Over dinner the night I stayed there, she told me a great story about how she overcame grief and her physical disability to start drawing seven years after she thought she’d never make art again. I wrote it for this week’s We Alaskans magazine in the Alaska Dispatch News.

Here’s how it starts:

The wolf showed up around Shannon Cartwright’s place in October of 2014. She never saw it, but a neighbor did. That’s how she knew it was black. By then, Cartwright had lived off the grid nearly 40 years. She’d seen about 30 wolves, maybe more.

“This one,” she said, “it wasn’t normal.”

Each morning, she woke in her cabin off the rail line north of Talkeetna and went out with her dog, Coda. Each morning she found new wolf tracks in the snow. With each passing day, the wolf was coming closer to the cabin.

Cartwright, a long-time Alaska children’s book illustrator, was in her mid-60s, and lived alone. Her nearest neighbor was a mile away. Her satellite phone was unreliable. She had a rifle, but it had been years since she was steady enough to shoot it.

…

Read the rest here.

A scene from her desk:

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Here’s how my story begins:

To get to the town of Talkeetna, where Alaska’s popular flag-stop train begins its route, take the Parks Highway north from Anchorage through the Anywhere-in-America strip-mall colony of Wasilla, pass Happy Hooker Towing and the neighboring Church on the Rock, go by so many lonesome coffee carts in so many dusty gravel parking lots you’ll lose count and on through the town of Houston, where kids on four-wheelers race down the roadside, kicking up dust.

Keep driving as these touches of urban living give way to a rolling tapestry of silver-bark birches. When you get to the stretch where trees were torched into black spindles by wildfire last summer, you’re close. Maybe then, up over a rise in the highway, you will get a glimpse of Denali’s unreal height, its snow-smoothed shoulders holding the weight of a wide, blue sky.

It had been a quarter of a century since I’d been to Talkeetna. Now, I was going there to catch the Hurricane Turn and ride 55 miles north through a series of off-the-grid homesteads to Hurricane Gulch. There the railcars would stop atop a bridge over a 300-foot drop to Hurricane Creek before turning around. It’s said to be the last flag-stop train route in America, a six-hour trip into a simpler, elemental way of life.

Read the rest here.

The post For Smithsonian: A ride on America’s last flag-stop train into Alaska’s homestead country appeared first on Julia O'Malley.

When my husband and I got married in July, 2007, purchasing peonies wasn’t an option. They were out of season. But I remember seeing Anchorage gardens full of the ruffly, aromatic blooms in July. I ended up using someone’s garden peonies for my own bouquet.

It wasn’t until August 2013 when I was leafing through an Alaska Airlines Magazine that I learned how unique Alaska peonies really are.

Peony farms have since sprouted up all over the state from Nenana to Homer and have cornered the global peony market from mid to late summer.

I recently had the opportunity to take a tour of Alaska Blooms Peony Farm and learn about these special flowers from owner Rachel Christy.

My son and I embarked on a rainy Sunday outside the city of Wasilla to a cabin where thousands of peony buds were growing in the front lot.

We were greeted warmly by Rachel and her niece, Harper.

This is Rachel’s sixth year growing commercial peonies. She became a peony farmer after attending a peony growers’ conference in 2011.

“I went to this garden conference and I thought it was for gardeners but it was really a farmers’ conference, a growers’ conference,” Rachel said. “And I got in there and realized this was about a crop, not just how to grow a nice peony, and so then it just hatched. I couldn’t stop thinking about it.”

She and her family decided to convert their lakeside cabin into a peony farm. It wasn’t easy, she said.

“It takes a lot of determination because it’s a lot of work,” Rachel said. “It was so hard for us to plant 1,000 [peony plants]. We have 3,500 here and it was so hard to get them planted – to get that done properly, mulch it properly, get the irrigation down.”

But all that work is paying off. Last year her farm sold 5,000 peony blooms and she’s hoping for even more this year.

It’s evident that Rachel is proud of her peonies.

“Every time I walk down my center aisle to come back to the farm I just stop and think, ‘It’s like Christmas.’”

Rachel grows several varieties of peonies such as Monsieur Jules Elie, Kansas, Festiva and Duchess.

Alaska Blooms sells only 25 percent of their harvest locally. The rest is shipped to wholesalers and florists in the Lower 48. But it’s the Alaska brides who prefer the bright, colorful varieties. The rest of the states go for the classic white, Rachel said.

Many of her blooms are now ready to be harvested and sent to a commercial pack house in Anchorage, where they get graded, packed, stored, and shipped.

Picking the buds at just the right time is a skill.

“It’s really kind of nerve-wracking,” Rachel said. “I try and get them when they’re soft.” If they are picked too late, they could open during shipping and that means florists won’t have time to arrange them for an event.

But if picked at the right time, the buds can sit in a cooler for four to five weeks before opening. Rachel and her family will harvest all their peony blooms by mid-July but will store them in the cooler until they sell out toward the end of August.

Although she sells most of her peonies to wholesalers and florists, she also sets up shop at the Wasilla Wednesday Market and plans to distribute to Aurora Village Carrs in Anchorage.

Rachel has some tips for extending the life of your fresh-cut peonies.

First, if you’re picking them for an event and you need them to stay closed, store them in a fridge, but be sure to remove your fruits and vegetables first.

“You have to be careful about what is in your fridge,” Rachel said. “Apples emit ethylene and that causes the peonies to open.”

Rachel suggests keeping your cut peonies in the fridge for 24 hours before arranging them. “You’ll get a longer vase life,” she said.

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Claus, 68, had already done half a dozen interviews by 10am, he said, talking with reporters as far away as Israel. North Pole is a community of a little over 2,000 south of Fairbanks in interior Alaska. He won as a write-in candidate with 58 votes.

It seemed everybody got a kick out of his election.

Claus was born Tom O’Connor, but he changed his name 10 years ago, he said. At the time he was living in Lake Tahoe, Nevada. He decided to grow out his beard and it came in white and bushy. That led him to play Santa over the holidays for some charities.

“I had a ball,” he said.

Claus had worked in law enforcement, as a chaplain and as a television news director (he’s also a dissertation away from a doctorate in education at NYU, he said). Around the time he grew out his beard, he decided to get involved with children advocacy. One day, as he walked to the post office in Tahoe, he began to pray about the direction his life should take, he said.

“One of the parts of the prayer was, ‘Shall I change my name?’” he said. “Right after I finished my prayer, this white, sort of nondescript car comes by. I heard what sounded like a guy in his 20s shout out, ‘Santa, I love you!’”

And so he changed his name to Santa Claus.

Read the rest of the interview here.

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See all the images from the class here.

The post City Notebook: A class Instagram walk on 13th Ave appeared first on Julia O'Malley.

(We also saw a lot of a couple bears on our trip, but that’s another post. )

The post See Alaska: Juneau (mostly food) in iPhone snaps appeared first on Julia O'Malley.

You’ll also be there just in time for donuts.

Adak, population maybe 100, is one of the most interesting American communities you can get to by jet. Its few residents make their homes on a large abandoned military base that dates back to World War II. A visitor can’t help but be struck by the ghostliness of the place at first: its boarded-up elementary school, empty commissary, childless neighborhood playgrounds and wind-battered vacant houses giving way to the elements. But the longer you spend there, the more your view of it changes, like your eyes getting used to the dark. As the shadows come to life, you realize where you are: an independent-minded, truly Alaskan small town. It is impossible not to be charmed.

Everything in Adak used to be something else. City Hall used to be the high school. The store, which is only open two hours a day (because after that electricity costs eat all the profits), used to be a community center. The Navy-issue hutches holding beer and wine at the liquor store? They used to be in some- body’s living room. The Bluebird Café (one of two restaurants in town) is in a house on a suburban-feeling cul-de-sac. The only way you know it’s a restaurant is the “Open” sign out front. About half the neighboring houses are empty.

Read more here.

With photos by Nathaniel Wilder.

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First came the sow:

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Then came the cub:

He ate apples off the tree for an hour and then took a bathroom break, which Leo thought was hysterical. And then he crossed the street and scampered into the neighbors’ yard.

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Anyway, here’s what I brought back from the trip on my phone, mainly food photos, from one of America’s most northern communities.

The post Point Hope (food) in iPhone snaps appeared first on Julia O'Malley.