Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Leroy Zeroth, bearded and soft-spoken, is heading home to Gold Creek, where he and
his wife Kathy run Alaska Cabin Adventures, offering a cabin for rent, along with a little
fishing, a little mountain biking, a lot of peace and quiet. ”It's pretty lowkey,” Leroy says,
“pretty personal.”
We stop at Indian River to let off Joe and Kluane, and now people are waving us down,
starting with Bob and Beth Hopkins, who homesteaded near Mark in 1981, had their cabin
built by 1985 and have been enjoying family time there with their four children ever
since. Leroy gets off (Kathy's there to meet him) and a little further down the tracks we
pick up Mel from Palmer, another homesteader, who is coming back a day early because
his wife hadn't been able to make this trip and he missed her. Also because it had been
twenty-five degrees at his cabin the night before.
Nadia, Jake and Taylor, three kids from Fairbanks, get on with Jake and Taylor's dad.
They've been staying at a cabin built by Jake and Taylor's grandfather fifty years ago, and
they are smuggling Madison past their father. Madison is a very pregnant frog Taylor had
almost stepped on the day before and which the three of them had promptly adopted. I
swear myself to secrecy and am granted the privilege of allowing Madison to crawl into
my hand.
At Hurricane, where the railroad crosses the Parks Highway again, Taylor hangs pre-
cariously out the window of her dad's pickup to wave goodbye (so far as I know, Madison
is now enjoying the cushy life of take-out flies in Fairbanks), and Mike Durban, accom-
panied by his son, a sixteen-year old also named Mike, gets on. A year ago Mike Sr. left a
teaching job in Orange County to build a cabin in the Bush. “Why?” I ask. He shrugs.
“Just something I've always wanted to do. We never got to know our neighbors in Califor-
nia. Here, you've got neighbors five miles away and they'll walk over to see you.” He and
his wife and kids rented Leroy's rental cabin while they got their own built. Mike Jr. is a
little shy, hardly daring to meet my eyes, but I am given to understand that perhaps not
everyone in the family shares Mike Sr.'s dream of a Bush lifestyle. I ask them if they'd
had any problems with wildlife, like bears. “Bears!” Mike Sr. snorts. “Mosquitoes are
worse than bears out here. You can shoot at bears.”
Sometimes the crew of the Hurricane Turn will push the car a little further up the tracks
and run out onto the bridge that spans Hurricane Gulch. On one side of the bridge there is
