Alaska's Wild West

Adventure and history await discovery across the last frontier state.

- By Mike Coppock

Several years ago, I was a long-term substitute teacher in the Yup'ik Alaska village of Akiak when the generator broke down. It was February and the village had no heat and no lights. I crawled into my sleeping bag wearing my coat, a little worried about hyperthermia. The forecast called for a low of minus 30.

I was drifting in and out when I heard barking. Wolves were coming in for the dogs. Lights usually kept the wolf pack from entering the village, but the easy meal the dogs made was too hard for the wolves to resist now that the village was pitch black. Suddenly a shotgun blasted, followed by another. Yup'iks were not about to lose part of their dog teams to wolves.

I got up around 6 a.m. trudging through snow to the school to get ready for my class. The air was crisp to the point of being painful. Moonlight was illuminating my breath. I heard a chopping sound. I could make out an elderly woman to my left wearing everything she could find to stay warm as she chopped firewood for heat and cooking.

My replacement flew in that afternoon, and I showed him around the village. He thought he saw a caribou skin stretched out across the side of a cabin. It looked odd to me until we got closer. It was a wolf pelt. There was a Native woman in the doorway braving the cold for a smoke. She said a hunter had brought it in from the tundra a few days earlier. Another woman had taken it into her cabin, thawed and skinned it, and then tacked it up to dry.

When we walked away, my replacement asked if I ever planned to come back to Alaska. I always come back, I said. It is as close as I can ever get to how the Old West really was.