Getting the flavor of...Dogsledding in Alaska, and more

Dogsledding in Alaska

My first lesson in Alaskan dogsledding came before I even got to my private cabin, said Andrew McCarthy in The New York Times. Instructor Carl Dixon, who met my ski-plane on the snow-covered ice outside Winterlake Lodge, shared his “rule No. 1” immediately: “When you crash,” he said, “never let go.” No one else had signed up for the four-day course with Within the Wild Adventure Co. (withinthewild​.com), and at first I rode as Dixon’s passenger. “There was no sound except the wind” as we darted through trees, and the rhythm of the huskies pulling us became hypnotic. I wiped out during my first time at the reins, but by day 4, I was ready to brave a section of the famous Iditarod Trail. Approaching “Wipe Out Hill,” I stood on the brake as I’d been trained, but the dogs wouldn’t slow. Suddenly I was tumbling 50 feet off the trail into the soft snow below. “Just like the pros!” Dixon shouted.

Zen skiing in Utah

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“I feared a spate of New Age frilliness” when I signed up for the “Ski to Live” camp at Alta Ski Area in Utah, said Brigid Mander in The Wall Street Journal. Kristen Ulmer, an extreme-sports legend (kristenulmer.com), has been running the program for nine years, and she champions the notion that training the mind to take on Alta’s famous chutes is more important than teaching technique. Amazingly, she might be right. We were told to take each run with a different voice in our heads—first fear, then “control, arrogance, the analytical mind, the show-off, and anger.” By the end of the first day, I was “exhausted from all the exertion—and all the thinking.” But I was also “amazed at how different each run felt.” I eventually concluded that a “know-it-all” frame of mind made me feel most exhilarated in mid-descent. I couldn’t explain why it worked, but accepting my newfound alpine mastery felt “very Zen.”