Brrrr

Gadling just pointed to an article by Mark Sundeen that appeared in the November issue of Outside magazine about surfing in Yakutat, Alaska.

The Coldest Ride

Yes, you read that correctly -- surfing in Alaska. It's a great article, the type of thing that Outside does very well. Sundeen reports on a caravan of professional and amateur surfers drawn to the tiny town on "the only sheltered deep water port in the Gulf of Alaska."



Looks cold, doesn't it? It is, thought not as cold as you might think thanks to the Kuroshio Current, the second-largest current on Earth which brings warm water northward from the western Pacific. It seems like braving the cold water is worth it, though:

"The beach is contained by thick forest, and out across the bay the fog lifts just enough to show the toe of a glacier cracking off the snowy base of St. Elias. Let me repeat that: I'm surfing incredible waves within sight of a glacier. The water numbs my fingers and face, but after a while it doesn't seem all that cold—nothing worse than Northern California, anyway. The waves rise out of nowhere, glassy peeling lefts we ride a few hundred yards, all the way to shore. After an hour, the tide rushes in so fast that you can watch it climb the beach, and as quickly as the waves arrived they disappear, leaving the spruce-ringed inlet once again calm, gillnetters pushing toward the open sea."

I love to travel, and have had the extreme good fortune to have a job that takes me around the world -- in addition to several trips to Germany and Holland, I've been to Tokyo, Beijing, New Delhi, and Bahrain in the last few years, and am heading to Dubai next week. Something tells me there won't be any fire service industry conferences in Yakutat, Alaska anytime soon, though, so this article will be the closest I'll get to a return trip to Alaska for the time being.