The Far North is a good place to be alone with your thoughts. Since my divorce, my young son and I have been living on our own invisible internal border, and AlaskaThe desolate interior of seemed like the perfect place to get used to feeling more alone in the world, while also fitting in more. So, despite my usual worry when I'm more than a few miles from civilization, the two of us traveled to central Alaska in January, when daytime temperatures remain below freezing and daylight lasts less than five hours, to encounter the darkness and silence of the atmosphere. subarctic winter.
Our hosts, the team of Jenna and David Jonas, have been living sustainably since 2012, far from the power grid, on a bluff above the Tanana River, about 60 miles west of Fairbanks. David is the younger brother of one of my oldest friends, and when we were all teenagers, he built a cabin on his parents' wooded lot in Vermont without power tools and lived there for two years. Today, he and Jenna are experienced wilderness guides, and their home-based business, Alaska Homestead Adventures, offers private, custom, all-inclusive winter vacations.
As the crow flies – or as dogs run – David and Jenna live seven miles from their nearest neighbors and 20 miles from the nearest town (Nenana, population 358). They chop ice for water, heat themselves with wood, make their sleds by hand and hunt, forage or grow most of their food on their plot of what locals call Grande Terre. They offer guests an alternative to the highly publicized and comfortable tours of remote natural landscapes offered by most luxury tourist outfitters. Instead, their farm adventures involve total immersion in the daily work and pleasures of life on the frozen frontier. This includes an array of indoor and outdoor winter activities, from pruning to ice fishing, as well as three home-cooked meals per day.
I was worried about spending three days in 225 square feet with an 11-year-old and no running water, but David and Jenna had lived in our cabin, the one-room Sun Lodge, for seven years before building by hand the largest log. cabin, a five-minute walk, where they now live with their two young children.
After spending a night at FairbanksMy son and I got up early to take a taxi 45 minutes south to a trailhead, where David met us with his snowcat. We swapped our snow boots for warmer pairs he'd brought, along with huge coats and what looked like glassblowing gloves. Then we got on a sled attached to the snowcat, standing on the back, holding on to the bar – it was like water skiing. We traveled over powder snow and through a forest of black spruce and a few aspen trees scarred by the bites of a hungry moose.
We arrived at the farm in time for a lunch of tasty, gamey moose stew. We ate from wooden bowls with wooden spoons, which our hosts had carved from the burls and branches of their own trees. A latrine, protected by birch bark walls, was about a minute's walk away. After lunch we put on our snowshoes and, between slips and trips, found and ate highbush cranberries, bright red and frozen on the branch. It was dark in the early afternoon, so we wore headlamps, but the path between our lodge and the main cabin was marked by Jenna's exquisite ice lanterns, in which candles burned.
The next day, after a delicious hot breakfast, we lit hand and toe warmers and boarded the dog sled. A team of nine huskies led by David (and a dog named Jack) pulled us across the Nenana River, frozen 20 inches thick and filled with messy ice. David stopped to point out the tracks of lynx and otters. During traction breaks, the dogs rolled in the snow and took big mouthfuls of it to cool off. Back at the cabin, we helped untie and rehouse the dogs. Channeling his beloved Calvin and Hobbes, my son helped shovel the powdery snow into a pile to form a fifteen, or an Athabascan snow shelter. The snow was very dry, but David told us it would sinter or consolidate into a new, denser crystalline structure within a few hours. Sintering seemed to me to be a beautiful metaphor for our journey, which was already strengthening and consolidating our new, smaller family.
My son and I wore the same two layers of long johns and wool socks for all three days, and we got a lot of use out of Jenna and David's extra winter clothes. The tankette runs on gasoline, but other than that we didn't participate much in capitalism. I kept my phone charged in the lodge and left it there for most of our day's adventures. Nothing we did felt like tourism. If anything, I felt like we had passed through a portal into an alternative, cold, slow life.
On our third and final day, my son wanted to practice his bushcraft skills. So we walked to the edge of the cliff, where David showed us how to start a fire with dead branches. We were lucky enough to find witches' broom, an abnormal growth on black spruce that is an excellent fire starter. Back at the cabin, David brought back some giant rolls of birch bark from the workshop, which we cut, peeled thinly, rubbed with oil and folded into decorative stars. There was still time for my son to dig inside his snow shelter and take another sledding run down the mile-long trail before sledding back to Parks Highway and from there taking a taxi back to Fairbanks.
We had hoped to see the elusive Northern Lights. I set alarms for midnight and 1:30 each night, got up, threw on a parka, and took a few staggering steps outside the Sun Lodge. Alas, the weather was cloudy both nights. And even though we signed up to receive Northern Lights wake-ups at our Fairbanks hotel, there were no calls, just clouds. To my surprise, I wasn't disappointed that I missed out on this classic bucket list experience; It turned out we didn't need to see it to feel the enormity of Alaska. The Great North had shown us another way, and forgoing modern comfort and convenience for a few days reminded us that we already had what we needed; in fact, we had more than enough.
Adventures on an Alaskan Farm offers stays of two to seven days for up to four people, from December to March, starting at $525 per person per day.
A version of this story first appeared in the November 2024 issue of Travel + Leisure under the title “Chills and thrills.
