Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
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Dogs on Ice
LUCKY WILSON IS ON
a first-name basis with most of the wildlife in Resurrection Bay,
from George and Martha, two eagles who have been nesting in a scrag across from Lucky's
helicopter pad at the Seward Airport for twenty years, to Michael, an old goat of the four-
legged kind who has chosen a tiny green square of nearly vertical pasture between two
snow fields on the fiercely steep slope of a mountain in which to live out his declining
years. “We're about a thousand feet away from him,” Lucky says. “You get any closer
you'll scare them, and if you scare them you'll change their habits, and that's bad.” He
points out a hole a grizzly bear has dug in the side of a mountain. “He was after a parka
squirrel,” Lucky says. “I could walk into that hole standing upright.”
We are presently hovering at two thousand feet above sea level, Lucky in the right seat
of a Eurocopter AS350 helicopter, on our way to the top of Godwin Glacier, and it's one of
those gorgeous Resurrection Bay days when, as Lucky says, pointing south, “Look. Look
right there. See it? That's Hawaii.”
Godwin Glacier Dogsled Tours is the brainchild of Lorraine Temple, who used to mush
professionally and has helped train teams for the Iditarod. “For years I ran a B&B in
Homer and people kept telling me they wished they could see mushing in the summer.
Then six years ago I hired on to run a glacier dogsled tour out of Juneau with Libby
Riddles,” the first woman to win the Iditarod Trail race. Then Lorraine came home to the
Kenai Peninsula and began scouting for a location to do the same thing there. “It's isn't
easy, everything is a national park or a protected wilderness. The Godwin Glacier is really
the only place on the Kenai available to do this kind of thing.”
Godwin Glacier is in the Chugach National Forest and the business operates under a spe-
cial use permit from the Forest Service, which means they haul dogs, cook tent, sleeping
