EP 153: Deserted in Alaska. 200 Miles on Foot, with Joe Letarte.

I might not make it out of this because I don't think anybody's going to come looking for us. That's one of those stories that feels like it was 150 years ago. When you lose your will to survive, you're dead. You're dead on your feet. Anything to do with Western big game.

Welcome to the Epic Outdoors podcast, powered by Under Armour. Hey everybody, Jason Carter, Adam Bronson coming at you from Southern Utah with the Epic Outdoors podcast. Got a great guest on with us today. Joe LaTarte from Alaska Wilderness Enterprises up there in Fairbanks. How are you doing, Joe? Yeah, good. It's a good day in Fairbanks. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. No, you bet. Well, I appreciate you joining us. From what I'm hearing, it's a long, colder winter, long one, so you're still hunkered in? Not getting spring fever too much yet, huh? Yeah, no, we're practicing self-isolation here 24-7. So that's the way our life usually runs, so it's no change here. So we're just kind of living the good life by ourselves out in the middle of nowhere, so it's good. That social distancing, I guess, is what you're saying is you're used to it. You guys social distance every day.

Absolutely, right. Just nice to have the rest of the world catch up to Alaska, right? That's right. Now we know how you feel. That's right. Well, yeah, tell us real quick, just give us a quick update on how the winter has treated Alaska, the game animals, and whatnot. Maybe just give us a quick update, and then we'll jump into some of your history. The situation in Alaska right now with the whole COVID thing is after listening to quite a few teleconferences from different organizations, a lot of different people have different ideas about how to proceed with the year. Everywhere from they're going to try to be operational on the first of May to they're going to quit for the rest of the year. There's just a lot of different ideas out there about what is going to happen. Of course, nobody can tell the future, so I can only speak for what Alaska Wilderness Enterprises is going to do.

And what we're doing is we allowed the people in April to switch to another year, and we allowed the people in the first part of May to switch to another year. The people in the last week of May, I told them that we're going to reassess starting April 4th every 10 days and to see how it goes. And then we're planning on being totally operational June 1st for our spring bear season. And so spring for us on the Yukon River is actually June, so we're going to try to do that. So that's how we're proceeding. The COVID thing up here is we do have it here in Fairbanks statewide. We have about 110 cases as of yesterday. So it's not super drastic, but, I mean, if you get it, we don't have the facilities to treat it. You know, we don't have a lot of advanced ICUs. We don't have ventilators. We don't have that.

So I think it's in everybody's interest up here not to get it because we just don't have the access to care. So that's kind of the wrap-up on that. That's crazy. Well, we were reading where some of these spring hunters and whatnot, if they wanted to go, that they would have to isolate themselves in a motel room for 14 days, be checked on multiple times a day to make sure they didn't leave and whatnot, and then they were free to go. Yeah, so right now the state does have some mandates out, and they run to April 21st. And one of those mandates is that if you come to the state of Alaska between now and April 21st, you have to self-isolate yourself for two weeks, for 14 solid days. So obviously you couldn't do a hunt doing that. They're going to potentially lift that restriction April 1st.

If that restriction stays in, and that's kind of one of the things we're looking at, so if they leave that on the books through May, then we won't be able to operate until that's lifted. So that has to lift. And personally, I would like to see this thing spike, then have the spikes start to come down and get to a point where they're starting to relax things to kind of not totally normal operation, but where people are still getting out, and they've kind of relaxed some of the self-isolation rules, and then I think we'll be able to operate. So we're just kind of waiting and seeing like everybody else, but we in no way have the mass shortages and the mass concern like they're having on the East Coast right now. So it's not like that at all.

Well, yeah, like you said, it's a wait-and-see game. A lot of spring bear hunts, whether it be southeast Alaska black bear hunts or grizzly and brown bear hunts throughout the state. A lot of people right now pretty anxious, just like you said, with the 14-day quarantine, it's not really practical to come up there two weeks before, sit around in a motel, self-isolate for 14 days, and then go hunt for another 14. So hopefully, like you said, not practical, hopefully some of this stuff over the next 20, 30 days, whatever, like you said, maybe spikes or starts tapering back off to some extent to where some of those things can at least allow the limited, and it still really is a fairly limited number of people when you look at it in the whole totality of it. It's not like the tourism industry for Alaska that's going to take probably a big hit until this wipes out,

but the bear hunters just in general. I mean, for the outfitters, it's a big deal, but collectively, we're not talking about tens of thousands of people flooding to Alaska. You know, we're hopefully able to see some of those hunts get pulled off. A lot of people kind of anxiously waiting right now.

Right. Well, one of the big things that's going to hurt the state as a whole is the cruise line canceling the cruises to Alaska. So a lot of them have been canceled. And so, I mean, all of southeast Alaska, the port cities that rely on the tourism industry, and then, of course, Anchorage is going to take a huge hit. And for us in our summer fishing operations, most of our clients are cruise passengers. So it's going to be bad, you know, for the rest of this year, just losing those boats, and if the hunting thing's thrown on top of it. And I have not been operating since January 20th. We usually do wintertime ice fishing and snow machine trips, but the majority, 98% of our clients for that are Asian. And once it broke out in China and we started having people coming over here, I just kind of saw the writing on the wall, and I didn't want to expose my employees to any of that.

So we shut down January 20th for that. So we have not operated all winter. So it's already started out to be kind of a really tough year. So we'll see what happens. Crazy times. So ice fishing, what are you guys ice fishing for? How does that go down? So we ice fish for rainbow trout and Dolly Varden, and it's all stocked fish. So there's some lakes around Fairbanks that we go down and do with the Chinese, the Koreans, the Japanese. They all just love it. I don't know what it is really in their culture, but they all come to Alaska for two things, dog mushing and ice fishing, and they just go crazy over it. So they really get a kick out of it. We cook the fish out on the ice and have, you know, growing up in the Midwest, we always had like the fish fries and stuff. So we do that kind of a thing out there, and they just, they really, really like it. And it's been hugely popular.

I started that probably 20 years ago, and I was the only one doing it. And now I think there's probably 20 or 25 people doing it. So it's really, really taken off. But as our Chinese tourism has escalated in Fairbanks, we get thousands of people here from Asia every winter. So it's just been really a great deal to be in, yeah. That's crazy. Well, tell us about kind of your youth and growing up and then kind of how it ended up where you got into the guiding business.

Yeah, so I grew up in the Midwest. I grew up in Illinois, and we spent a lot of our time in Wisconsin. I had family in Wisconsin. My dad was a minister with a church there in Illinois, and we had a church camp up in northern Wisconsin. I spent a lot of time up there. My grandfather fostered a lot of the outdoor interests in me. He was a surveyor for the federal government back in the early 1900s, and so he had surveyed a lot of northern Wisconsin and a lot of Arizona when it was still a territory, actually. So my folks had me late in life, and so my grandparents and my folks were a lot older than most kids grow up with. And we lived kind of in a suburban environment where I grew up, but the outskirts of that, right on the border of our city, was just nothing but farmlands. And so I ran trap lines and hunted pheasant and did all that and had a really great interest in the out-of-doors.

When I went to college, I went down to actually Jonesboro, Arkansas. I went to Arkansas State University for a wildlife management degree, and it was down there that really kind of the whole Alaska thing kind of came to fruition. I was a military science major, so I was ROTC down there. And when I got out, I had owed the Army X amount of years, active duty. And I was sitting on my bed one day in my dorm and looking at a magazine, and I'd always wanted to go to Alaska. I was dreaming about going to Alaska, and I thought, well, you know, I mean, if I graduate and I get in the Army and I kind of wanted to make that a career at that time, I thought, man, I might never go. And so I thought, well, I should just go up there. And kind of in the year before this all happened, I had met a girl in my hometown, and she was kind of an adventurous type of person, too, and she wanted to go somewhere.

And she thought, well, maybe we could move to Colorado or go out there and see that. Anyway, long story short, we got in the car, and we drove out to Colorado and looked around and, you know, really liked it there. But I think the throwdown out there was we went to a place in Big Thompson Canyon, and that was right after the Big Thompson Canyon flood in the late 1970s, and it was pretty wiped out. But there was one restaurant still standing there, and it was called the Devil's Golf Stage Stop, and it was probably to this day some of the best Mexican food I've ever had. But we were in there, and there were some local guys in there. And, you know, when you came from the east out to Colorado in those days, you kind of stuck out, so people kind of harassed you. It wasn't like it was now. Yeah, now you blend right in. Yeah. And so anyways, they told us we weren't tough enough to go to Alaska,

and we weren't tough enough to do this. And so that was pretty much it for her. She was like, okay, now we're going, you know. And so that was kind of the start of it. And it took us another year and a half to actually put the plan into motion, but we did put it into motion and ended up in Alaska. So tell us about your first trip up there to Alaska. How did you get there? Well, like I said, we were both living in the Midwest, and her folks had retired out to California. And she said, well, if you go up there and you don't come back, I don't want to be stuck in the Midwest. So I helped move her out to the west coast. And I thought, well, that would be closer to Alaska anyway. And I was going to go up and kind of recon Alaska and see what was going on and see what we could get going up there. And so I left California, left the Los Angeles area,

actually on a Greyhound bus, and ended up going up to Seattle. And my plan was to get on with the fishing fleet that was coming up to fish for, you know, salmon fisheries. And a lot of the guys were obviously, a lot of commercial fishermen here live in Washington and are Seattle residents. And they come up every year fishing and go back. And Oregon has a lot of commercial fishermen in it, too, that come to Alaska. But I got there like a week late, and the boats were all gone. And so I was just like, well, wow, now what do I do, you know? So I thought, well, I started asking around. And somebody said, well, there's a ferry, a state ferry that goes up there. So I went down, and I still remember the pier number. It was Pier 48 on the Seattle Harbor. And there was the Alaska ship called Columbia there. And it made four or five trips a summer from Seattle to Alaska.

And, you know, back then it was $93 one way, which, you know, for the late 1970s, that's kind of a lot of money. That's a lot of money. Yeah. When I left California, I mean, we had no money. We were like stone broke. I think my wife had $50. I had $50. So I started the trip with $100. Jeez. You took hers and left her with nothing? Left her with nothing. You know, she said, I know you're going to come back, and I know you're going to, you know, we're going to live our dream, and everything's going to work out. So here you go. She is investing in the future. Trust me, it's a takeoff. Wow. Wow. So I ended up, so there I am on Pier 48 with $100 and a $93 ticket. I thought, well, there's really no other choice. I can't go back. You know, failure wasn't an option to me in those days. I mean, and plus, you know, when you're basically 20 years old, I mean, you don't think too straight anyway.

So, you know, why not, you know? So I bought the ticket, and then with the extra money I had, I went down. There's a market there on the wharf. $7? The extra $7, you mean? Yeah, the extra $7. Okay, just making sure. I bought as many. I thought, what can I buy that would be, that I could live on, that would be kind of, would keep and, you know, kind of last a long time and be a little bit nutritional. I thought, well, I saw some sardines there, and I thought, well, I'll just buy a bunch of sardines and crackers. So I invested my $7 in sardines and crackers, and I got on the boat with a backpack, sardines and crackers, no money, and that was it, and that was my trip to land. Back then, I don't know, you know, it wasn't like nowadays with all the nice gear. Trust me, my backpack was made out of canvas, and the frame was aluminum, and it was a big clunky thing, you know,

and I slept on the deck of the boat. They had lawn chairs out there that you slept on, and that was it, you know, and so off to Alaska I went, and I remember arriving in Haines was the debarkation point, and I'd met some people on the boat that were starting a river rafting outfit, and they were from Idaho, and they had a river rafting company in Idaho, and so they were going to try to come up and run the Tetch and Cheney River, and it's just kind of ironic that all that I met them and that they were running the Tetch and Cheney because it was years later that I actually got my guide area at the base of the Tetch and Cheney River, which is the Elfak River in Yakutat, where I now operate my brown bear hunts, you know, and so they were actually my first job. They gave me a job because they felt sorry for me, running clients from Haines up into Canada, up to the Tetch and Cheney,

and then dropping them off and then coming back to Haines. And so then I made enough money with them, and I made it up to Anchorage, and there was nothing going on in Anchorage, really, and so I went down to the Homer Spit. The Homer Spit nowadays is a huge tourist destination, and it's pretty tame as far as what goes on there. But back in those days, I mean, it was actually a working, there was a fish processing plant there and commercial fishermen, and it was kind of rough down there, you know, and of course that was the home, I think it was the Salty Dog Saloon or something like that, and back in those days that place was wild, I mean, rip-roaring wild. And so I was living on the beach and going down to the cannery every day, and you got in line at the cannery every morning about four or five in the morning, and they just took as many people as they needed

to work on the slime line or gut fit, whatever they wanted you to do. And if you got work, you got work, and most of the time you didn't. And, but there was dozens and dozens of people lined up every day, and, you know, and of course it was raining, and, you know, the tents were like my backpack. The tents were soaking through. They were just kind of junky stuff we had back then, and it was tough living. So I ended up kind of starving out down there a little bit, and there was like two halibut charters there back then, which is, people would laugh now because now there's just dozens, you know. And they would throw the heads away to the halibut, and they'd throw them in the trash in a big 55-gallon barrel at the harbor there. And so I'd go down there in the evening and get the heads out of there and cut the cheeks out of the heads,

and, you know, that's one of the best parts of the halibut. And so I was living on halibut meat and living on the beach like that and just kind of getting by with nothing. And then I heard about a job up out of Fairbanks wrangling horses up in the Brooks Range, and so I hitchhiked up there, and that's what brought me to Fairbanks. Wow. So was that all, that getting on in Seattle, going up, and then what you talked about, your time in Anchorage, was that the better part of like a spring and all summer and fall, or how long experienced is that before you got to Fairbanks? Yeah, I took all summer, and then so I was in Fairbanks right at the beginning of the fall in time for hunting season, so that's what the guy needed to wrangle the horses for. And it was actually a, he was actually billing it as a guide in survival school, so I think to get kind of cheap, free help,

you know, he was billing it as a school, but he really just needed camp labor, and so it was perfect for me because, you know, room and board and a place to be, and, you know, all you had to do was wrangle horses the same fairly simple, so off I went, you know. I had no idea even where the Brooks Range was. I just went and did it, you know. So you did that for a year, and then you're like, well, I think I like this. Winter's coming. Did you stay there? Is your wife still in California? California, where did it go from there? Obviously, the hook got set deep in you to some extent at some point and decided to stick around, and how did you go to the next step of whatever you embarked on? Yeah, so I went, so the next season, so I hung around and I did a little bit, I went out on a trap line with a guy that winter and did a little bit of that, and I did go back down south to see my folks,

see my girlfriend,

right at the holidays and a little bit past the holidays, and then I came back up, and we got ready for the spring season, and we went out and did that, and then by that time, I thought, well, this is really going to be, this is really going to work because now I'd seen the Brooks Range, and like back then, you couldn't go up the Hall Road, so what they, the tourists all go up to Prudhoe Bay now on what they call the Dalton Highway. Back in those days, the Dalton Highway, we called it just the Hall Road because it was built along the Trans-Alaska Pipeline construction route to haul supplies for the construction, so they hauled stuff on it, and so there was a pipe yard in Fairbanks, and as they built the pipeline, so they built the pipeline from Valdez north and from Prudhoe Bay south, and they had barged a bunch of material up to Prudhoe Bay, and so they were coming south with it,

and the hookup point was just south, just out, just over the Brooks Range on the south side where they, you know, welded the pipe together to finish it because it was just such a rough go from Prudhoe Bay over the Brooks Range through Attigan Pass and all that, and so they didn't allow the public on that road because when I came here, they were still building the pipeline. I mean, they were still finishing up things, and there's a lot of workers up there. Fairbanks was a huge boom town. I mean, it was just crazy, you know, just everybody was working, lots of money. People would come back, just go on rampages with their money and, you know, trash hotel rooms and pay for them the next day that didn't care, and everybody was rolling high, you know, and the bars lined downtown. Fairbanks where the tourists now walk was all just bars, and I remember they were open pretty much 24 hours a day,

and so it would be like five in the morning, they'd close for an hour to sleep them out and mop them up, and they'd open back up at six, and so everybody would stand up with their drink at five in the morning and walk out on the street, and you'd have all these people out on the street while they mucked out the bars, and then you'd walk back in and put your drink back down and start the day over again, you know, and so that was kind of everybody's day off from the pipeline, you know, and it was really a wild time in Fairbanks, so the public wasn't allowed up the hall road, and so we got one of the first permits. The guy I was working for got one of the first permits for commercial operators to go up the hall road, and so we were hauling horses up the hall road at that time to the chandelier shelf and then going in to the Brooks Range, and then in a year or two past that,

I worked for a guy and we were going up to Pump Station 3, which is just south of Prudhoe Bay, and hauling horses and going in that way, and then that trip there, that was, we were actually hunting over by the Canadian border, so one way from Pump Station 3, it was a little bit better than 200 miles in there with the horses, you know, and you've got to remember that horses, to our knowledge anyway, had never been in there before. There was no trails. It's just not like the American West where you've got trails everywhere. It's just trail-less, marshy, Brooks Range has a lot of boggy areas, and so it's a lot different than most people envision it, a lot different, you know, and it was drastically different from anything I had ever experienced back then, you know, so. Well, that's crazy stuff. So, I guess, at some point, you get a new job with an outfitter, you're working with

that outfitter, maybe bridge that gap for us on how that went down. Okay, so I went from, so the outfitter that I worked for when I first came to Alaska, I worked for him for a year, two years, I guess, so that would have been the year of 79 and 80. No, 79, I just worked for him one year, 79, and then in 80, I went to work for another outfitter who didn't really have an area, but he was in with this Colonel Eugene Witt in his area up in the Brooks Range, and so that area was on the Jindjik River, and that was really a really cool camp to be in because Colonel Eugene Witt was a retired Army colonel, and he was World War II era guy. He had actually started guiding in the Brooks Range with a guy named Red Adney who was the first guide in the Brooks Range back in the 1940s, early 1940s, and when he got sent overseas for World War II, he actually went over several times, but the last time

he went, he was, he went in, he was an infantry infantry guy in charge of an infantry regiment going in behind Patton, so he was what he called one of Patton's blood and guts guys, and so he cleaned up the Germans after Patton went through with the tanks. He came through, and it was really through him, you know, talking about the old days in the Brooks Range and like how hard and how hard they worked up there to guide back then, so they had these big barrels that they would pack eight miles one way to a spike camp and set it down and then go back and get the stuff to put in the barrel, and they made all these trips in the summer, they put so much work into things that like nowadays nobody would ever think of doing that, you know, but they wanted to provide the best service for their clients, you know, and so I think it was really through him that I kind of realized, and you know,

up until this point I had actually worked for a couple different guides between the spring season and the fall season, and it was kind of the good, the bad, the ugly, because there's, you know, as we all know, there's a lot of bad guys out there and there's a lot of really good guides out there. What I saw from some of the other people wasn't so great, and what I was about to see during this horse deal was definitely the worst of all humanity, but Colonel Witt was a really great guy, and so we would spend the nights sitting by the wood stove there, and he would talk about when you lose your will to survive, and these words became very important to me during that walk out of the Brooks Range, you know, when you lose your will to survive, you're dead, you're dead on your feet, and he would describe how they would come up on the Germans that were totally fine, they weren't wounded,

but they were so weary of war, and they were so pretty much shell-shocked from the bombardment they had just taken, and having the tanks go through, that he said they just stood there and they would bayonet them and kick them off the bayonet and move on, you know, he said they just went through like a wave, and so that's why they got the name Patton's Blood and Guts guys, and he said those guys just didn't put up any resistance at all, you know, they just capitulated, and he said when you lose your will to survive, you're dead on your feet, and boy, those words stuck in my mind even to this day, you know, if you give up, you're dead, you have to keep going forward, you have to keep fighting, you know, and so he talked a lot about his military career and then the history of the Brooks Range, and it was the history of the Brooks Range that's really not well documented, so it was very,

very interesting to me, and so I worked for him, and when I was in his camp, I met a guy, the guy I was actually working for was the guy that was in with him, he said, well, we've got to go out on our own, you know, we've got to do this, this, and this, and I'm like, well, okay, and being young, I was like, you know, I shouldn't have done it because the guy was a little bit sketchy anyway, I didn't really trust him, he was a little bit on the fringe, but, you know, back then you got to realize I was, you know, 20-something years old, from the Midwest, nobody was evil, everything's good, everybody's honest, you know, I looked a lot naive, yeah, everybody wants the best for you, Joe, everybody's rooting for you, everybody wants the best for you, everybody's rooting for you, and everybody's going to help you. Yeah, everybody's rooting for you, you know, and so I kind of bought

into his story, you know, and so he went out the next year, which was 1981 then, and he came back, he says, well, I purchased all these stock animals and this tack, and I've got all this stuff, and, you know, he's going to go do it, you know, he wanted me to go work for him, and so I did, you know, and so that was the biggest mistake of my life, so up we go, and, you know, he's operating with another outfitter yet, not Colonel Witt, he's operating in another guy's area there, and we're going along, and I noticed that the mules were, and the horses were not really, they just didn't seem right, they seemed like they weren't really climatized to the colder climate, you know, and he's like, oh no, I got them from Canada, you know, blah, blah, blah, he always had a really good story, and I'd never really been around a really good con artist, and con artists are good at the story, they can

think on their sheet, you know, and they can think, they can lie, they can lie on demand, and so that's really what he was doing, and he had an answer for and bought into it, but as the season went along, yeah, what time of year was that you were going, was it just fall, was it fall season, or were you? So typically the Brooks Range thing would run like this, we would get ready in June in Fairbanks, we did a spring bear season, May and June, around the Fairbanks area, and then we'd get ready to go to the Brooks Range, and we would try to leave on right after July 4th to head up the haul road with the horses, and you know, back then the road was so rough, that you didn't know if you were going to get up and down the hills, you didn't know how many tires you were going to blow out, and so we spent a lot of time changing tires, we spent a lot of time just getting there, and I can

remember one, you know, it rained and rained and rained one summer going up there, and the hills became super muddy, and I can remember having to have a state grader hook onto the truck from behind, and kind of help us get down the hill, and then go around the other side and pull us, up the other side, and that's how rough the road was, you know, so it was really, really tough. Anyways, so we headed up the hall, so we'd head up the hall road right after July 4th, try to get into camp the last week of July, and then the sheep season would start August 10th, you know, so that was the plan, and of course everything's running late, and you barely get into camp by opening day, and then you have all this stuff, and the pilots back then, coming from Fairbanks, sometimes they showed up, sometimes they didn't, and also I think it was just so different for me, because nowadays we have satellite

phones, and we have Delorum devices, you can text people anywhere in the world, and you know, back then to get a message out, you had to wait for the plane to come, you had to write the message down, give it to the pilot, maybe he'd give it to somebody who'd get it in the mail, or maybe he'd give it to the right person, and then you had to wait a week or two for the answer to come back, you know, so I mean, you know, no GPSs, really no communication, it was really, really, really different, and I think if people had to go back and do what we did back then now, I think they'd just lose it, because we're so used, even in the outdoor world, we're so used to immediate gratification that just this thinking about it, the concept seems really, really bizarre to me, so we went up into the Brooks Range, and I noticed the horses were going down, and of course this guy had to make all the money he

could, so usually in the Brooks Range, you try to get out of there by about September 15th, and back then especially, after that it starts to get really cold up there, but he decided that he'd people probably don't remember him now, but there was a guy, he was an outdoor writer for Peterson's Hunting Magazine by the name of John Wooters, he was the whitetail guy, he wrote a lot of whitetail articles for Peterson's Hunting back in the 60s and 70s and early 80s, and he had gotten him to come up on a muzzle-loading moose hunt with his friends, and so he had a group of friends from East Texas that came up, but they wanted to hunt late, and so we were going to stay late, and that's really, that was really the death knell right there for the horses and for almost me, so we're up there hunting late, so September 15th comes and goes, and then we actually didn't get them out of camp,

and we were using float planes up there on lakes, and so I can remember the lake freezing over and having to go out there with the canoe and bust the ice out so the float plane could land, but the day the plane came, and I should have known right there that this, you know, I should have known I was getting set up here, the day the plane was supposed to come and get everybody out, the outfitter told me, he says, take all the horses and that other wrangler and go back down to the camp we were just in, which was probably about four miles away, he says, I think I forgot to do something with the cache, you know, put the barrel lids back on, or make sure they're secure, some totally not really important thing that really didn't need to be done, and while we were down there, I heard the plane coming and going, and I'm like, hmm, well, I'm sure, yeah, that seems weird, so I get back

up to where the lake is, and there's a note on a stick sticking in the snow, and it says, oh, hey, emergency came up in town, I gotta go, just take the horses out to the haul road, I'll see you out there, I'll drive the truck up from Fairbanks, good luck, and I was just like, are you kidding me? So here I am. Or did you have another guy? I had another wrangler with me, but the two of us. How far is that? From the haul road to where you were? We were about 150 to 170 miles, but, you know, by the time you go up this drainage, down that drainage, and over this path, and over that path, you're going over 200 miles, you know, so. And the date, what's the time of year again? So this was, this was on about September 28th. Which you said, pretty late up there. Yeah, you said you were wanting to be out by September 15th. And so he jumped in with the hunters and flew out. That's what he did.

He flew out. He jumped in with the hunters and flew out. Wow. Well, here we go. Let's talk about this. This is part of what we wanted to get you on here for. So I mean, yeah, so I mean, you know, so here I am and I have no satellite phone. I can't call anybody, I'm just there. So my choices are stay there and maybe somebody comes back, maybe somebody doesn't, but the lake's freezing over and by now it's getting down to zero. I mean, it's cold, you know, or go, you know, so I decided we better go, you know, and so we loaded everything up the next day and, you know, no GPSs, no satellite phone, no nothing. I had a compass and I had a topo map. How many times had you been there before? Zero. Is that the first year you've been there, right? It's the first year I've been there and I'd never been, I'd never made the trip from the Hall Road into camp that way before ever, you know, and so, and,

you know, once it snows, once it snows on the mountains and there's snow all over the ground and you look out there and then you look at the topo map, it's pretty tough to tell which peak is which, you know. And so what about this kid with you? I mean, did you guys get along? Was he a good hand? Yeah, he was a good guy and he, he was really, really worried right from the beginning and he thought it was never going to work and he kind of was like kept reiterating the fact that he had worked in a topo office and he said none of the ones in Alaska are correct, you know, they're also off, you know, and I was just like, well, that's all we got, you know, so we're just going to have to make it work and to me it just seemed kind of, kind of like doable because the drainages are so big and like, you know, how do you, how do you get lost doing that, you know, but, you know, I just wasn't,

I just didn't really even at that time have a fathom for just how massive the Brooks Range was, you know, and how massive these, how much ground you have to cover, you know, and the other thing that was really weird was, you know, back then we, for some reason, the Brooks Range is fairly wet, there's a lot of wet, boggy spots in it, so we actually wore hip boots all the time, you know, we hunted in hip boots, we hunted sheep in hip boots, you know, and so that's not really a good thing to have on your feet, you know, nowadays we all make a big deal about, you know, what kind of boots do you have, blah, blah, blah, well, I know you don't even need boots because I used to do it in hip boots, you know, and it wasn't fun but we got it done, but I mean, when you're looking at walking out 200 miles in the snow, the last thing you don't want to have on your feet is non-insulated hip boots,

you know, and it's zero degrees out, you know, and how are you going to dry your

anyways, off we go and right away, you know, we get into the trip and the horses look kind of weak and I remember that he had flown a bunch of grain in and he had been graining them up and I think he was just trying to keep them going, you know, just trying to keep them going so he could get out of there and then he didn't want to be there, well, I know for a fact that he didn't want to be there when they died because years later and I kind of found that out, but oh, so we get into the trip and of course now it starts to snow and one thing leads to another and the snow gets deep, you know, so now we have like two or three feet of snow on the ground and then when it clears off, well, guess what happens, you know, the temperature drops, you know, so it's going down to 20, 30 below, so we're in hip boots, you know, we're sleeping in this dinky, you know, totally not even a tent tent

that was just so cheap, it was unbelievable, I mean, I can remember having everything I had on, getting in my sleeping bag and still being cold, you know, and of course you had to get the hip boots off every day and so they're wet from sweat, you know, and so you have to sit there and hold them open while they freeze because if you lay them on the ground and they go flat, there's no way you're getting them on in the morning, so in the morning you put them on frozen and then you just kind of lived in them until the heat of your feet warmed them up and they were pliable and you could go again, you know, so. Come on, how many horses again were we talking about? There was about eight mules and horses so I think there was probably six mules and two horses and so now they start to go down, you know, they start to really have problems when that really cold weather hit, you know, and lots of

ice fog, so there'd be a lot of ice fog during the cold weather and then during the day it would kind of clear off and I was thinking, well, when they started to die I was just like, you know, this is really getting bad now and we actually had to shoot some of them because they just got so bad it was just, you know, we just had to put them down and so within about three or four days, four days maybe, we were down to one horse, you know, so now we're walking, you know, and so we had our backpacks, our hip boots, I had a chunk of moose meat, I had a bag of rice and I had a .22 pistol and my rifle, that was it, you know, and we were shooting tarmigan along the way and some nights I can remember just kind of getting the, you know, being able to kind of saw a piece of frozen moose meat off and then kind of thaw it out and just eat it frozen and then, you know, be able to boil a little water,

we had a stove and have some rice with it and that was pretty much the meal for the day, you know, and so it was pretty slim, slim pickings, you know, and we would pick stuff off along the way, we found a pool where some grayling were trapped in it and we speared those out of there and ate those and, but, you know, losing the animals is really demoralizing when you've used them off season and, you know, you get to know them and, I mean, they just really, really work hard for you and to watch them just kind of freeze to death and then start to glaze over in their eyes and then, you know, have to shoot them or just have them fall over dead, it was bad, but 30 below, you know, it was drastic, you know, and I can remember thinking about three quarters of the way through it, I was like, yeah, you know, I might not make it out of this, you know, because I don't think anybody's going to come

looking for us. And I started to kind of think about that guy and I'm like, yeah, I don't think he maybe really had an emergency in town, you know, I think he kind of knew this was going to happen because, you know, he kind of made comments about the horses and the mules doing poor, you know, throughout the season and I'm like, yeah, there's something to this, you know. So at the end of the day, I remember the last day, so back in those days when, you know, the pipeline was new, Prudhoe Bay was new, the Arctic air was super clean, super pure and I can remember, I remember telling the kid, I said, I think I can smell diesel exhaust, you know, because it was just so poignant and he's like, there's no way, he says, we're nowhere near, he was convinced at that point that we were totally lost, you know, and I was like, no, I think I can smell diesel smoke and so I said, hey, in the morning

we'll head up this, you know, down this river and there's a ridge down there, we'll get up on that and I said, according to the map, we should be able to see the haul road, you know. and so we got up in the morning and he had had really kind of a mental breakdown at this point and he was really doing bad and I was just thinking, if that haul road's not there, he's just going to lose it because he had already been crying. How long had this been since you started out? How many days were you talking? I think we were gone probably nine or ten days, you know, so we were probably into day eight, which probably doesn't seem like a long time but like every day when you're in that situation, boy, every minute just seems like an hour, you know, because you're just having to think so hard about what do I do and the wind's blowing and you're cold and now you realize you might not make

it and your feet are freezing and his feet actually were freezing. He was actually getting frostbite and he was pretty much losing it. You know, he was starting to come apart in his mind just with all the negativity he had going on in his head and at that point I thought, well, I might not make it either but, boy, we just got to keep going forward because we got to get out of here. I mean, that's just all there is to it. You know, we can't spend the winter out here, you know, because it's going to get down to 40, 50 below here pretty quick and then we're really going to be in trouble, you know.

So we got up, so we went down that river and we got up on that ridge and it had snowed the night before so everything was really white now because the snow was getting real deep and we looked out over the, I'll never forget it, just completely flat, barren landscape and we saw nothing, there's no road, nothing and I'm like, God, we totally screwed up and I thought we should have taken that other fork and that path the last one we went over and I said, so now I'm thinking, I'm looking at the map and I'm thinking, God, I think we're just on the north slope, which is terrible, we're supposed to be going west down the Ribdon River and we've gone north and we're totally done now because there's nobody out here, at least if you get toward the pipeline corridor, you have some of the helicopters flying up and down for the pipeline within two or three miles of the pipeline and they had a lot

of security then, I was trying to get within the at least in that corridor so somebody could see us and now there's nothing and now he starts crying and I was just like, yeah, we are screwed, because I was pretty much getting spent by that time too, you know, you just, you get so physically tired and the stress and the adrenaline and everything. You had a goal, you had a, you thought this was it and then it's not and you're already, you know, nine or ten days into it and wore out. Did you still have a horse, one horse or nothing by then? No, we had nothing by then so we were just walking, you know, and so, I don't know, we were just sitting there and I thought I saw something moving and I took my binoculars that I had and I looked and it was the back of a semi-truck and what we had done was the snow and covered the haul road and we were just looking, we were looking kind of across it,

you know, where we couldn't see it and it really was running the other way and so this was one of the first trucks, they didn't run at night back then, they only ran in the morning and so this was early in the morning and they would leave Prudhoe Bay early in the morning so we saw that truck coming down the road but it was way off in the distance, we were off in our calculations but not by much and boy, I'll never forget it, I nudged them and I'm like, there's a freaking truck there buddy, let's go, you know. and we went down and the last obstacle was the Sagavanuktuk River and so if you ever go caribou hunting up on the haul road, the Sagavanuktuk River is a raging terrible river that is still like you can wade across it and it was frozen over but you could hear that water just rushing under it, you know, and I was just like, man, how are we going to do this? And we did have

a dog with us, you know, and so the dog's running out on the ice and back and forth and I'm like, well, the dog made it, well, you know, we're heavier than the dog. The dog's 45 pounds. Yeah, 45 pounds. figure that a dog would make it slide to make it behave. Yeah. Wow. So he made it and you guys, the ice did, held you and you got across? I mean, well, I had a, we had some rope and I always carried rope around up there because it comes in handy when you're crossing rivers, especially on ice and we had actually broken through with one of the horses a couple times during the trip and so, you know, having somebody go across with a rope on them usually is a little bit better than just plunging in and so the kid tied the rope onto me and I slid my pack across and then I just kind of got down and I kind of distributed my weight out and I just crawled across and made it, you know, but I mean,

it was, you could hear the water raging underneath it, but there was no choice, you know, and then I held onto the rope for him and he tied it on himself and came across and we got up on the haul road and I'll never forget climbing up that embankment and then getting up on the haul road and thinking, I can't believe it, we actually, we actually made it, you know, we actually did this thing, actually did it. Was it a matter of minutes or hours or how long before somebody came along and what was that? Pretty much right away they had a lot of security there so people noticed you because, you know, the public wasn't allowed up there so a guy rolled up in a pickup truck and he's like, oh, he goes, who are you? I was like, well, we had these horses and he's like, oh, he goes, your boss is down in the camp having breakfast, he's been waiting for you, you know, and I'm like, really?

I'd like to talk to him, no, let's do this. He had been down there for days, you know, and he wasn't saying anything to anybody and he never told anybody we were overdue and he never said a word to anybody so I think he was just waiting out, I know he was just waiting it out but, you know, here I am, kid from the Midwest, nobody does it again, I went down there and he was just like, oh, it's so great to see you, I can't believe it, I was so worried about you and he laid all the BS on me and just kind of like smoothed the whole thing over and he's like, God, I was just getting ready to call the troopers, I was just getting ready to do this, if he hadn't shown up today, blah, blah, blah, you know, and all this stuff and so it really wasn't until about 10 years later that the whole story came together for me and then I had the proof of what he had really done, you know, and so,

tell us about that a little bit, like, yeah, how did, I mean, you kind of indicated it earlier in podcast that you knew the truth and anyway, so tell us how that came out. Yeah, so, so that kind of came and went, you know, and we're glad we made it out and, you know, he was like, oh yeah, you know, he wasn't upset about the horses so that should have tipped me off because if he wasn't expecting it, he should have been like, what, what happened, you know, so thinking back on it, you know, he kind of knew that was going to happen but it was about 10 years later I was back in Fairbanks and, you know, working for other people and a guy moved in down the road from me who I thought looked kind of familiar and we got to talking over time and he's like, God, yeah, you look familiar and I'm like, yeah, where did I know you from? He goes, well, I was a pilot. I said, oh, did you ever fly up

in the Bricks range? He goes, yeah, he goes, oh, that's where I know you're from. He's like, yeah, you worked for that outfitter up there and I'm like, yeah, he goes, you know, I always wondered what happened to you because that day that he left you there and flew out, I said, what about Joe and Eddie and he's like, yeah, don't worry about it, they'll never make it and so right then and there, I knew right then and there that he knew that he left us for dead and what he really was afraid of was he knew those horses and those mules were going to die and then I did find out that he didn't get them from Canada, he got them from down in the States somewhere like Arizona somewhere so they totally weren't climatized and he knew they were going to die and he didn't want to take the rap for them, he was afraid he'd get animal cruelty charges pressed against them so he literally just left us out

there to die is what he did and so that was that and so when we came to the pump station, that's why he was so surprised because he couldn't believe we had made it out either, you know. Well, what about the pilot when a pilot hears that don't worry about them guys, they'll never make it? Why didn't he come back and get you? This one's on me, I gotta go back. Yeah, good question, you know, I mean, it was a crazy time up here back then and you know, why didn't he do that? You know, here's two young kids and a guy says something like that and he never contacts anybody, it's just, I don't know, you know, so that's why the whole experience was just bad, really bad, it just showed the worst in humanity, you know. But you talked about obviously how this changed your life and then maybe that moved you forward on an accelerated rate with your girlfriend at the time and to become your wife,

how did that all happen and then tell us about this guy that you were with, I mean, did you guys, I mean, that's a pretty special bond, two guys keeping each other alive so to speak, you know what I mean, on a trip like that. Have you guys, did you guys stay in touch for a lot of years? Yeah, so my life took the turn when I went over the last pass and it was a steep one and it's a pass from the Wind River and the Brooks Range to the Ribdon River and it's pretty steep and when you get like three feet of snow on it, it's even steeper. I can remember walking back and forth several times just to make a trail to move forward ten feet, you know, and when we got over that and I mean, soaking wet now and, you know, trying to dry your clothes on a willow fire at night and all this kind of stuff and, you know, with all the conditions that was when I kind of realized that was the, you know,

I might not make it out of here and I remember just getting to the other side, getting to the Ribdon River, going down the side, going down the pass and looking back up at the mountains and I saw the snow just swirling off the top of the mountains and the wind was blowing so hard up there and I thought, you know what, nothing is as important right now in my life and nothing's important in life, you know, money and all the stuff that I thought was important was not, it's just getting out of here, being alive and then my girlfriend and spending the rest of my life with her and getting married and it was right there that I thought, if I get out of here, I'm going to go back and get married and I'm going to be with her the rest of my life and that was it, you know, and so that was another thing, there again, it gives you that drive, it gives you that hope that if you get out of there

you will do that and so it gives you the hope to make it out and I think it's one of the things that kind of carried me through, you know, so that was a very decisive moment of my life right there on the Ribdon River and the Brooks Range, you know, and so when we got out the kid's feet were frozen and he had actually had two of his toes turned purple and it was bad, you know, and so he was actually, he had foster parents in Montana and one of them came up and got him and he was pretty pissed off about the whole thing and so that was a big hullabaloo and I never actually saw him again after that, you know, I never, after he left, I never heard from him, I never heard anything about him and lost contact with the outfitter, obviously, you know, I didn't have anything to do with him so that was just kind of the end of that so I spent this kind of strange season with him in the Brooks Range

one year and then never saw him again, you know. Crazy, wow, so he's gone, you don't know dead or alive or either of them outfitter or you've been. I have no idea, yeah. I have no idea. Well, I guess, what a crazy story, Joe, I mean, that's a, and not, I mean, you gotta remember this, what was this, early 80s, that didn't seem like that long ago but you gotta realize where you're at and, you know, Alaska was barely a state, you know what I mean, and still being developed, like you said, very primitive. I can't decide what's more wild, like Alaska or Peoche, Nevada. I mean, they were both crazy places back then and so, anyway, so you end up homesteading up there in Alaska a little bit and, you know, is that cabin still around or tell us a little bit about that? Yeah, so the, the homesteading came a few years later so I went through the Brooks Range thing and I got into it,

I got my first guide license in 1982 and so we actually got married in 1984 though so I was kind of one of those guys that put it off, put it off, put it off until, until I actually had my walk out of the Brooks Range and that changed my life and then I realized, you know, I became, I grew up a lot during that trip and I realized what my priorities were and what really was important in life and it was her and so came back, married her and boom, off to Alaska we go and then back in those days they still had the true homestead programs and when I say true homestead program that means that you, they picked your name and they picked a bunch of other people's names and then they had a plot of land and they, you know, had a map and at 12 o'clock on July 6th, boom, go. First one to put four corners in, brush the lines, mark it out, put your name on it and then get back to town to the land

office Monday morning, get it, got it, you know, and so I mean there was, people were like really at each other's throats. We had a guy pull a gun on us later in that, later in that weekend when they were homesteading there was a big shootout up there and one family opened up on another and killed a couple people and so that kind of stuff happened during that homestead offering and then it happened again in the homestead offering down by Denali Park like a year or two later where people got killed or were fighting over the land and so they went, so then at that point they went away from the, you know, race to the finish homesteading to a lottery system where they drew your name and then they had more than enough land and they let you out there and gave you a lot more time to go do it and it wasn't like the first one back got it, you know, and then you actually had to purchase the land

from the state, you know, which they gave you a heck of a deal and it was virtually free, but still, you know, people, they just kind of cut down the competition a little bit, so when we did it though, it was pretty tense, you know, I mean, pretty tense times and there's a lot of really, a lot of really crazy people in the world and when you tell them you can have up to 40 acres for free if you just stake it and live on it for five years, it brings out the best and it brings out the worst in people. Sounds like shed hunting down here in the lower 48 states these days. I mean, I don't know about deaths, but about everything but. So yeah, and they actually have gone to a draw in certain places to avoid. Where? Antelope Island. Oh yeah, that's right. They've got a few areas where they got to do a draw. Oh geez. Only the Boy Scouts up on the Refuge in Jackson. I mean, it's like, that's right.

So crazy stuff. Holy cow. Not to regress too much, but what was the time frame between your gal giving you the 50 bucks and you marrying her? How long, what we were dealing with, you know, time-wise on there? Married in 84. Five years. Yeah, five years. Five years. So 79 to 84. So it was either give her 50 bucks back or marry her. That's what I'm, am I picking up what you're putting down? I still didn't have the 50 bucks in 84, but we got married anyway. Okay, all right. And so, all right, so then you're homesteaded, you know, you've got a plot of ground. Was it 40 acres then? Yeah, so we did the 40 acres and we built a cabin on it and, you know, we spent our time and so you didn't have to be there five years total. You had to be there X amount of time within a five-year period and so we went, we lived up there quite a bit and, you know, did our thing up there. But then we were

also coming back to Fairbanks for supplies and coming back to Fairbanks for different things, you know, and so it was really nice and it was a beautiful parcel and I just actually was cleaning up some stuff the other day and I found some pictures of her working on the cabin, peeling logs and it was really a nice cabin and we built it totally from hand. We had no tools really. I mean, we didn't have any, you know, anything to lift the logs other than come along so I built the whole cabin with two chainsaws, four come alongs, an axe, a sledgehammer, and a crowbar, and that was it, you know, so we built the whole cabin like that and these were pretty big logs. The cabin wasn't mammoth or anything, it was about 16 by 20 but still, you know, when you're by yourself kind of and, you know, getting the ridge pole up there, you know, with come alongs and, you know, come along in all the logs from

falling in the woods to the cabin site, you know, without using a truck or any kind of a forklift or anything and it was extremely labor intensive and it was really the deal, you know, I mean, I never could do it today but back then, kind of the sky was the limit on effort, you know, we had more time and effort than anything else so we just did it, you know. Crazy. That reminds me, our family, nowhere near as primitive conditions is what you're talking about in the early 80s but in the mid to late 90s, we built a cabin down here in southern Utah in an area we couldn't drive to, it was an acre of ground on the San Juan area in southern Utah and we fell the aspen trees made out of aspen that was all there and we had to fall them one summer, let them dry, peel them and let them dry all that winter and then the next year you could start working on them and had the draft horses drag them up

to the site and of course I was a teenager and so I wasn't as much help, I was a young teenager as my grandpa and dad but I saw that come together firsthand and just, and we had modern tools, we had a lot more you know, you know, even though that was 15 or 20 years after year it's not like that was dramatic but still we were, you could run to town 20 minutes away and get anything you wanted, it wasn't, you know, not Alaska and you run out of a certain part it's like, you gotta make something work, you gotta sharpen a piece of metal somewhere to make it work another piece of tool or something so I, I've been there a little bit you, you kept after it and became an outfitter yourself and tell us a little bit about, just briefly wrap that up and how I guess that you learned a lot obviously but it didn't deter you from I guess maybe where, like I said earlier, the hook of Alaska got set

pretty deep in you pretty early on. Yeah, so the, after that trip I realized that the, you know, the Brooks Range was not really, it's tough horse country, you know, Alaska's tough horse country but the Brooks Range especially and I know a lot of people run a lot of horses up there now but back then when I was doing it, you know, there weren't the established routes, there weren't the trails, there weren't what they have a little bit, now it's a little bit, a lot better actually. But I just, you know, I realized I wanted to start my own outfit and I realized from a hunting point of view, from a business point of view, you know, getting all that horse feed and the tack and the horses and just the expense of the horses going up there every year and then you use them for a short window of time and then you have to winter them somewhere and I mean, some of these guys were spending just

thousands of dollars, you know, wintering their horses in Fairbanks and you know, back then the winters were harder, you know, in the early 80s we had a lot of 50s, 50 below for weeks type stuff and so it was tough, it was tough keeping horses going and I thought, you know, if I do this I really want to try to make a profit doing it and I started working for an outfitter in the Alaska range and we were just doing the backpack thing and it just seemed so much easier, you know, it just seemed, you know, when you backpack out, I just kind of enjoyed it more because I wasn't chasing the horses as much and I wasn't dealing with the horses. I mean, you know, when we were using the horses in the Brooks range we were shoeing them, we were, you know, saddle sores and fixing tack and we were constantly doing all that kind of stuff and I just thought it kind of took away from the hunting.

You had to have full-time wranglers on staff at another expense. So I just opted to kind of do the Alaska range thing and do the backpack thing and I thought it made a lot more sense in the travel time, you know, from Fairbanks to where we were hunting anyway in the Brooks range one way and a super cub was over four hours, you know, and so the area I hunt in now is one hour, you know, from Fairbanks and so it just made a lot more sense to me and quite honestly, there's a lot more sheep in the areas that where we hunt now. I mean, there's a higher concentration of sheep in a smaller area so you see a lot more sheep. The Brooks range was so spread out and if you actually look at a map of the Brooks range, it's actually four or five different little mountain clusters that make the range and I mean, I can remember traveling 20 miles on horses to go from one band of sheep to the other,

you know, I mean, it was tough at times, you know, it was beautiful country but, you know, we really had to travel to find what we were hunting for and it's just, it's a huge, huge area up there so, so I decided to, you know, get my guys' license and start out in the Alaska range and so that's how that happened. That's crazy. Well, my first, my first sheep came from the north slope of the Brooks range. We actually flew out of Happy Valley. There you go. The old Lynn Mackler back in the day. Oh yeah, Lynn Mackler, that's right. Anyway. Yeah. Yeah, well, it is, it's crazy. Big, big country. We've seen Pump Station 3, then you know what I'm talking about. Oh yeah, all that stuff. We drove, kind of drove the haul road, the first hunters that particular year and so kind of helped him get all of his stuff up there to get started for the season. So, anyway, kind of cool. Well, congratulations on

being alive, Joe. Yeah. Right? What a story. That's one of those stories that, that feels like it was 100, 150 years ago and in some cases it might as well have been, like we said a minute ago, because of where you're at. It's not forgiving. Very easy to die in Alaska and a lot of people did it. So, appreciate you sharing that with us today. It's pretty, pretty awesome, pretty awesome that you're, you know, here to talk about it and have a successful business decades later still going at it. Alaska Wilderness Enterprises. All right, Joe. Well, we appreciate you and, I don't know, I hope it warms up there for you this month. It's kind of, like you said, what did you say it was this morning up there, degree-wise? About my house, so we've got a lot of temperature inversion around Fairbanks, so I think the warmest spot was probably up around zero. I had 13 blow at my house because I live

on a river, so it's a little colder over there, you know. geez. Geez. Well, hopefully spring breaks soon and comes your way. Daylight's lengthened, but we know that doesn't always mean something necessarily, so it sounds like you're stuck for a little bit according to the forecast, but hopefully it breaks and you guys get out, and like we talked about at the start of the podcast, this world gets somewhat back to normal and allows some spring bear hunting and some of the things we all love to be able to actually happen. Well, great. Yeah, I appreciate that, and I think it will. I think if we all kind of practice some social distancing and stay in and kind of keep the spread down, I think it'll be over faster than not, so just hoping for the best for everybody all over the country, and hopefully we don't have the bad repercussions from it that they've had overseas, but I appreciate

the opportunity to talk to you, and it was great, and I really enjoyed it. You bet. Thanks, Joe. We appreciate you being on, and good luck to you this fall. If there's anything we can do to help you, let us know. Okay, take care. Thanks again, Joe. Thank you.