Ermine before Ermine: a prologue

April 21, 2026

How the years of wild ice successes, failures, and discoveries that came before Ermine charted a course for the company

Many writers and readers disapprove of prologues, criticizing them as a literary crutch whose work is better accomplished in the story itself. As Laurie McLean, of Fuse Literary, has opined, ‘Prologues are usually a lazy way to give back-story chunks to the reader… damn the prologue, full speed ahead!’

To be clear: Ermine is, in fact, skating full speed ahead. As I write this, we’re finalizing new CNC fixtures, tweaking our new A Series design, and experimenting with new high-end Nordic skate blade steels. Those who want to take McLean’s advice about prologues are invited to check out our latest and greatest products. But for those curious about Ermine’s backstory and the early experiences that helped set the course for the company, this one’s for you.

Discovering Wild Ice

I’ve written and spoken many times about my first experience on Nordic skates: buying them on a whim, clipping into them on the Anchorage coast with no expectations, and being blown away from the first moment on them. After that first experience, my friend Cale Green and I immediately started working on a short film about skating outdoors. We didn’t even know this sport was, exactly (wild ice skating? Nordic skating? Backcountry skating?), but we pressed ahead anyway, sure of our subject even if we didn’t know what to call it.

Our film was basically a ‘sizzle reel’ sequence of big, dramatic shots: sweeping pans across bright turquoise ice on Kenai Lake, tracking shots between icebergs on the Sheridan glacier lagoon, that kind of thing. But those filmmaking experiences, which were also my very first experiences on Nordic skates, contained so many small, quiet, and beautiful moments too. I remember being fascinated by the parallax movement of bubbles embedded in thick ice, leaving trails through finger-long frost as we walked between frozen ponds, and watching the moon rise over Wasilla Lake while the ice reflected the rose pink of the sky. Those first days on Nordic skates, just about everything was exciting, interesting, and new.

Skating on Wasilla Lake, December 2016

We launched our film November 2017, with no idea what to expect. It immediately took off. ‘Wild Ice – Backcountry Skating Alaska’ was ultimately featured in National Geographic, Outside TV, Outside Online, and the Washington Post. It also made the rounds at film festivals, even winning ‘Best Short Film’ at the Fort William Mountain festival. Yep, we were on to something!

Wild Ice – Backcountry Skating Alaska

Nordic skating, Alaska-style

The success of ‘Wild Ice’ only strengthened my drive to make Nordic skates in the United States, but starting a Nordic skate company was a much bigger undertaking than making a film. While I began the work of figuring out how to make skates, I also spent a lot of time doing my new favorite activity: actually Nordic skating.

The Nordic skating scene circa 2017 was far smaller than it is today. Almost nobody I knew owned Nordic skates, there were virtually no in-person community events, and resources for sharing ice reports were limited. This meant that it was much harder to find skateable ice, though it often meant that the ice we did find was challenging and provided lots of opportunities to learn. We were usually the only people out on the ice, which made our trips feel less like recreation and more like exploration.

Skating Rabbit Slough with Matt Bergt, January 2018

A few memorable experiences from those early years included catching Eklutna Lake just hours before it was covered in snow, skating past iceboats on Lucille Lake, and exploring the Palmer Hay Flats lagoons just days before they were shattered into pieces by the November 2018 magnitude 7.1 earthquake. On the Lynx Lake Loop, I saw ice stars for the first time. On Rabbit Slough, I learned how creeks often raise, buckle, and crack in the middle as the ice thickens.

Brett Woelber skating Lucille Lake, and ice stars on Chicken Lake. Both photos November 2018

Many of these early skating trips involved people on different types of skates. Virtually every garage in Alaska has a few pairs of hockey skates tucked somewhere (if not ten pairs), and friends who joined wild ice skating trips initially defaulted to using what they had. The advantages of Nordic skates over other types of skates were immediately obvious: Nordic skates were warmer, faster, and more stable, and portages were infinitely quicker and easier.

Skating Eklutna Lake, January 2018

Gradually, one by one, my friends started purchasing and using Nordic skates. It’s one thing when people tell you that something is a good idea. It’s another when they put their money where their mouths are. Watching more and more skaters invest in Nordic skates was yet more evidence that the interest — and market — were there.

Identifying issues with existing skates

When you don’t have a good frame of reference, it becomes very hard to judge products on their merits. Your best (and, really, only) course of action is to use them extensively and find out for yourself where their strengths and weaknesses lie. And that’s exactly what we did with the Nordic skates that were on the market at that time.

After years of skating and involvement with Alaska’s Nordic skating community, I concluded that some of the skates on the market truly were well-made, with good construction and quality materials. However, it also became clear that there were some issues with various models:

• Blade pullouts were the most common failure mode for Nordic skates. This would happen when hard use caused the blade to break out of and separate from the frame. In some cases, this meant pins holding the blades in place were shearing or falling out; in others, it meant glues (perhaps unsuited for cold temperatures) used to hold blades in place were failing.
• Twisted frames were shockingly common on some models. All of the Nordic skate frames on the market were machined out of long ‘extruded’ sticks of aluminum. Extrusion is made by pushing heated aluminum through a custom die. Errors can cause this extrusion to bend or twist, and the result for Nordic skates was bent or twisted skate frames. Some “T”-shaped aluminum extrusions were in fact shaped more like a “T.”
• Low quality blade steel was used in some skates. This steel would dull quickly, especially on silt-strewn Alaskan ice. Moreover, the finishing on the sides of some blades was extremely poor and caused excessive wear on the stones used during the sharpening process.

Last, while not a problem per se, it became clear to me that the style of skating developing in Alaska was different from the style of skating that predominated in Scandinavia. The Scandinavian skating scene was oriented around smooth ice and covering distances over wide-open spaces. A lot of bucket-list skating trips in Sweden, for example, involved skating over the ocean between towns. This style of skating was so common that what we North Americans called ‘Nordic skating’ was simply called ‘tour skating’ there.

Nordic skaters in Alaska were approaching the sport differently, largely due to different conditions and our relative lack of infrastructure. We were doing shorter trips (almost always loops), deliberately seeking out challenging ice, and skating on much tighter (and often debris-strewn) locations like marshes, wetlands, and flooded forests. A lot of Alaskan Nordic skaters also had backgrounds in hockey, which meant they were already highly skilled, agile, and powerful skaters. It was clear to me that a skate for Alaska needed to prioritize stability, durability, and maneuverability more than long-distance efficiency.

Skating several miles up the Twentymile drainage, January 2021

Addressing issues with existing products and building a skate to suit the Alaska environment and community became a driving force behind Ermine. And ultimately, it became a core part of our success.

Ermine is born

North America’s homegrown Nordic skate industry was born May 27, 2021, the day our business license was issued. This was also, incidentally, the same week as my own birthday. Our business category was ’31 – Manufacturing.’ After years of planning, testing, and working with several local businesses to sort out our production process, we’d finally be making Nordic skates in the United States. And best of all, we’d figured out how to do it in Alaska!

Ermine Skate business license, issued May 27, 2021

We publicly launched our first skate, the A100, on August 19, 2021. The A100 was unlike anything else in the industry, with an ultra-wide 1.57mm blade, a thick and durable deck, four oversized stainless steel sping pins, and colorful polymer ceramic coating.

To members of the public, that August 19 date was the day Ermine started. But from our perspective, that start was really the end of a years-long process. Ermine’s true start was all those experiences in the half-decade prior at Rabbit Slough, Portage, Lynx Lake, and Potter Marsh that informed our design and development process then and set the path that we’re still racing forward on today.”

- Paxson Woelber has been a dedicated Nordic skater and advocate for wild ice skating since 2016. In 2021, he founded Ermine Skate, North America's first Nordic skate company. Today, Ermine offers a range of premium Nordic skates and Nordic skating products designed for wild ice.