...A time to gather stones together

According to The Byrds, there's a season for everything.  Our team has spread out across the Western Hemisphere during the Christmas season, but we will come back together this coming weekend.  Karina has been socializing in Oslo. Max was (most likely) in Ostersund, Sweden. Nevio has (presumably) been eating spaghetti in Val di Fiemme. Lukas and Lasse held their mini-training camp at Lukas' house in the Black Forest in Germany, after which Lasse went to a ski race in the area and beat up on all the locals. Laura has been watching the flowers and green grass grow from her home in the meadows of Neukirch. Steffi went to Fairbanks to become better aquainted with -30 degree weather and with her future parents-in-law. Davis went to Palmer and brought Lutz along with him (and Lutz's sister and her boyfriend), and Maya, Brandon, Tor, Jaime and Galen stayed where the ski conditions were best - Anchorage, Alaska.  I saw Galen out skiing the other evening at Kincaid Park.  And I was happy to see on the internet that Jaime went to snowless Maine this week and scored a couple of good races on man-made snow at the U.S. National Championships. Andrew went to Colorado and reports a lack of snow there, too.  So it looks like all the world's snow is falling in Alaska this winter.

http://www.adn.com/2012/01/06/2249330/snow-keeps-piling-up-in-valdez.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-HBlfLbaHDE&feature=related

As for me, I spent a couple weeks in Zihuatanejo, Mexico before coming back to spend a week traveling around Alaska for work, dodging blizzards.  Lasse was concerned that I might get out of shape in Mexico, but he doesn't have to worry about that because I was training like crazy: every day we walked to a different beach (or to the bus stop), and when we got there we spent all day splashing around in the water before walking home again.  (And we stayed hydrated, too.)

Mexico has some nice coral beaches:

 When I went over the falls and landed on my board I became shark bait, so that was the end of that surfing session:

This is Yakutat, about two hours BEFORE the snowstorm:

Mt. Saint Elias rises 18,000 feet, straight out of the ocean, near Yakutat. Those aren't clouds in the foreground, it's ice.

To everyone who's not here in Anchorage:  This is what you're missing at Kincaid Park.

I went skiing with Lutz and Davis today.  4" of new snow overnight.  The groomers hadn't gotten there yet.

Lutz and Davis:

Lutz's sister and her boyfriend, Melanie and Mattias, came skiing with us at Hillside today.

This weekend, the travel team packs up and heads out on their first road trip of the season, for college races in Steamboat Springs and Granby, Colorado.  With any luck, they'll let me know how things are going so I can write about it here for the legions of UAA Ski Team fans that religiously follow this blog.