's— I think we're, you know, this is just a great thing about life in the state. So just, yeah, want to make sure everyone knows. Yeah.

Is there any like Q&A or is there— Yeah, we have like 5 minutes for questions. Okay, cool. Does anybody have questions? Of course, this entire time I'm thinking, how do you know how safe the ice is where you go? Yeah, that's a really good question.

Luckily, most people kind of have a sort of inherent, like, fear of going out on thin ice, which I think is good because people tend to be a little cautious in the beginning. It's fairly easy actually to test the supportiveness of outdoor ice. Outdoor ice can be really variable, so you do have to be careful. But we use tools called ice poles. They're, they basically look like a ski pole and they have a sharp metal tip.

And, uh, you go out to the ice and you literally just stab it with this spear. And if the pole goes through into the water in, you know, 1 or 2 firm hits, then you know that the ice is kind of, kind of thin and you need to be careful. If you give the ice 1 or 2 good thwacks and that pole hasn't gone through, it's gonna support you. So we have this tool that provides instant, really good, valuable feedback regarding what you actually want to know, which, which is actually not how thick the ice is. It's whether or not the ice can support you.

So by hitting it, you get a really good sense of whether it'll support you regardless of the thickness. And then there are other things we do to be safe, like carry rescue claws. We carry warm, dry clothes in a dry bag in our backpacks. We carry throw ropes. On a more remote trip, if it's very cold, I'll often carry a stove, maybe a little foam pad, maybe even a sleeping bag just in case there's an emergency.

But as sports go, I mean, we— it's— I would say it's on the safer side of things that people do in Alaska, to be honest. If you fall through the ice and pull yourself out, you have the tools, or you should have the tools to get warm again, warm and dry, get back to your car. I mean, that, that really contrasts a lot with, you know, backcountry skiing with avalanches, you know, A lot of stuff we do in Alaska, including just driving. I think often the drive is the most dangerous part of a lot of these trips. I mean, seriously, you know, driving the Seward Highway when it's icy is like a little dodgy.

So often I think once we get onto the ice, that's— we're probably safer. Yeah, there's risk, but it's— we're really good at mitigating that. Okay. Did you bring a skate along to show us? I did.

I would, as long as I'm not violating Yeah, all right, I'm, I'm going to show the side of the skate that does not have a brand name, uh, although you get to see the brand name of the boot that's on, so I don't know, it seems like a wash. But, um, yeah, so this is a Nordic skate. So the, the orange part here is the skate itself, and then this is a, a binding that's attached to the skate. So this is a SkateSki binding with a— we just replaced the, the rubber flexor on it. But otherwise it's just a stock skate ski binding.

And then, um, you can use a— typically we would use a skate ski boot. You can also use a Nordic touring boot. Um, and then I'll show, show you guys real quick.

I think you can all still hear me. The boot pops right off. So this is actually really awesome, a really awesome thing about Nordic skates, that you can walk to the edge of a lake or a water body in your boots and then clip your skate on when you get to a lake. Or if you're out in one of those wetlands like I was showing you guys photos of, if you get to a little section where you're like, ah, okay, the ice ends, we have to walk 50 feet through the woods— well, if you have hockey skates on, you have to just walk in your skates. If you have Nordic skates, it's just— it's as easy as clipping out of your skate and just walking in your boots.

Although we walk in our skates a lot anyway because I don't know if that's laziness or we're cool or what. Probably combination. But yeah, this is a Nordic skate. It's essentially, uh, it's kind of like a long track speed skate in a lot of ways. Um, very warm, comfortable boot, very long, stable skate.

Long, stable, fast, and efficient skate. It's not as maneuverable as a hockey or a figure skate, so a lot of the really, you know, a lot of those rink sports are designed around powerful tight maneuvers, that's not really what this skate is designed for. But if you're out on a really big lake like Skilak or something, this just lets you cover an immense amount of distance. And, you know, if you have friends on, on hockey skates, for example, they might take like 5 strides for every 1 stride you take on a Nordic skate. They're just dramatically more efficient.

Yeah, I don't know if I have any more time or any other Questions?

One more question? Mia? Well, thanks for being here. It's really great to hear. And the videos and the photos are just absolutely stunning.

My question is, how fast do you get going? Ooh. OK. So I usually keep— I turn on Gaia GPS, which is sort of like Strava, similar thing. The fastest that I've seen is over 20 miles an hour, but that's skating across something like Portage when the ice is really good and you have a really good tailwind.

But you can get going really scary fast. I also sometimes— my dog, I have a Samoyed, he just loves pulling and I'll put him in a harness and then hold his leash and then just get down kind of in that type position and that'll— he'll also, you know, we'll be going very scary fast, like to the point that I'm trying to slow him down a little bit. But yeah, I'd say Nordic skates probably cap peak around 20, 25 miles an hour. But it's not necessarily the top speed. Like you can accelerate in a hockey skate faster than you can accelerate in a Nordic skate.

It's that they're incredibly, incredibly efficient because of the way the blade is designed. So you can push off and just ride one skate and ride it and ride it, and you'll go hundreds, you know, hundreds of feet, like 100 meters on a single push at a reasonable speed. So it's that combination of, you know, efficiency as well as the warmth and the comfort of a Nordic skate that really makes them so good for outdoor ice. Yeah, thanks. What's up?

How do you stop? You can kind of hockey stop. If you're decent at it, you can turn sideways. We do a lot of pizza stops too. So you just kind of turn your toes inward.

Wild ice is really, really hard on blades because it's full of silt, especially in Alaska. The ice up here is just notorious for shredding blades. Like you go skating out in the valley after a windstorm and all that silt can just rip your edges off. So we try to be pretty kind to our blades by not stopping super abruptly with them. So in general, you try to, you try to adjust your skating style with a Nordic skate to a more kind of flowy, flowy, efficient style rather than a really jerky style, if that kind of makes sense.

But we usually wouldn't need to make a really, really hard hockey stop unless you're skating and you see like open water next to you or something. Something, you would, you know, you'll stop or you'll go in. I mean, you have two options, so you better stop. Yeah. Yeah.

I'm happy to talk to anybody else afterwards too.

Yeah. Thank you. Thanks everyone for coming.