Elaine and I know the Brooks Range well. We’ve spent years moving through it slowly, learning its rhythms. The Alaska Range, though, has always remained elusive, save a single foray more than a decade ago.

Right after we got married in 2011, on something of a honeymoon, we were dropped at the Eielson Visitor Center with overloaded packs and an ambitious plan to traverse from the toe of the Muldrow Glacier to the Teklanika River. Forty-eight hours in, Elaine was flattened by a brutal stomach flu. I followed soon after. A windstorm shredded our tent. We had a bear encounter that felt uncomfortably close. We limped out early, humbled and sick, with a full share of type-three fun. Since then, the Alaska Range has remained largely unseen for us.

Until today, that is.

There was a sharp temperature drop this morning and perfectly clear blue skies. We remembered the conversation from the night before with Paul and Whitney, the couple we’d met skiing. Paul, it turned out, wasn’t just a pilot. He’s the Director of Operations at Talkeetna Air Taxi, the outfit that moves climbers and skiers into the Alaska Range, including Denali itself. As the conversation deepened, another connection surfaced: Paul had been central to the rescue of our friend Malcolm Daly off Thunder Mountain back in 2000. It’s a legendary rescue, and one we’d heard about for years.

As such, when Paul told us to come to the airport if the weather held, we listened.

Driving into Talkeetna that morning, we crested the hill and Denali appeared in full view, not just tall, but massive. I’ve never seen a mountain that big in clean perspective. It dominated everything around it.

At Talkeetna Air Taxi, Paul confirmed that a flight was going close to the mountain that day. The conditions were excellent: clear skies and little wind. The price wasn’t trivial, but it was no more than a standard lesson flight for Elaine. And after the year we’d had, the question felt simple. If time were suddenly shorter than you thought, would you do this? We paid.

Seven of us climbed into a de Havilland DHC-3 Otter, a ski-equipped workhorse from another era. As we lifted off and crossed the low country, cabins and snowmachine trails slipped beneath us. Then the foothills rose. The toes of glaciers appeared. And suddenly the scale changed.

Mount Foraker. Mount Hunter. Denali. Wind tore snow from their summits while the air around us remained smooth. We threaded into amphitheaters and along sheer rock walls at the head of the Tokositna Glacier, followed the ridge of Mount Huntington, and dropped into the Ruth Glacier and its vast amphitheaters. We circled the Sheldon Chalet, flew the Great Gorge, passed the Moose’s Tooth, orange rock cutting through ice and snow.

It was the wildest mountain terrain I’ve ever seen. Endless glaciers. Crevasses like architecture. A landscape that beckons return.

That evening, back on the ground, we ate ramen and headed out again, this time on skis. We pushed up the river trail, then slipped off into the deep woods as daylight began to thin. The world narrowed quickly. Snow-laden spruce closed in. Birch trunks rose pale and skeletal. The trail softened and bent, less about efficiency now than immersion.

It felt like Jack London country, the kind of place where travel is intimate and consequential, where darkness and cold rule. The cold deepened. The quiet pressed in from all sides. The only sounds were the occasional raven call and the movement of our skis.

We dropped onto the river itself, wide and quiet, the surface locked in white. Open leads murmured beneath the ice, mesmerizing and daunting. The light lingered impossibly long, orange to pink to violet, and then, through a break in the trees, the three giants stood again on the horizon. Denali. Foraker. Hunter. Dark now. Distant. Somehow, even wilder.

Mist rose from the low ground. Birch branches glowed faintly. Headlamps came on. We skied back toward the car in full dark, the last ones out, the woods closing in behind us as if we had never been there.

Alaska was settling into us, deeply and quietly.
It had been a very good day.