It’s been rustic. I’ve been staying at cabins with no running water. The bathroom is an outhouse for peeing & pooping. A pot of water heated on the stove and then used to wash oneself in the shower-tent in a corner of the garden is the shower at my friends’ cabin. No shower option at the cabin here at Byers Lake.
Rustic, wild.
Some of this rustic, wild simplicity is familiar, it reminds me of my sailing adventures, of the simplicity & “back to basics” of life on those adventures, as a young adult — and I like that.
A lot is new, though, unfamiliar.
The drive from my friends’ cabin outside Fairbanks to Byers Lake along Alaska highway 3 was beautiful, but in the middle of nowhere. A one- or two-lane highway winding its way through forests, forests as far as the eye can see, and mountains — the Alaska Range — in the distance. One drives through two or three small towns along the way, the major one being the one outside Denali State & National Parks, but these “towns” are nothing more than a cluster of buildings around a gas station. All of them, though, have a State Troopers building. The only town with cafes and gift shops was the one outside Denali State & National Parks.
At one of the gas stations where I used the restroom, I overheard two guys, strangers, chatting, telling each other about their hunting exploits: one had just shot a moose the day before.
This is a very different world from a lot of what I’ve seen before — in the U.S. or in Europe.
I’ve never been so far North. Here, I’m at around 67 degrees North. Although the super-long days of summer and the “midnight sun” are behind us now, the days are still longer than down in Colorado. And the light is paler. The light has a delicate but somehow insistent quality to it. It’s beautiful, it looks almost magical, surreal.
The trees I’ve seen so far have been mostly spruces and birches, the latter now turning yellow and gold as autumn approaches. It’s all green and golden, all extremely lush. It reminds me a bit of the late summers of my childhood in the Austrian Alps, except for the light.
The mountains — the little bit I’ve been able to see that was not hidden by the thick cloud cover in these past two days — are different, too. A dark grey, brownish, blackish rock that I cannot identify, and what looks like dark green/dark grey shrubs. But most noticeably, the tree line being so low: because of the high latitude here, the tree line stops much sooner than on any of the mountains I had seen before.
It’s been a pity, though, that I haven’t been able to see, or do, much more in the past two days because of the rain. It’s been raining almost nonstop for a day and a half here at Byers Lake, since we arrived yesterday afternoon. So instead of being out there running or hiking and exploring, I’m here, sitting in this rustic cabin, hoping we’ll have enough firewood to keep us warm through tomorrow, writing these notes.
I’d like the rain to stop or, at least, to abate a little. I’d like to get out there and go for a walk in the woods, to enjoy the potentially beautiful autumn here. Preferably without running into a bear…
The Little Prince and the Fox 