illustrations by Kevin Cordtz

WITH DETERMINATION AND TWO LAYERS OF CANVAS, NEWLYWED TRAPPERS SURVIVE A WINTER

It was late fall and the lakes had been grumbling under new layers of black ice for at least two weeks. My wife, Cheryl, and I were at a cabin south of Fairbanks with a few friends on one of the last nights before a chartered plane would drop us off for an uninterrupted four months of trapping in the Wrangell Mountains.

We knew that temperatures could hit 70 below zero in the dead of winter, and we were carefully planning our temporary living quarters to make life in those conditions possible, if not pleasant. We were gambling on the credibility of third- or fourth-hand accounts of another trapper who’d pitched a canvas wall tent inside of a larger wall tent, ran cords of dried spruce through a barrel stove, and survived.

So the plan—as well as plans can be conceived over a dwindling bottle of Johnnie Walker—was to erect two A-frames, one for each end of a 12-by-14-foot, white-walled canvas tent, run a long ridgepole through the center and, from that, suspend a shorter ridgepole that would support the smaller, 10-by-12-foot tent inside. The outside tent would have an external frame, and the inside tent would have an internal frame. The space of dead air between the two tents would add an amazing margin of extra warmth. At least that’s what we’d been told.

It all sounded plausible enough, and construction of the framing didn’t present any immediate threats to my prowess as a chain-saw carpenter. An important consideration in the arrangement would be to pitch both tents tautly before slitting their precious canvas roofs for the proper alignment of the 6-inch pipe from the wood stove. The stove originated from a 16-gallon drum cut lengthwise and topped with a thick plate of steel. If all went well, the front-loading unit—a miniature half-barrel stove—would provide enough heat to cook hot meals for our sled dogs and to keep us comfortable through the long nights ahead.

The other tedious detail involved putting up several rounds of logs under each tent, which would afford us extra height. At one point, Cheryl suggested that we might as well build a cabin, but rules prohibited the building of a permanent shelter where we would be trapping. Besides, the sketch of the double-tent frame on the inside of an old Pilot Bread carton was growing more convincing by the minute.

The vast gap between our architectural renderings and reality set in several days later when I stood on a frozen lake with the drone of the Cessna 185 fading in the distance. For starters, the spruce trees were stunted, thick with limbs and tapered like carrots. So much for finding the sleek, straight tent poles called for in my plans. The now-frozen lake had looked so hospitable, months before, when we’d pored over maps, studying the contour lines of the hills, the blue squiggly lines of creeks and the green splotches that were stands of timber. With the exception of the Wrangell Mountains to the south, the surrounding country looked like nothing we’d imagined.

At this point, however, there was no turning back. We’d stuffed ourselves and our 15 dogs into an airplane for the last of five flights that shuttled our belongings 70 air miles out of Northway, and the plane wasn’t scheduled to return until spring.

Our desolation lasted only as long as it took for the chill to set in, and we quickly began sorting through the huge pile of supplies: a waist-high mound of dried chum salmon; bags of dried dog food; cases of canned salmon and jam; No. 10 cans of powdered eggs; sacks of flour; beans and rice; boxes of Pilot Bread; cheese and other food staples; four 5-gallon cans of Blazo to fuel our two-burner Coleman stove and lanterns. Our primary concern was to locate clothing, sleeping bags, rifles and axes that would ensure immediate survival. We rummaged through our stores, gathered the tents and an assortment of tools, and headed into the woods to pick a campsite for the winter.

“I’ll bet it blows here,” Cheryl asserted after we’d selected a location and were pondering which way to orient the door. But I thought otherwise, and launched into a dissertation on how the spruce trees here did not exhibit the traits of those in windy country, where they all lean in one direction or their limbs grow more densely on their leeward sides. We were young then, newlyweds, and I knew everything

“I still bet it blows here,” she added in a perfunctory tone.
In our very short lives together we’d been tossed about in perilous seas, experienced defining moments in blown-down tents, fallen through thin ice, and been caught out and forced to sleep with our dogs in the snow at 50 below. Back then, we didn’t have much to quibble about. It was us against the elements, and the more pressing challenge was to knock down enough trees to put up our shelter.

We strapped on our snowshoes and stomped out a trail through the thickest timber. Within hours, we’d hooked up a few dogs and skidded in a promising number of poles for the frames and the stub walls. Contrary to our plans of erecting the outer tent first, we put up the inner tent and slept in it several nights before stretching the outer tent over its framing. Though the end product varied considerably from the plans on the Pilot Bread carton, the doubled tents provided a notable margin of warmth—just in time for our first cold snap of 40 below.

With the camp set up, our days melded into long hours on our snowshoes or on the runners of our sleds. We brushed trails in three directions from camp and made sets for marten, mink, fox and wolverine. Some of the creeks had begun to freeze hard, providing natural highways to the high country. Animals were on the move, and we soon settled into the monastic pace of caring for the dogs, skinning and stretching pelts, repairing dogsleds, harnesses and gang lines, and gathering firewood. The stove worked satisfactorily for melting snow, and the temperature inside our double-canvas abode neared 80 degrees at night when we fired the stove with dried spruce and cooked salmon in a pressure cooker for the dogs.

Before crawling into our sleeping bags each night, we banked the fire with birch and packed aluminum foil around the cracks of the door and the intake vent, hoping we’d wake to a bed of coals in the morning. The stove, however, leaked enough air that the embers would often be gone and we’d have to start the fire from scratch. During cold snaps of 40 to 50 below, we’d wake to temperatures of around 20 below inside our doubled tent. One morning in early January, the inside thermometer read 31 below while an identical thermometer tacked to a tree outside registered a crisp 67 below.

By then, we’d established a morning ritual. From our makeshift double bed we could sit up in our sleeping bags and slip into our heavy kuspuks, hanging from a nail on the ridgepole directly overhead. We’d don gloves and mukluks that had been kept warm next to us inside our heavy sleeping bags, rated to 35 below. We’d rocket out of the bags, dance around in the tent to get our blood flowing, and stuff food—mainly biscuits that Cheryl made ahead of time—into our mouths. At night we’d stash a bundle of kindling and several curls of dry birch bark by the stove ready to bank the fire. Neither of us owned a wristwatch, but it seemed like it took about 15 minutes to bring the inside temperature to a balmy 60 degrees. The coffee would start percolating about the time our sourdough thawed out.

We ate sourdough hotcakes and drank hot coffee while the stove chuffed away in the corner. We melted snow and made hot fish soup for the dogs before hooking them up for the day. We drove the dogs and tended to our traps in anything warmer than 55 below, and on the colder days we snowshoed out of camp, felled dead trees and cut them into five-foot bolts. These were staged vertically in the soft snow alongside the dog trails, which made it easy to load the dogsleds on our way home each night.

With the dogs picketed out on their chains and the sides of the stove turning cherry red, talk of animal tracks dominated our nightly discussions. With Canadian public radio talk shows crackling in the background, I skinned the day’s catch while Cheryl stretched the pelts on thin pine boards. When the dogs had been fed and the hiss of the single-mantle lantern died for the night, we’d lie in our bags and listen to the howling of wolves, the area’s resident owls or the roar of wind in the distant mountains.

One night, the wind sounded different and, for the first time that winter, the tents shuddered. We crawled out of our bags to see what was up. I shined a headlamp on the outside thermometer and noted that the temperature had rocketed from 30 below to 20 above in about 15 minutes. The wind speed continued to increase, and it began to snow. We suited up in our winter gear and spent the next hour rounding up loose dog-food buckets and fortifying support lines on the tent. We checked the dogs, and they seemed to be just fine. After snuggling back into our bags, we noted a general sense of draftiness about the tent. During the night, as the wind crescendoed, the thin canvas walls separating us from the elements fluttered and popped with the volume of gunshots.

With each series of gusts, my mind scrutinized our abode. I questioned the strength of the poles, the tautness of the lashings, meditated upon our choices in knots and even the stitch and weave of the tent fabric. The gusts kept coming, some of them roaring through the sparse woods like a jet engine. If our tents exploded, we could always cocoon ourselves in the remnants and dig ourselves in with the dogs, but did we bring enough heavy thread to make repairs? My ruminations ran untethered in a sleepless night.

We woke at first light to shimmering, wet sleeping bags. A fine powder of snow covered everything else. The wind had subsided some, but we discovered after stepping out of the tents and clamoring up the rock-hard, three-foot snowdrift outside the door that it still could take our breath away and knock us down. Our concerns shifted to the dogs, buried beneath the snow. We spent the remainder of day digging them out and slipping the ends of the picket chains higher up the trees so that the dogs wouldn’t be smothered. Several times we coaxed them out of their small caves with chunks of dried fish and rubbed the caked snow from their eyelids, but they seemed content to remain drifted in.

Darkness approached. With the stiff heels of our bunny boots, we kicked stair steps down the face of the large drift at the entrance of the tents. The wind continued at a steady roar. The roof panels of the tents flapped violently and threatened to separate the sections of stovepipe. There’d be no fire in the stove that night. We shook the snow and ice from our outerwear and crawled into our bags.

We woke the next morning to an eerie calm. Our sleeping bags crinkled in their outer layers of ice, and my nostrils stung in the antiseptically cold air inside the tent. I lingered in my bag. There would be miles of trail to break and traps to uncover.

For days, we would grope around our camp on snowshoes with long willow sticks, probing for firewood and other supplies buried like avalanche victims beneath the snow.

I roused from my icy bed, brushed a half-inch of powdered snow off the top of the woodstove and the pile of kindling and, within minutes, the little stove roared like a distant train. We made coffee, puttered around camp and fired the stove for the rest of the day. By evening, our bags and even the dirt floor were dry.

Life returned to normal after the storm. The days grew long, and with each passing night we slept in the growing confidence that the weather wouldn’t keep us from wintering out in Alaska’s coldest country—not when we had the comfort of a drawing on a Pilot Bread box.

Charlie Ess is a writer based in Palmer. He wrote about a family trip to Ikatan in the Feb. 2009 issue.