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Alaska Blog 1- Due to limited internet and electricity access, these blogs have been written hastily with no editing. Please pardon all typos and grammatical errors.

The snowy peak of Denali overlooks the brown mountains and tall leafless trees of autumn. Mid-October isn’t the high season for visiting Alaska and that’s evident by the many closed shops in Anchorage’s dainty international airport, which looks not unlike any airport in any Midwestern town population 300,000.

I’m still not exactly sure why I came to Alaska, except that I have a friend here and I have a week or so to spare. So there wasn’t much of a plan. My friend would pick me up at the airport in the jalopy he’d purchased no more than a few months ago, he’d take a week off of work, and we’d trek about Alaska by car and on foot just wandering around.

On Monday, at four o’clock local time my plane landed, I grabbed my luggage, and met my friend, who had willingly driven a full two hours south to greet me at the airport; not that we had many other options. My only other recourse would have been to rent a car, and most rental companies have strict policies against driving their vehicles on Alaska’s many unpaved rural roads – the only route to our destination, whatever that would be.

Our first stop was a house in Wasilla, “a hick suburb of Anchorage,” as it was described by the gas station clerk. My buddy had a paycheck to pick-up from a boss there who not only took the time to show me around his home but also gave me a tour of the garage out back, which he’d converted into a birch syrup plant, one of only a few hundred birch syrup plants in the world, he assured me. He showed me a large rectangular machine about the size of a refrigerator. “Reverse Osmosis,” he said, referring to the process it performed, allowing the water to be sucked from the birch sap. The man, aged about fifty-years and sporting a long gray beard, was preparing for the Christmas rush, his busiest time of year for making and selling the syrup. We let him get back to the work that had occupied him when we knocked on his door. He was in the middle of installing a new oven and microwave and needed to finish before his wife returned from Costco with groceries and dinner. My buddy and I took off for our next destination.

I wasn’t too sure of what we’d be doing all week or even in the next hour but my friend had somewhat of a plan and I was more than willing to go along. For night one we stayed in a hostel where’d he’d been living for a few weeks. His was a shed, which had been insulated and powered with electricity, a portable heater plugged into one of the wall sockets.

The main house was only a few feet away and provided a kitchen, laundry machines, and a bathroom with shower. Wintering and caretaking there was a mid-twenties boyfriend and girlfriend couple. As far as I learned, she worked summers washing dishes at a resort and he cooked up baked goods infused with marijuana which he sold back in Anchorage, about a hundred miles south. He was still asleep by the time we left the next morning and had returned only a few hours previous from selling a large batch of rice crispy treats; whether he sold them all to one person or individual passersby on the street I have no idea.

For whatever reason though the question lingered on my mind as loaded my friend’s car in the gray light of morning, then set out for the north. Apparently our destination was Fairbanks with a detour across Denali National Park, then a trip to the Arctic Circle the following morning. Temperatures were ranging up and down the twenties, a light dusting of snow was on the ground and the road gave way to vistas of trees, mountaintops, and open plains in all directions.