Northern Journey
A Newspaperman's Story
In the Introduction to his book Northern Journey, A Report from the Frontier (Northern Light Media, 2023), author and longtime newspaperman Lew Freedman wrote:
Some people were born to the North and never know anything else. They would faint after a minute-and-a-half if dropped into a heat-searing desert. Some come to the North later and accept and appreciate what it is and has always been. That was me, encountering first Alaska, then much of Canada, Greenland and Iceland, beginning in my thirties. These were big lands, grand lands, open lands, vaster than anywhere else you were likely to visit.
Lew Freedman moved to Alaska in the winter of 1984, and in the first chapter he tells readers what that was like, and about his introduction—as assistant sports editor of the Anchorage Daily News—to the great Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race and fishing in the North.
CHAPTER 1
GOING NORTH
Alaska was a foreign concept to those around us in Philadelphia when we announced a mid-winter departure for the North. My wife at the time, young daughter, 5, and myself, were viewed as aliens in some quarters – such as the pages of the Philadelphia Inquirer newspaper.
Under the headline "Moves: Juneau where they’re going?” a local columnist named Clark DeLeon examined what was considered a peculiar plan. In part, he wrote of the Freedmans, “You might say that Lew and Donna have had it with Philadelphia winters. They’re packing up their belongings and their 5 ½-year-old daughter Abigail and heading to where the weather is different – Alaska. You were expecting maybe Miami?”
The Mrs. quoted an uncle who had been stationed in Alaska with the military and said, “The only thing to do up there was to go to the dump and watch the polar bears.” She also reported that since fresh food had to be flown in, all the vegetables “suffered from jet lag.”
Some 40 years later, I still wonder where the uncle hung out since I have never once seen a polar bear in Alaska, outside of the zoo. I know they’re out there, but not whenever I’ve been around.
The funny thing about our game plan for reaching Alaska was to avoid as much winter as possible. So instead of driving straight across the northern tier of the Lower 48 states, through such known chilly places as Minnesota and the Dakotas, where a blizzard was liable to break out, we embarked on a two-car caravan in a half-circle, driving 4,000 miles to reach Seattle. There we placed our vehicles on a barge and we flew to Anchorage.
This proved to be the right decision since, indeed, there was a major snowstorm in the upper Midwest we would have collided with. It would have been good practice for Alaska, but we were not seeking such diversions. Going south to go north was more amenable.
It took less than a day in Anchorage to learn something about the harshness of Alaska in winter. We landed on February 12, 1984. That was the day Japanese adventurer Naomi Uemura, a world-class mountain climber, disappeared on an attempt to make the first solo winter ascent of 20,320-foot Mt. McKinley, whose name was later changed to Denali.
As we sought an apartment to rent, the news was all about Uemura. The shocking aspect was that he was deemed doomed so quickly. One minute search parties were being formed, the next he was being declared dead. So fast? Yes. The message delivered was that no one stays alive in the extreme of such winter for very long on his own. Uemura’s body was never found.
When I was a little boy I wanted to be a cowboy, going out West to work on a ranch or join the rodeo. Instead, I was on The Last Frontier, which was more western than the Wild West, as well as more northern. Although it did not immediately cross my mind, I eventually realized I was now positioned to rope moose instead of cattle.
In preparing to transition to Alaska, I yielded to the constant threat of snow and ice and gave into temptation and bought the biggest car I had ever owned. Car might not be the most accurate word. It was an eight-cylinder honking-big Chevy Blazer that was kin to a tank and burned through gasoline at an obscene rate. It was sturdy as all heck, though, which came in handy a few times when someone skidded into me after being unable to halt on slick pavement. In one such incident, they wrecked their own front grill and I drove away with an inch-long dent.
I bought the vehicle in New Jersey. During the drive, passing through Memphis, I spied a newspaper ad for Blazers – and they were throwing in free rifles. Darn it, missed the bargain. In Oklahoma, there was a sign on the road reading, “Hitchhikers May Be Escaping Convicts.” One way to sell your state’s charms.
We spent eight days driving to Seattle. When we flew into Anchorage, it was sunny out the plane’s window and the breathtaking view, which I later learned was the regular reminder we were home, was of the snow-covered Chugach Mountains. You inhaled Alaska’s gorgeous nature at first sight, really at first step, when disembarking from the terminal.
Of course, those were baby mountains compared to McKinley/Denali, which had Uemura captured in its icy tentacles. When the sun was out, which it happened to be, we could see the big mountain 130 miles to the north, the signature geographic feature of the state.
Alaska was beautiful, but it could be as mean and heartless as a gangster holding a grudge, only slightly less capricious than a roulette wheel in choosing whose number was up. We were Cheechakos, newcomers, but it all made you think as you learned what fierceness Alaska sometimes held.
Soon enough, there were troops of family and friends lined up asking, “What’s it like?” Anchorage was home to 200,000 people at the time, so it wasn’t as if we were moving to a village of 25 or anything. There were cars and street lights and such things that were relatively big-city-like. But almost from the start I took notes on ways Alaska was different than all other places I had known or visited.
Such as darkness. At the peak of winter, if that is the proper word, Anchorage has daylight roughly five hours per day, smack in the middle of the day, from about 10 a.m. to around 3 p.m. You notice. Some people don’t do well with that. They can’t cope and fall into deep depressions. There is even a name for such reactions: Seasonal Affective Disorder. It is no accident the acronym is SAD. The shortage of light did not faze me at all, but did bother my wife, who eventually purchased a special light she turned on and up occasionally as an artificial sunlight fix.
Of course, everyone expected that we were going to be colder than we had ever been in our lives. But that wasn’t quite true. I grew up in Boston and New England, places that knew its stuff when it came to winter. I had also lived in Syracuse, New York for two years. One winter in upstate New York it snowed 160 inches, more than it ever did in a single season in Anchorage. On a day off there, after listening to a weather report indicate a minus-50 windchill, I decided to take a walk and see how it felt. Since wind was blowing like a hurricane, visibility was almost non-existent and guess what? It was cold. My walk was cut short after a mile.
Alaska has an image, but not all of Alaska is the same. There are several distinct sections of the state. Southeast, where Juneau is situated, is damper rather than colder. Anchorage is dry and cold, but not nearly as cold for as long as Fairbanks, 365 miles to the north.
In early March, snow began to melt. The temperature rose to 45 and even 50 degrees. In Anchorage, they call it “break-up” when the winter ice begins to melt, more often than calling it “spring,” as the season is termed elsewhere. The puddles were mini-lakes. Neighborhoods rivaled the Mississippi River at flood stage.
I felt compelled to write to the others Outside informing them we had not frozen to death, that Anchorage had such establishments as McDonald’s and Dairy Queen. The general idea was to try out Alaska for a year and see if it fit, to determine if it could become home. Some days Anchorage seemed as “normal” as any other American city. At other times it was so different – sled-dog races on the main street of downtown – you had to remind yourself it was actually part of the United States. A running joke, even then, was calling Anchorage “Los Anchorage,” to imply it had more in common with Los Angeles than the rest of Alaska.
As someone who looked for the differences from what I had known living in Boston, Philadelphia, Syracuse and Tallahassee, Florida, I scoffed at the insult portrait. There were plenty of ways Anchorage was Alaska. Let’s just say that in none of those other communities, did they hold an annual “Fur Rendezvous” celebration where trappers traipsed through the street wearing their own version of Davy Crockett hats, or the fur of any dead animal.
Dog mushing is the national sport of the north. For the Fur Rondy sprint races, three days of heats of 20-or-so miles, or for the ceremonial start of the 1,000-mile Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race, officials truck snow in and unload it all over the downtown streets. Isn’t that backwards? I thought so. Everywhere else I lived where it snowed, they plowed the snow off the streets to clear them. It was a bit head-shaking the first time I watched dump trucks rumbling through downtown unleashing fresh snow from their butts, making for a blanket of white over the asphalt.
As a sportswriter, I wrote about major dog races many times in Alaska, but although I had zero intimate knowledge of the animals, I also felt compelled to guide a sled. Less than five minutes into my first experience driving dogs, I miscalculated on a gentle curve. As the sled rounded a stand of trees, it tipped sideways. In slow motion, but nonetheless irreversibly, it tipped over. I fell off the runners and splashed into the snow face first. I ate a mouthful of white. Snow shot up the sleeve of my parka, stinging a wrist and arm with its chill. We were only traveling about two miles per hour, so little violence was done to any body part, but there was minor damage to the ego. I thought, “Don’t they have power steering?” Actually, it would have qualified for “America’s Funniest Home Videos,” but no videotaping took place.
Snow fell thickly, but gently, wet flakes splattering on my coat.
The smoothed sled-dog trail wound through the spruce trees, their needles weighted with fresh snow. As I lay on the ground, the dogs stopped, turned their heads and stared back at me with a look of superiority. I am not sure if dogs could be described as smirking. The sled was righted. I climbed back on the runners and I shouted, “Mush!” Just had to say it.
I was not actually alone steering the sled. Also standing behind the sled basket was Dan Shetter, the pro. I was more like the pupil in a driver’s ed car with a learner’s permit. He was the licensed driver who would step on the brakes if anything went truly wrong, perhaps if we were going to mush over a cliff. The huskies barked and ran on. This was a tourist trip of 10 miles, hauled by eight dogs through woods and meadows in Girdwood, on the outskirts of Anchorage where Alyeska Ski Resort is located.
The sled runners whooshed through the snow. The dogs galloped, tongues bobbing as they breathed in the brisk air. Our movement, reaching 10 miles per hour tops on this highway, created a noticeable windchill factor. We were surrounded by snow-covered mountains rising up as a craggy wall. The nearby Seward Highway was invisible on the other side of the hills, Anchorage seemed distant. It was much like mushing into the past, before the world’s pace of travel advanced to high-speed, engine-propelled urgency. Once, dog teams owned the north country. If men had the bravery to head into the wilderness, they needed dogs to get anywhere. They moved by sled, not trains or planes and certainly not automobiles. Driving a team of sled dogs this day pretty much made me a time traveler.
I could see how the sport grew on you. I had never owned a dog, never had one for a pet, not until much later. For a time period, when I was a long-distance runner, all dogs seemed to be the enemy because they chased me, barking, making as if to bite me. When I first arrived in Alaska, I thought dog owners were grown-up fans of “Lassie” whose parents didn’t allow them to have dogs when they were children. So, they made up for it by operating dog yards, with 50 or even 100 canines, huskies who were athletes.
Gradually, throughout the 1980s and beyond, dog care and nutrition became more sophisticated as mushers trained their animals to run into the wind and whose animals matured into fast athletes. None of this off-the-shelf chow stuff. They had dog food manufacturers as sponsors and their dogs only ate the best quality goods. People in the Lower 48 states who followed the Iditarod heard about the $50,000 first-place prize at stake, but they had no idea the cost of sustaining a team and a dog lot year-round exceeded what could be won on the trail. Those serious mushers darned well needed sponsor help.
Since it began in 1973, no musher has ever died during the Iditarod race, though it seems inevitable someday someone will be caught on his own in the middle of nowhere in the middle of a blizzard, lose his team and be forced to trudge through insanely harsh weather. Such things have happened several times, to race founder Joe Redington Sr., Joe Garnie and Lavon Barve, among some top contenders. They had to dig snow caves with their gloved hands and put up with bone-chilling temperatures overnight without being fortified by water or food. They survived.
The toughest survive, men or women, and their dogs. Garnie walked for 18 hours alone to make it through one terrifying night. Martin Buser, originally from Switzerland, who settled in Big Lake, Alaska, about 60 miles north of Anchorage, and became a four-time Iditarod champion, once said that coping with the blowing wind on the Bering Sea Coast near the end of each year’s race removed a layer of skin on his cheeks each time. Yet Buser had competed in the race 37 times. Perhaps he has a lotion maker as a sponsor.
On a trip to Nome one year, 1993, I was given a back country sled ride by Matt Desalernos, who was then president of the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Committee. He stuffed me into the sled basket and took off, mushing in country far from the race finish line. It was 10 degrees and I felt the nippy nature of the air. I wore borrowed over-sized mitts and a face mask, but still understood the chill.
We bumped over a trail thinly coated with snow so that each time we rose and dropped, my back slammed against the back of the sled. When we hit a really good spot, I thought I might have fused a tailbone. We were the only ones in sight. We mushed past the dilapidated cabin Wyatt Earp once occupied during Gold Rush days when he ran a Nome saloon.
My cowardly toes were in danger of being frostbitten in my regular boots. They were not as rugged as they once had been. Desalernos said, “You should have told me. I have so much foot gear my ex-wife used to call me the Imelda Marcos of the north.”
During our travels we spied a herd of musk oxen. The big, shaggy creatures remind me of northern-adapted buffalo. They have big, brown, baleful eyes. We cruised fairly close to one such oxen and Desalernos wondered aloud if a big dude might not turn on the dogs. The musk oxen ignored us.
The most famous dog-sled journey in history, known to those who study the north, was the Serum Run of 1925, when premier musher Leonhard Seppala guided dogs on the longest of legs culminating a relay that brought life-saving diphtheria medicine to Nome to save the community.
Shetter, my guide on the Girdwood trip, did not consider his dogs to be quite as reliable. Several were goofy, pleasant dogs. They enjoyed running, but were not hardened athletes and he didn’t seem to believe they would have been a good fit for the long-ago rescue. “If it were up to these guys, there’d be a lot of sick and dead people,” Shetter said.
Growing up I never went fishing. Not once. The only people in my family that I ever knew to go fishing were my grandfather and great-uncle on the occasional Saturday. They never invited me. I never resented it, either.
The first time I ever fished in my life I was 32 and it was the debut trip to Alaska on Auke Bay outside of Juneau. I wetted a line and it whetted my appetite for the sport, even though I was not about to be recruited for the Bass tour. I moved to a place, into an environment, where everyone I knew went fishing. I transformed from someone who thought of fishing as b-o-r-i-n-g to thinking of it as challenging and fun.
Eventually, I became someone who killed things. That is, who at least tried to, but who wasn’t as successful at hooking and bringing in fish as I wanted to be.
Harry Gaines taught me how to salmon fish. Harry was a guide on the Kenai River, recommended to me when I declared a must-need attempt to chase the wily king salmon since I was now an Alaskan. Harry was a radio personality who broadcast from the river. He was a jovial man who featured a white beard that made him resemble Santa Claus.
Anyone who writes about the outdoors is usually welcomed by a guide because it is thought great free publicity will come out of the trip. The writer has the power to make them look good. However, if the outdoors participant gets skunked, doesn’t catch any fish, the simple zero on his scorecard can make the guide look bad. Harry and I got along marvelously and became great friends. Yet it took me several tries spread over quite a few years for me to catch fish with him. I would write columns for the Anchorage Daily News making fun of myself and Harry would be razzed by friends and neighbors who asked, “Did that guy ever catch a fish with you?”
Finally, I caught a silver (or coho) salmon, a smaller species and Harry delivered a perfect reaction. He got down on his knees in his aluminum hulled boat on the river and salaamed me. Had to happen someday, he figured.
Especially in the 1980s (not so much now when the great chinook runs have declined), there was tremendous focus on the likelihood of someone catching a world record on the Kenai. In 1985, a gentleman from Soldotna named Les Anderson, who lived in the community right on the river, caught and weighed a 97 1/4-pound record fish. It was an astounding catch and the mount of this huge salmon is on display at the Soldotna Visitors Center.
Anderson was not the type to make a big deal out of things. He didn’t boast or brag and after a while he even tired of being introduced to people as the man who caught the world record.
The atmospheric conditions, the size of the salmon runs, the attention on the topic, all seemed to combine to throw a bright glare on the record. No one announced this fish was going to remain the biggest. Everyone felt the record would likely be broken again soon.
During this frenzy, Harry the guide decided why shouldn’t he be the one at the helm of the boat when the record was broken? Gaines wanted to offer a $50,000 prize to any angler who caught the record king with him. Of course, he wanted to insure himself against the payday. Harry was dismayed when Lloyd’s of London refused to take the gamble and insure him.
The record was not broken fishing with Harry. Nor did anyone out-fish Anderson in his lifetime. Or ever. Harry Gaines and Les Anderson both passed away years ago. Going on 40 years, Anderson’s world record remains the ultimate king salmon fish caught on rod and reel. Whenever I am in the area, I make sure to stop in and view the mount and admire the fish. It is a fatso, for sure, with tremendous girth. For sure, that king salmon is the fish of dreams. ~•~
This is an excerpt from Northern Journey, A Report from the Frontier, by Lew Freedman (Northern Light Media, 2023). In Northern Journey Lew tells the stories behind the adventures which became his multi-award-winning books and articles. 238 pages, 6″ x 9″ format, more than two dozen b/w photos. $24.95 plus $4.50 shipping. Available from Northern Light Media, Amazon, or via any bookstore (ISBN 9798373238281). You can order the book at this link: