A story about Richard William Spils
I remember waking up at 5am the morning after a large snow storm in Anchorage, Alaska. This was probably in 1992. At the time I worked with my Mom and Dad at the family business about a half mile down the street from our house in Anchorage. The building which my parents owned and ran the business out of had a flat roof—the snow was waist high. We were up on the roof by 5:30am shoveling snow to get as much weight off the roof as possible so the roof wouldn’t cave in. After a couple hours of heavy shoveling we had removed a good 2 feet of snow off the entire surface of the roof.
I think it was January. The sky was clear and we could see the Northern Lights—they were intense enough to light up Sleeping Lady (a defining mountain in the Anchorage viewscape). Later that day we split from work by 4pm, grabbed our cross country skis and went skiing up at Russian Jack. I remember waxing the skis and buffing the wax with a cork block before heading out. By 4:30pm it was already pitch dark and dang cold. My face was red and frozen and I stayed locked on the two parallel ski tracks behind my dad. We stopped once and he pulled out a couple bitesize Snickers for an energy boost. Those little candy bars were delicious!
