Autumn in Denali beguiles me every year, when the world on fire reinvents shade, palette, tone. People think of New England for colors, the Midwest, or prairie towns, full of hardwoods that easterners brought to line the boulevards of their adopted homes. No one thinks of Denali. My sister says, “You don’t have any trees, do you?” But color doesn’t need trees. Fall colors the North not in canopies overhead, but on the ground, chemistry’s carpet unfurling underfoot. Reddened willows, lichen’s green glow, squashy mushrooms in earthen tones. Berries—snow, cran, blue, cloud, nagoon, bear, salmon—orange and white, wine and almost-black. Aspens draw eyes up with their taffeta glimmer and lisp, but in autumn’s conversation, the ground has the floor.
I am an existentialist at heart and I love fall in part for its contemplative underpinnings, the way it makes me notice the concrete world (everything’s dying) and think about the abstract one (everything dies). When trees and brush go aflame right before leaves and blooms pale at winter, I also wonder: will I have even minutes as full of purpose as these plants do, when my hue is tinted by the tasks of my hands?
I left trails early one season to teach for a semester in Oregon. This was the fall after I finished my MFA, just before we’d decided to stay in Denali for good, and at first I felt ambivalent. I did not go to grad school in order to become a professor. I had never asked the academy to save me from a life of labor. But this job was appealing. One semester long, a unique off-campus program that I had attended as a college student, where I fell in love with the West. Housing provided—my own cabin, with running water! Low commitment. It seemed stupid to turn it down so I could spend two more months digging holes. I took it. It was my first teaching job, among faculty I admired, and while my crew finished the season’s work in a hard and early frost, I shored up my notes, took my place at the blackboard, and lectured on Nabokov and poetics, poststructuralism and Zen. I led small group discussions and a writers’ circle. The students wrote papers and gave presentations under my guidance, similar in some way, I hoped, to the kind that had so benefited me a decade and a half before.
My closest neighbor lived in a trailer just up the gravel drive from my cabin. Dale was an outdoorsman/nonprofit activist who worked to preserve the local Siskiyou Wilderness against unchecked cattle grazing and ag-biz industry. He’d climbed Denali in the seventies and, in a wicked storm near the summit, lost his hands and feet to frostbite. You’d hardly know it; with dexterity, grit, and a scrappy horse named Pancho, Dale managed to do what anyone could—cook, browse magazines, drive—and more that most people cannot—tie knots, care for stock, lobby politicians. He’d stop by on the way to or from his trailer, often on horseback, and we’d chat about climbing, our dogs, or Alaska. “Ah, Denali,” he’d say wryly, holding up a rounded stump: “I left a piece of myself there.” Dale was the only person in my life those few months who understood what I missed from back home.
My friend Daryl, one of the head professors, worked the property’s timber stands on weekends, thinning the mixed conifer forest for firewood and forest health. He often invited me to cut with him because he knew I had the same crush on the chainsaw that he did, and the same love for the afternoon break we’d take when we shut off the saws and leaned against cut rounds in the late-fall sun. A few times, Daryl and I took interested students into the woods to learn to run a chainsaw. I told them the rules I knew: use your brake, wear chaps, watch the tip of the bar, take your time. On Friday afternoons, the community tackled chores; my group chipped away at a semester-long project—building a trail to the creek. The students vaguely knew this had something to do with my “real” job. What exactly did I do again? They clutched shovels and hoes, loppers and mattocks, all heavy and cumbersome in their hands. I held up a pulaski, as familiar to me as Kierkegaard or free verse, and I tried to explain.
What I’d miss: Passing on skills that someone taught me. Hiking uphill in front knowing I’ll die before I get passed. Tired bones. Watching a twenty year old fall for trails. Tinkering with tools that I won’t have to pay for if my repairs don’t work. Unexpected animal sightings. No thought about “getting a workout.” Slinging a shovel over my shoulder and heading home on the last day of the workweek. Peeing outside twenty times more often than in. Eating lunch with filthy hands. The tradition of woodswork. Having a beer in dirty clothes in a bar full of squeaky-clean tourists. Sharing tools with people who take good care of them. Seeing happy hikers on a trail I helped build. The confederacy of traildogs. Finding a scrench in the bottom of my pack on a February ski trip. The flexibility borne of built-in daily movement. The smell on my clothes and skin and hair that comes only from being mostly outside. Showers that mean something.
The Triple Lakes Trail was built by the CCC in the 1930s, and my admiration for the New Deal combined with my penchant for handwork meant I was glad to receive this assignment for the season’s work. The TLT is the longest trail in Denali, an eight-mile hike connecting the park entrance with McKinley Village south on the Parks Highway. A local favorite, the trail had been long neglected, its condition, in a word, pummeled. A fall-line alignment caused serious drainage and erosion problems, and the tread was highly impacted from overuse with no maintenance. Mud pits on the lower section of trail occasionally sucked a boot off a foot, Cordova style. Our job, over three summers, was to reconstruct this historical trail, fixing it where possible, rerouting it where impossible, and building new trail to connect it to the visitor center’s burgeoning trail network.
Coming off the previous season’s heavily motorized labor, Triple Lakes represented a return to the things I loved most about trailwork. An uphill hike to the job site on crisp mornings (and rainy ones), lunch breaks near beaver dams, lakeshores, and rocky cliffs, a sizeable hand tool cache, borrow pits, and a commute that occasionally required the crossing of Riley Creek on a zipline, ass-end over the current. Perhaps most critical, the bond that comes from hard, quiet work.
The switch to hiking and hand labor was a major issue for a few of the guys on my crew, though, who began their trails stint in the thick of Denali’s mechanized years and had no experience like my Glacier boot camp days. While I waxed nostalgic about the old days, humping heavy loads uphill on our shoulders and running between drains to stay ahead of each other, the guys could not understand why you’d want to push a wheelbarrow when you could use one with a pull cord. I tried to convince them that this was the real trailwork, the stuff that lured me into this life. They didn’t get why I’d prefer such sweaty, slow, laborious work when a Bobcat’s so fast and sweet and fun to drive. (Which it is.)
As the months went by, we came to a compromise: it’s all real trailwork. Bobcat or shovel, gravel pile or fill pit, our work is real work. I remembered quick that handwork is no romance. Some days my back killed and the job seemed endless and the pace boring and there was nothing glamorous about the bucket-hauling blisters on my hands. I admitted that I’d welcome the beep-beep of a backing Bobcat to lower the massive berm on the downhill side of the trail that we’d been moving inch by inch with shovels and mattocks. On the other hand, the guys conceded that yarding a gnarly stump out of the tread with a hand-ratcheted come-along was just as satisfying as tying it off to a truck hitch and gunning the engine. Several of them cottoned to the crosscut, vying for the chance to use it carefully, with due reverence for its cocked teeth. They saw the art in sharpening hand tools, how it eases the work. They noticed new muscles, faster hike time, stronger hands. And as our progress slowly accrued—each step accountable to this day, that shovelful, the fill pit over there—the specificity that gets mowed over by machined work unfurled. By the end of a week, muddy and ready for a weekend, way further behind than we’d be if we had power tools, we couldn’t help but feel invested, gratified. And yes, dead tired.
Sixty-three-degrees-north-winter takes up half the year, so it gets another mention. Mid-October through mid-April is cold, snow early on the ground or windy and bare straight throug
h Christmas. Midwinter brings long snaps at 40 below (shorter than decades ago, the old-timers say), and if the mercury rises past 20, it’s as likely to rocket to 40 for a fluky Chinook, the warm and blowsy front that tears through once a winter carrying with it smells of other seasons, other worlds.
Winter’s rhythms are made up of wake and sleep, motion and stillness, the race against the clock (finish chores, go for ski) and the hours of reading in lacy-windowed cabins warmed by fuel oil’s glow. On winter’s crisp nights, I stumble to the outhouse: an impossibility of light. Blanket-black nights are backdrop for the aurora, that scientific borealis acid trip. I know about solar winds and charged particles circling the magnetic poles, but the first time I saw a pink-and-green display, I thought birthday party. On a cold night, a deep breath even through neck gaiter and face mask burns the throat, but you have to be outdoors. Watching the aurora from inside isn’t the same. Only under that sky is it clear how fully in this universe we are, as the roof of our home lifts and swirls.
Winter in Denali means sled dogs. Thick-coated, long-legged, broad-chested Alaskan huskies bred not for looks or papers but for travel through deep snow and deep cold. I’d always been drawn to husky mutts with blue eyes and wolfy faces, but before I moved north, I had not given sled dogs much thought. You can’t live a month in Denali, though, without catching whiff of the obsession.
The history of the Interior is written with dogs. When the first wolf lingered outside a human camp for easy access to discarded bones, domestication began. Alaska Natives ran teams for hunting and travel. Sourdoughs mushed iced-over rivers to their homesteads long before the road system. The post office in Alaska delivered mail by dog sled as late as 1963. The first rangers in Denali patrolled for poachers on the runners of a sled, and to this day, the park maintains a working kennel that breeds, trains, and raises thirty dogs for winter patrols and summer interpretive programs. Many locals have dog teams, for racing, monitoring trap lines, accessing remote cabins, and wilderness trips. An Iditarod champ lives down the road, and our old landlord ran the Yukon Quest. Huskies bolt through gas station parking lots and circle the backs of trucks, husky posters line the walls of schoolrooms and restaurants. In a dog yard neighborhood, howls break out every few hours when a moose passes near or a pickup casts headlights through the fence.
Like many seasonals, Gabe and I “adopted” a Denali kennels pup that first summer, coming evenings to unclip her from her post and take her for a leash walk. The winter following our first season, we came up from Anchorage for a dog trip into the park with our friend Kara, the kennels manager. She and the winter volunteers ran the teams, and Gabe and I skied, breaking trail ahead of the team in deep snow, towed behind the sled like a water-skier when river ice became too slick for kick and glide. Kara, who’d been mushing for years, gave me a quick lesson—shift your weight like so, brake hard on hills, don’t run over the dogs, and the cardinal rule of mushing: never, never let go of the sled. My first stint on the runners included a twenty-foot drop off a corniced snowdrift (I knew you’d be fine, Kara said) and a quarter-mile belly-drag along the Teklanika River flats, gripping sled runners with both hands, spread eagle, so as to never, never let go of the sled. (Eventually, they pulled away.)
The beauty of traveling with dogs is unmistakable, but driving a loaded dogsled in wilderness is a far cry from the groomed speed of a sprint trail race. No smooth skim of a fast prow over placid surface with one hand free to wave, like the dignitaries at the ceremonial start of the Iditarod down a strip of snow on Fifth Avenue in Anchorage. Instead, it’s pedal and push, shift and lean, gee and haw in a deep, calm voice, a hop to avoid low brush or a spruce branch in the eyes, a jump and dash over open water, broken ice. Off the runners, it’s a trail-breaking slog ahead of the team on snowshoes, route-finding in blowing snow. At camp, it’s chopping river ice or melting snow for thirty dogs’ dinners, the slosh of the long-handled scoop emptying gruel into their dented tin bowls and the sound of barking dogs falling silent on their grub, dogs who’ve pulled all day because you asked them to, and they love it. The second cardinal rule of mushing: people don’t eat until the dogs have eaten.
After that first trip, Gabe and I were hooked. We wrangled any contact we could get with sled dogs. We volunteered for park patrols. We befriended mushers, lingered in their kennels, learning litter names. We house-sat for dog yards, imitated the motions of owning a team—twice-daily feedings, soaking kibble, cutting fat, scooping poop with a flat-nosed shovel. We fed neighbors’ dogs whenever they asked, stuck in town in a whiteout, too pregnant to haul food buckets to the dog yard. We did anything to be close to sled dogs.
Once we’d moved out of C-Camp, Gabe and I talked it over. Neither of us wanted a full team, unready to give up our human-powered ski adventures, or make the sacrifices a dog yard required. (You couldn’t guarantee some suckers like us would be around to feed if we went away.) But we decided to adopt one dog. Each spring, the Denali kennels retires the nine-year-old litter to local homes. The year we were ready, Campion needed a home, a seventy-five-pound gray-and-white leggy Alaskan husky with Siberian markings and icy eyes. I remembered him from trips (he was my wheel dog on that first steep ride), but I didn’t know him well, just that he needed a home, we needed a dog. I worried about the responsibility. We were footloose. Would we have to rush home to feed every day? What about our trips, weeks or months long?
I needn’t have worried. What Campion cost us in convenience, dog-sitting logistics, and performance dog food was far outweighed by what he gave us. I’ve grown to love him more than I’ve ever loved a beast, different than how I’d love a kid, less attached to how he reflects me, less worried about what I’m doing wrong. Unencumbered by expectation, we coo over his funny antics, how he chases his tail when he wants a walk, his long, slow farts when he sits for a treat. I’m soft for this dog, in love with his thick fur that smells like snow and spruce and popcorn. I worry that he’s warm enough on cold days at his dog house (he is), and if he likes the kibble we feed him (he does), and that we’re pushing his old bones too far. But Campion surprises me again and again. He skijored with me at nine, ten, thirteen (pulling out front in his harness while I skied behind) and happily ran with a team when given the chance. Campion taught me about winter—how to move carefully on frozen rivers, how to find a packed trail underfoot, when to curl up and cover your nose with your tail. He taught me about determination, how drive can be both ingrained and chosen, again and again. At nearly sixteen, with a tumor and a limp and foggy eyes, he’s taught me how to give my whole heart to something I’ll lose. Campion prepared us for our second sleddy, Beluga, a spunky lead dog I love just as much, for new reasons. Together they sleep in a pile in the back of the truck. (They whine when they don’t get enough exercise.) They bark and yank at their chains when we come to unclip them. (They eat moose turds and lick my face.) They skijor with us over miles of snow, one in a blue harness, one in red. (They turn me into a person who’s always covered in dog hair.)
The rural Alaskan paradox: we have an outhouse and WiFi. I tell people who find this odd that we skipped the twentieth century. We have electricity (late 1800s) and iTunes (2010). It’s just right. I can read the New York Times online, and my house never smells like shit.
The shovel is an undervalued tool, referred to most often as a prop in the trope of the lazy federal worker leaning on it. Poor shovel. It deserves better. As a federal employee for more than a decade, I’ve had a lazy moment or two, but usually a defensible and short spell on a hot day well out of sight. (For all my faults, sluggishness is not one of them.) I have no patience for those who think a government job comes with the right to “milk it,” “spank the monkey,” or, most discouragingly, “fuck the dog.” (Who exactly is the dog in this metaphor, anyway?) It isn’t fair to us, a lot of whom work harder for the government than many in the private sector. And it certainly isn’t fair to the shovel, which can’t help being the second-best tool
to lean on (after the rock rake). If I had my way, anyone who uses the shovel truism—the guy who loves to lean, or the tourist who disparages him—would be subject to forty whacks with one. I’m sure that wouldn’t cure the laborers who tend toward it of chronic mediocrity, but at least it might dignify a humble tool that deserves more respect than as kickstand for flat-tired bikes.
In every season, we contend with light and dark. Outsiders ask how we stand the dark, but the light is harder for me. Summer’s long days are intoxicating—Roof the shed at midnight! Start a climb at 4 a.m.!—but it’s also exhausting, the never-stopping, the sense that all things are possible, all the time. In blaring summer, I crave dark, cold, snow. Dark is less expectant than light. It shuts out all stimuli but what you choose for yourself. Dark gives permission for mulling, for hours of reading, late breakfasts and the free-of-sensory-overload unconscious time that rebuilds me. Summer is friendly, but dark is an ally.
Dark is also an adversary. Some begin to lament the growing dark in September and soldier on until spring with a bitter resolve that connotes pioneers in sod houses. Everyone has a tip for thriving in the dark months—buy a SAD light, dump that needy boyfriend, take up knitting. The way I learned to love the Interior winter was simple: move vigorously outside for at least an hour and expand my sense of day. In June we sleep when it’s light, and in winter, dark needn’t mean quit. A full moon lights a night skijor, reflected starlight on snow a rural street lamp. January evenings mean lit candles in windows, a dim log cabin the excuse to let Christmas lights glow for months. Winter tells me, push past the limits the body’s clock sets for itself. Expect darkness. Watch for light.
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