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THERE’S AN EASY WAY FOR ALASKANS TO EXPERIENCE ALASKA

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While Alaska makes most Americans’ bucket list, many locals rarely adventure beyond the road system to experience the history, culture and glorious beauty that make this land so great.

Alaska is as thrilling to Alaskans as it is to our visitors – and thanks to Alaska Airlines, it’s within reach. For as few as 7,500 Alaska Airlines Mileage Plan miles each way, you can zip through the canopy of a magnificent rain forest, explore the eerie sand dunes of the Kobuk in Northwest Alaska or watch mighty bears catch dinner in the Valley of 10,000 Smokes in Southwest Alaska.

From Petersburg to Barrow, explore Alaska for as few as 7,500 Alaska Airlines Mileage Plan miles each way.

When traveling within Alaska, there’s no need to pack light.

Check three free pieces of baggage when traveling in state – and that includes fish boxes.

For those with a wild streak, catch the waves in Yakutat, the surfing capital of Alaska. Trek the golden tors outside Nome where the musk ox roam. Or take a Polar Bear Plunge in the Arctic Ocean from a basecamp in Barrow.

Relax while cruising the historic Chena River in Fairbanks under the midnight sun. Check out the cute shops along Ketchikan’s waterfront promenade. Or take the tram up Mount Roberts and end your day dining where the top chefs hang out in Juneau.

Visit alaskaair.com/Club49 to become a Club 49 member. Sign up for Club 49 Insider emails, featuring weekly fare sales.

Ketchikan Fairbanks

Kodiak

ALASKANA 6 Beyond the State Fair 8 A Changing View

by Sara Loewen

PUDDLE JUMPER 12 A 24-Hour Tourist at the Top of the World

by Michaela Goertzen

Alice Rogoff / Publisher Maia Nolan-Partnow / Editorial Director Jamie Gonzales / Editor Viki Spiroska / Production Coordinator Joshua Genuino / Art Director Aaron Jansen / Creative Director Kelly Day-Lewis / Layout PHOTOGRAPHY Bill Roth, Mavis Muller, Sara Loewen, Michaela Goertzen, Nathaniel Wilder, Philip Hall, Kerry Tasker, Arturo Polo Ena, Arina Filippenko, Scott Dickerson, Gary Minish SALES Roberta Graham / Executive Vice President Account Executives Joy Bax, Lana Covert, Linda Gutierrez, Nick Humphreys, Meghan Mackey, Brandi Nelson, David Nolen, Cyndi Ramirez, Emily Rohrabaugh, Erika Watsjold

17 Curious Bones

by Julia O’Malley

20 Alaska’s Sky Highway

by Jamey Bradbury

23 20Q with Cleve McDonald

LOOK 24 Ultima Thule Outfitters

by Michaela Goertzen

BODY, MIND & SPIRIT 31 The Science of Great Skin

by Maia Nolan-Partnow

36 Building Confidence and Mobility on Horseback

by Arina Filippenko

38 Four Days on the Milo

by Matt Reed

SAVOR Copyright © 2015 Alaska Dispatch News P.O. Box 149001 Anchorage, Alaska 99514 Please send letters to the editor to jgonzales@alaskadispatch. com, and include your name, city of residence and phone number. We cannot guarantee publication of letters, and we reserve the right to edit letters for length.

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9 OFFBEAT ALASKA FESTIVALS TO ADD TO YOUR SUMMER CALENDAR HO CAN RESIST an annual visit with the Alaska State Fair’s frolicking baby pygmy goats and softball-sized cream puffs? Hey, no judgement–they’re adorable (goats) and delicious (cream puffs). That said, let us turn your head toward some of the state’s other summer festivals you should add to your bucket list.

KODIAK CRAB FESTIVAL The Emerald Isle definitely merits a summer visit, and if you’d like unfettered access to fresh, delicious crab, plan your trip to coincide with the Crab Festival.

When: May 21-25 Where: Kodiak Travel Deal: Get 7% off published base fares (excludes sale fares) to Kodiak from any Alaska Airlines or Horizon Air city (excludes Hawaii, Canada and Mexico). Use discount code ECMA220 for travel May 18-28, 2015.

HOMER YACHT CLUB REGATTA Just when you thought things couldn’t get any more picturesque in the “Cosmic Hamlet by the Sea,” they fill Kachemak Bay with sailboats. Book your overnight stay near the beach and enjoy your morning coffee with a side of spinnakers.

When: June 26-28 Where: Homer MIDNIGHT SUN FOLK FESTIVAL Do you like folk music? How about old timey bank robberies? Join the hospitable

7 folks in Nome to experience all that and more. Note: Festival is typically during summer solstice. This year’s special dates accommodate festival headliners, The Jerry Cans.

When: July 31-Aug. 1 Where: Nome ANGRY, YOUNG AND POOR The biggest outdoor music festival of the year for Interior Alaska is free to attend, thanks to the hard-working organizers who rally support with fundraisers. Family fun with punk rock roots.

When: July 11 Where: Fairbanks WORLD ESKIMO-INDIAN OLYMPICS They say if you want to experience a warm Alaska welcome, visit Fairbanks in July. WEIO is chock-full of incredible athleticism. The high kicks, ear pulls and greased pole walks will have your jaw dropping.

When: July 15-18 Where: Fairbanks Travel deal: Get 5% off of Alaska Airlines and Horizon Air published fares to Fairbanks from any city (excludes Mexico) when you use discount code ECMF47 for travel July 11-23, 2015.

RUNNING WITH THE BULLS Alaska’s only 10K with 80 musk oxen on the sidelines (behind fences... they’re not crazy). Hosted by the Musk Ox Farm, athletes young and old run, walk and amble their way around the lush Matanuska Valley acreage. It’s probably too warm to wear your qiviut, but it would be a nice nod to the locals.

When: Aug. 3 Where: Palmer

BURNING BASKET Burning Basket is a decidedly more mellow take on Nevada’s Burning Man with almost as much fire. Locals and visitors spend several days assisting artist and organizer Mavis Muller to construct a 10-15-foot basket from natural plant materials, weaving mementos, sentiments and embellishments into the sculpture in the lead up to a sundown bonfire.

GIRDWOOD FUNGUS FAIR Do you like your mushrooms wild, and with a side of hot jazz? This is the festival for you. Three days of fungus-y fun, from guided foraging walks to a Fungus Formal with gourmet fare.

When: September Where: Homer Spit

When: Aug. 28-30 Where: Girdwood MOUNTAINEERING CLUB OF ALASKA ICE CLIMBING FESTIVAL For those of you who have looked at a glacier and thought, “Yep, I should scale that.” MCA members–from beginners to advanced climbers–get two days of instruction in the best way to conquer the ice.

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THE SEASONAL MIGRATION OF A FISHING FAMILY

by Sarah Loewen

H E N R I V E R O T T E R S moved under our cabin on Amook Island last winter, they tunneled oily dens through piles of insulation ripped from above. There were so many when Peter first crawled underneath in May they seemed to scurry out from every other piece of lumber. We had to burn the scrap wood and bleach the smell from the kayak they’d designated a latrine. Our dogs refused to go near the crawlspace all summer.

The otters were reluctant to leave, even after Peter put a stereo under the cabin and blasted

Metallica at full volume. For the rest of the salmon season, whenever those otters swam past our beach they eyed the cabin as if they were just biding their time until they could reclaim the pink fiberglass palace they’d made under there.

It’s hard to be uprooted. Even after 10 years of setnet fishing in Uyak Bay, it’s still chaotic moving every spring from the town of Kodiak to the cabin on Amook Island.

Last summer we watched a rabbit trying to swim across Uyak. Lots of things swim for miles to cross the bay—herds of deer, mountain goats,

9

families of bears. But it’s the image of that sopping bunny, which kept circling back toward the shore before setting out again, that captures the frenzy of relocating.

In the days leading up to our first salmon opener in June, we close up our house and ship a summer’s worth of supplies to the west side of Kodiak. Peter flies out early to unload shrinkwrapped, 500-pound pallets, and take the skiffs out of storage in Larsen Bay, the village closest to our fishsite. He unboards the cabins and connects waterlines, and starts hauling out fishing

gear and anchors.

When I follow a week or two later, it’s easy to fill up a six-seater mail plane with two boys and a baby, two dogs whining in their kennels, totes of groceries and garden starts, one goldfish sloshing in my lap.

Peter’s parents have spent the last 43 seasons salmon fishing here. In a doorway of the old cabin at their site, I can trace Peter’s penciled growth through all the summers of his childhood.

Going back to the cabin each May is a way of marking time.

10 For 35 years, Jan and Pete senior shared a 24’x24’ cabin and an outhouse with the crew. Now they have a house, with indoor plumbing. Solar panels have quieted the droning of generators running for hours.

Before we were married, Peter would skiff into Larsen Bay late at night to call from the cannery payphones. Now there’s a cellphone tower in the village and Internet at most fishsites, with Amazon’s free shipping available for hardware and outboard parts.

When we built our cabin, we were the same age as our crewmen. Now they’re still 20-something, eager to upload photos or videos to prove they’re salmon fishing in Alaska and accidentally using up all the bandwidth in the process. Which leads to unpleasant confrontations that ruin lunch, and I question why we’ve chosen a livelihood that mixes strangers and family, all of them sharing every meal and almost every waking hour.

By the end of a season, everyone is relieved to leave, the same way you appreciate your health after the flu, or mobility after an injury. Town promises different faces, takeout, central heat and water pressure.

Peter says it’s the changing tides and weather patterns and catch that make salmon fishing interesting.

But those same elements snap anchor lines and drag sets, and clog nets with seaweed and jellyfish instead

of salmon. Storms keep skiffs on the beach when nets are full of fish. It’s easiest to love this livelihood when the fishing is good, but pulling hundreds or thousands of salmon from the nets, seven days a week for 10 to 18 hours a day, is hard on a body.

Come September, Peter is tired of the constant maintenance of motors and skiffs. Some seasons, salmon fishing feels like that old joke about farming— what you do between breakdowns. Some years, it’s all work and too few fish to pay for it.

Heavy fishing is what we’re always hoping for, and when it happens, Peter is euphoric and I realize I’ve inadvertently been wishing myself more solo parenting. This is the point in the summer when I’d really like to meet a friend at the park and vent about the imbalance of fishing demands on family time, and by the end of our conversation I’d be over it. But when Peter’s alarm goes off at 5 a.m., I ask myself if I’d really rather be the one pulling on wet rain gear in the dark to pick the nets, and I get over it.

I remind myself of those things the fishsite nurtures in our kids—curiosity, flexibility and a kinship with the natural world. It helps to see each season with a mother’s eyes—all these days not sharing the kids with schedules, classrooms, homework and friends.

No phones ringing and nowhere we have to be. We

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can read six chapters of Harry Potter in one sitting, and finish half the series in a summer. Living remote makes it easy to let all else fall away.

There’s a family down the bay from us with sons who’ve grown up fishing here. I’ve always thought of the brothers as a kind of preview of what’s to come— with their rope bridges and Swiss Family Robinson tree houses, and summers of archery and ax tossing and cliff jumping. One year their gear shed became a dodge ball court after hundreds of Nerf balls washed up around Uyak when a container ship lost its load in a storm. The boys seem so perfectly suited for setnetting that I was surprised to hear that one brother was anxious to leave the fishsite last August. He was missing his girlfriend. That’s coming too, those years our kids would rather spend time with other people instead of with us.

But not yet. Not now. On any given morning, our boys putter down the beach, filling buckets with eels and tide pool creatures. They chop pushki with knives their Papa dulled for them. They beg to ride along when Peter picks the nets and return from delivering salmon to the tender with pockets full of candy. They build fires. They pee outside wherever they want. Their cousins arrive and Papa hands out jelly beans during coffee breaks. They don’t bathe for days. “This is the life!” our six-year-old declared— a line borrowed from his grandpa—on his first day back last summer.

Setnetting has given my mother-in-law 40 summers with her twins and her daughter Carrie, who brings the grandkids every July. When she isn’t cooking, Jan plays rounds of Scrabble with Peter’s sister, Jackie, who still picks a bouquet of wildflowers for her mom’s birthday in August like she has since she was five.

Pete’s parents, our partners in this business, are in their 70s. It’s not possible to picture the fishsite kitchen without Jan in it, or to listen to the VHF without hearing Pete Senior’s voice on it. The steady rhythm of days out here sometimes fools me into thinking that seasons in Uyak will continue like they always have.

We have a second-hand trampoline where our boys spend countless hours bouncing against a changing view—humpback and fin whales, sea otters, eagles, sea lions and seals, and on rare days, the shimmering white peaks of mainland Alaska across Shelikof Strait. From here, the contour of mountains across the bay is as familiar as running a hand over your old dog’s back. Most evenings before bedtime I watch the boys leap into the darkening sky, though already I’m seeing the scene as a photograph, the only way to hold them still in that moment, in their focused delight at how their bodies move through the air, as if it’s the easiest thing in the world to be soaring and rooted in a place like this.

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12

WHAT MIGHT YOU ENCOUNTER IN YOUR DAY-LONG BARROW EXCURSION?

OU ARRIVE IN BARROW on April Fools Day to a 30-below wind chill; no joke. You move, stiffly, through the logistics of arrival: rental car, hotel check in, stow bags.

NOON You go looking for a polar bear on a tip from the Top of the World Hotel staff. You cruise up and down Stevenson Street at 20 mph, along the Arctic Ocean, scanning the one-dimensional, white expanse for a blob of off-white fur. You’re scared silly to get out of the car to actually have a decent look, for fear one might pop out from behind the massive drifts and ridges that make up the vast snowscape. You do, however, work up the courage to take your picture underneath the whale bone arch, or next to a whale carcass.

1 P.M. After an hour or so, with no luck on your polar bear hunt, you head back into town for a late lunch. You cruise around looking for Sam & Lee’s—a Korean-

owned, Chinese restaurant with the best spicy chicken noodle soup in town, according to one of the locals.

1:30 P.M. The soup is indeed spicy, and has sort of a Japanese twist, with udon noodles and cabbage. During your stay, you overhear the owner take a phone order for kimchi and muktuk. She explains that she can’t legally sell muktuk, but the customer is welcome to provide their own, and pay extra for the kimchi and preparation. You learn that she made this recipe for a wedding reception once, and it’s been a popular dish ever since.

2:30 P.M. Again, feeling the urge to explore, you request a to-go cup, knowing you’ll risk the soup sloshing and saturating the rental car, possibly adding fees to the $236 day rate. But you can hardly leave leftovers at $19 a bowl, so you take your to-go bag and grab a fortune cookie on your way out. The fortune reads, “Creative energy is up—capitalize on it.”

13 3 P.M. You’re thwarted at your next stop, the World Gift souvenir shop. A young girl, Ambrosia, informs you that it only opens during dividend time. Instead, you visit the Inupiat Heritage Center and learn about life on the tundra and whaling culture. Afterward, you drive by an igloo in someone’s front yard on your way to the Fur Shop.

5:30 P.M. The Fur Shop, it turns out, is that and so much more: fabric, yarn, thread, candy, Barbies, books, body spray, Home of the Whalers hoodies. Easter lilies and cellophane-wrapped baskets line the crowded aisles. Stuffed animals hang from the low ceiling. The Fur Shop also doubles as a flower shop.

Finally, on the back wall, you discover boxes of furs, neatly labeled: “tails,” “wolf legs,” “faces.”

6:30 P.M. You go back to your neat and modern hotel room to warm up and regroup. You peruse the gift shop in the lobby for Top of the World t-shirts, books and local art.

You finish off your leftovers.

7:30 P.M. You decide against dropping by the bingo hall. With no other nightlife scene in which to be out, about and anonymous, you go to the grocery store. You roam the aisles; you people-watch; you pay twice what you would at home for a bar of dark chocolate.

9 P.M. The cold compels you back to your room, where you realize, as you unwind, that this 24-hour novelty tour is a 24/7 reality for Barrow residents. The isolation, the climate, the cost of living—these are all a part of daily life at the top of the world.

7 A.M. The next morning, you wake to the buzzing of snow machines and a pink pastel ring around the horizon—an Arctic circle. A school bus makes its way down the street below, as if you were in no place unusual; except you are.

You put on your 30-below snow attire, anticipating the little time you have left.

7:30 A.M. You sit down to an all-American menu at the Niggivikput (“our place to eat”) restaurant, the “Northernmost Fine Dining in Alaska.”

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8:30 A.M. You go on a dumpster tour—a culturally-revealing excursion, as it is a common practice throughout the villages to paint the dumpsters with pictures and phrases inspiring to that community. Several dumpsters list Iñupiat values: humor, cooperation, respect, caring, peace, family, pride, dreams. Others admonish: “Keep Barrow clean,” “Smoking stinks,” “Stay in school,” “Give thanks.” Some are proud: “Fresh air or be square,” “Got muktuk?” and “We (heart) our whalers.” Most fittingly, in a place that receives alternating extremes of 24-hour light and dark, you discover the most inspiring of all: “Don’t let today’s darkness overpower sunshine.”

9:30 A.M. You get the rented Ford Escape stuck in a snowdrift outside someone’s front door when you turn down what was not actually a road. The young couple, baby in tow, walks out of the house to see what is the matter. Feeling like a creeper and a fool, you overcompensate with apology. The level-headed couple is unfazed, and happily pushes on the hood while you put it in reverse.

10 A.M. After that, you decide to wrap it up and return the rental. At the auto shop, you meet a Chinese man who develops engines for snowblowers. He has been on a testing mission. The employee taking your keys tells him there are over 100 words for snow in Iñupiaq, and that this gentleman has his work cut out for him, trying to make the perfect machine to handle it all.

10:30 A.M. Back at the terminal, you go through the motions. You smile to yourself when the gate attendant announces community elders get priority boarding. You may or may not grumble to yourself when you realize there is no exception in Barrow to taking off hefty snow boots at security.

11 A.M. Once on board, you notice the couple that helped you out of the snowdrift takes the row in front of you. There is a moment of recognition, of camaraderie. And there it is: the highlight of your trip. Among a mish-mash of sensory experiences—watermelon air freshener in the rental car, early 90s hits on Barrow’s only radio station, the blinding reflection of sun on snow—that renowned Iñupiat generosity and good humor has made the most significant impression.

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EX PLOR I NG T H E W I N DSW EPT R E M NA N TS OF A DA K'S LONG VACANT MILITARY SETTLEMENT

by Julia O'Malley

DAK ISN’T THE SORT OF PLACE MANY PEOPLE JUST GO. If you are neither hunter nor birder nor fisher, and you still want to go there, it’s best if you have a collector’s mind. It’s the sort of place you’d really get if you’ve always been a beachcomber, a person who likes to walk a tide line, who can’t resist pocketing the hollow bird bone or the hunter’s sun-bleached shotgun shell.

It helps, too, if you like history. History, like beachcombing, is essentially a way to exercise the imagination. Adak has exotic natural beauty, sure, but the place is also a unique study in the life cycle of human debris. It’s junk, really, but if you’re the right sort of person, it fills your mind with stories.

To get to Adak, you fly 1,200 miles west of Anchorage to the far end of the Aleutian Islands.

Alaska Airlines currently offers jet service to the island on Thursdays and Sundays. It takes about three hours to get to Adak, depending on the wind. The plane is often mostly empty.

You descend out of the clouds and there it is: snow-capped peaks rising out of the sea like the island home of a villain in a James Bond movie, the Pacific on one side and the Bering Sea on the other. Once you land, you’re in another time zone, one hour earlier than mainland Alaska.

ONE-TIME STRATEGIC MILITARY INSTALLATION The United States sent 4,500 troops to Adak to build a base in 1942, just after the Japanese attacked Dutch Harbor and occupied the far western Aleutian islands of Attu and Kiska. The military constructed a harbor, scores of buildings and the beginnings of what is now a massive airstrip. In 1943, on the eve of a planned U.S. invasion of Kiska, there were 90,000 troops stationed on the island. (When they finally landed on Kiska, they discovered the Japanese had left.)

The base remained through the Cold War. Before it closed in the mid-1990s, roughly 6,000 people made their homes on the remote, windy island. When my plane touched down in midApril, there were fewer than 100 residents left, living among the curious bones of the old Navy town.

18 MAKING CONNECTIONS Nathaniel Wilder, a childhood friend and photographer, met me at the airport, looking tan from a week outdoors. This was his sixth spring hunting caribou on the island. Caribou hunting is one of the big reasons people who aren’t fishermen or government employees come to Adak.

As is the case on a number of Aleutian islands with herds of grazing animals, caribou were introduced as a way to guarantee there would always be food. Without any natural predators, the herd has grown to about 3,000. Nathaniel and four friends took five animals, hiking out with the meat over miles of grassy muskeg and mountain passes. The friends were all getting on the plane.

The airport turns into a community gathering when a flight comes in. Everybody seems to be around. Nathaniel introduced me to Jack Stewart, a white-bearded military retiree in his 70s whose empty rental unit we would be staying in. Nathaniel and I also met Elaine Smiloff. Elaine, who is in her 50s, holds half a dozen titles, including city council member and weather observer. She agreed to give us a tour the next day if we paid her gas money. (She also told us to get land use permits from the Aleut Corporation. They are available at the airport for a small fee.)

We piled into Jack’s red pickup and lumbered through an

industrial area, past a stack of crab pots, a closed Mexican restaurant and an open liquor store, past the high school, which is also a post office and city hall, past Ann Stevens Elementary, which was boarded up, past a chicken yard where hens pecked around an old office chair, turning into a subdivision marked with a faded sign that read, “Sandy Cove.”

STEPPING BACK IN TIME It doesn’t take long before you fall into Adak’s time warp.

All the decor is about 25 years old or older. It’s like being on a massive movie set. And, to complete the retro picture, there is basically no Internet connectivity, except for Wi-Fi that is either crazy expensive and/or too slow to load email. Smartphones are useless. There is no Google to help inform your experience. There are no status updates to pull you out of the moment. Truths aren’t quite as verifiable there, and word of mouth holds more weight. You also have way more time to think.

Elaine arrived the next day exactly on time in a dented passenger van, a big black lab named Max, Jr. running ahead of her with a stick in his mouth. (He looks back at the intersections to see which way she’s turning.)

We cruised in the van over rolling grassy hills, breezing through open gates punched in layers of rusting wire fence

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that once must have seemed intimidating. The weather-beaten, institutional buildings of the base had been transferred to the Aleut Corporation, Elaine said. Many of them were totally open to the weather, windows broken by vandals, rat droppings and beer cans on the floors, birds nesting in the beams.

One of our journeys began in an empty cinder block mess hall. We descended a flight of stairs and edged through a partly-open metal gate, arriving in an underground tunnel. It was dark except for our cellphone flashlights. (Pro-tip: Bring a working headlamp to Adak.) A wind rushed through from broken windows somewhere on the other side. Through the tunnel, Nathaniel and I soon came upon an empty underground swimming pool. Vandals had been entertaining themselves by throwing office furniture into the deep end.

Elaine and her friend Mik (an off-season Denali tour bus driver house-sitting a place on the island) were down the corridor hunting for treasures. Elaine, like many of the locals, is a master repurposer. (With permission, of course.) She was on the hunt for some old shelves for her store. Trees don’t grow on Adak, and most people heat with oil, but Elaine heats with wood, relying partially on scrap. She told me she once burned through all the wood in a water-damaged underground bowling alley.

“Ten pins a night,” she said.

A SOUVENIR The last day, we drove a rutted road out to Finger Bay with Mik and Elaine. Max Jr. and two little dogs that live at the Blue Bird ran along beside the van, nosing through the grass for rats. I asked Elaine how often she checks her email. Maybe once a week, she told me. When somebody calls and tells her to.

When the bay came into view, Nathaniel spotted a seal.

We watched it slide into the water.

We parked and walked along the bank. A giant net used to stretch across the opening of the bay, meant to snare submarines like sockeyes. Now it was piled up near the shore, getting grown over.

There was all sorts of other evidence of the elaborate military project that had once been. Mossy foundations.

Holes. Pipes. It was the sort of thing you might want to look up online, but of course that was impossible, so you had to imagine it. About then, a small white shape in the water caught my eye. I bent down and picked it up. It was an obsolete spark plug. I turned it over in my palm, feeling the weight of it, and then I slipped it into my pocket.

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SHOE BOX WITH WINGS. A flying bathtub. There’s not one perfect way to describe the SC-7 Skyvan parked behind the offices of Alaska Air Taxi.

But one thing’s certain: It doesn’t seem possible that something so ungainly could fly.

But it flies. With Alaska Air Taxi owner Jack Barber at the helm, it’s flown all over the state, carrying cargo as varied as groceries, ATVs, fuel—horses. Roughly a third of Alaska’s population is reachable only by boat or airplane, so pilots like Barber serve as a lifeline to the Bush. Skyvans, Cessnas and de Havilland Beavers are often the only option for getting people and cargo in and out of remote communities.

For decades, pilots have flown small cargo loads and mail to the Bush, mostly in planes like the Cessna 207, a single-engine freight hauler with 1,100-pound payload capacity that Lee Ryan, vice president of Ryan Air, calls “the mainstay of Bush aviation.” But planes like the Skyvan and Ryan Air’s CASA 212-200, which can haul 5,000-pounds of freight, now make it possible to get oversized goods to villages quickly, year-round. The change has radically impact-

ed the lives of those who live off the road system.

“Before, if an individual in Kwigillingok wanted a king-sized bed, they had to wait until the big boat showed up in the summertime to deliver it,” according to Wilfred “Boyuck” Ryan, president of Ryan Air. “With the type of airplanes we focused on, we could bring that king-sized bed in year round.”

No matter how large or small an item is, if it’s going to the Bush, it’s going by plane. This keeps larger village hubs, like Ryan Air’s Emmonak Station, busy, with 10 to 20 flights from several carriers arriving and departing each day.

On the ground, station manager John Allen Crane coordinates mail delivery to the local post office. The ground crew transfers cargo destined for nearby villages to even smaller aircraft, like the Cessna 207. Deliveries with the larger CASA 212, meanwhile, are limited. “We’re not FedEx,” Crane has to remind his customers. “It’s going to take a few days for your freight to get to the village.”

Meanwhile, Crane starts making phone calls.

While he’s happy to deliver cargo to Emmonak customers for a small delivery fee, most folks prefer to swing by the airport and pick up their orders.

“You get to meet a lot of people and know everybody by face,” he says.

21

There’s a lot that sets flying in remote Alaska apart from flying elsewhere—harsh weather, short, sometimes unmaintained runways—but this might be the most unusual aspect of flying in the Bush. The divide between passengers, pilots and crew is virtually nonexistent.

“You jump on an airliner, the pilots are locked in the cockpit,” says Lee Ryan. “You rarely see them. Up here, the pilot’s right there with you.”

“It’s a unique experience for a pilot to get to know the people riding in the back,” adds Cleve McDonald. For 46 years, he made his living as an airline pilot, primarily with Alaska Airlines, flying into com-

munities like Dutch Harbor, Bethel and Ketchikan.

“I figure every three months, we’d completely empty those places out, the number of people flying in and out. They greet you by name, you know their kids.

They learn to appreciate the fact, when you say, ‘We’re not going today,’ they know it’s probably a good call."

The relationship between Bush pilots and the people who depend upon them goes beyond simple respect. Business owners, like Ed Ward of the Kodiak Brown Bear Center, place complete trust in their regular pilots.

“They’re the first contact our clients have, so we

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have to know they’re going to represent our company well,” Ward says. “Everything we have, be it fuel, food, building supplies—everything comes in or goes out on a floatplane. And if something we request isn’t available, we trust the pilot to find a good substitute so we can make a go of it.”

It’s not cheap to get supplies to places off the road system, so pilots double as puzzle-solvers, figuring out how to make the most of the space available on each aircraft.

Sometimes that means tying a refrigerator to the float of a de Havilland Beaver.

Flying has changed a lot since the early Bush pilot days—so much so that Lee Ryan claims, “We’re not Bush pilots anymore. We’re pilots who fly in the Bush.”

Weather cameras, GPS and even cell phones make it easier for pilots to stay connected and gather informa-

tion on destinations.

But the basics never change. As a young pilot, Boyuck Ryan learned the names of every creek, river, hill and cove along his regular routes; later, he taught them to his son, along with how to read the weather and how to fly without relying on newfangled technologies.

The relationship between pilots and the people of remote Alaska hasn’t changed, either, except to grow stronger. If a mechanical problem grounded Boyuck Ryan in Kasigluk, he says, “I’d have a warm place to stay, dinner, breakfast the next morning. When you fly from village to village in one of these small planes, you realize just how big our state is. But as a pilot, you meet people, develop relationships and the whole state starts to seem like a small community.”

23

Q: HOW WOULD YOU SPEND YOUR PERFECT DAY? A: No question: Jump in the 185 and go fishing with a

bunch of kids.

Q: WHAT’S THE LAST BOOK/STORY YOU REMEMBER ENJOYING? A: Saga of a Wayward Sailor by Tristan Jones Q: WHAT IS YOUR SUPER POWER? A: I’m not very super-powerish.

Q: WHAT LIFE QUESTION ARE YOU STILL TRYING TO ANSWER? A: You know, there’s not a bunch of questions I have; I just enjoy living life to the fullest.

Q: WHO WOULD YOU INVITE TO YOUR FANTASY DINNER PARTY? A: Clint Eastwood. Then I’d bring a bunch of local buddies, and we’d have a good time.

Q: WHICH MOMENT FROM YOUR PAST WOULD YOU LIKE TO REVISIT? A: The day I stood on top of Everest was pretty incredible.

[Ed. note: Cleve is the 97th person to climb all seven of the world’s highest summits.]

Q: WHAT DO YOU DO TO UNWIND? A: Go fly in the 185.

Q: WHAT’S YOUR FAVORITE PLACE IN ALASKA TO VISIT? TO LIVE? A: Oh, gosh. I love going anywhere in the mountains. Going fishing. Tikchik Lake would be one of my favorites.

Q: WHAT’S YOUR FAVORITE PLACE TO EAT? A: Gwennie’s Q: WHAT WAS YOUR FIRST JOB? A: Deckhand on a tug boat Q: WHAT’S THE LAST CONCERT OR PERFORMANCE YOU LOVED? A: I don’t go to concerts, but my girlfriend’s granddaughter

was in a dance recital at West High last year, and I really enjoyed it.

Q: WHO DO YOU GO TO FOR ADVICE? A: There’s a bunch of mentors in my life. Todd Burleson is a good buddy of mine. My mom is a great mentor.

Q: WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE HOLIDAY TRADITION? A: Probably Thanksgiving, cooking for the families.

Q: WHAT DO YOU COLLECT? A: I’ve got all sorts of hobbies I do—kite boarding, climbing. So I love stuff I collect for those different sports.

Q: WHO ARE YOU NAMED AFTER? A: My grandfather Q: DO YOU HAVE A FAVORITE ALASKA BEVERAGE (COFFEE, MICROBREW, STREAM WATER)?

A: Alaskan Amber

Q: DO YOU COUNT DOWN THE DAYS UNTIL SUMMER OR WINTER? A: Summer Q: WHAT’S YOUR FAVORITE OUTDOOR ACTIVITY? A: Skiing, climbing, kite boarding Q: WHO IS YOUR FAVORITE ALASKA ICON? A: Wow. There’s so many! Ted Stevens.

Q: WHAT’S YOUR GUILTY PLEASURE? Probably going for a great workout and just getting tremendously beat and feeling like I did really good.

24

Y D E F I N I T I O N of wilderness is unpredictability,” said Paul Claus, our pilot and owner of Ultima Thule Outfitters, as we flew into a fog-filled pass. He had just radioed the lodge for a weather check, where “Granny” (his mother Eleanor) said it was blowing snow and she could hardly see Bear Island. “Weather is the most unpredictable,” he said.

Our group of seven, piled into a turbine Otter along with the weekly grocery haul, was headed toward the unpredictable, the unknown—toward Ultima Thule, in fact, both the lodge and the idea. The medieval definition of ultima Thule is any distant place located beyond the known world. As we wound our way 100 miles deep into the Wrangells, that’s how it felt.

In addition to a weather briefing, we had all re-

ceived a functioning headset, and now a guided geography lesson. It was a land of superlatives we entered: Wrangell-St. Elias National Park—the largest in North America; Bagley icefield—the largest non-polar icefield in North America; Mt. St. Elias—the largest vertical rock face on the planet. Paul called this place the last true wilderness on earth.

For three generations, the Claus family has made a life and a living in these mountains, starting with five acres that Paul’s father, John, homesteaded in 1961. The rest of the Ultima Thule team are each as accomplished.

Paul is a renowned bush pilot and mountaineer. His wife, Donna, is a decorated skier. Their daughter, Ellie, was a junior Iditarod champion and maintains the record for youngest Iditarod finisher. Their son, Jay, is a mountaineer and licensed hunting guide. Their younger daughter, Logan, is an accomplished pilot, artist and free spirit. Ellie’s husband, Ben, is a search and rescue helicopter pilot for the Alaska Air National Guard.

25

Granny runs marathons. She trains by running up and down their half-mile runway, and qualified for the Boston Marathon at 60.

Since spring break-up was making a mess out of said runway, Paul carefully lowered the plane onto an ice bar alongside the Chitina River, and we landed at Ultima Thule, on skis, no less. Low visibility added mystery to the already unknown, and mountain peaks towered beyond the cloud ceiling. It was quite a scene.

As Ellie guided our small group to the lodge grounds, she discussed glaciers, grocery logistics and gardening. “We flew in two Otter loads of starts last year,” she said as we passed the hillside gardens that would be brimming with flowers and vegetables by summertime. A sauna, wood-fired hot tub and taxidermy-bedecked cabins rounded out the accommodations.

Inside each cabin, two growlers of glacier water, chocolates and a smoked salmon spread, cheese and

apple platter awaited. But the real gem in my experience was the main lodge—a place of warmth, good company, storytelling, music, family photo albums, fresh cookies and craft beer. For all of the Claus’ effort to share their piece of wilderness, they do a fabulous job of making guests feel like they’re the furthest thing from it.

“Can I get you something to drink?” came a question from the kitchen as I sat down at the counter to observe dinnertime prep. I requested a lemonade. “Do you want it sparkling?” Ellie asked as she pulled out the SodaStream. Of course, I did.

No sooner had I finished my sparkling, unfiltered glacier water lemonade than I was asked whether I wanted wine with dinner. Definitely. Red or white? It depended on the meat we were having. Ellie peeked into the kitchen, and came back: “What goes best with moose?”

Roll Call

100 YEARS How many years have you

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Photo by Jim Lavrakas, Alaska Dispatch

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of a national Alaska’s largest city was born out government to pour political scandal that led the federal a railroad across the enormous investments into building the city’s location Alaskan wilderness. Before its time, and trade center was recognized as a key transportation exist yet. But for an Alaskan population that didn’t grew up to over the century that followed, Anchorage an international take that role, and more, to become crossroads. the individual through The city’s story is told here names became whose those both residents, its of stories contributions, famous and others who made everyday has been representing the lives of all of us. Anchorage to strike it rich, a place to defend the nation, a place and care for a place to build a home, raise a family, a great future. Over neighbors, and a place to dream of enormous, sudden a century of work, conflict and where home, ideal an become has change, Anchorage city blossomed the amenities of a modern, comfortable in the lap of the Chugach Mountains. our city’s Researched and written to help celebrate photographs, historic with illustrated and centennial tells the human From the Shores of Ship Creek Anchorage: the story of the great events that made World War construction of the Alaska Railroad, Earthquake, II and the Cold War, the Great Alaska the city’s growing the discovery of Alaskan oil, and defense and national importance in the energy, how the learn will Readers transportation industries. what its bright and city developed, who made it, and prosperous future holds.

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adventures, tragedies and triumphs behind made Anchorage over its first 100 years—the These are the stories of the people who of commerce and culture. camp to northern metropolis and crossroads city that the city’s growth from railroad construction who arrived to trade skins at the tent people hunted and fished here, and of the massive Alaska Read about Shem Pete, whose Dena’ina first governed the town with the optimism and made who history to Christensen, sprouted on Ship Creek. Andrew And many other vivid characters through disappointed with the city he built. that defines Anchorage today.

Railroad project, but who became bitterly diversity ican artist, who is part of the new and Dispatch News, the Anchorage Museum, the present, up to Indra Arriaga, a Mexican-Amer Alaska the of generosity the provided through itself.

Richly illustrated with photographs with the energy and verve of the city Ship Creek celebrates the city’s centennial private collectors, From the Shores of

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resident. His Charles Wohlforth is a lifelong Anchorage Turnagain in 1966, family moved from New York City to Eric, an attorney when he was 3 years old. His father, of Revenue under in public finance, was Commissioner Board of Trustees the of Chairman Egan, Bill Governor wrote many of of the Alaska Permanent Fund, and P. Wohlforth, Alaska’s finance laws. His mother, Caroline Board, a founder was President of the Anchorage School and a life-long of two schools and other organizations, served on the community volunteer and leader. Charles is a magna cum Anchorage Assembly 1993-1999. He and journalist a University, laude graduate of Princeton than 10 books. He broadcaster, and the author of more has four children.

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The Official Anchorage Centennial Documentary Film, Anchorage Is... is a celebration of a railroad camp that grew up into a vibrant, diverse city of the north produced by Todd Hardesty and John Larson. The film gives an intimate look at who we are now as well as the ten decades of important events that shaped our character. Though rich with historical images and archival film, Anchorage Is... also tells the story of Anchorage through fresh voices of current residents, weaving their stories into the tapestry of the past.

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28 Dinner conversation was as well-rounded as the menu. By the time we reached dessert (a layered sponge cake inlaid with the words “Ultima Thule” in dark chocolate syrup), Paul had covered homesteading, park service relations, even ANILCA. It takes a lot of energy to entertain, and for someone who could leave hosting to the help, I thought it was especially gracious that he made a deliberate effort to connect with each guest.

Over coffees and cocoa, we talked more about wilderness, as a philosophy and a lifestyle.

“Everyone who comes here wants to experience wilderness,” Paul said.

“But they don’t know what that means,” Ellie added as they recalled guests who have come with predetermined adventures, meals, even stories they want Paul to tell, based on a previous guest’s experience.

“It takes time to disconnect,” Ellie said.

I remembered what Paul had said during the flight, about wilderness meaning unpredictability, and it made perfect sense that a part of helping their guests experience wilderness meant helping them adapt to it. I realized how they had already eased me into this place beyond the known world: annotated flight and grounds tours, sparkling lemonade, moose meatloaf encased in a flaky pie crust.

By late evening, I was exhausted, and retreated to my toasty cabin. I was already in my pajamas when our photographer snagged me to come see the Northern Lights. There followed a party in the hot tub, while the highly active aurora overhead reflected off the water, making it glow green.

You really can’t plan for a night like that, or recreate it.

Sharing those moments, not creating them, is what team Ultima Thule does every day. They show you that wilderness isn’t about isolation. It’s about community and exploration and discovery. They offer unlimited, customized adventuring— flightseeing, fishing, hiking, skiing, rafting, beach combing, glacier sledding—all-inclusive with the package rate. Because each day at Ultima Thule is new and unpredictable. You never know what it will bring.

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For the Claus kids, the confidence and resourcefulness they learned growing up at the lodge goes way beyond the Wrangells. Whether traveling the world or exploring other endeavors, “We feel like we have the skill set to just go,” Ellie told me the next morning over espresso. Fortunately for their clientele, they’re not going anywhere.

While she intends to continue marketing, improving their customer service strategy and creating that “wow” factor, Jay has plans to expand the operation into other areas of the park, and Logan will continue to assist with operations and artistic flair.

“We’re not investing ourselves because we have to, but because we’re really lucky,” Ellie said, speaking for the three of them.

Her tone reminded me once more of our dinner conversation: “Ultima Thule…what does it mean again?” I had asked.

“A land remote beyond reckoning,” Paul said wistfully, probably for the thousandth time, and still with wonder.

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THREE SISTERS FROM CHEVAK TRANSFORM ANTIOXIDANT-RICH ALASKA BOTANICALS INTO TOP-SHELF SKINCARE PRODUCTS

ROM BIODEGRADABLE packaging and recycling programs to maracuja and argan oils, spray-on clay and do-ityourself sugar scrubs, beauty consumers are increasingly looking for greener options for skincare. The global market for organic personal care products is expected to pass $13 billion in 2018, according to a 2012 study conducted by Transparency Market Research, and organic skincare products will account for nearly a third of that revenue.

For the family behind Alaska's ArXotica skincare brand, though, natural skincare isn’t a trend—it’s a busi-

ness venture rooted in ancient indigenous practices.

Sisters Cika Sparck, Michelle Sparck and Amy Sparck Dobmeier are members of the Qissunamiut tribe who grew up picking berries near Chevak on the tundra of Western Alaska.

“Everything we gathered was used for food or medicine,” Cika Sparck said. Traditional wisdom told them tundra plants had all sorts of health and healing properties. So they started thinking: What’s good nutritionally must be good for the skin—which is, after all, the largest organ in the body.

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32

B O DY, M I N D & S P I R I T

a labor of love. The sisters began developing a line of skincare products with natural ingredients harvested from the tundra: Fireweed as an astringent and moisturizer; crowberry as an antioxidant; Arctic sage as a restorative. They added odorless, neutraceutical-grade salmon oil for its Omega-3 fatty acids. They left out ingredients like parabens and mineral oil. They sought out seed money, arranged for laboratory testing, researched the market and perfected their formula, and ArXotica’s Quyung-lii serum hit the market in 2011.

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THE SCIENCE ArXotica’s product line is rooted in traditional practices, but there’s contemporary science driving the market for antioxidant skincare.

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The pigments that give plants their color, called “flavonoids,” have antioxidant properties, and fruits and vegetables that have deeper colors naturally have more flavonoids and, consequently, more antioxidant activity.

Rich in vitamins A and C and anthocyanin flavonoids, blueberries are commonly thought to be the most antioxidant “superfood” available—but then, most people don’t have access to wild crowberries, which have many times more anthocyanins than commercially grown blueberries. Studies in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry found crowberries to have higher anthocyanin content than other berry species and indicated they are a source of “health-promoting ingredients” due to their “diverse anthocyanin profile.”

Which brings us back to the tundra. To document the benefits of the Alaska wild plants in their products, the Sparck sisters sought out third-party studies, assessments and analyses of their own.

“We kind of went overboard with due diligence to prove we had the goods to make the best skincare goods,” Michelle Sparck said

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33 in an email. “We had our empirical, anecdotal and traditional ecological knowledge, but for a novice bath and beauty company, we wanted to come out of the gate as knowledgeable and superior ingredient-wise.”

Funded with seed money from the Alaska Federation of Natives’ Alaska Marketplace program, the research found ArXotica’s materials to have high oxygen radical absorbance capacity (ORAC) scores and confirmed what the sisters already knew: The northern plants they harvest have through-the-roof antioxidant power.

“It’s a phenomenon called ‘northern vigor,’ which is awesome,” Cika said. “We have a short growing season, but it’s more concentrated.” Midnight sun, strong winds, flash frosts and other harsh conditions mean tundra plants have to build up more resilience than plants that grow under milder circumstances. The result, Cika said, is plant life that has something in common with the people who live under the same conditions: “We’re more potent and strong.”

THE FUTURE In a little more than three years on the market, ArXotica has developed a small but dedicated fan base (which includes this writer; I use the Quyung-lii anti-aging serum nightly) in Alaska and beyond.

“They want to buy from us because they know the materials,” Cika said. “They trust the source and they trust who

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35 it's coming from, but they trust the materials.”

In addition to the products currently available, ArXotica has a toiletry line—head and body wash, lotion and conditioner—developed and ready to roll into production.

“We have enough extracts and materials to flesh out our whole product The hitch is securing distribution. The company has met with representatives of tribal gaming resorts around the Lower 48 about getting into their spas and hotels, but what the Sparck sisters would really like is to contract with Alaska hotels and luxury lodges to provide guest toiletries.

“People want the full Alaska experience, and I don't want them to walk into the hotel room and pick up another Gilchrist & Soames,” Cika said. ArXotica’s products are currently available in about two dozen retail locations around Alaska and the Lower 48, and they’d like to expand that reach as well. Earlier this year, they were awarded a contract for a retail space in a high-traffic location, but the bid process was scrapped over a competitor’s objections.

“It won’t deter us, though,” Michelle said. “We have proved we are in this for the long haul.”

For now, ArXotica’s products are harvested in Alaska and manufactured in New Jersey. The sisters would like to base all their operations in Alaska, although there are infrastructure and trans-

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portation hurdles they’ll have to clear. They describe a future in which ArXotica is an economic driver in Western Alaska, providing jobs and helping train chemists and ethnobotanists. They point out that the location of their source material helps keep their environmental impact low; their wild plant harvest can’t really be mechanized, and their default shipping option is cargo backhaul on returning flights. Cika describes ArXotica’s customer as a “conscientious consumer”—someone who cares not just about the product but how it’s made and where it comes from. She also sees tourism as a potential component of ArXotica’s business.

“One of my big dreams is having a working and luxury trip,” she said. She envisions bringing customers to the tundra on “glamping” trips on which they can harvest plants for their serum, then relax with a mobile spa unit, enjoying facials and massages on the shores of a Western Alaska lake.

“They’re also (going to be) seeing the villages and seeing what we’re working for,” she said. “They’ll see, literally, where we’re coming from.”

See harvest pictures and learn more about ArXotica’s products, including where to buy them, in our extended online version of this story.

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B O DY, M I N D & S P I R I T

EQUINE-ASSISTED THERAPY HELPS CHILDREN AND ADULTS LIVING WITH DISABILITIES IN ANCHORAGE

by Arina Filippenko, Alaska Teen Media Institute

Donald Ives MD, RVT, RPVI

ESTLED IN THE WOODS of South Anchorage just off Abbott Road sits a local program designed to improve quality of life for Alaskans.

Equine Assisted Therapy Alaska (EATA) is a non-profit that caters to children and adults who are living with physical, emotional and cognitive disabilities. Through horsemanship, the program helps participants improve motor and speaking functions.

Hippotherapy combines physical, occupational and speech therapy through the act of riding horses. The physical movements of a horse are similar to that of human hip movement and riding can increase the likelihood of normal hip development for people with disabilities. Riding also builds upper-body strength.

Generally, students are placed on a horse with two side-walkers and a lead guide for safety, along with a speech or physical therapist to provide direction and support. The program also offers trail rides to its participants to challenge them outside of the arena and provide new opportunities for growth.

Janie Call, senior riding instructor, emphasized the importance of a whole team working together to support participants, especially the younger ones.

“The kids are learning to communicate with other people, people they don’t know. They have to communicate with their horse. The horse picks up on how they feel,” Call said.

37

While this type of programming focuses on strengthening core support and improving muscle tone and circulation, it also aims to build confidence and self esteem through that emotional connection with the horses. The students’ lessons consist of mastering basic horsemanship skills, which are also transferable to everyday life.

Call said parents of children who have disabilities are looking to connect them with therapy that can help them be successful individuals, more mobile and independent.

“You can bring children here and they’re able to be in a session, but it’s fun and they enjoy it,” she says. “I had one parent tell me, ‘My son goes to therapy every day and this is the only one he really likes.’”

Jackie McConnell is the mother of two children with Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy. She said hippotherapy at EATA has been beneficial to her family.

“The evidence is clear, that for the kind of muscular dystrophy that my kids have, it keeps them walking longer,” she said.

Volunteers and participants say the benefits of EATA sessions are numerous and highly encouraging for those looking to get away from traditional therapy methods. Taking advantage of the natural beauty of Alaska and the adventure of riding horses, EATA gets participants moving and feeling more confident in themselves and their abilities.

They currently offer programs for wounded warriors, military groups, families, business groups and foster care/residential treatment facilities.

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B O DY, M I N D & S P I R I T

IKE MCCUNE SPENT MOST OF THE RUN up Aialik Bay sitting back in his captain’s chair, keeping the M/V Milo on course with his feet hooked between the lower spokes of the ship’s wheel while he chatted with whomever happened to be sitting on the makeshift daybed behind him. On the floor was a small hatch that led down to the captain’s berth and galley, and as would happen for the better part of the four-day trip, there was a steady flow of people climbing up and down it, with snacks, and questions (“Where are we?” “Can you believe this?”) and Pete’s guitar.

It was our first surf day and we were a novice bunch. Of the six passengers, two had sailed on the Milo before and none of us had more than a passing familiarity with surfing or stand up paddleboarding. That morning we had woken up to snow flurries and were traveling in and out of patches of snow and fog and sleet, each with its own surreal effect on the water. Mike, whose captain’s uniform that morning (as well as the rest of the trip) consisted of a sweatshirt, pajama pants and flip flops, seemed to take delight in his passengers’ incredulity both

39

at the weather (snow in April!) and the quirkiness of the boat’s controls (among others, the ship’s autopilot has to be tricked into steering north). Pete, a former neighbor of Mike’s and a veteran of voyages on the Milo, rested his head on his guitar, playing Jack Johnson tunes that melted into made-up riffs and emerged as Beach Boys classics.

As the bay began to narrow and we closed in on the coastline, Mike was on his feet, steering with one hand, squeegeeing the wheelhouse’s fogged up windshield with the other. Occasionally he’d pull out a pair of binoculars and make a closer inspection of the coastline. When someone asked what he was looking for, he explained that a big problem with finding good surf spots in Alaska was that it was hard to distinguish the white water of the breakers from the snow on the beach. The best months to surf in Alaska, we learned, are April and September (neither of which can be guaranteed snow-free).

Eventually, the Milo came to an idle about 100 yards off of a gravel beach frosted with snow. The evergreens and rocky cliffs that framed the beach dissolved into gray and fog in either direction. Mike and his business partner, a Homer-based photographer and surfer named Scott Dickerson, pulled down a side window and held an impromptu conference as they studied the surf. They spoke more in gestures and looks than in words, but they must have liked what they saw. Moments later, Scott was on the bow, letting loose the anchor.

Part treehouse, part bed and breakfast, part surfmobile, the M/V Milo (or just Milo) began life in 1960 as a North Pacific fishing seiner, but since 2010, when Mike, Scott and a cadre of like-minded surfers piloted it up from San Francisco, it has been refurbished and upgraded to accommodate the adventurer set. Above deck, they added a rear cabin, “The Piggy,” fabricated from the wheelhouses of a pair of barges. On top of that, they installed a hot tub that was later removed to make more space for surfboards. Below deck, the hold, once used to store fish by the ton, now houses the Board Room, a heated locker room for changing in and out of wetsuits. There are also a pair of double occupancy berths—Igloo 1 and Igloo 2—named for their

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An Effective Alternative to Braces Q

during the day. It actually guides your child’s teeth into the correct position, before more severe crowding or bite problems arise.

Why have I never heard of the Ortho-tain?

By: Owen Mandanas, DDS

In my 14 years as a dentist in Alaska, I have focused a lot on preventive dentistry.

Usually it involves prevention of cavities and gum disease. For the past four years, however, I have been using an appliance with my patients, called the Ortho-tain, that can effectively prevent the need for orthodontics. I am truly excited to share this with you and it is a goal of mine to straighten as many young smiles as possible with the Ortho-tain.

I truly am amazed by the results I have seen to the point that I think it is crazy that the public is not aware of its existence.

There is an alternative to traditional braces and, yes, it actually works!

Q

What exactly is Ortho-tain?

A:

The Ortho-tain is a mouthguard appliance that can straighten your teeth without brackets or wires. It is generally worn at night and a few hours

A:

The appliance has been around since the 1970’s. I believe you have never heard of it because it is not as lucrative as traditional orthodontics, yet it is as good, or more effective, in most people. It was invented

by Dr. Earl Bergersen, a humble and caring orthodontist, not a salesman. I had the pleasure of meeting him in 2012 and he was very excited to share and teach this technology which relies on an understanding of growth and development.

Q

My dentist said that it is too early to worry about braces for my 7-year old daughter, but I can already tell she is going to have problems.

I had braces when I was a child and I don’t want her to go through what I did.

Will the Ortho-tain work on kids this young?

A: I have placed children as young as 5 or 6 years old on this appliance. It is ideal to start them at a younger age because compliance is usually better in younger children. Also, at this

age they only need to sleep in the appliance. It can correct cross-bites, overbites and deepbites. These are growth and development problems that can be challenging to correct with braces or may even require surgery as an adult.

Q

Can I afford Ortho-tain?

A: Definitely. The appliance is 1/3 to 1/2 the costs of traditional orthodontics.

Q

I am glad that my child will not need a retainer after treatment.

How come you need one after braces?

A: Your teeth are connected to your jawbones with a periodontal ligament.

With normal braces we wait for the adult teeth to come in all crooked and twisted (after the ligaments are set) and we untwist them. Microscopically these ligaments are like rubber bands and they want to move back to where they were. This is called relapse and is why many people get braces over and over again.

Since the Ortho-tain guides teeth in straight as they erupt in the first place, the ligaments form and end up exactly where we want them. It’s actually one of the most remarkable things about the appliance.

41 chief architect, a surfer who goes by the name of Iceman.

Originally, Mike had envisioned the Milo as a new home. Born in Hawaii, he began traveling to Alaska to work in fisheries in the 1970s. By 2009, his kids were grown and on their own and he was tired of paying property taxes. He’d met Wendy in 2004 and whenever they went on dates, she said, they would invariably find their way to a boatyard. Fittingly, Mike and Wendy married on the deck of the Milo in 2011.

Soon they were taking people out on the Milo to explore Alaska’s bays and coves. When exactly they evolved into a business is a bit fuzzy. When I asked Mike and Wendy, they estimated around 2012, but both had to stare at the ceiling a while to divine a date.

And it’s easy to see why. The boat seems to be as much muse as vessel.

Much of the momentum behind Ocean Swell Ventures, the charter company under which the Milo operates, has been provided by Scott, who along with his wife, Stephanie, formed Mike’s original crew. Early one morning in the wheelhouse, I asked Mike how he and Scott came to work together. He explained that there were 12 surfers in Homer, only three of whom were ever in the water and he and Scott were two of them. Scott, who was laying on the daybed behind the captain’s chair, half asleep, added, “Most people think he’s my dad.”

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Like Mike, Scott hails from a commercial fishing background, but instead of pulling up nets and picking fish, he now triples as the Milo’s other captain, a surf guide and Ocean Swell’s official photographer. Scott’s photos, together with the exoticism of surfing in glacier-fed fjords, have garnered interest in the Milo from professional athletes like the Malloy Brothers—a trio of pro surfers from California’s central coast—as well as corporations like Patagonia, Mountain Dew and Alaska Brewing Company.

Down in the Board Room, Mike introduced me to my gear: 7mm neoprene mittens and booties and a 6mm wetsuit, which was so heavy it had to be hung from two plastic hangers fixed together with medical tape. He showed me the parts—the snaps, the zipper, the hood, the neck hole I was supposed to get my whole body through—then offered me his one piece of instruction, “To get it on, you have to kind of ASI 61Degrees AD_7.41x4.75_PF.pdf

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birth yourself in a little bit at a time.”

Twenty minutes later, I was on the deck fully dressed for 40-degree water except for one mitten, which I couldn’t seem to pull on no matter what sequence I rolled and unrolled the neoprene. I had come up as the boards were being loaded into the water, so I tried to stay casual about it, holding the mitten under my armpit or in my other hand as if I had plans for my free hand before I got in the water. (Eventually, Wendy would take pity on me and pull me aside to wedge my mitten on underneath the cuff of my wetsuit, sympathizing, truthfully or not, that this happened to her all the time.) Scott and Pete were on top of The Piggy, lowering down the boards, while the rest of us, with our arms raised above our heads guided the eight- and nine-foot behemoths past the edge of the deck and into the water, then lashed them to whatever cleat we could find on the railing.

One by one, we stepped over the railing and onto boards. Unlike the protected cove in which we had anchored the night before, the boat rocked up and down as waves rolled underneath us. I had stepped over the railing at mid ship, but with each wave, the board squirted out from under me. I was at the stern of the boat before I finally obeyed what everybody on deck was shouting: “Let go!”

And then, like Joe, and Mollie and Pete, who had all gone before me, I was all alone, hunched on all fours in the wind chop of Aialik Bay. The four of us, each on our own little island, wobbled between kneeling and standing and laying flat on our boards. We had all chosen to go out on stand up paddleboards, assuming that a board and a paddle would be easier than just a board, but I was having my doubts. Occasionally, I’d hear a plop and I’d look over to see an empty board drifting across the surface.

Sometime later, presumably after they tidied up the chaos we left on the Milo, Scott and Mike materialized on the water. Mike was laying down, doing the forward crawl on a surfboard.

Scott was standing up, moving toward us on a cargo-laden board, paddling over his load like a gondolier. They acknowledged us with a quick wave, hi and hello, then turned and steamed toward the surf. It was as if they were playing under some other set of physical laws. In fact, for the rest of the trip, we would marvel at Scott, who would surf with his camera bag on the nose of his board and paddle out in water without his wetsuit, defying hypothermia.

I would be up and down all that day, on flat water, and in and out of the surf. I would paddle bravely into oncoming waves and judiciously around a gang of barking sea lions. I would talk tides and breaks with Mike. I would sit exhausted on my board and watch falling snow disappear into water. And the whole time, but especially in my better moments, I would feel the beginner’s thrill of being late (but not too late) to someone else’s dream.

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SAVOR

T WA S A C H I L L Y fall day at the Valdez harbor in 2013 when Rebecca Bard paused to study the empty shuttered café that had just been put up for lease. The café, a slide-window operation with a covered seating area out front, lay in a high traffic area, just across North Harbor Drive from the public docks. Bard happened to be in the food truck business over the mountains in McCarthy and she knew a prime location for slinging hamburgers when she saw one. On a lark, she pulled out her cell phone and called the owners to see how much they wanted.

The following April, she’d forgotten all about it when they called her back to ask if she was still interested. Bard hemmed and hawed. Her initial interest had been more on the level of idle curiosity, and she had her own eatery to get ready for

the upcoming summer season.

But when they gave her a mere week to decide, she thought, sure, what the hell. “I’m always up for a good challenge.

Let’s see if we can open a whole new business in a month and a half.”

One might imagine a frozen smile and a hint of panic creeping into the eyes there, but Bard knew what she was doing. She and her business partner Ian Gyori have been running the Roadside Potatohead, or “The Potato” as it’s known among McCarthy folk, since 2008. They’re the third team of owners to run what has become a legacy of great food in the tiny town near the foot of the Kennicott Glacier. They’re also among the more creative and innovative food truck teams you’re likely to find.

Bard and Gyori are committed to sourcing as much of their food locally as they can, or at least getting it from within Alaska. Their beach-

45

46

SAVOR

head in Valdez has allowed them to buy seafood right off the boats, and Bard’s been looking at sourcing their meat from farmers in Palmer.

They also get as

much of their lettuce and greens as possible from market gardeners within a few miles of McCarthy.

Gyori, a professionally trained chef, makes his own pastrami, sausage and bacon, all part of a menu that ranges from the basic burger and curly fries combo to Vietnamese banh-mi sandwiches to vegetarian wraps and my personal favorite, the rosemary garlic fries. Lately they’ve also started doing what they call “surprise over fries,” house-made pickled vegetables and sauce over a pile of their signature hand-cut French fries. There’s a different surprise every day...something that’s also true of running a small town Alaska restaurant.

“Operating a business in general in McCarthy is difficult,” Bard said, “because you are responsible for your own power, and you are responsible for your own water.” The Potato, like all businesses in McCarthy, has to produce its own electricity with a generator. Trash disposal is always a headache in a place noted for its rather healthy bear population. Inevitably, things break down, and repair professionals are far away. Gy-

ori once had to take apart their espresso machine while on the phone long distance to Kaladi Brothers in Anchorage so they could walk him through it step by step. “You gotta be part chef and part mechanic,” said Bard.

Then there’s the food expediting. Things like ketchup and hamburger buns have an irritating tendency to not arrive when scheduled. Bard reckons she lost 20 flats of eggs last summer to the bumps and washboards of the McCarthy Road. This can bring on a minor existential crisis when you’re hungover on a Sunday and all you want from life is one of their egg, ham and English muffin sandwiches. This particular Potato delicacy is to the wretched Egg McMuffin what the poems of Pablo Neruda are to the lyrics of a Ted Nugent song. But there’s always something else good on the menu to soothe your jagged edges.

Bard is a very capable cook herself, but she gives most of the credit to Gyori for the Potato’s diversified offerings. “Ian’s worked at a lot of restaurants in San Francisco,” she says. “Almost every winter he goes and stages at these really awesome restaurants.” Staging is a sort of brief, unpaid internship at a restaurant, but they don’t take just anybody off the street—you have to be a pro with an impressive resume to get in the door. Gyori brings back everything he learns to McCarthy and pours it into their tiny food truck.

During the years I lived in McCarthy, I ate regularly at the Potato, both for the excellent food and for the breezy screen-porch atmosphere. It’s a refreshing change to step out of the dark wood and brass of the town’s only bar, blinking against the glare of the sun, perhaps pushing a hand toward the sky to shield your face from the glare. You walk around the block on a dirt street, then enter through the porch’s springhinge door at one end.

You order off the hand-chalked menu nailed to the wall, then sit and visit with whoever else is waiting while delicious sizzling smells waft from the kitchen. There are

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a couple stacks of magazines, a soda fridge, a trash can, some cottonwood fuzz caught in the screen. All around you the life of McCarthy carries on at its usual languid pace, with the noise of the nearby creek, the rustling of the leaves and the buzz of four wheelers forming the pleasant background hum.

After their first year of operation in Valdez, the seaside community has embraced the new Potato and their crew is heading back for another season. Business, in fact, has been so good at both locations that they’ve recently turned a major corner—they’re going to be leaving the food truck business. But fear not, the Roadside Potatohead is not disappearing. Rather, they’re getting ready to start construction this summer on an honest-to-goodness sit-down restaurant in downtown McCarthy. That’s about as major as commitments come.

There will still be days when the hamburger buns and tomatoes don’t make it in to town, but improvisation is what makes their business (and their menu) such a wild success. Customers sometimes hear, “I’m sorry, we don’t have tomatoes. We’re at the end of the road and they didn’t come in this week,” said Bard. “But the fact that we have food like this is already pretty awesome.”

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SAVOR

RAFT-BREWED BEER IS BECOMING a lifestyle in Alaska.

With their stouts and IPAs, t-shirts, stickers and repurposed growlers, microbreweries are popping up like spring forgetme-nots. Most breweries—Alaska has almost 30—are located on the mainland’s road system. From the largest brewery, Alaskan Brewing Company, to the newest, Resolution Brewing Company, Alaska maintains a high standard of beer quality and brewery aesthetics. Here is the lowdown on six we visited this spring.

ARKOSE BREWERY Named for Arkose Ridge and Peak in the Talkeetna Mountain Range, Arkose Brewery is located near the state fairgrounds and it’s the perfect stop for an afternoon refreshment. Their brewing equipment is American-made (in Portland, Oregon) and their tap handles are Alaska molded steel, crafted just down the road from their brewery. We recommend stopping by if you’re craving a darker beer.

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49 HOMER BREWING COMPANY Homer Brewing is an Alaska microbrewery that doesn’t just cater to beer connoisseurs. They also carry their own chai tea syrups—which make for a fragrant shop. The brewery is family friendly and has an outdoor beer-sipping deck, complete with park benches and coffee table. They have a wide selection of beers, but don’t drop by hoping for an IPA—the owner prefers to steer clear of them.

Lighter: Old Inlet Pale, 4.9% Darker: Odyssey Oatmeal Stout, 6.3% 1411 Lake Shore Dr, Homer, AK 99603 907-235-3626 KASSIK’S BREWERY Known for their particularly sassy beer names (like Morning Wood IPA), Kassik’s is a 15-minute detour off of Kenai’s Main St., and is worth the extra mileage.

The family-owned brewery opened nine years ago, and the drinks are as refreshing as ever. Owners Frank and Debara Kassik are true Alaskans who brought their children up from California 20 years ago.

They’re involved in their community and promote the local hockey team with their Power Play IPA. Lighter: Orion's Quest Red Ale, 6.8% Darker: Caribou Kilt, 8.5% 47160 Spruce Haven St, Kenai, AK 99611 • 907-776-4055 KENAI RIVER BREWING COMPANY This brewery is really where the Soldotna locals hang out. Upon walking in, expect conversations to halt and an awkward pause to commence. Following the initial elevator glances—and assuming you’re friendly—you are soon welcomed into their hometown clique and conversations. Kenai River will allow you to mix

beers (try the Honeymoon Hefe and Gummi Bear for a true sugar rush), and don’t forget to bring your lunch because they welcome outside food. Be aware: you will most likely leave with the town gossip and a growler or two.

Lighter: Honeymoon Hefe, 5.2% Darker: Naptown Nut Brown, 6.3% Just because: Gummi Bear, 9.2% (A Belgian tripel, they use gummy bears to sweeten the beer instead of sugar.)

241 N Aspen Dr # 100, Soldotna, AK 99669 907-262-2337 RESOLUTION BREWING COMPANY You will feel like you’re in Seattle when you step foot into this microbrewery, and then you’ll taste the beer and it takes you right back to Anchorage. Resolution opened in March of this year and beer sales have skyrocketed. Owners Brandon Hall, Chris Castaneda and Luke Bowen created a product and brand all while Hall was on tour in Afghanistan.

Lighter: Tent City, 5.9% Darker: Father Dyer, 7.2% 3024 Mountain View Dr, Anchorage, AK 99501 • 907-720-7964 ST. ELIAS BREWING COMPANY St. Elias practically pulls you into Soldotna, and it’s the one stop on this brewery tour that serves full meals. The flights are also some of the most affordable and their walls are covered with frontier-style wallpaper and art—pay special attention to the bathroom ceilings.

Lighter: Even Keel Kolsch, approx. 5% Darker: Mother’s Milk Stout, 3.8% Just because: Framboise Lambic, 6-7% 434 Sharkathmi Ave, Soldotna, AK 99669 907-260-7837

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WHAT WE LOVE

T 61° NORTH, we not only want to share our love for (and, admittedly, addiction to) shoes and boots, but also share it on both the printed page and in our social media. Here are just some of our top picks.

“...They're a magical teal suede that never seems to get dirty. They're also from Her Tern—my weakness!”

“I love these shoes because they make me feel happy and I can walk in them for hours and hours.”

“...When I found these beauties at ShuzyQ and they worked for my hard to fit feet, I invested immediately.”

–Hillary @vivedera with Giblet the tomcat

–Emma Smeets @emmapotatopeel

–Meggan Judge @megganjudge

“They’re cute and comfortable. I could do cartwheels in these shoes,”

“She likes that she can play in the water behind our car with them.”

–Lauren

–2-year-old Elizabeth’s mom

“They look nice.” –Charles

Email us with ideas for a future What We Love at special@alaskadispatch.com, subject: What We Love. Or connect with us on social media and share. @ShareADN

@ShareADN

Alaska Dispatch News

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