Anchorage has reached a new low in snowfall, shaking up the usual winter activities—including the famed Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race. Just 4.3 inches was recorded this week at the National Weather Service's Sand Lake gauge, the least to fall between Dec. 1 and mid-February since recordkeeping began in 1953, the Anchorage Daily News reports. Other parts of Alaska are light on snow, too. Winter events are having to adapt. On March 1, the Iditarod will have its ceremonial start in Anchorage, but the real start will happen two days later, 360 miles north in Fairbanks, per the AP.
The snowshoe softball game during Anchorage's Fur Rendezvous winter festival will be a "bootball" game this year, with players allowed to wear any kind of boots. The Open World Championship Sled Dog Race will change from a series of 26-mile loops to three days of competition on a 3-mile course. Sled-dog rides at the festival are canceled. Those changes were all unnecessary last year, when almost 6 feet of snow fell between Dec. 1 and mid-February, making it the city's second-snowiest season on record. The average for the period is about 39 inches, according to the weather service.
Anchorage has had little snowfall since last month, when a series of unusually warm, windy storms struck, with the only precipitation rain or freezing rain. "We have had years of low snow but we didn't have the chinook of all chinooks," said John McCleary, executive director of the Fur Rendezvous, of those storms, per the Daily News. "In my 40-plus years, we've had the warm chinooks for a small period of time but not for almost three weeks and rain and wind which was cyclonic." (More Anchorage stories.)
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