Travel' means something different for those in Alaska. Airplanes are a necessity, but even then travel is often long, difficult  and expensive.  When you add weather delays and 'bad service' delays we often have 12 to 20 hours on a single one way trip. But... it's a lot faster than a ship or a horse or a covered wagon. I need to remind myself that travel is not simply about the destination, it's a...  Read More

Snow. It had to come sooner or later. I look out my window and see a covering of white. Everything is fresh and clean and beautiful. Isaiah 1:18 says, "Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow." Snow is a beautiful reminder that God forgives- that he's always willing to make us clean- to give us a fresh start, a new beginning. Come to him with your sins- be open and honest...  Read More

In Matthew 7:15 Jesus said, "Watch out for false prophets. They come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ravenous wolves." 2 Peter 2 warns us that there will be false teachers among us. There are Christians with whom I strongly disagree on points of doctrine yet I know they are brothers in Christ. Being a 'wrong' teacher is very different from being a 'false' teacher. To be a 'false ...  Read More

Jesus once said to the disciples, "I have food to eat that you know nothing of," and then, "My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to finish his work." There was a 'food' that his disciples didn't understand- a filling that nourished the soul. Jesus was giving hope to a foreign woman who  was in the middle of a tragically disappointing life. Some things are not only more important than o...  Read More

Even though I had a cast on my leg, I had a 12 gauge and a 30.06 in my truck, with my bird dog 'Tucker' sitting on the front seat beside me. It was winter, the temperature was below zero, and there was at least 3 feet of a soft snow on the ground. I was driving the road looking for ptarmigan, grouse, fox or wolves north of Paxson, Alaska. I parked my truck at the base of a high ridge, looked up, a...  Read More

As a young man I was utterly directionless. I lived as though the world revolved around me. I was concerned with my immediate pleasure and honestly never even considered a future responsibility to earn a living or care for a family. When you live that way (as though everything is about you) it's impossible to move forward. You stand still- the world is spinning- and eventually you begin to sink. M...  Read More

I once read that Mark Twain said, "The boy who picks up a cat by the tail learns a lesson he can learn in no other way." As funny as the thought is, it would actually benefit us if all of life's lessons could be learned that quickly. That boy would go from mischief to an immediate and overwhelming FEAR along with PAIN and perhaps a few SCARS. From this moment forward, that boy will have a reverent...  Read More

We'd spent long, hard days with little sleep. Our feet and bodies were battered and sore. The hunt was over, but we still had a lot of work to do. Gear had to be cleaned and dried, the tents needed to be pitched so they could dry out before storing, and bloody backpacks needed to be disassembled and washed. Our sheep meat needed to be cut up, wrapped and put in the freezer. Rifles needed to be cle...  Read More

The next morning, we followed the small stream down until we found our packs. By the time we broke down our spike camp and carried that and our sheep up to our main camp, hours of hard labor were behind us. But we weren't finished yet. We were on a brutal, bone-jarring trail with the ATV's heavily loaded- often off-balance and in danger of tipping. There was a good deal of winching, lifting, pushi...  Read More

We had a good idea of where to find our tent. But by the time we stumbled across it in the dark, it was 1:20 AM. This had been a very long day. We were soaked with rain on the outside and drenched with sweat underneath. My feet were raw, and as I crouched to get into my tent I wasn't sure if my shoulders, hips or legs hurt worse.But on the inside I was smiling. We had two rams. This had been a gre...  Read More

By the time we spotted our rams, climbed up to them, and finally had all the meat and horns and capes packed, it was somewhere between 10 and 11 PM. By the time we got off the mountain and then down the valley to the end of the ridge, it was after midnight. It was dark, we had no flashlight or headlamps, and we knew that we might have problems finding our tent in the next valley. We dropped our pa...  Read More

There were two big rams. We took careful aim, quietly counted to three and fired. We cringed as we watched the rams fall through the air for perhaps a 100 feet, land, tumble and freefall again. Everything happened so quickly that we didn't even consider the cliffs beneath us. Believe me, we considered them now. We had no way to drop off this ridgeline to our sheep at any point. We would have to fo...  Read More