Over the past seven days I’ve ingested over 15,000 milligrams of sodium from my freeze-dried meals. This is the type of thing you calculate while waiting for the pilot and the plane to emerge from the entrance of the valley and touch down on the remote airstrip.
That’s a lot of sodium, but outside of missing my wife and baby daughter, I feel incredible. Six nights in a tipi tent with a titanium stove eating as much dead black spruce as my buddy Ryan and I could feed it — with a bonus night because the Cessna 185 that dropped us off couldn’t pick us up due to weather — has me reset and with the clear perspective only possible after a trip to the wilderness.
I feel the type of calm that can only linger after extended time beyond cell reception. Granted I was checking my InReach every hour for word on whether or not our pilot could reach the strip, but that’s far different than trolling through the anxiety-inducing world of social media to kill time. Even though my feed is fly fishing, hunting, and personal growth, the rhetoric from the rot of society is let through by the digital gatekeepers and pushed by bots who benefit from fragmenting our culture.
There’s a limit to the amount of freeze dried meals your body can ingest before it becomes tired, if not sick. The same goes for the brain on screens.
I typically have a few moments of reflection at the during or at the end of a trip when I reflect about why. I know I don’t have to justify the pull of hunting in lonely places or putting my body through trailless hikes and copious amounts of sodium. But I do anyway.
Ryan and I talked a lot about whether or not we’d return to this specific strip. There were people across the river and bulls were around, but it was far from a show up and tag out program. It was beautiful and the flight wasn’t brutally expensive like some. Still, we want to sample more Alaska.
The terrain of interior Alaska is captivating in a way that Southeast isn’t. That’s not to say Southeast is monotonous, but it’s hard to compete with the myriad colors of a mountainside and the opportunity to glass the edge of alders for grizzly bears and moose, then point your binoculars up and look for Dall sheep bedded next to or ambling through slopes of scree.
It’s not always like this. The reason the plane can’t land is the fog, sleet and snow at the higher elevations and it’s early/mid September. The fall into winter is a quick one. We lost a considerable chunk of an hour of daylight in our week.
The road system is another mixed bag. A connected population means multiple opportunities to buy everything from cars, trucks and trailers, to argos, four-wheelers and snowmobiles. Not to mention streaks, burgers and pizza. That sort of connectivity also allows the worst of the big city to ooze out into surrounding communities and the novelty of accessibility and convenience can wear off.
It’s tempting, but not realistic to stay indefinitely. There is a difference between a break from, and avoidance of, responsibilities. A break is restorative and helps you handle responsibilities. A break provides a chance to catch your breath, even if that means hikes so tough you can hardly breathe.
As far as the first meal once I get out, it might not be healthy, but it sure won’t involve removing the oxygen absorber before adding water.
• Jeff Lund is a freelance writer based in Ketchikan. His book, “A Miserable Paradise: Life in Southeast Alaska,” is available in local bookstores and at Amazon.com. “I Went to the Woods” appears twice per month in the Sports & Outdoors section of the Juneau Empire.
