Daryl and his team

Did you hear about the guy that went up to Alaska and came back a husky sucker, well that isn't quite the way the story went.

In 1975 I went up to Alaska to make my fortune on the Alaska pipeline. A day late and a dollar short as usual I found myself washing dishes in a Glennallen truck stop. Not quite what I had in mind but I figured that I would make the best of it.

Promotion wasn't long in coming in labor poor rural Alaska during the pipeline. I was promoted to cook of a truck stop that the health inspector hadn't discovered yet. It was hard to wade through the grease to the food and harder to keep them separated once I got there

Being from Southern California, the land of sunshine and pretty girls, I couldn't imagine winters coming low temperatures. In this interior town the temperature in mid winter can reach 60 degrees below zero. To get an idea I would go sit in the walk in freezer which was 0 degrees, It was cold in there; however, it could still get 60 degrees colder. How could that be possible? With a supposed 10 men to 1 woman ratio. The prospects were poor for finding a companion to offset the chill of winter. Chances were that if I was going to have companionship I was going to have to buy it. The local ladies of the night put to high a value on themselves so I bought me a husky dog.

I wasn't getting rich as planned, but I loved Alaska. With 24 hours of daylight I could go fishing no mater what time I got off work. The abundant rains made everything so green. I was never to far away from a trout or grayling stream. Everywhere, I went I met people like myself, adventurers, young and old their independent, adventurous spirit and their resiliency in the face of adversity was inspiring. Alaska is a land of extremes. Summertime temperatures can reach 100 degrees, winters can reach the bottom of any thermometer. In Alaska's boom, bust economy you can have several years of prosperity followed by several years of hardship and even during prosperous times it is financially hard in winter. Adversity builds character and Alaska certainly is full of characters, Gold miners, trappers, hunting and fishing guides, bush pilots and homesteader's all of them had a pot of coffee on the stove, a story to tell, and a leg to pull.

Fall brought a brief but beautiful change of seasons. Inside of 2 weeks the aspen and birch trees turned from green to gold to bare branches, Their fallen leaves riding the wind blowing them into the darkness of winter. Then the darkness came, and the cold rolled in with the darkness. September 10, it was 8 degrees in the day time. By November it was reaching 55 degrees below zero. I found that the cold wasn't as bad as I imagined it to be. In the walk in freezer I wasn't wearing a jacket. All you needed was some good insulated coveralls, a heavy parka and a hard head and you can stand most any temperature. I just wished I didn't have to sleep in them!

A days limit

I was renting an 8x24 four travel trailer that I couldn't't heat up for the life of me. The trailer wasn't insulated, but it did have three heaters in it, an oil stove, a propane stove and an electric space heater. At 20 below the oil would start icing up and quit flowing. At 40 below the propane quit expanding. That left me with the 1,000 watt electric heater that was more ceremonial than functional at 60 below zero. Thank goodness for a good down sleeping bag, overalls, parka, hard head, and the love of a good dog.

My dog Bud would get me outside to get us some exercise. If you don't have a reason to go out into that cold you just don't do it? So now I had to take the dog for a daily walk so he could do his business some place other than my living room. That made me wonder about all that frozen waste, day after day the frozen accumulation mounting. This place is going to be a mess come springtime.

I found that it wasn't the cold itself that bothered me, it was the mechanical failure that it caused. Heating a house with anything but wood was absurd too impossible. During the first freeze my plumbing froze up for the winter, so I had to build an outhouse. I went out and dug and dug and finally got down to the ground. I decided that was deep enough for me. You had to plug in your engine heater and battery blanket whenever you parked the car so that the engine didn't freeze up. If you were going to park somewhere there wasn't a place to plug it in, you just left it running, you locked the door and hoped you remembered your extra key. Everything would get brittle when it got real cold, you could close your car door and the handle would break off in your hand. After the car would set all night the tires would freeze flat on the bottoms, then for the first half mile it felt like you were driving down a river bed covered with big rocks in a 4x4 until the tires rerounded themselves. One 55 below zero night I came home and went to plug in the car and my plug in cords shattered into a thousand pieces. I vowed not to fix that S.O.B. Until it was 20 above, and I hitchhiked for the next 3 weeks. Up before I thought that Frigid-Air was the name of a refrigerator.

I still loved Alaska though. I would look around me and wonder why. It must be that when things are covered in snow they are so pretty. I couldn't put my finger on it. There were only three colors, the white of the snow, the dull green of the trees and the blue of the sky. Then I realized everything was rounded off and visually softened by the snow. The hoar frost crystals sparkled in the 4 hours of sun. You can see for ever because there isn't any atmospheric haze, all the moisture in the air freezes and falls to the ground. Over head the northern lights dance in the sky and in the absence of the northern lights every star in the the sky glowed in the clear night air. It was dark all right, but it didn't take very much moon to light up the snowy landscape. On the horizon was the Wrangel Mountains dominated by Mt. Sanford a 16,000 foot volcano venting a steam plume into the Arctic air. And a breath of frigid air was invigorating as long as you were warm. It must be because that I was from California and I had never experienced a change of seasons. And now I was witnessing some of the most radical season changes on earth. I realized the sameness of California was boring.

dogteam Willow Alaska

Since my home was colder than a grave diggers heart I fell into the habit of spending all my waking hours at the bar. I became friends of the manager and we worked out a deal that I could drink for free if I would run the shuttle service. I would sit there and drink until someone needed a ride home or back to the pipeline camp, then I would charge them $1.00 per mile for the service, and I got to keep the money. When the bar closed at 5 in the morning I would load up my car with people going to the pipeline camp and drop them off there for $5 a head, it was right by my house. A drunk delivering drunks service, only in Alaska. It didn't take long for me to see the flaw in this lifestyle. I needed a winter hobby. I went ice fishing once and the ice on the lake was 6 foot deep. I threw out my line and my bobber quickly froze into my freshly dug hole. With my aversion to digging ice fishing didn't appear to be the answer, That left x-c skiing or dog sledding. The thought of doing the number one aerobic exercise at 40 below zero had about the same appeal as skinny dipping in my ice hole. However, dog sledding sounded more romantic, images of Jack London's Call Of The Wild ran through my mind. So dog sledding it was.

I started collecting dogs that no one wanted or would sell cheap, so It wasn't long before I had a dog team (and I use the term loosely) because it wasn't any team! What I had acquired was a hodgepodge of slow, lazy, unruly, fighting dogs without a leader. I had my work cut out for me. One evening on my way to hitch up the dogs I saw all of my dogs looking at the sky. They were watching a dazzling display of Northern Lights. I was surprised to realize that people aren't the only creatures that enjoyed this phenomenon of the north.

Out of necessity I became the leader and top dog of the team and by winters end I had the team heading mostly in the same direction at the same time and with a sense of satisfaction I could glide noiselessly through the Alaskan woods in the shadows of the Sourdough, the Northern Lights shooting across the sky. Not only did I feel like that I was in a Jon Van Zyle poster, I felt like a part of Alaska.