Winter Cabin Time in Wrangell – St. Elias National Park, Alaska

Last week Maria and I went out to McCarthy to enjoy a getaway at our cabin. We often refer to our little house in the woods as our Camp David. It’s a place for the Executive Branch of our household, Maria and I, to escape the daily routine. March is spring in some places, but it is definitely winter in Alaska. When we leave the cabin in the fall, we set it to “winter mode”, we don’t shut it down for the winter.

The winterized cabin is a bit different from the summer version. In summer, we have a rainwater collection system, a hot shower, a French drain, pump-driven running water in the kitchen, and we can drive all the way to our front door. In winter, we have a nice snow trail. We used to ski in and carry all our gear, including all the food and water we would need while staying at the cabin. Now we bring our Ski-Doo and easily transport our stuff and water up the hill on the trail to our front door. We park the truck three miles away at the foot bridge, where road maintenance ends, and where we can find parking.

The water systems are all “winterized,” meaning they are filled with RV antifreeze. We still have running water though, but it’s a bucket-to-bucket system. Nice enough to wash our hands, but not quite like pumped water from our 300-gallon summer system. We have to dump the slop bucket that’s under the sink drain. It’s always a good idea to do that when it is only half full. The shower hoses are also filled with RV antifreeze, so that is out. Instead, we use a big Rubbermaid tub, and heat water with a teapot, for a quick pour-over bath, which we may do once or twice during our stay.

In the summer, I may burn wood in the stove once every few days during the shoulder seasons. In winter, we get in and fire the stove up right away, and for three days, we don’t let it go out. It was -26F outside when we woke up on the first morning; the ambient air temperature inside the cabin was about 55F. Until it hits 70F inside, I keep the fire cranking. On day three, the cabin logs were warmed, and I let the fire go out for up to four hours before it dropped below 60F inside. I have a lot of wood, since the 10 acres are densely wooded, but I figure the amount I have stockpiled is good for about two months. 

The solar panels work in winter, and I even turned on the refrigerator when the house warmed up. Electric lights are a major bonus during winter; a few years ago we used candles and flashlights. Evening time is now a joy, and we play games and even watch movies! I like winter; it is peaceful. Hearing a loud plane overhead is rare, and the quantity of people is maybe 10% of the summer crew. In summer, you can hear the buzz of McCarthy even though we live 2 miles from town. In winter, the birds and the fan from the woodstove are all we can hear.

In summer, the Kennicott Glacier is brown, and the Root Glacier, Gates Glacier, and Mt. Blackburn stand out, glowing white and blue. In winter, everything is coated white with snow. Porphyry Peak and Bonanza Ridge look phenomenal! But the snow diminishes the grandeur of the 5,000ft icefall. The area is gorgeous, but different.

I am always slightly worried the whole time I am in McCarthy in the winter. So many things could go wrong. Injury, fire, blizzards, and other unknowns that in the summer would be bad, but wouldn’t jeopardize life. I feel like I need to leave a change of clothes in the woodshed in case I have to leave the cabin in a hurry. I already leave the key to the snowmachine in the ignition, in case of an emergency.  

Blizzards can be disconcerting since the road only gets plowed when the airstrip is not usable, meaning there could be a week or two when the road is basically impassable. Or I worry about a meltdown. There is a thing on the McCarthy Road called road glaciers, which is when a culvert freezes up, and the excess water pours over the road and freezes, sometimes being feet deep of ice. If it warms up, it becomes slushy and unstable, which can cause difficulty in traversing. I have heard about people getting stuck for hours or sliding to the edge of the road and flipping their rig! I have tire chains for such situations, but I hate using tire chains because they’re hard on the tires and wheel wells! 

We didn’t have a blizzard or meltdown this time, thankfully! And we drove in and out basically easier than in the summer. The ice road can be amazing when you have good luck. And we had an amazing time! We went to Kennecott, XC skied all over the glacial lakes, drove the snowmachine on three different rivers, and basically had a blast! I can’t recommend visiting McCarthy in the winter due to all the things I mentioned above, and I’ve pulled the plug on trips when I knew I would be driving in a blizzard. But it’s really fun if all the stars align and a winter trip happens. Did I mention how beautiful the stars are in the winter? I saw some faint Aurora, but the Milky Way and the constellations are spectacular without any light contamination.

I am glad to be back and working on new paintings in the Anchorage studio. Enjoy these longer days and get out before the snow all melts down! 

Ca•bin•a•tion – a Vacation at One’s Cabin

Maria and I are at the cabin in McCarthy this week, and it has been a dream.  This is not always the case when adventuring in the WRST (Wrangell-St. Elias) National Park in the winter.  We have been here when we have had a cold (virus).  We have been here when we thought we were not going to be able to drive out, because it snowed so much.  We have cancelled many trips, because the weather forecast and our work schedule didn’t align.  I would schedule a time when I didn’t have a lot of work, and then a blizzard would start up after we were already packed and ready to drive out to McCarthy.  The thing about McCarthy is that it’s a long drive of 310 miles one way, and the McCarthy Road is no joke in the winter.  It can vary from being a two lane ice highway, to just two ruts in ten inches of packed ice and crusty snow.  Tire chains are a must-have, and it is a good idea to have a reliable 4WD vehicle with 10 inches of clearance.  I will not drive out to the cabin in a winter blizzard, I’ll drive back to Anchorage in one, but not out here, just to get stuck for an unknown amount of time.  We haven’t made it here in the snow season since spring of 2020. 

Maria and I recently purchased a 2023 Ski-Doo Expedition Sport 600 ACE, and we love this transportation device!  It has made winter cabin life way safer, easier and more fun.  We have been here without a snowmachine (snowmobile, or sled for people not from Alaska) and the amount of time spent hauling water to the cabin was notable.  With our new “sled”, transportation around the area has been a breeze, and hauling our stuff to the cabin, including water, now takes a fraction of the time.  

We have a 10-acre lot here, and we put our cabin right in the middle of it to be further from the trail/road for privacy.  Nobody had been here since fall.  I had to break trail through 4 feet of packed sugar snow.  First, we unhitched the sled load, and immediately got stuck, almost rolling the snowmachine on its side.  I was able to back out to the road with some vigorous shoveling.  We then strapped on our XC skis and broke a trail-loop to the cabin from the the road to the front door.  About this time, Jason Lobo showed up (he lives past us, about a mile up the trail).  Jason was full of good ideas and pointers to get me and my stuff to my doorstep.  However, I didn’t put them to very good use, and got stuck about 50 feet in.  Jason took the handlebars and drove the last 200 feet of the trail, and Maria rewarded him with a beer for his efforts.  I then practiced driving around the still soft trail about four times before re-hitching the load and bringing it in to the cabin.  I really need to practice driving in deep snow.

Yesterday was a bluebird day, and we met up with our buddy Matt Empt and his dog Duncan.  We drove the sled to Kennicott and picnicked behind the power plant.  Duncan ran and alternately rode with Matt on his vintage Yamaha Bravo 250.  The views were spectacular!  The WRST park is a feast for the eyes!  We then went down the hill to play on the glacier lake where we towed Matt around on his alpine skis, and I practiced driving in the deep stuff.  I got stuck a few times and I figured out how to ride in the powder a bit better.  The thing is, the snow is not really completely powder, it is an accumulation of many storms, and the layers are inconsistent — a bit of crust mixed into the sugary stuff beneath.  It makes it really easy to bog down if you don’t keep up your speed.  We had a great time, and then we rode back to the cabin.

We love being at the cabin, and a vacation at your other home is a wonderful way to go.  Building a cabin is no joke, and buying one can be pretty expensive as well.  But it sure makes a vacation simple.  You have all you stuff there, and you don’t have to make a lodging reservation at a VRBO, or wherever.  There is no host to have to communicate with, and when you leave, the cleanup is all your own.  Using a wood stove is about as much a learning experience as using a snowmachine, but when it is your own, it makes it that much easier.  Relaxation is at a high compared to previous trips here in the winter, and I think mostly that is due to the new sled.  It feels safer to have a reliable mode of transport up and down the hill to the truck, and possibly all the way to Chitina.  Life is good!  Live it well!     

Lazy Morning at the Cabin

Maria and I are at the cabin in McCarthy today.  It has been ten years since we started building this little log house.  We woke up to rain and a bit of wind.  I started a fire in the wood stove, since rain promises a colder day. It is 45F outside, but a nice toasty 67F inside the cabin.  Should I put another log on the fire? I think not. 67F, is great but 75F is too warm.  I’m supposed to be outside harvesting dry spruce branches to fuel the Burning Dude, which will burn tomorrow at 9pm on the bank of the mighty Kennicott River. I made a lazy breakfast burrito with all the fixings and then volunteered to do the dishes.  The dishes are done, and it is still raining. I think I’ll have a pot of hot herbal tea, since the coffee is all gone and I don’t want anything with more caffeine at this point. I already did my yoga and there are no good reasons left not to go outside and get to work, but I am enjoying taking it slow today. I will go outside and harvest that brush when I am done writing this blog.  Until then, I’m going to enjoy watching the birds splash in the puddles outside, and the trees wiggle in the wind. The hot tea is great, and I can see fall happening all around me with yellow leaves falling from Aspen tops, and fireweed going to seed.  Yesterday we woke up to frost on the ground, then it started raining in the afternoon. I love how fall is a slower time of year — getting us all ready for the stillness of winter. I’m excited about tomorrow’s Burning Dude event, and I’ll talk about that in my next blog post. I wonder if anyone will come if it’s raining hard and windy.  At least fire danger will be low, since it has rained a bunch in the last 24 hours. Okay I’m ready to go out now. I better put on my waterproof gear, since I can hear the rain humming on the metal roof.

We built Burning Dude yesterday. The Dude is getting very wet in this rain storm. He will burn on 9.09 at 9:09pm on the bank of the Kennicott River.

Burning Dude, McCarthy, AK, September 11, 2021, 9:11pm

Burning Dude 2021

I know that Burning Man is an established event that has been happening for decades,  but I have never been.  I basically don’t know anything about the event, except that it is a wickedly insane art festival where they burn a temple at the end, sometimes with a man at the top.  A week-long avant-garde art event with 70,000 people all showing up to party and experience being human together in the middle of a hot, dusty desert.  

Dave Hollis, my friend in McCarthy, is a retired computer programmer who I would consider to be the social guru for the Kennicott River Valley.  This guy knows what is happening, where it is happening, and also plans some amazing events of his own.  In McCarthy, around 2009 Dani Evans and B-Mac built a Burning Woman, and she asked Hollis to be a fire tender.  Four years ago in 2018, Hollis and Brady, and some other McCarthy locals, decided to make a small version of Burning Man, which they called Burning Dude.  It is a fragment of the Nevada festival, and can’t even be compared, but it is still a hoot, and a lot of fun.  I missed the Burning Woman, and I also missed the first Dude, who was 12 feet tall, and I heard was awesome.  In 2019 fire danger was high, so there was no Dude.  The second Burning Dude in 2020 was designed by Seth, a local fire dancer, and I helped erect the dude with 10 other people, while Brady quickly nailed supports to keep it upright.  It burned, but never fully caught on fire.  The sculpture was 34 feet tall.  The oversized head was dropped and ignited later, providing plenty of entertainment.  I told the team that I have sculpture training and would like to help build next year’s Dude.

Burning Dude 2020

This fall, both Seth and Brady were not available to build the Dude.  Hollis was bummed, but he asked me if I thought it could still happen without them.  I gathered a small team: my wife Maria, my cousin Cameron, and of course Hollis.  I designed the Dude on a sheet of paper, to be built from log mill slabs, which are fairly irregular, and have a lot of bark on them.  I took an afternoon the day before to gather twigs from the bottom of spruce trees from my ten-acre lot, and loaded them onto my trailer.  The next day, Maria and I drove down to McCarthy, picked up Cameron and we unloaded the brush on the bank of the Kennicott River.  Then we drove over to Hollis’ house where we picked up about 200 spruce slabs.  We chucked them down to the Kennicott river, and we started to build.  I had packed a ton of tools, including my cordless drill, driver, chainsaw, a million screws and nails, as well as wire.  First, I built a sturdy box, and then we built the feet and legs.  We attached the torso, and put on the arms.  Finally we built the head, and put a crown of sparklers on top of it.  Hollis and Maria juggled the head up to Cameron, who was standing on the box.  Cameron hoisted the head up to me, as I crouched inside the torso.  I quick-like attached the head and then had to remove my chainsaw helmet to extract myself from the torso.  Next, we stuffed the spruce branches all over the dude and filled the box, torso and head.  I bought a gallon of vegetable oil and we stapled oily paper towels all over the Dude.  We were building the Dude in a prominent location, right next to the foot bridge, where everyone saw us.  Hollis did a great job telling people to show up at 9pm for Burning Dude.

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We had three hours to spare before the scheduled ignition, so we went to Mark and Livvi’s new house for ice cream and hot dogs.  At 9pm, a fairly large crowd had gathered around the Dude.  All four of us ignited him at 9:11pm on 9/11!  I knew the spruce boughs would work, and vegetable oil is essentially as combustable as diesel fuel.  It ignited in three stages: first the box platform, then the torso, and finally the head.  The head had this amazing glowing crown above it from the sparklers, and then it kept burning even after the branches all burned up.  The paper towels were amazing.  The head fell in after 11 minutes, but the Dude lasted about 44 more before Malcolm decided to kick the box over.  I was so pleased with how well everything worked.  I thank Maria, Cameron and especially Hollis for making this possible!  Not as spectacular as Burning Man festival in Nevada, but Burn Dude was a success in 2021!   

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Spring is in the Air!

You can smell spring in the air!  That means pollen, dust, dog poop, and lots of muddy puddles here in Anchorage, Alaska.  This is the time of year when I start to really miss our cabin in McCarthy, and looking forward to escaping there.  We’re planning to head out there the day after Mother’s Day. That’s right, you still have a little time to order a present for your mom, before May 9th!  I’ve gone to MXY (the airport code for McCarthy) earlier in the year, but the driveway to our cabin gets really swampy during meltdown, so I’ve found it’s better to wait until the second week of May. This year will be especially swampy, considering the heavy amount of snow. I hope the wood shed is still standing! On big snow years, piles of snow are still sitting around through Memorial Day weekend!

I love the first trip in spring to the cabin, because we no longer have to do too much building, mostly just opening up the cabin, setting up the rain-catchment system, and seeing my MXY friends. I always bring my painting supplies with me, so I can keep working in my little studio out there, which was formerly our shelter while we worked on the cabin. This year I hope to go on a couple over-night backpacking trips into the National Park, and plant a big garden. My mother-in-law came to visit last year, and decided that we needed a garden, so she ripped out a lot of bushes, and cleared a nice spot for it. Then I cut down a few trees, tore out the stumps, and rototilled the dirt. We just need to build a fence to keep the critters out, and then we can plant the seed potatoes we’ve been saving all winter, and the little starts that are growing nicely in our condo right now.

Summer isn’t even here, and I’m already planning out the entire season. We all kind of go nuts here in Alaska in the summer with all this daylight. Here’s hoping for plenty of sunny days, but also enough rain to keep the forest fires at bay.

Brand new leaves on the aspen trees on our property.

How I Won My First Beer Brewing Contest – by Maria Benner

This is a guest post by Maria Benner, the Business Manager of Real Art Is Better.  Scott asked me to write this post today about my experience winning my first beer brewing contest.  He had a lot to do with that!

During Alaska Beer Week, one of the events is Turnagain Brewing‘s Tart Side Challenge.  Members of the Great Northern Brewers Club who choose to participate pick up 1 gallon of unfermented wort from Turnagain Brewing, which is the brewery’s base for its sour beers.  Then contest participants flavor the wort at home with ingredients of their choice, bottle the beer, and submit it for judging.  The brewery then brews a big batch of the winning recipe.  Well, Alaska Beer Week was re-scheduled at the last minute this year in January, so I missed it, because I was in India.  So, Scott showed up to the brewery to pick up his 1 gallon, and Ted, the owner, let him take another gallon on my behalf, and the two of them entered me into the contest by proxy.  Scott called me, and asked me what I wanted to do, and I told him to put blueberries in it.  He flavored my gallon with frozen whole organic blueberries from Costco, and added a little DME for extra carbonation.  When I returned from my trip, I bottled the beer, and then we submitted our entries to the brewery a couple months later.  Scott flavored his batch with honey and ginger, which was delicious!

The judging took place at the GNBC annual campout in June, and my blueberry beer was declared the winner!  So Ted called me to congratulate me, and to ask me how I made the beer, so I told him that I was in India, and Scott flavored it.  So Ted called Scott to get the recipe.  Turnagain Brewing was short on fermentation capacity, so Ted fermented my blueberry beer in a red wine barrel.  So the beer turned out very different from my/Scott’s version, but it was really tasty!  The red wine barrel added depth, and a bit more sour flavor.  Ted also boosted the amount of blueberries by 25% to 1.25 lbs per gallon, and pulverized them, instead of adding them whole.  The result was a deep purple beer!  We named it Blueberry Avalanche.

Well, the big release date was set for August 12th, but no one checked with us, and we had already planned to be at our cabin in McCarthy during that time.  So Ted was kind enough to arrange a wholesale of one pony keg to the owner of The Potato restaurant in McCarthy, just so I could also drink my beer along with everyone else on the 12th.  Scott and I personally delivered the keg to McCarthy.  The night before the big day I texted the owner of The Potato to ask when my keg would be on draft.  She told me we had to finish some keg of kristallweizen first.  So the next day I texted her again, and stressed the importance of debuting my blueberry beer on August 12th, the same day as in Anchorage.  She was kind enough to switch out the kegs, and I was super happy to drink two pints of my beer in McCarthy on the release date!  Some of my friends in Anchorage were drinking it at Turnagain Brewing, and sending me messages about how much they liked the beer!  I heard it was very popular.  There were only six pony kegs in existence, and they were all gone in less than five days.

Thanks to Turnagain Brewing, my hubby, the GNBC, and The Potato for making this experience so fun for me!  I’m looking forward to participating in more brewing contests!

“Brewed by local Maria Benner”

Cheers!

 

Spring Break Alaska Style

Spring break in Alaska means skiing, building snowmen, and spending time inside, because up here winter lasts well into April. Most stores are on a national merchandising schedule, so while Costco is selling snorkel masks and swimsuits in March, we’re still looking for hand and toe warmers, and new ski jackets.  Ever since we finished building our log cabin in McCarthy, we’ve been going there for Spring break whenever we can, because McCarthy in March is super beautiful and fun!  So here are some photos from our rowdy spring break shenanigans, Alaska style.  At the time we still didn’t know that spring break would be endless this year due to COVID-19.

In the winter we can’t drive all the way to the cabin, so we haul stuff that can’t freeze in the truck up to the cabin on the first trip — about 2.5 miles, in case the snow machine doesn’t start when we get there.

Windy day

The snowmachine started, and we loaded all supplies to the cabin in one trip

Relaxin’

While digging out the benches around the fire pit, I arranged the snow blocks into a modern snowman sculpture.

We brought fireworks. Sorry neighbors!

Sunny day for an afternoon ski!

Jason Lobo’s Dodge Power Wagon

We spent two weeks in McCarthy earlier this month, and while at a great BBQ on the West side, I invited myself over to my neighbor Jason Lobo’s place to paint one of his many interesting vehicles.  Although we live in the same subdivision, his lot is about a mile away.  I walked, as I felt it would be easier to pack the painting home walking than biking.  Also, the road is a mud swamp due to spring meltdown, so driving was less than desirable.  I arrived to find Jason working in his yard.  After a few minutes he gave me a tour of his new water truck, which is a F-750 Ford.  Parked right next to it was this beauty, a vintage Dodge Power Wagon.  A great truck, and it still runs!  I love how it has not been restored, but has all the scars and patina of a working machine.  I guess the fuel pump is out, because Jason has connected a gravity fed fuel tank.  I had a great time painting this cool old McCarthy truck, stopping every hour, or so, to chat with Lobo.  He was working in the garden planting onions, garlic, and potatoes.  I walked home in the afternoon to have a late lunch, and then got some of my own yard work done.  Overall, a pretty productive day.  By the way, this isn’t the first time I’ve painted one of Jason’s trucks.  Check out the painting of his red Ford.

This original oil painting, and limited-edition prints are for sale at my Etsy shop RealArtIsBetter.

Jason Lobo’s Dodge Power Wagon. 14″x11″, oil on panel. By Scott Clendaniel.

A Tale of Two Homes… in Alaska

Back at the cabin after a skiing adventure.

People always ask how I like living in McCarthy.  They must see my Facebook posts and just assume since I spend a lot of time there that it’s my primary residence.  As of now, I live in an efficient downtown condo in Anchorage.  As much as I love going to McCarthy, and the Wrangell – St. Elias National Park that surrounds this cool mountain town, I will probably never spend more than five months of the year there.  It’s really remote without a real gas station and only a small seasonal grocery store.  Maria and I have been building a cabin on our lot two miles south of the town of McCarthy for about four years now.  We bought the lot in 2005, and I convinced Maria that we should start to build a cabin there in 2010.  In 2012 we broke ground on the foundation and started the log work.  Three summers later we were putting the roof on.  This year we installed the wood stove and moved in!

We have lived in a small apartment style condo in Anchorage since 2006.  It has been really efficient, and at 730+ square feet, two bedrooms with a small bathroom, it is not luxurious, but cozy and comfortable city living.  I just cleaned the entire pad in about an hour this morning.  However, it feels cramped after a long winter and I was just dying to go to McCarthy in the winter now that the wood stove is in.  Hanging out on our ten acres in the woods after living near the heart of Anchorage without an outlet to private outdoor space left us feeling hankering for some wilderness solitude.  I convinced Maria it would be cool to head out for a week in March, ski in with sleds of supplies and just hang at out mountain home.  I did some painting and Maria did some business work in the mornings and we would adventure in the afternoons.  Later in the day, which are getting longer and longer as spring rapidly approaches, we would burn large fires of forest brush in the outdoor fire ring.  On a couple of noteworthy outings we skied around the sleepy town of Kennicott, explored on skis the icebergs on the West side of the glacier, skied up McCarthy Creek, and in and around our neighborhood.  Overall, it really gave me a great feeling of mountains wilderness beauty that satisfied our itch to leave the hubbub of the city  behind.

Working next to the wood stove.

The trip was great, but a week was long enough during March.  First off, water is a problem in our subdivision.  We are up on a bluff, so you have to spend some serious cash to put in deep wells, so most of the time we collect rain water from our roof.  This works really well during the summer months, and in winter there is snow, but it takes a lot of energy and time to melt snow.  We can’t drive to our lot during the winter as the bridge is covered in three feet of snow and so is the road up to our place.  It is a snowmobile haven, and a good place to ski as well.  I ski, since I don’t have an Arctic Cat or a Ski-Doo.  Water is heavy, so we had to ration it to avoid too many heavy loads.  Another problem with wilderness living in the winter is using the outhouse, which is really far away from the warm house, and is frozen.  Lastly, the wood stove is an archaic technology that is a lot of work to keep a log cabin warm.  It’s hard to find wood that isn’t too wet from snow.  It seems that it rained and froze right before it snowed, and even though I stored the wood under a tarp, there was a lot of it full of moisture.  Yes, we are in the process of building a necessary woodshed, but as I said, we aren’t even fully done building the place yet.  The house has a bunch of drafts and we need to finish chinking, as well as installing a bunch of important trim pieces.  It seemed I was constantly loading the stove, until the creosote clogged the pipe.  This turned out to be a major cluster, but fortunately it happened at the end of the week so we just went home.  Next time I head out, I have to bring a chimney brush, climb on the roof and maintain the stovepipe before we have heat.  Then we will have to hope we don’t burn the place down.  It seems silly to have a house that is made of the same combustible stuff we heat it with, but it’s working for now.

Maria skiing past an ice berg on Kennicott Glacier.

Icebergs on Kennicott Glacier.

After a week in the woods, I’m glad to be back in Anchorage.  Working at the comfortable studio with running water, and hanging out in my small cozy condo at the corner of downtown and Fairview.  I can buy groceries and gas, drive on plowed roads, have indoor plumbing, and a thermostat.  The wilderness is very inspirational, and I loved my trip, but I also know that the people who live out there are some tough hombres.  It isn’t easy living off grid especially as you are building systems.  One thing goes wrong and you could be living in a cold cabin… or worse.

We waited for this giant slab of snow and ice to crash all week, and it finally fell with a loud thud on our last night at the cabin.

The gray jays were happy to see us. They finally started eating out of our hands last summer.

The Kennicott Mill building.

The Kennicott Glacier.