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The Dogs Come First

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Adrenaline & Personal Growth: The School You Always Wanted

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Authentic Alaska

Willow Stronger – A Wildfire, the Teams of Dogs and the Sacrifices and Kindness of Neighbors

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A sunny summer Sunday found Iditarod rookie Mary Helwig reading a book on her lawn near Willow when a neighbor’s text interrupted: A fast-moving forest fire was headed toward her kennel at Mile 72.5 of Parks Highway. Helwig packed food for her five dogs, some expensive sled-dog harnesses, her good parka, a few furs, a small suitcase of clothes and a few other random things—such as her bluebird-of-happiness figurine. Later, she’d kick herself for not grabbing more—especially her dog sled. Willow is best known as the home of the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race restart, and nearly as many sled dogs as people—about 2,000—live in this unincorporated community, which dots the Parks Highway between Mile 60 and Mile 80. The wildfire started about 1:15 p.m., June 14, 2015, off Sockeye Avenue near Mile 77.5 of the Parks Highway. A few hours later, flames had spread south five miles and began…

Northern

Breaking Trail – Another Day in the Arctic

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It was a hard day for going anywhere, let alone up the Redstone Valley and over Iviisaq Pass. My Eskimo buddy Clarence Wood and I plowed through loose, rolling drifts from the previous day’s blizzard, our snowmachines dragging basket sleds loaded with gas, gear and grub, bound for a week in the upper Noatak. Barely making headway on my long-track Arctic Cat, I leaned forward over my skis, teeth gritted as the engine howled. Clarence, with his shorter, heavier machine, was having even more trouble. He lagged behind—totally uncharacteristic Clarence behavior— then stopped. I doubled back to where he stood by his half-buried rig. “No use, buddy,” he shrugged. “Need to drop our sleds and break trail.” People who have never driven a snowmachine might have the impression they float like boats, and cross-country travel amounts to riding some sort of mechanized flying carpet. But anyone who’s driven long distances…

Wildlife & Nature

Still Wild – the Roadside View of Denali

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You could travel the wildest reaches of Alaska for a lifetime and not witness a scene like this—a pack of wolves feeding on a caribou kill on the edge of a rushing river. From the crest of a tundra bluff, I watched the gray alpha male tug at a hindquarter as others waited their turns. Then a female grizzly with two cubs arrived and drove the pack off. As she and one cub fed, the other hammed it up, standing on hind legs, rolling his eyes, gnawing on an antler. I sat transfixed behind my camera tripod, glued to the eyepiece, squeezing off shot after shot. It was easy to imagine that I sat alone somewhere up some far arctic valley, hundreds of miles from the nearest road. But to my right and left, crowds gathered—several busloads of people jammed against he windows, plus a half dozen professional photographers and…

Southcentral

Talkeetna Roadhouse – A Place To Gather

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Photos by Andrea D’Agosto I sat at the Talkeetna Roadhouse with three other women climbers after an attempted ascent of Denali. After two weeks of freeze-dried meals, our mouths watered in anticipation of home-cooked fare, and the aroma of freshly baked bread warmed the room. We replayed our failed summit bid of North America’s highest peak, the storm that hemmed us in and the staggering grandeur of the mountain itself. We needed a place to collect ourselves. We needed comfort food. And we were not alone. Conversations about trail conditions, hazards of wilderness travel and the weather have been taking place around tables at the Talkeetna Road- house for nearly 100 years. The Roadhouse sits on Main Street in Talkeetna, a community with an official year-round population of 876, located halfway between Anchorage and Denali National Park and accessible by road, rail and local air taxi. Founded in 1917, the…

Activities

Reliving the High Life – Returning to the Site of a Near Tragedy

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During the seventh night of an eight-day ascent up Denali’s demanding Cassin Ridge, Mike Helms and I anchored our tent to a precarious perch at 18,000 feet. That night, we survived hurricane-force winds and in the morning, woke to temperatures that had plummeted to -35 degrees. We waited for the sun before starting for the summit, but the sun offered little warmth, and in the oxygen-deficient atmosphere we struggled to move one foot higher than the other. When we reached 19,500 feet, we saw a small tent and a single climber waving frantically. We arrived to find a man named Jack Roberts; his toes were frostbitten, and his partner, Simon McCartney, lay in the tent semiconscious with high-altitude cerebral edema. We considered our options and hatched a plan: Mike and Jack would continue over the summit and return with rescuers, and I would wait with Simon. They left, but the…

Travel

Jump Ship – Add a Land Tour to Your Cruise Itinerary

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Denali looms out the window of our motor coach on the windy road to Talkeetna. It’s a welcome sight after driving through the haze and hot spots of the Sockeye Fire in Willow. We pull over at a rest stop to take photos of the peak while a local cross country ski team trains up and down the steep bike path using rollerskis and poles in the 80-degree heat. My 10-year old son has come with me on this trip, a seven-day Voyage of the Glaciers Princess cruise combined with their Denali Explorer land tour. Like most kids his age, Logan bores easily, and a little ADHD doesn’t help. The last time I was on a large cruise ship (somewhere in the Caribbean), I was his age. I don’t remember much about where we docked or what we did off the boat, but I loved the ship: It was massive…

Travel

Alaska Magazine Readers’ Destination Picks

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As we head into the new year, we asked you, our readers, about your favorite destinations in Alaska. No need to turn to Yelp or Travelocity for reviews—our Facebook poll reached more than 104,000 loyal Alaska magazine followers. We received a few hundred photos featuring everything from the northern lights to bears fishing in Katmai. The results? See below and start planning your vacation to one of these spectacular locations. Hatcher Pass / Hatcher Pass Management Area Hatcher Pass edged out Seward as the number one destination in 2015. Readers wowed us with photos of the Little Susitna River and wintery trails leading to Reed lakes. One Facebook follower said, “Archangel Valley. Can’t beat it!” The area encompasses 300,000 acres, and its proximity to Anchorage (it’s a three-hour round- trip drive) means easy access to recreation in the picturesque Talkeetna Mountains. Waterfalls, glacier-fed rivers and lakes, tundra and wildflowers, along…

Northern

Three Strikes – Bad Decisions but Incredible Adventures

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“This doesn’t look good,” Seth Kantner muttered, peering at the pale gray end of a spark plug, then passing it to Vic Walker and me for inspection. The top plug on my side looked even worse—grains of aluminum piston speckling the electrode, sure signs of a damaging, possibly fatal, engine overheat. My jet skiff lay against a cut bank up the Nuna River in northwest Arctic Alaska on a fading September evening. Globs of icy rain hissed on the still-hot engine. At the very least, we were bound for a three-mile slog over swampy, slush-coated tundra to Seth’s cabin, and after that, a chain of logistical headaches trailing over the horizon, featuring a crippled skiff far from home. It was one thing if an impossible-to- dodge boulder or a twitch of fate had caused the mess. But none of it had to happen. I had three rapid-fire chances to avoid…

Travel

Fishing with the President – Jimmy and Rosalyn’s Visit to Lake Clark National Park

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I slept well, but then again, A Secret Service agent stood just outside. The agent wasn’t there because of me, but rather guarded former President Jimmy Carter and First Lady Rosalyn, who were in the cabin next door. The president was here to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, better known as ANILCA. Carter had signed the law in 1980 and set aside some 104 million acres for parks and wildlife refuges in the most sweeping conservation legislation in the world. At the time, there were protest marches in Anchorage, and Carter had been hung in effigy. After a round of public appearances, the president and his contingent flew west to Lake Clark National Park and Preserve. The National Park Service planned to show the president an ANILCA park and treat him to some fly fishing. As the park superintendent, I played host. We…

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