PAXSON — I pulled up to the front of our cabin on the Denali Highway just after midnight with a lively 10-dog team. I anchored them down, went to the shed for straw and got the dog cooker going. Ahhh, now to the cabin to start the fire and maybe grab a quick cup of coffee before feeding the dogs.
What? The cabin was locked. I never lock the cabin. Yes, there is a combination lock that hangs in the hasp, but I forgot the combination years ago. I went back to the shed, found a wrecking bar and pried the hasp off the wall. Inside, everything was much the same as I had left it a week ago. Except the coffee had been used, the wood box was full of garbage that couldn't be burned and the kindling was gone.
In truth, the coffee was what got me. However, what if? What if I was traveling through and the temperature was minus-40? About a dozen years ago, a family of three froze to death less than a mile from this cabin. If someone's in tough shape and arrives at a Bush cabin, easy access and handy fire-starting materials could make the difference between discomfort and disaster.
If one gets far off the road into Alaska's true Bush, cabins are still left open and stocked. They may not be stocked with your preferred food, and may not have coffee, but usually there is wood to burn and food to eat. Why someone would have locked our cabin door is beyond me. If someone needs to use a remote cabin and can't replace something, at least contact the cabin owner so he or she knows.
The outlying areas of Southcentral and the Interior within several hundred miles of Fairbanks used to have a number of cabins scattered along waterways, but the Bureau of Land Management has burned or removed many of them. Their reasoning is that if the parcel of land that the cabin sits on was to be transferred to state ownership, they didn't wish to transfer a liability to Alaska.
That may be a valid legal position. However, that premise will bring little comfort to a traveler in trouble — or one who is just weary. There used to be a snug little cabin on the Susitna River, just below the mouth of the 28-mile Tyone River. It was built years ago and used primarily as a trapping cabin. The cabin was roughly a hundred miles from anywhere with winter road access and half of that from the Denali Highway in the summer. I stopped at the cabin one January on a solo snowmobile trip. My old SkiDoo Tundra had a motor mount coming apart, and I still needed to travel another 50 miles to reach my cabin.
There were enough bits and pieces around the old cabin for me to make a temporary fix, saving a long walk. I warmed up at the cabin and read a couple journal entries by other visitors. One guy was walking through the area during the winter and was traveling slower than he'd expected. He stayed at the cabin for a couple of days to regroup. Another traveler had swamped his canoe just upstream and had been able to get things back together at the cabin.
That cabin is gone now, taken apart and tossed in the Susitna River by the federal government. I guess having my coffee used up is not quite so bad.
Nonetheless, many cabins remain scattered along lakes and rivers in Alaska's backcountry. Some are classified public-use, managed by the state or BLM. Others are trapping cabins that are permitted by the same entities. There are also cabins on private lands far off the beaten path.
In most cases, it is OK to use these cabins in an emergency. If you must use someone else's cabin, it should be in a case of necessity, not just because you want to recreate in the area.
Leave everything better than it was when you walked in the door. Contact the owner as soon as you can. And please, don't lock the door behind you.
John Schandelmeier is a lifelong Alaskan who lives with his family near Paxson. He is a Bristol Bay commercial fisherman and two-time winner of the Yukon Quest International Sled Dog Race.