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The countryside, which you might expect to be frozen into immobility in March, is in
fact teeming with life. There are wolf tracks the size of salad plates, tracks of fox, porcu-
pine, squirrel, vole. “Those are my favorite,” Carl says of the vole tracks. “You see their
tracks heading out across the lake and you know it has to look like the size of the Sahara
Desert to them.” One set of vole tracks disappears in mid-trail, with the ghostly imprint of
wing tips on either side.
I arrive back at the lodge trying not to glow with pleasure and enjoyment, but it isn't
easy.
That evening, the promised lesson in Beginning Gougères. Susie, Nancy, and I don
spotless white aprons with varying degrees of apprehension. What Kirsten doesn't know
is that Nancy and Susie have both earlier confided that they don't cook. Me, either. Nancy
tries to warn her—“We're the remedial class”—but it doesn't faze Kirsten and she
launches right in. We boil flour and water and butter and shred nutmeg and cheese and
pray over the tray as it goes into the oven. Our gougères are a little ragged around the
edges but they taste good. “Does anybody ever fail this lesson?” I ask, and Kirsten smiles.
“Oh yeah,” she says. We are very proud.
“How did you get here?” I ask over a dinner of savory beef stew. “How did you wind
up cooking gourmet food and teaching people to ride snow machines in the back of bey-
ond?”
Once, Kirsten was an ICU nurse and Carl an audiologist. Both of them worked for the
Public Health Service, and met when they were posted to the Alaska Native Medical
Center. “He was the current hottie,” Kirsten says. After they were married, they took a
float trip down Lake Creek, at the mouth of which there was a For Sale sign in the weeds.
At that point Carl had never built anything. To date, he has built all three of their lodges,
beginning with Riversong Lodge where Lake Creek flows into the Yentna River, Winter-
lake Lodge on Finger Lake, and Redoubt Bay Lodge at the entrance to Lake Clark Pass.
They've been running full ever since. “A lot of our best friends started out as guests,”
Kirsten says.
The next day is clearer, if possible, and colder. It's time to mush. These “retired” dogs
are hysterical with enthusiasm, straining so hard to get into the traces that Carl has to lead
them to the sled by holding them up on their hind legs.
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