Kicking off 2012, Alaska style

Sorry for my lack of posts lately. I'll try to be better about it.

Last weekend (Jan 27-28) I went on a cabin outing with some friends. The cabin was about 2 hours north of Anchorage, owned by a friend's family. We left town around 4 pm to head out to enjoy the peaceful beauty of the middle of nowhere.



The roads were clear, and the mountains visible. This is about 40 minutes north of Anchorage.

I was in the first group arriving. We got there at around 6:30 Friday evening and began setting up. It was around -23 outside, so we spent most of the time inside. We cooked up some dinner (sloppy joes) and getting everything set for the second wave of people (those who got off work later). At around 9:00 at night, we got a call, as a one of my friends got his car stuck in snow, so we had to go dig him out. That was less than fun.

After getting everybody in the cabin, and finishing dinner, we started playing some games. The night ended with a partially finished game of Lord of the Rings Risk. Here's what the board looked like.


This was at about 3:30 am, and we were all fairly evenly matched up at this point, so we called it a night.

The next day, the men got up (relatively) early and started cooking breakfast.


It was a beautiful morning.


There we are making bacon and hash browns.


These guys were making pancakes, omelettes, and juice.

The cabin was quite nice, and spacy.


This is the view from the second floor.

Once we got our mega-breakfast out of the way, a few of us got prepared to go snow-shoeing and sledding outside.


It was still close to -20 outside, and though we had a nice clear, sunny morning, we needed to snow suit up.


Every girl is crazy about a sharp dressed man.

We went out, and made our way towards the river. Once we got there, we found some sweet spots to sled down.



The river was frozen pretty solid.


And we left our marks in the snow.



We made it back to the cabin in one piece. I had put on too many layers (as one girl kept telling me it was so cold, I really needed to layer up), so I was sweating like crazy on the way back. Well, sweat will freeze quite nicely at -20.


My ice-mage look. Yeah, that is frozen sweat.


It was a great trip overall. Hopefully, I'll be better at posting on a more regular basis.