I Took My 11-year-old Son on an Off-grid Winter Adventure in Alaska — and It Was the Best Trip We’ve Ever Taken

The far north is a good place to be alone with one’s thoughts. Ever since my divorce, my young son and I have been living on an invisible, internal frontier of our own, and Alaska‘s desolate Interior seemed like the right place to get used to feeling more alone in the world, while at the same time more completely integrated into it. So despite my usual uneasiness when I’m more than a few miles from civilization, the two of us traveled to central Alaska in January, when daytime temperatures remain below zero and daylight lasts less than five hours, to encounter the dimness and silence of the subarctic winter.

Our hosts, the wife-and-husband team of Jenna and David Jonas, have lived sustainably since 2012 far off the grid on a bluff above the Tanana River, about 60 miles west of Fairbanks. David is the younger brother of one of my oldest friends, and when we were all in our teens, he built a cabin on his parents’ wooded land in Vermont without power tools and lived there for two years. Now he and Jenna are experienced wilderness guides, and their home-based business, Alaska Homestead Adventures, offers private, bespoke, all-inclusive winter vacations.

As the crow flies — or the dogs run — David and Jenna live seven miles from their nearest neighbors and 20 miles from the nearest town (Nenana, population 358). They chop ice for water, heat with wood, make their sleds by hand, and hunt, forage, or grow most of their food on their piece of what locals call the Great Land. They offer guests an alternative to the highly mediated, comfortable visits to remote natural landscapes provided by most luxury tourism outfitters. Instead, their homestead adventures involve full immersion in the daily work and pleasures of life on the frozen frontier. This includes a panoply of indoor and outdoor winter activities, from whittling to ice fishing, along with three home-cooked meals a day.

I was apprehensive about spending three days in 225 square feet with an 11-year-old and no running water, but David and Jenna had lived in our cabin, the one-room Sun Lodge, for seven years before hand-building the larger log cabin, a five-minute hike away, where they now live with their two young children.

After spending a night in Fairbanks, my son and I rose early to take a cab 45 minutes south to a trailhead, where David met us with his snowcat. We traded our snow boots for warmer pairs that he had brought, along with enormous overcoats and what looked like glass-blowing mitts. Then we rode a sled attached to the snowcat, standing in the back, gripping the bar — it felt like waterskiing. We traveled over powdery snow, and through a forest of black spruce and the occasional aspen scarred by the bite marks of a hungry moose.

We arrived at the homestead in time for a lunch of gamy and flavorful moose stew. We ate from wooden bowls with wooden spoons, which our hosts had carved from their own trees’ burls and branches. An outhouse, protected by birchbark walls, stood about a minute’s hike away. After lunch we strapped on snowshoes, and between slips and stumbles we found and ate highbush cranberries, bright red and frozen on the branch. It was dark by early afternoon, so we wore headlamps, but the trail between our lodge and the main cabin was marked by Jenna’s exquisite ice lanterns, which had candles burning inside.

The next day, after a delicious hot breakfast, we fired up some hand and toe warmers and stepped aboard the dogsled. A nine-husky team led by David (and a dog named Jack) pulled us down the Nenana River, frozen 20 inches thick and pocked with jumble ice. David stopped to point out the tracks of lynx and otters. During breaks from pulling, the dogs rolled in the snow and took big bites of it to cool down. Back at the cabin, we helped untie and rehouse the dogs. Channeling his beloved Calvin and Hobbes, my son helped shovel the powdery snow into a pile to form a quinzhee, or Athabascan snow shelter. The snow was very dry, but David told us that it would sinter, or consolidate, into a new and denser crystalline structure in a few hours. Sintering struck me as a fine metaphor for our trip, which was already strengthening and consolidating our newly smaller family.

My son and I wore the same two layers of wool long johns and socks for all three days, and we made heavy use of Jenna and David’s extra winter gear. The snowcat runs on gasoline, but other than that, we weren’t participating in much capitalism. I kept my phone charged in the lodge and left it there for most of our daytime adventures. Nothing we did felt like tourism. On the contrary, I felt as if we’d dropped through a portal into a cold, slow, alternate life.

On our third and final day, my son wanted to practice his bushcraft skills, so we hiked out to the edge of the bluff, where David showed us how to build a fire out of dead boughs. We were lucky enough to find some witches’ broom, an abnormal growth on the black spruce tree that’s an excellent fire starter. After we returned to the cabin, David brought a few giant rolls of birchbark in from the workshop, which we cut, peeled thin, rubbed with oil, and folded into decorative stars. There was still time for my son to dig out the interior of his snow shelter and take one more toboggan run down the mile-long trail before we rode the sled back out to the Parks Highway and, from there, a cab back to Fairbanks.

We had hoped to see the elusive northern lights. I’d set alarms for midnight and 1:30 each night and had risen, pulled on a parka, and staggered a few steps outside the Sun Lodge. Alas, it was cloudy on both nights. And though we signed up for aurora wake-up calls at our Fairbanks hotel, there were no calls, just clouds. To my surprise, I wasn’t disappointed to have missed this classic bucket-list experience; as it turned out, we didn’t need to see it to feel Alaska’s enormity. The far north had shown us another way, and giving up modern comfort and ease for a few days reminded us that we already had what we needed; in fact, we had more than enough. 

Alaska Homestead Adventures offers two- to seven-day stays for up to four people, from December through March, from $525 per person per day. 

A version of this story first appeared in the November 2024 issue of Travel + Leisure under the headline “Chills and Thrills.”