Outdoors

In a packed warehouse space in Midtown Anchorage, Paxson Woelber cut the ribbon on Ermine Skate's new shop Wednesday evening, using a skate the company hasn't released yet.

Ermine makes Nordic skates: long blades with a cross-country ski binding on top. Skaters walk to the ice, clip in and set off across frozen lakes, marshes and lagoons rather than circling a rink. Woelber started the company in 2021, and the Anchorage Assembly called it the first Nordic ice skate company in North America when it named November Wild Ice Skating Month last year.

"It actually feels like it was just yesterday that we started this thing in a little garage in East Anchorage, and here we are, you know, six seasons later in a little, very garage-like structure in Midtown Anchorage," Woelber told the crowd. The new space on West 58th Avenue is both a storefront and a manufacturing shop, and the company said on Instagram it had spent eight months getting it ready.

Before the ribbon came a surprise. State Rep. Ky Holland, joined by Rep. Andrew Gray and Sen. Forrest Dunbar, presented Woelber with a legislative citation that Holland said had passed the House and Senate. Holland read one line from it: "Few individuals have done more to democratize access to wild spaces in Alaska."

"I didn't know any of that stuff was happening," Woelber said. "I thought you guys were just here for the Nerds Clusters and the chips and stuff."

Wild ice is any ice that forms naturally outdoors, on ponds, lakes, lagoons, sloughs and even frozen beaches. Around Anchorage, skaters head to places like Potter Marsh, Rabbit Lake and Portage Lake. Assembly Vice Chair Daniel Volland, who represents downtown and called Woelber "a really good buddy," said it is "the most incredible thing to be out on frozen lakes and marshes surrounded by mountains."

Compared with hockey or figure skates, Ermine says, Nordic skates are warmer, faster and steadier on uneven ice. "If you have friends on hockey skates, for example, they might take like five strides for every one stride you take on a Nordic skate," Woelber told legislators in April. The Wild Ice Skating Club of Alaska, which he co-founded, had nearly 12,700 members in its Facebook group at the time, Alaska News reported.