Rainbow Peak

I’ve been quite bad updating the blog lately but I have a pretty good excuse: I’ve been too busy having fun. We’ve had exceptional weather over the past month and there has been no shortage of opportunities to enjoy it. The past weekend was quite cold, so I finally had the chance to cross off some things from my to-do list.

Two weeks ago Inari and I and a few friends headed down to the mountains to climb Rainbow Peak, one of the easiest and most accessible climbs in interior Alaska, making it an ideal day trip. To take full advantage of the little sunshine that there is in January, we awoke at 4:30 am (!), left Fairbanks at 5:30 am, and started climbing at 9:00 am, just as the sun was rising. The snow at the bottom of the mountain was so sugary that we had to literally crawl on our hands and knees for the first 20 minutes. We encountered solid snowpack (actually very crusty snow) once we got past the vegetation that separates the mountain from the road, so we strapped on our crampons and headed up. We reached the peak at 1:30 pm and were treated to spectacular views. From there we could see Denali three hundred kilometers to the west as well as Mt. Wrangell (a massive volcano), Mt. Drum, and Mt. Sanford (a 5,000 m peak), all approximately 150-200 km to the south. We were back down to the car at 4:30, just as the sun was beginning to set. I found myself in bed at 10:00 pm and didn’t find myself getting out of bed until noon the next day.