Wild, wild country

In Alaska, coldest months offer an example of the majesty of mother nature at its most elemental.

Living at and working near LA, I didn't crave beaches and palms in their mild winter. Rouge 90-degree days in January make me long to escape and scrape ice of the windshield, or at least wear a sweater. So in February/ March, I flew into snowbanked blanketed Anchorage and caught the Alaska Railroad's natty blue-and yellow Aurora Winter Train to Fairbanks. As we chugged out of the city, the windows filled with a white wonderland of trees and snow, an occasional house, a moose or two, and, around every turn, Denali, getting steadily larger looming in the horizon. At 20,310 ft, it's the highest mountain in North America, but that number doesn't express how gigantic it is, in real life, how ridiculously far away you can be and still sigh WOW, big, huge. I'm told the peak is often hidden in the clouds, but under blue skies, my experience was of something impossible to miss but constantly pointed out. "There's Denali," said everyone in Anchorage. "There's Denali," said everyone on the train. "There it is all right," I'd agree. It seemed so close yet so far -- but I was about to get much closer rapidly.

It's difficult to convey the sheer awesomeness of the Sheldon Chalet, a new lodge that sits right at or on Denali's shoulder and is accessible only by helicopter. But the bare facts are these: in the 1950s, a bush pilot named Don Sheldon homesteaded five acres inside what would later become Delani National Park and Preserve, including a 300 ft high granite outcropping sticking out of the galcier. Atop it, he built a hut that by virtue of its location, was only practical for use by experienced mountaineers.

Sheldon died in 1975, but last year, two of his children built a hexagonally shaped, heavilly over engineered, highly improbable was five-bedroom piece of heaven, from which guests can trek over glaciers, go heli-hiking, and glimpse the Aurora Borealis. Flying in, I watched from the helicopter's bubble-like cockpit windows as leafless birch forests gave way to cracked superhighway s of ice snaking through a maze of upthrust slabs, sawtooth ridges, and looming monoliths. "There's Denali," the pilot said.

The chalet appeared ludicrously small, dwarfed by its surroundings, a toy house perched precariously on a miniature rock outcropping. After we landed, I was led inside and welcomed with champagne and oysters and nibbles that refocused my brain on the most important thing -- me.

Herein lies the particular, vertigo--inducing magic of the Sheldon Chalet: contrast. The lodge fortifies you with lifes cozy comforts. There's a warm stove, snuggly fur blanks, slippers in your size, even artful little pillow chocolates. But step outside and there is only austerity and dead alien silence, a un-earthly landscape produced by eons of uplifting rock and compressing ice, a place so profoundly unable to know or care about your existence that in its presence you feel both afraid and euphoric. You are so small and life is so utterly brief and so insignificant, but isn't that kind of freeing?
The experience forces you to be mindful in the present, egoless, in tune with a broader self-awareness, expanding ones horizons and being one with the collective universal mind, free of petty concerns like instagraming, facebooking or sending gloating texts. Plus, there's no Wi-Fi.

The Chalet is only the most rarefied example of an Alaskan trend toward remote, small-scale accommodations. The new Borealis Basecamp, 25 miles north of Fairbanks and fully off-grid, is a lunar colony of domes-shaped white cabins. Each has a panoramic view from its bay windows angled to facilitate viewing the northern lights in all its splendor from -- wait for it-- bed. aurora tourism is notoriously tricky; not only do you need to be in the right place at. the right time, you need a clear, dark sky. Fairbanks is in the right latitiude (check) and has little ambient light and low precipitation (check, check), but still have ro cross your fingers and toes.

My first night, around 10, a pale band appeared in the sky. The wind kicked up; the temperature dropped into the single digits. I got out of bed hustles to my many layers. I needed to be under the sky, the whole thing.

Pale green light swirled up like peacock plumes. Glittering bridges spanned the horizon. Here it was again--the exhilarating indifference of the natural world. The aurora, this impossibly beautiful thing, holds no intention, carries no purpose, needs no observer. It's chemistry. On this particular night, charged particles had traveled more than 90MM miles through space on the solar winds and reacted with space gases in the atmosphere to
when I happened to be looking up. Ninety million miles.

"Big country," people say about Alaska, but everything's relative.

READ ON: https://www.alaskamagazine.com/articles/still-wild-the-roadside-view-of-denali/