Yesterday, for my afternoon off, Emilia and I went down to Midway, Utah to swim in the Homestead Crater. The crater is a caldera, a natural hot spring surrounded by a rock dome. We got the idea to go there from a Groupon. The crater is at the Homestead Resort, where I have stayed for several race series at Soldier Hollow, the 2002 Olympic cross country venue. On a previous visit to the Homestead I had walked into the crater, but I never went swimming in it. Emilia had never been there at all. It’s a cool place.

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U.S. Ski Team men’s coach Jason Cork put together this video of me from Eagle Glacier for my technique coach Zach Caldwell to review. It includes footage from several different workouts.

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It’s another rainy day in northwestern Utah. I’m starting to think I flew back to Seattle instead of Salt Lake.

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My travel back to Utah from Alaska yesterday was relatively smooth. Like I did on the way there, I got upgraded to the first class cabin on the long flight (Anchorage to San Francisco). It was nice to have a big seat and to be served dinner.

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This morning Reese Hanneman and I woke up early so we could do a long double pole roller ski before my flight.

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Yesterday I finished a camp on Eagle Glacier and tomorrow I’m flying back to Utah, but today I had the opportunity to take advantage of the Alaskan summer. I’m staying here in Anchorage with my friend Reese Hanneman, and he showed me what it’s like to be a local. We took his big, rugged truck into the mountains north of the city (into what’s known as “the valley”).

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I just flew off the Eagle Glacier above Girdwood, Alaska. My teammates and I were on the glacier for a week for a joint camp between the U.S. Ski Team (USST) cross country men and the Alaska Pacific University (APU) men’s team.

This is going to be a long post. Believe it or not (and you probably won’t if you make it all the way through this post) but I actually deleted a ton of photos. I’m not used to blogging about an entire week, and I took pictures as if I was blogging daily. Because of it’s length, this post might also be a bit discombobulated. My apologies.

Before departing for the glacier we filled up on some delicious greasy food at Taco King, an Alaskan specialty that we hit up three times during our week dry-land training in Anchorage.

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It’s been a day of hurry up and wait. We were told to be ready to head to the helipad in Girdwood, Alaska to fly to the Eagle Glacier at 8:15 this morning. However, we got an e-mail at 8 O’clock that said it was snowing on the glacier. The new departure was set for noon. At 11:45 we got an e-mail that said the weather was still bad. The departure time from Anchorage was pushed to 4 p.m. The latest time is now 4:45 for a 6 O’clock flight. We have our fingers crossed. (Eventually we will make the decision to hike in if it doesn’t appear that we’ll be able to fly.)

I took advantage of the time this morning to go out for an hour and a half roller ski double pole session. I skied up Campbell Airstrip Road on the hills above the city.

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This is my second blog post in four hours. I think that might be a record.

The women’s joint U.S. Ski Team and Alaska Pacific University (APU) camp is a week ahead of the men’s edition. They concluded their two week camp and flew off the Eagle Glacier today. We are half way through our camp and will fly onto the glacier tomorrow. We took advantage of the one night of overlap by having a full group get together at my teammate Kikkan Randall’s house.

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Yesterday afternoon my good friend Sarah Gallagher, who I played with in diapers 24 years ago, gave me a goody-bag full of cookies and banana bread. They taste amazing. I’m so psyched. Thanks Sarah!

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