A Story of Coming Home to the Wild

 

 MY FIRST TRIP

As I sit here writing I have decided to chronicle our move to the wilderness.  This is a story that has its beginnings far back in my childhood and adolescence.  A story whose beginnings are hard to find. Yet, I will begin in 1983.

It was my first trip into the great white frozen wilderness of Alaska. It was early winter in 1983.  The State of Alaska had offered an opportunity for Alaskans to obtain land in the wilderness.  My father and a friend of his had sat around our kitchen table discussing and planning just how and when we would go about finding and staking a remote parcel of our own.  My dad bought an old snow machine and we built a sled to carry our gear.  We built the sled in the living area of our small house in Palmer Alaska, we planned and prepared our gear.   I took off several extra days of school.

We began the trek with a 2 hour drive to the small town of Talkeetna where we unloaded our machine and sled and began to load our gear.   Little did I realize the impact that this trip would have on my life.  It would set me in a direction that for over thirty years has kept bringing me back to the wilderness of Alaska.

As we finished packing up, the snow was falling and I was surprised at how much snow there was on the ground. There was nearly 5 feet of snow, a dry cold soft snow that did not pack easily.  This was the snow that I was to become so familiar with and struggle against for many years to come.

We climbed on, fired up the machine, and off we headed down the trail.  Soon we approached the first obstacle, the railroad trestle, with a narrow pedestrian bridge on the side.  Its thin cable side rails were all that separated us from the partially frozen Talkeetna River 30 feet below.  A chill ran through me as I gazed down into the black, swirling, icy water.  I could not imagine how cold it would be to fall into that raging torrent, nor did I care to find out!

As we crossed the river the narrow trail stretched before us fading into the distance as it ran beside the railroad tracks deeper into the wild Alaskan Bush.   I had begun an adventure that would continue for the rest of my life.

Perched there behind my dad on the seat as the snow swirled around us I wondered what lie ahead in that white wilderness. As the machine droned on the snow soon formed a white mantel over machine and riders. 

Five miles down the trail we made a turn up into the hills, leaving the railroad tracks and the forging deeper into the forest.  The snow became even deeper and the trail was no longer easily followed. Soon there was no trail and we were forging on through the white expanse of forest.  The snow was piling up and pouring over the top of the windshield and around the sides.   We had to stop every few minutes and dig the snow out of our laps. 

As the trail disappeared we had to leave our sled behind and break trail, then we would turn around and pull the sled to the end of our broken trail, drop it again and then forge ahead, turn around and repeat this process over and over for hours.

As the day drew on the realization dawned, we were going to have to somehow camp in this sea of white I wondered how we were going to set up the tent!