The far north is a good place to be alone with one’s thoughts. Since my divorce, my little boy and I have been living in an invisible inner boundary of our own and Alaska‘s desolate interior seemed like the right place to get used to feeling more alone in the world, and at the same time get used to being more integrated with it. Despite the usual uneasiness I feel whenever I’m more than a few miles from civilization, the two of us traveled to central Alaska in January, where daytime temperatures are below freezing and daylight lasts less than five hours, and encountered the gloom and silence of the city. subarctic winter.

Our hosts, the husband-and-wife team of Jenna and David Jonas, have lived sustainably off the grid since 2012 on a bluff above the Tanana River, about 60 miles west of Fairbanks. David is the younger brother of one of my oldest friends, and when we were all teenagers, he built a cabin without power tools on his family’s wooded land in Vermont and lived there for two years. Now he and Jenna are experienced wilderness guides, and their home-based business, Alaska Homestead Adventures, offers private, bespoke, all-inclusive winter vacations.

As the crow flies or the dogs run, David and Jenna live seven miles from their nearest neighbor and 20 miles from the nearest town (Nenana, population 358). They cut ice for water, heat with wood, build their sleds by hand, and hunt, forage, or grow much of their food in what locals call the Big Land. They offer guests an alternative to the highly mediated, comfortable visits that most luxury tourism providers provide to remote natural landscapes. Instead, farm adventures involve full immersion in the chores and pleasures of life on the frozen frontier. This includes three home-cooked meals a day, as well as a wide range of indoor and outdoor winter activities, from whittling to ice fishing.

I was apprehensive about spending three days in a 225-square-foot space with an 11-year-old with no running water, but David and Jenna had lived in the one-room Sun Lodge, our cabin, for seven years before hand-building the larger log cabin. They currently live with their two young children in the cottage, a five-minute walk away.

After spending a night there fairbanksMy son and I woke up early to take a taxi 45 minutes south to a trailhead, where David met us up with the snowcat. We traded in our snow boots for warmer pairs he brought, giant coats, and what looked like glassblowing gloves. We then rode a sled attached to a snowcat, standing in the back and holding the bar – it felt like we were water skiing. We passed over powdery snow, through black spruce forest, and aspens occasionally scarred by the bite marks of a hungry deer.

We arrived at the courtyard just in time for a lunch of tasty and flavorful venison stew. We ate from wooden bowls with wooden spoons that our hosts carved from the nests and branches of their own trees. An outbuilding protected by birch bark walls stood about a minute’s walk away. After lunch, we laced up our snowshoes and, among the slips and stumbles, found and ate towering bush dogwoods, bright red and frozen on the branch. It was dark in the afternoon, so we wore our headlamps, but the path between our hostel and the main cabin was marked by Jenna’s delightful ice lanterns with lit candles inside.

The next day, after a delicious hot breakfast, we turned on the finger and toe warmers and went dog sledding. A team of nine people, led by David (and a dog named Jack), hauled us down the Nenana River, which was frozen 20 inches thick and filled with jumbled ice. David stopped to point out bobcat and otter tracks. During pulling breaks, the dogs rolled in the snow and took large bites of it to cool off. Back at the kennel we helped untie and rehome the dogs. Channeling his beloved Calvin and Hobbes, my son helped shovel the powdery snow into a pile. Quinzhee, or the Athabascan snow shelter. The snow was very dry, but David told us that it would form, or solidify, into a new, denser crystal structure within a few hours. Sintering struck me as a beautiful metaphor for our journey that was already strengthening and reinforcing our newly downsized family.

My son and I wore the same two layers of wool long johns and socks for three days and made heavy use of Jenna and David’s extra winter clothes. The snowcat runs on gasoline, but other than that, we didn’t subscribe to capitalism much. I kept my phone charged at the cabin and left it there for most of our daytime adventures. Nothing we did felt like tourism. On the contrary, I felt as if we had walked through a door and entered a cold, slow and alternative life.

On our third and final day, my son wanted to practice his crafting skills in the woods, so we hiked to the cliff edge, where David showed us how to make a fire from dead branches. We were lucky enough to find witch’s broom, an abnormal growth on a black spruce tree that makes an excellent fire starter. After returning to the hut, David brought several giant birch rolls from the workshop; We cut them, peeled them thinly, rubbed them with oil and folded them into decorative stars. My son still had time to dig into the snow shelter and make another sled run down a mile-long trail before sledding back onto the Parks Highway and then taking a cab back to Fairbanks.

We were hoping to see the elusive northern lights. I set an alarm for midnight and 1:30 every night, got up, put on my parka, and staggered a few steps outside the Sun Lodge. Unfortunately it was cloudy both nights. Even though we signed up for aurora wake-up calls at our Fairbanks hotel, there were no calls, just clouds. Surprisingly, I wasn’t disappointed to miss out on this classic bucket list experience; As it turned out, we didn’t need to see Alaska to feel its greatness. The far north had shown us another way, and a few days of giving up modern comforts and conveniences reminded us that we already had what we needed; In fact, there were plenty of them.

Alaska Homestead Adventures Two- to seven-day stays for up to four people from December through March start at $525 per person, per day.

A version of this story first appeared in the November 2024 issue. Travel + Entertainment under the heading “Tremors and Excitement.”