I Took My 11-year-old Son on an Off-grid Winter Journey in Alaska — and It Was the Greatest Journey We’ve Ever Taken

The far north is an efficient place to be alone with one’s ideas. Ever since my divorce, my younger son and I’ve been dwelling on an invisible, inner frontier of our personal, and Alaska‘s desolate Inside appeared like the correct place to get used to feeling extra alone on this planet, whereas on the identical time extra fully built-in into it. So regardless of my traditional uneasiness once I’m quite a lot of miles from civilization, the 2 of us traveled to central Alaska in January, when daytime temperatures stay beneath zero and daylight lasts lower than 5 hours, to come across the dimness and silence of the subarctic winter.

Our hosts, the wife-and-husband crew of Jenna and David Jonas, have lived sustainably since 2012 far off the grid on a bluff above the Tanana River, about 60 miles west of Fairbanks. David is the youthful brother of considered one of my oldest associates, and after we have been all in our teenagers, he constructed a cabin on his dad and mom’ wooded land in Vermont with out energy instruments and lived there for 2 years. Now he and Jenna are skilled wilderness guides, and their home-based enterprise, Alaska Homestead Adventures, provides non-public, bespoke, all-inclusive winter holidays.

Because the crow flies — or the canines run — David and Jenna stay seven miles from their nearest neighbors and 20 miles from the closest city (Nenana, inhabitants 358). They chop ice for water, warmth with wooden, make their sleds by hand, and hunt, forage, or develop most of their meals on their piece of what locals name the Nice Land. They provide visitors a substitute for the extremely mediated, snug visits to distant pure landscapes supplied by most luxurious tourism outfitters. As a substitute, their homestead adventures contain full immersion within the each day work and pleasures of life on the frozen frontier. This features a panoply of indoor and outside winter actions, from whittling to ice fishing, together with three home-cooked meals a day.

I used to be apprehensive about spending three days in 225 sq. toes with an 11-year-old and no operating water, however David and Jenna had lived in our cabin, the one-room Solar Lodge, for seven years earlier than hand-building the bigger log cabin, a five-minute hike away, the place they now stay with their two younger kids.

After spending an evening in Fairbanks, my son and I rose early to take a cab 45 minutes south to a trailhead, the place David met us along with his snowcat. We traded our snow boots for hotter pairs that he had introduced, together with huge overcoats and what appeared like glass-blowing mitts. Then we rode a sled hooked up to the snowcat, standing within the again, gripping the bar — it felt like waterskiing. We traveled over powdery snow, and thru a forest of black spruce and the occasional aspen scarred by the chew marks of a hungry moose.

We arrived on the homestead in time for a lunch of gamy and flavorful moose stew. We ate from picket bowls with picket spoons, which our hosts had carved from their very own timber’ burls and branches. An outhouse, protected by birchbark partitions, stood a couple of minute’s hike away. After lunch we strapped on snowshoes, and between slips and stumbles we discovered and ate highbush cranberries, vivid purple and frozen on the department. It was darkish by early afternoon, so we wore headlamps, however the path between our lodge and the principle cabin was marked by Jenna’s beautiful ice lanterns, which had candles burning inside.

The subsequent day, after a scrumptious sizzling breakfast, we fired up some hand and toe heaters and stepped aboard the dogsled. A nine-husky crew led by David (and a canine named Jack) pulled us down the Nenana River, frozen 20 inches thick and pocked with jumble ice. David stopped to level out the tracks of lynx and otters. Throughout breaks from pulling, the canines rolled within the snow and took massive bites of it to chill down. Again on the cabin, we helped untie and rehouse the canines. Channeling his beloved Calvin and Hobbes, my son helped shovel the powdery snow right into a pile to type a quinzhee, or Athabascan snow shelter. The snow was very dry, however David instructed us that it could sinter, or consolidate, into a brand new and denser crystalline construction in a few hours. Sintering struck me as a fantastic metaphor for our journey, which was already strengthening and consolidating our newly smaller household.

My son and I wore the identical two layers of wool lengthy johns and socks for all three days, and we made heavy use of Jenna and David’s further winter gear. The snowcat runs on gasoline, however aside from that, we weren’t collaborating in a lot capitalism. I stored my cellphone charged within the lodge and left it there for many of our daytime adventures. Nothing we did felt like tourism. Quite the opposite, I felt as if we’d dropped by way of a portal into a chilly, gradual, alternate life.

On our third and last day, my son wished to follow his bushcraft abilities, so we hiked out to the sting of the bluff, the place David confirmed us methods to construct a hearth out of lifeless boughs. We have been fortunate sufficient to seek out some witches’ broom, an irregular development on the black spruce tree that’s a wonderful fireplace starter. After we returned to the cabin, David introduced a couple of big rolls of birchbark in from the workshop, which we minimize, peeled skinny, rubbed with oil, and folded into ornamental stars. There was nonetheless time for my son to dig out the inside of his snow shelter and take yet another toboggan run down the mile-long path earlier than we rode the sled again out to the Parks Freeway and, from there, a cab again to Fairbanks.

We had hoped to see the elusive northern lights. I’d set alarms for midnight and 1:30 every evening and had risen, pulled on a parka, and staggered a couple of steps exterior the Solar Lodge. Alas, it was cloudy on each nights. And although we signed up for aurora wake-up calls at our Fairbanks resort, there have been no calls, simply clouds. To my shock, I wasn’t disenchanted to have missed this traditional bucket-list expertise; because it turned out, we didn’t have to see it to really feel Alaska’s enormity. The far north had proven us one other means, and giving up fashionable consolation and ease for a couple of days reminded us that we already had what we would have liked; in reality, we had greater than sufficient. 

Alaska Homestead Adventures provides two- to seven-day stays for as much as 4 folks, from December by way of March, from $525 per particular person per day. 

A model of this story first appeared within the November 2024 subject of Journey + Leisure below the headline “Chills and Thrills.”