The Yukon-Kuskokwim (Y-K) Delta is distinctly short on downhill ski slopes and doesn’t have groomed trails for cross-country skiing. If a person on skis wants to go somewhere fast, there is a way though: the wind.
“It's a way to go skiing out here that is particularly good for out here,” said Bethel resident Eric Whitney. He’s an avid what he calls “snow-kiter.” The sport goes by many names.
“I always show people a video if they ask, because it's kind of – I have a kite attached to me that can be 6 meters, and it's attached to a harness, and the kite is up in the air, and it's pulling me around on skis, and I can be on the river or the tundra if there's enough snow,” Whitney explained.
Other than traffic on the Kuskokwim Ice Road, Whitney said that the lower Kuskokwim River is an ideal place to ski while being pulled by a giant kite.
“Anywhere else, like in a road system town, there's roads, there's power lines, there's fences, there's rocks, there's trees,” Whitney said. “We have almost none of that. We have a few trees, but it's just an amazing area to kite here.”
About a decade ago, maybe more, Whitney isn’t totally sure, he first clipped into a pair of skis, wrapped a kite cord around his waist, and took off to see if the powerful winds of the Y-K Delta could take him somewhere.
“I started by getting pulled around by a tiny little kite on skis, just to see if it was possible,” Whitney said. “I don't even know how I got the idea, if I saw something on YouTube or whatnot, but I managed to get a small trainer kite to pull me down the river on skis. I asked a friend, ‘Hey, do you want to come out kiting with me on the river?’ And he's like, ‘Yeah.’ I knew he was available because he's a pilot, and they weren't flying planes that day because it was too windy. So he's, ‘Yeah, I want to see what this looks like.’”
Since then, Whitney has kite skied all over the region. He’ll go in the center of Bethel, locally known as the Donut Hole because there are no roads or buildings there in the middle, or out the ice road on the Kuskokwim River. Once, he hooked up a kite and skied more than 70 miles downriver to the coastal village of Kongiganak.
In early February, Whitney took his relatively solitary passion down south with a friend, Tom Fredricks of Wasilla, a kiter who also reps for kite brand Ozone. Whitney entered the 2025 Snow and Ice Sailing World Championships in Madison, Wisconsin put on by the World Ice and Snow Sailing Association and the International Kiteboarding Association.
Whitney decided to seize the day.
“So I ended up signing up for all the events there as a pro elite kiter, basically because I'm going to be there all week,” Whitney said. “And why not?”
It was his first-ever snow kiting competition of any kind, let alone an elite world championship event. It was set up like a sailing regatta.
“It means a lot of racing,” Whitney said.
In both sailing and kite skiing regattas, competitors race multiple times, combining the scores from each race. Throughout the five-day competition, they raced the courses again and again, trying not to get points. The higher you are on the podium after each race, the lower you score.
“I chose the K300 Yacht Club as my home Racing Club,” Whitney said. To be clear, there’s no yacht club here in Bethel, let alone one associated with the Kuskokwim 300 Sled Dog Race, also known as the K300. “The software they have you sign up for is a sailing-based thing, and it seems to assume you have a boat with a hull number and all kinds of stuff. So they asked about, ‘What is your club?’ And I said, ‘K300 Yacht Club,’ because I'd just been out marking trail for K300. And that was, you know, I thought it made sense.”
Each day, competitors lined up on the ice of Lake Mendota in Wisconsin, holding their kites back but jockeying for the best position.
“Just starting one of these races looks crazy,” Whitney said. “There's like, ... 15 kites in the air, and people are posting up, waiting for the start of the race. It's a timed event, and there's snowboarders kind of behind you, and there's all the competitors. It's crazy to see all these kites in the air. And it's really exciting to see that because out here, I just see my kite.”
Whitney said that he entered all the events he could as a kiter with skis. There are also divisions for kiters with snowboards, people on ice skates with fixed wing apparatuses, sleds with sails, and so on.
“I really wasn't competitive in the overall, because I really didn't know what was going on and didn't have the gear to do it right,” Whitney said. He was fascinated by the gear that people flew in from all over the world to compete. Eight-foot-long skis with razor edges, super-tall ice skates, kites made for racing that allow you to cut upwind more efficiently.
“Then at the end of it, they had a marathon event, and that one involved: how far can you go in an hour?” Whitney said. “Initially, when I signed up, I'm like, ‘An hour for a marathon, that doesn't sound like much,’ but after you've been there for a week, oh, I was quite tired. An hour sounded like a long time.”
For the marathon event, Whitney said that his friend loaned him some longer skis and a less cumbersome kite. And he got the advantage of some Kuskokwim-esque weather. “The storm blows in, and I was like, ‘Oh, it feels normal. Just now it's blasting and it's totally icy,’ and, yeah, that seemed pretty normal,” Whitney said.
All those hours training on the blustery Kuskokwim, plus a pair of skis he could hold an edge on, gave a very different feeling to the marathon race.
“When I noticed I was passing the guys that I could barely keep in sight in the other races, that was a moment,” Whitney said.
Whitney ended up making the podium in his first snow kite competition – a world championship. He placed third.
“On the other courses, I was happy to get around the course at all,” Whitney said. “So to come in third, I was thrilled. So I'm pretty excited about it.”
Next, Whitney said he’ll be returning to familiar stomping grounds – the annual Snow Kite Festival at Thompson Pass near Valdez in April. And after that? Who knows. A big kite and a pair of skis can take you a lot of places.