My feelings for snow are uncomplicated; I don't like it. Winter for me is a time of brooding discontent, a time to lie low and wait for spring. I need to feel the balm of the sun's rays on my back, on my skin, warming my bones. I have never really understood what draws people to cold climates, why anyone would ever want to live, much less take a holiday in a frozen wasteland. But despite this, or perhaps because of it, I have always had a morbid fascination with places like Alaska.

      One Friday night last year, I had a brutal journey across the continent via Chicago, Seattle and three stopovers up the B.C. coast. While winter was reluctantly beating a retreat from Toronto, I tentatively accepted an invitation to step back into the snow by spending a weekend in Alaska.

      I flew into Juneau trapped between a giant bear of a man in the window seat and a non-stop-talking travel guide in the aisle seat.

      "Are you cold?" my unsolicited personal travel guide inquired, running his eye over my winter coat as I settled into my seat on the flight from Seattle to Juneau. "Is this your first time in Alaska?" I nodded, trying to laugh off my caution. Although the weather channel had told me to expect a balmy 4 °C in Juneau, I had decided not to take any chances. Packing my bags with some serious winter clothing, I reminded myself that Alaska is not a place to be caught with your pants down.

      "It's not that cold in Juneau. We have a coastal climate up there," the man explained. He was wearing short sleeves, as were most of the passengers, who inexplicably seemed to be dressed for a Caribbean holiday rather than a trip to the frozen north.

      As we approached land, I contorted my body to get a view of the landscape. To the east were snow-covered peaks that jutted up into the sky, creating a picture-postcard scene that ran uninterrupted all the way up to Juneau. Every now and again the plane would circle around, giving everyone a new perspective — a maneuver the pilot cheerfully announced as if he were a tour guide.

      Looking out of my hotel window across the main road, I sat transfixed as dawn broke over the city. An opaque blue sky and a bright morning bathed the tops of the snow-covered peaks in bright daylight. The night-lights of the houses and cabins on the waterfront were reflected in the void of the sound. Twenty minutes later, the entire island was basking under crisp sunlight and a clear blue sky.

      The wonder at watching the sun come up like that was tinged with regret: I hadn't come to Alaska to see the sun; I came to see snow, to feel the full and bitter blast of winter. Disappointed, I decided to interrogate my hosts about the Alaskan winter.

      I tossed out a suggestion that the Alaskan winter was a myth, boasting that Toronto could be as cold as anything Alaska had to offer. There was a bemused silence in the car. Eventually Ross, a phlegmatic looking soul who lived in Fairbanks, 100 kilometres from the Arctic Circle, confessed that temperatures fell as low as -40 in Fairbanks. "Is that Celsius or Fahrenheit?" I asked excitedly. "Both," he replied laconically. Minus 40, Ross explained, is the point at which the two scales converge. I was mortified. Seeing the whites of my eyes, Ross decided to open up, filling me with grim anecdotes about the cold. When he recalled that it had reached -58 the previous winter. I suggested that Fairbanks must be in outer space.

      Although a sizeable portion of Alaska is inside the Arctic Circle, the southwest of the state, especially the coastal zone, is actually in a mild temperate zone. I was told, much to my disappointment, that rain, rather than snow is the predominant feature of the climate in Juneau. It rains 270 days a year there. This, as Phil, the manager of my hotel, consoled me, was good for accenting the blueness of the ice on the glacier.

      When I finally made it out to the Mendenhall Glacier, the sight of the large block of blue ice conjured up a misty-eyed nostalgia for my high school geography lessons. All these years later and the mad enthusiasms of my geography teacher for glacial spits and glacial erratics suddenly came to life. I felt like I was standing before, or perhaps among, the ruins of an ancient cathedral. Faced with the solemnity of it, I felt an inexplicable sadness at the thought of a glacier retreating at a rate of nine meters a year. Standing before it offered a concrete appreciation of the immensity of time. I felt small, insignificant, in the face of this slow-moving monolith, slow moving but capable of such profound impact on the landscape.

      Walking back from the glacier, I turned around for one last look. Bald eagles were circling high above the unblemished snow peaks, towering high above the valley, and it occurred to me why people come to places like Alaska — it is for the appreciation of nature in its rawest and untouched state, to be humbled by the true force of ice, and of snow.

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