Extreme Alaska

Tara Todras-Whitehill for The New York Times

Snow biking, ice climbing and snow-kiting in Alaska.

The wind came from the northwest. It blew down from the glacier-studded peaks of the Alaska Range, through the icebergs of Turnagain Arm and across the frozen expanse of the Twenty Mile River. It was an unrelenting wind, the kind that fells trees, shapes mountains and drives people to their firesides. And there I was among the sculptured snow ridges and frozen grass on the banks of the Twenty Mile, attached to a giant kite, wearing a pair of skis.

When I signed up for snow-kiting in Alaska, I didn't think about how it would feel to be bracing myself against a 25-mile-per-hour wind as I watched my kite flutter in the snow a hundred feet off, threatening to whip up into the air at any moment. All that kept it down was my hand on the rope "brake," tight against my hip. I could barely hear Tom Fredericks, my upbeat instructor, shouting in my ear, "Now, it's going to pull real hard when it first comes up," before the rest of his words disappeared into the wind. Frankly, I was scared.

But then, I hadn't come to Alaska in winter to take it easy. I let go of the brake. Seconds later, I was flying.

Colorado, Utah, Wyoming — these are the places one thinks of as winter sports paradises in the United States. But Alaska? Too dark, you might say. Too cold. Too, well, extreme. One imagines frostbite temperatures, cloud-scraping mountains and tundra too inhospitable for trees. The numbers bear out the prejudice: in the spring and summer of last year, close to 1.2 million people visited Alaska for vacation; in fall and winter, that number was just 34,000.

But as March approaches, average highs creep up to a balmy 34 degrees in Anchorage, and the daylight hours are as long as anywhere else. Conveniently for winter-sports enthusiasts, most of the 600 inches of snow the Chugach Mountains see each year remains. Still, few people go, leaving one of our country's largest snowy playgrounds unvisited by any but locals and the few who are savvy enough to make the trip.

What this means is that Anchorage — unlike Interlaken, in Switzerland, Jackson Hole, Wyo., and other winter adventure capitals — has a robust sports scene in which tourists are almost an afterthought. The city is full of young, fit people whose garages are overflowing with snowshoes, ice axes, skis, snowmobiles and other adrenaline paraphernalia. And they play a lot of different sports. Skiing (backcountry, cross-country and alpine) and snowmobiling (called snow-machining in Alaska) are probably the most popular, followed by dog mushing. After that come ice climbing, skijoring (cross-country skiing pulled by a dog) and snow biking. Then you get into sports that no one in their right mind would do, like snow-kiting, winter surfing and scuba diving (in dry suits).

It's true that these sports can be done elsewhere. Backcountry skiing is all the rage in the Northwest; ice climbing is popular from Colorado to Vermont. But Alaska has more snow, more ice, more wind, taller mountains and lower tree lines than pretty much anywhere else. When it comes to extreme sports in the winter, Alaska is as extreme as it gets.

The sports I chose during my recent trip were snow-kiting, ice climbing and snow biking. I chose these activities not only because I had never done them, but also because they are well suited to the state: snow-kiting for the vast expanses of windy tundra, ice climbing because of all the glaciers and frozen waterfalls, and snow biking because of Anchorage's extensive system of winter trails.

Since Anchorage and its surroundings are home to more than half the state's population, I decided to base myself there. If Alaska's winter sports scene is centered around residents, then I wanted to be where the people were. I found the city itself to be uninspiring, but the city itself is not the point; the surrounding areas are.

AND SO, ON A CLEAR DAY, my sister, Tara, and I drove south out of Anchorage on the Seward Highway toward Turnagain Pass, a stretch of road rightly hailed as one of the most scenic drives in the country. The road stays north of the Turnagain Arm, a vast fjord walled on either side by the Chugach Mountains as if both were carved by the same glacial knife. The peaks of the Chugach Range are not that high, averaging around 4,000 feet, but pressing around us so tightly, their snowy slopes naked of trees for more than half their height, they felt like the Himalayas.

ETHAN TODRAS-WHITEHILL is a frequent contributor to the Travel section.

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