in interior Alaska in the early 1970s were fleeting; the snow wasn’t fully gone until June, and it was back on the ground in late October. But there was a timeless quality to the season brought on by the perpetual daylight. I can recall drifting lazily down Arctic rivers in my kayak, watching the low-angled sun set the sky ablaze for hours as it slowly crawled across the horizon to begin a new day’s sunrise. With all this light, flowers and other vegetation didn’t just grow here, they exploded; sometimes a single cabbage required a wheelbarrow to transport it from the garden to the root cellar at the end of August.
Winters in Alaska were pure magic. The snow fell deep in the upper Susitna Valley, where North America’s highest mountains trap the Gulf of Alaska’s moist air moving up Cook Inlet. On many mornings, I had to dig two to three metres up from my cabin doorway to find ground level at the rooftop and step outside to discover a world transformed with dwarf trees. Just the highest tops of the black spruce trees still stood above the snow line. The small log cabin was well insulated by the deep snow, requiring little wood to keep it warm and cozy. The problem was daylight: it was such a fleeting midday phenomenon on the southern horizon that at times I slept right through it into the next night.
A friend took this photo of my dog, Moosejaw, and me in front of the old trapper’s cabin I was living in located nineteen kilometres up the Alaska railway tracks from Talkeetna. The snowfall is always deep in the upper Susitna Valley where the moist air from the Gulf of Alaska is trapped by North America’s highest mountains. Steve Rorick photo
They call the Alaska Railway the Moose Gooser because the engine cars waste so many moose that use the tracks as the only snow-free corridor along the Susitna River. The “cowcatcher” pushes along the dead moose on the front of the engine car until the carcass reaches an elevated trestle, where it gets dumped to the side. There was just such a trestle located near my cabin, and I took advantage of the frozen carcasses to feed my dog, Moosejaw. I was a vegetarian at the time, riding the Moose Gooser to and from Anchorage once a month, where I would stock up on grains, nuts and veggie burgers shipped up from California. When the ecological and moral absurdity of what I was doing finally struck me, I started feeding myself, as well as my dog, from frozen, train-killed moose carcasses. Talk about a radical dietary change; I didn’t use the outhouse for days.
The Alaska Railway ran along the Susitna River close to my cabin and was also known as the Moose Gooser. In the winter months the railway tracks provided a snow-free animal corridor. The engine car’s “cowcatcher” delivered a steady supply of frozen moose carcasses, which at first I fed only to my dog, Moosejaw, but eventually I ate such meat myself. Dmfoss photo, Thinkstock
With cabin fever setting in, I once joined neighbours Denny Dougherty and Steve Rorick on an extended winter pack trip. The −45° Celsius temperatures made this one of the most harrowing experiences of my life. The darkness proved a great challenge. December is altogether the wrong month for winter expeditions. From the time the tent was dropped, the dog team harnessed and the sled loaded and secured, we had only an hour or so of twilight to travel in before total darkness set in and we had to set up camp again and sit out another twenty-two hours. Lighting a fire was a do-or-die predicament, for once the thick mitts came off, one strike of a match was all the time nature allowed before the fingers went too stiff to strike a second one.
Soon after I set off on a week-long winter pack trip with Alaska bush neighbours Denny Dougherty and Steve Rorick and our combined sled dogs, we came to realize that the long December darkness was absolutely the wrong time for such an adventure.
In the end, it was winter darkness, not the cold, that drove me out of Alaska. I’m a bird; I need to fly where there’s light.
In the summer of 1972, I worked the herring spawn fishery in Prince William Sound and saved enough money to purchase a seventeen-foot collapsible Klepper kayak. It was the perfect craft to give me the freedom to explore some of the Yukon and Alaska’s wildest places: the great river systems of the Yukon and Mackenzie, the Porcupine, the Stewart, the Hess, the Ogilvie and Peel. I also built up a bit of a grubstake from firefighting and working the potato harvest in Alaska’s Matanuska Valley. I could now afford a six-month trip “outside,” as Alaskans refer to the rest of the world.
While kayaking alone for months in the Haida Gwaii and Southeast Alaska wilderness, I relied on a camera timer to get a picture of myself coming ashore in my Klepper kayak.
It was already November and bitterly cold when I started hitchhiking south from Fairbanks with my impractical cargo—a large backpack and the collapsible kayak broken down into two big travel bags. Mine was no idle endeavour. I was setting off to kayak the headwaters of the Amazon from Pucallpa to Iquitos, Peru. Standing along the barren highway with tears freezing to my cheeks, I began to wonder if some of Denny Dougherty’s “climbing mountains on Mars” madness hadn’t rubbed off on me. This would be an eleven-thousand-kilometre hitchhiking journey, and only pickup trucks or empty hauling vans could possibly accommodate my load. Dreams die hard and tropical sun beckoned. I pressed on.
After days of being stranded at Haines Junction in the Yukon, unable to get a ride south down the Alaska Highway, I opted for a lift to the seaside community of Haines and stowed away on the ferry to Ketchikan. An island set in the wilderness with no bridges or roads connecting out of town, Ketchikan is not exactly a hitchhiker’s paradise either. Stranded on the dock, I was pondering my predicament when a burly logger walked up to me. “Want some work?” he asked bluntly, with no introductions.
“Sure, why not,” I answered. Before I could ask him exactly what work he had in mind, I was boarded on a Cessna float plane at dockside with all my gear and flown out to Gildersleeve Logging Camp on Prince of Wales Island.
“Here’s yer hard hat, caulk boots and yer bill,” a no-nonsense foreman said when I landed. “You owe us $85 for the flight,” he added when he saw me staring in disbelief at the billing. “Now get to work.” I’d been shanghaied!
It was late November, the first snow had fallen and loggers were walking out in droves to avoid the dangerous conditions, heading instead to warmer pastures—hooker parlours in Seattle. I was to be a “choker man”—the lowest-level job in the camp. Wrapping freezing-cold steel cable around logs buried under a foot of snow was not the tropical holiday I’d had in mind when I left Fairbanks. To make matters worse, the “rigging slinger” was a madman who was consistently blowing the whistle to the “yarder” to start hauling the logs before I was in the clear. The yarder couldn’t see below the steep hill we were working on, so all he had to go on was the rigging slinger’s whistle and singularly sick sense of humour. If it was time for me to die at age twenty-two, then I wanted it to be kayaking whitewater at the headwaters of the Amazon or lost in the Andes, not crushed in an Alaskan clear-cut by a log destined to become toilet paper.
I loathed the logging camp. It was a prison with dollars supplanting guards, providing pizza, pie and pin-ups as perks until payday. Driving in the smoke-filled “crummy” in the first light of dawn, I would look out at the tortured landscape and back at the tortured souls swearing their way to the work site. Rather than gag on cigarette smoke in the crummy where the crew ate their lunches and cussed out every living critter on God’s green earth, I would work my way through the logging slash and take my lunch in the peace of the forest, the only piece we had left. “Hell, he’s probably down there eating huckleberries,” the crew would joke to one another, and before long they nicknamed me Huckleberry. It was weird to get the same nickname from both ends of the spectrum—hippies and rednecks,
