I was just finishing up breakfast with Kevin Kellogg when Rick Osborn clomped into the Bettles Lodge dining room, patting down his pockets. He was the lone National Park Service employee remaining in Bettles for the winter and was dressed for outdoor work: winter jacket, beanie, work pants, ice cleats affixed to his boots. He wedged his hands between the cushions of a nearby booth.
Kevin, who's been flying chartered flights for the Bettles Lodge for the last 14 years, had been showing me his photos of the Brooks Range and apologizing that we wouldn't be able to go on any flights while I was there. It was late October, the beginning of Bettles' shoulder season (between moose hunting season and aurora borealis tourist season), which would last until January. Kevin had just flown the lodge's two planes down to Fairbanks for storage. But now we watched Rick, who was kneeling on the floor, dipping his head down to get a better look underneath the table. Finally, Kevin asked, "What are you looking for?"
"I lost the keys to City Hall."
In addition to being the lone remaining National Park Service employee, Rick had also been elected to Seat D of the Bettles City Council. Unanimously. Well, almost; eight total votes, one questioned. He searched another one of the half dozen booths. "Do you remember where was I sitting last night? It's just two keys on a ring."
Kevin and I joined him on the floor. I had been in Bettles for less than 24 hours and I was already doing my part for the electorate.
The locals
I flew in from Fairbanks on Wright Air and (eventually) landed safely on the air strip behind the lodge. Without a bundle of toilet paper or a load of groceries in tow, it came as no surprise to anyone else on the plane that I was a tourist. We were in the air 15 minutes before the last vestige of the road system—the narrow brown line of the Dalton Highway—veered out of sight. Before reaching Bettles on the flight locals call the "milk run," we touched down in Hughes and Allakaket. In each village, the plane was greeted on gravel airstrips by small swarms of four wheelers, as people loaded and unloaded supplies and offered farewells and hellos. As we came into Hughes, we passed through air currents coming off Indian Mountain. The bottom seemed to fall out of the plane, a beeping erupted from the pilot's control panel and I found my hand on the thigh of the man sitting next to me whose name I would later learn was Super Dave.
"It's alright. It's a small plane," he said, after the plane smoothed out. Super Dave was on his way to Bettles to cover for the guy who maintained the power plant and who had to leave town for an eye appointment. He had also come with a pack full of pork ribs.
"We're having a rib cook off on Sunday. Last time I was here, I was challenged."
To an outsider, just living in Bettles—a small town 35 miles north of the Arctic Circle—may seem like a mark of stoicism. When I asked people how often they left town, they were nice enough to answer. It's a question they expect from someone just visiting, but it seems to be beside the point.
Eddie Shanahan, who works part time for Bettles Lodge, but whose dog, Timber, is there full time, told me that he had left in June for a doctor's appointment in Fairbanks, but before that, it had been three years since he had been away. Of course, it was my mistake—to see living in Bettles as a narrowing of some sort.
Irene Holly, who operates the town's road grader, first settled in Bettles in 1977—after a plane crash. She had been stranded in the woods for 10 days when a search party from Bettles found her. "They took me back to Bettles, and I just fell in love with the people."
Fresh start
The one year-round business in town is Bettles Lodge, which was built in 1953, making it the first permanent structure erected in Bettles. Together with its newer companion, the Aurora Lodge, it sits along the Bettles airstrip and serves as a popular stopover for pilots refueling on their way up to the North Slope. It's also a launch point for adventurers headed into Gates of the Arctic National Park and Kobuk Valley National Park, two of the most remote national parks and sought after by bucket listers trying to check off all 59.
In recent years, the lodge has also attracted a large number of mid-winter visitors coming up to view the aurora. As it happens, the same conditions that make Bettles an optimal place for landing planes—the clear skies and cold dry air of "the Arctic desert"—make it arguably one of the best places in the world to view the northern lights, or as Bettles Lodge owner Eric Fox calls them, "'The lights,' because they're not north of you here. They're above you."
If it sounds like Eric speaks with the fervor of the newly converted, it's because he is. After a career in Illinois that spanned construction, bartending and telecommunications, he and his wife, Heather, bought Bettles Lodge in early 2014. While she travels back every few weeks for work, Eric has tried to stay in town as much as he possibly can. "If you told me 10 years ago I would be running a lodge in the Arctic, in a town of 10 people, I would have said you were crazy. But I wouldn't go back for the world."
As he toured me around town in the lodge's van, I got the sense that he was finally where he wanted to be—the big backyard of youth, with the chance to show off its wildness.
Dressed almost exclusively in camouflage and boots, with a 12-inch Bowie knife strapped to his thigh, Eric walks everywhere with purpose, but also with the heads-up spark of someone pleased with his good luck in life. We stepped out at the nearby float pond to try the ice, where he stopped mid sentence and stood looking out over the horizon.
"You hear that? ... That's right, not a thing. That's why I love it here."
And later, while we threw quartz rocks in the shallows of the nearby Koyokuk River, he told me of plans to start offering gold panning excursions: "This wouldn't be one of those off-the-road gold panning places where they throw five or six flecks of gold in your pan. We could make it into real Alaska gold panning."
Government of the people
Like Rick, Eric has even thrown his hat into the ring of local government, if unwittingly. "I was out of town for my first city council meeting, and I came back to find out I was the Bettles fire chief." And his wife, Heather? She's the new mayor.
By 9 p.m. on my first night at the lodge, the northern lights spanned the entire width of the horizon, a band of white just several degrees above the peaks of the Brooks Range and the Jack White mountains. As it got later and the sky grew darker, the band moved up higher in the sky, and the lights began to turn and flicker as they do.
We would be shut out by overcast clouds on the second night, as is the risk with aurora chasing. But for one night we got lucky. We stood around a bonfire outside the lodge—Eric, his mother, Sandy, his Aunt Pat and me. The bonfire was the only source of light for miles around.
Occasionally, a person—Super Dave, Rick, Kevin, Eddie—would walk by and look up, and we would chat, chins up, eyes on the sky. We spotted constellations, and not so easily explainable flashes of light. We discussed the possibility of satellites crashing down where we stood (slight), and extra-terrestrial life (fair to middling). The hardcore aurora viewers, Eric explained—the ones who fly up to Bettles with tripods and cameras—often stay up all night. If the lights are really going, he will offer to come by the lodge in the middle of the night to knock on doors. But tonight we were casual observers, and I got to experience what I like to feel when playing tourist—that is, a part of things.
Earlier that night, Rick and Super Dave had been trying to convince Lindsey Cowan, one of the Bettles Lodge employees, not to leave. She had plans to become a physical therapist's assistant and was moving closer to the University of Alaska Anchorage. All of us were drinking beers and laughing. "They don't want you in Eagle River," said Super Dave. "Seriously, you're not fit to live anywhere else but here."
"You see," Rick turned to me, "we're the End of the Worlders here."
Matt Reed is a freelance writer living in Anchorage, Alaska. His writing has appeared online and in print in 61°North, Alaska Innovator, The Nevada Review and other journals. He is currently in a race against global warming as he tries to finish a novel set in the ski industry.
This article appeared in the Winter 2015 issue of 61°North. Contact 61° editor Jamie Gonzales at jgonzales@alaskadispatch.com.