01. First Epistle

August 22, 1993

Park Service life - Alaska style,

We arrived in Alaska, via the Alcan Highway. My Frien’s, don’t believe what you hear about this highway. There are sections that are always under construction (winters are rough on roads); but, if you obey the admonitions (frost heaves next 80 miles speed limit 40 mph) you will be able to stay on your cruise control most of the way. I will not even attempt to describe the drive other than to say it is like spending a week driving through Glacier National Park. Services, of all types, available about every 100 miles. This does not make a good story so folks tend to describe the trip in terms of travail (leaving out having ignored the warnings) in favor of emphasizing the story of having broken….whatever!

The furniture arrived, in record time for Alaska, and we are at the stage of saying, "it will never fit" (even though half of our belongings were left in Arkansas.. That is what life is like when you move into a house that is several about 1200 square feet smaller than the one you left. The house is about 900 square feet and fairly typical for the area. It costs too much to heat large houses up here. The garage has to be used for some storage and must also be heated. Now, we will actually have to use the garage for a garage and not a workshop….Diana's orders when facing a winter of -60 degrees.

Alaska has been great, and we are enjoying it, in spite of the hard work of putting the household back together. North Pole is about 18 miles from Fairbanks and we are finding that only basic shopping is available here. This will be fine after we settle in; but in the meantime, it requires a lot of driving.

My primary office is in Fairbanks. Or 200 flight miles or 400 road miles from my "field office" in Eagle Alaska.

I finally got a quick flight out to Eagle (population 300). It is 10 miles from the park boundary and 60 miles from the in-park development. Only 5 miles of road in Yukon-Charley National Preserve. It goes from Slavens Roadhouse up Coal Creek (4 fordings required) to an historic gold mining camp.

Eagle is like something straight out of the television program “Northern Exposure.” A luxury home is to have more than one room. Opulence is to have running water. My Chief Ranger, his wife and three sons, have been living without running water for two years. They hike a mile down to our offices for showers and haul their water from a central well in town for all other purposes.

Eagle sits on a huge bend in the Yukon River with an incredible view. The gravel road in from the AlCan is really dust and very large rocks. It is open "usually from mid-May to mid-Oct", the rest of the year everything goes by air-except no flights on the weekends.

Flights to remote villages exist only due to the U.S. Postal Service. They subsidize the air delivery of mail. Tatunduk "Airline" uses a plane capable of carrying 6 passengers, but I don't think it has ever had all six seats in place since it left the factory. My first flight out we carried the mail and 400 pounds of bread (for the single restaurant in Eagle-open only in the summer). I was impressed by the care that the young man used in loading the aircraft, but understood his concern when he climbed into the pilot's seat. There was barely room for my backpack and me in the co-pilot seat.

The flight out (200 miles direct) was over some very beautiful mountains. Most of the way we were within the 2.5 million acres of Yukon-Charley National Preserve. We landed on a gravel runway (gravel in Alaska, boulders anywhere else). My return flight was somewhat different. It was scheduled for 3:30 PM, give or take an hour. Turned out to be take and we got off the ground into a stormy sky at a little after 4 PM with the same young pilot. I asked him, "Do you think we ought to just spend the night in Eagle"?

"No problem, we'll just sneak down through the valleys," he said. And that's just what we did, It was down a valley, over a pass, and look for a way out to the next valley. Took us twice as long as it normally does to get back to Fairbanks, and we only missed our return route by 30 miles. Flights out seem to take off on time and be uneventful. Returns are a different story. My next return flight there were 4 passengers. A young man leaving his fire-fighting summer job, a younger man (about 4 years old who acted like he had been flying forever), me and a huge husky dog (who definitely acted like he had not been flying forever and let us know about it all the way). Dogs are put in a bag that laces around their neck and are thrown in with the passengers.

So ends our introduction to life "up north" and this Epistle from Paul.