All through the afternoon and into the evening, the winds built. By the time the early darkness of the Alaska winter descended, the house was rocking in the big gusts as the digital display on the anemometer bounced near 70 mph.

From an office walled with glass on two sides, I watched the view of Anchorage disappear into periodic walls of blowing snow. The snowshoe hare tracks that had earlier traced trails between the willows in the yard outside the windows were long gone, blown away, and the hares themselves curled up somewhere under the roots of a fallen tree or in a nest of once-tall summer grass bent beneath a drift.

The good news for them was that the owls which had every night been hooting up their own storm would not be hunting in these conditions.

Down at the dog kennels, Hoss and Bailey curled up in the far corners of their houses and waited for the blow to subside. Not all that many hours earlier, I had been thinking about taking Hoss skijoring on a freshly packed trail in the woods to the east, a reward for his helping break it out two days prior when the fresh snow was in places neck deep on a Labrador retriever.

In those conditions, a three-mile trail easily circled in less than half an hour when firmly packed had taken us closer to an hour and a half. It was a reminder of the vagaries of Alaska winter trails. When they are good, they can be very good. But when they are bad, they invite marathon struggles.

The day after Hoss and I broke out the short-loop trail, a friend and I pushed a longer trail back to the edge of the Chugach Mountains' front range. It was a slog on skis atop an old snowshoe trail easier felt than seen. You knew when you were on that trail. It was firm beneath the foot, and the snow was only knee-deep. You knew equally well when you went off it. The snow then rose quickly to thigh or crotch depth, and what was below did not feel firm at all.

We took turns breaking trail, sweating uphill and fighting constantly against skis that did not want to come up from under deep, heavy, wet snow. We looked forward to the turn at the top and the loop back downhill. We thought it would be easier. It was, but not by much. There was still little skiing in the day's ski. The deep snow put up so much resistance it was more a long walk on skinny boards.

"Snowshoe conditions,'' another friend later observed.

Snowshoes would, indeed, have been better. Their tips don't get stuck so easily under three feet of snow. You don't need to fight to bring them up before you can begin to move forward again. Trailbreaking is hard with snowshoes, too, but there tends to be less rationalizing as to how "well, at least we're getting a really good workout.''

One of the luxuries of modern times is that we can categorize the expenditure of sweat in this way. I doubt anyone thought about getting a good workout 100 years ago when travel by snowshoe in Alaska was a norm. Back then, in fact, a man might have watched the howling winds and blowing snow that followed a couple days of difficult trail-breaking and cried.

By the time the winds stopped, I knew, the trail would be gone beneath drifted snow and in need of breaking once more. It was not a particularly unpleasant thought. It was an opportunity for another of those "good workouts,'' and a wiping of the snow-white blackboard that makes winter about the best time to be on the trail in Alaska.

The snow keeps a temporary record of anything and everything that moves across the land. Once the storm ends and wild creatures begin to emerge from their hiding places, the snow will track their movements and tell their tales:

The round, shallow prints of the lynx on the trail of the snowshoe hares now near a population peak. The tracks of an inattentive red squirrel ending between the snow-dusting tips of the wings of the owl on the prowl. The prints of the coyotes sneaking along the trails close to the subdivision looking for anything they might steal from man to eat, including possibly a cat or two. Always the big, hole-punched tracks of the moose. And, maybe, with luck, the small bear-like tracks of the wolverine that has been passing through the valley now and again.