Winter expedition to extremely remote cabin in the Alaskan Wilderness

[Music] I've been looking forward to making this episode since I started my channel in fact I named my Channel with this exact kind of trip in mind Alaska cabin Adventures today we are heading deep into the Alaska Wilderness in search of a cabin but it's not just any cabin it's a cabin that's notorious for bad luck and disaster Tim and I have been out here other times and we've been hit with massive snowstorms broken down snow machines Epic Adventures that nearly cost us our life so naturally we like to go back and see if we can't get ourselves into some more trouble this is a story of the Nugget Creek [Music] [Applause] Cabin I'm sure many of you recognized him from his videos on truck house life him and I have been old buddies and we've been adventuring across the state since 2008 Tim came out to the cabin last night had a couple beers and we made a trip plan and packed up our bags we got up at 5:00 a.m. and by 6:00 we were on the [Music] road the first leg of our journey is one of the most dangerous it's a 300M drive across Alaska on really icy steep roads that wind along Cliff edges with all sorts of moose and other wildlife in the road Falling Rocks and frost Hees not only that but we're hundreds and hundreds of miles away from the nearest town that would have some kind of service for a vehicle if something broke down or went wrong it'd be up to us to fix it and get back on the [Music] road so far things have been going pretty smooth the road wasn't too bad and we were making good time and then it happened one of the most terrifying moments of my whole life so we're going down first Steep Hill we've been down just about the whole Drive coming around a corner solid ice and right around the corner there's a front end loader basically like a tractor with a big bucket in the front blocking the entire Road like a do vehicle scooping snow out and we would hit him but I hit the horn and you can see him look up and stare at us and he got the thing out of the way in time while we're sliding towards him it's pretty close coming around a steep icy corner with no chance of stopping only to see a gigantic piece of Steel blocking the entire Road was the last thing I thought we had to worry about but anyway after narrowly avoiding disaster we continued on and started the next leg of the journey the McCarthy [Music] Road [Music] for those who have never seen it it's hard to imagine just how desolate and remote this part of the state is McCarthy Road follows the old railroad bed that was put in in the early 1900s to pull copper or out of the mountains in [Music] kott it was 13° fhe when we left the cabin but the interior of Alaska can often be much colder by the time we got to the trail head it was about -5° F which can lead to problems with getting your snow machine started yes barely I might seem overly excited about getting my snow machine started here but it's not without good reason the last time we came out to this cabin we were left stranded it was -25° F and my snow machine refused to start we spent the entire day taking turns trying to get it to pull over put a sleeping bag over the top of it and even lit a Coleman stove underneath it to try to get some heat up into the engine block with no way of calling for help we decided it was going to be up to us to get out of there the problem was that there was four of us me and Tim and our respective girlfriends Norman and a broke down snow machine and we only had two working snow machines to get out with the dead sled and toe we packed up all of our gear on the snow machines and headed off down the 17m trail into one of the darkest and coldest nights I've ever experienced but the top heavy and uneven loads caused the snow machines to tip over frequently sending us and all of our gear into the snow and into the trees it was so cold that the machines that were working started to have problems as well after a couple miles the headlights on Tim snow machine stopped working we turned on our headlamps but even those were having a hard time working in the cold and after a couple more miles they faded to Black we got into a rhythm of making it down the trail a few hundred yards tipping over packing up all of our stuff getting back on the machine and making it a couple more hundred yards down the trail but the problems just kept coming first the dog leash that we were using to tow the dead snow machine broke leaving us with only a thin piece of parachute cord to tow the other snow machine then with the dim lights that we had left we saw two glowing eyes standing on the trail in front of us we realized that it was a 50 lb Lynx caught in one of the Trappers steel traps that had been set along the trail once we realized that there's traps actually on the trail we no longer could let our dog Norman run alongside of us we had to pick him up and carry on the snow machines as well which caused us to tip over even more frequently finally we came to a hill that was too icy and steep to tow the other snow machine up it seemed like all hope was lost and we were going to have to abandon the snow machine and just walk our way out but lucky for us Tim had a couple of tricks up his sleeve he had just enough cord to rig up what's called a z drag which is essentially a mechanical advantage pulley system that helped us get the sled up the hill with all of us pushing behind it and him pulling we were able to inch the sled up and over the hill after seven grueling hours we finally made it back to the truck and not a moment too soon we were all suffering from exhaustion and bits of frostbite were starting to show up on our exposed flesh that night while we were on the trail I looked up at the stars and thought to myself if we make it out of this alive I think my adventuring days are going to be done but for reasons I still don't understand it had the opposite effect it lit a fire in me a fire from more Adventure and I was hungry to get back into the wilderness W yeah [Music] w [Music] yeah by the time we got all packed up and ready to go the sun was starting to set and the Darkness coming on we had 17 miles to ride on our snow machines to get back to the cabin we figured if everything went smooth we could get there just before dark enough time to get the fire going and get settled in but this is nugget Creek where nothing ever goes according to [Music] plan [Music] [Music] it didn't take long to realize that there's something different about the trail this year in the past it's always been wellmaintained by a Trapper who traps lings hair and other animals along the line on multiple occasion we've come upon his traps with live links and other animals in him which I'll admit is not my favorite thing to see but this year the Trapper had not been out at all in fact the only tracks that were out here were the many thousands of animal tracks crisscrossing the trail going up and down the forest line being the first ones out here for the entire winter was a cool feeling but it also came with a host of other obstacles that we were not [Music] anticipating [Music] so this is the creek that Matt got stuck in last time we just had a hard time getting across this nice we were surprised to find almost no snow out here compared to my cabin which had close to 3 or 4 ft picking through the rocks and Open Water wasn't too big of a problem but it was as we got into the dense Spruce Forest that the real challenge occurred [Music] with the Traer not running his line this year there was no one to come through and clear out the down trees which became more frequent and bigger as the trail went on trees down well at this point I'm starting to question whether or not we were going to make it there are so many down trees and they're just getting bigger that's a pretty big one I think that's a chainsaw wonder if we can move it we both try to pull it over to the side [Music] okay this is a big one finally we came to a tree that was impassible there was no way to go in the woods around it due to the Steep trenches on either side of the trail but this time we came prepared I pulled out my still chainsaw and tried to get it fired up come on [Applause] [Music] baby sh if you've seen my other videos you know that this still chainsaw did a lot of work this summer I cut multiple cords of wood would and I've relied on this saw for everything for the last 10 years but in true nugget Creek fashion tonight would be the night that my trusty still would finally give me a problem come on [Applause] that might be enough to get around all [Music] those let's see if we can move it yeah [Applause] is it cut all the way free yeah here let be fruit I bet the branches are Frozen to the ground the branches are just holding us in yep breaking them off hold on it's getting hung up on this one all right go for it now there we go rra R get these limbs from a little further out let's J for this limb about to break one two yeahoo ground nice look at Creek all right let's get back on the trail immediately after getting the tree cut and getting the saw put away and back on the trail we ran into yet another blowdown want to go around back here yeah but instead of trying to cut this tree we decided we'd try to work our way around it through the thick [Music] [Music] brush [Music] all [Music] right well this is nugget Creek right here and all the Creeks so far have been wide open this is the biggest of all of them so hopefully it's passable and uh the cabin's right on the other side so we'll see what we can do eh oh yeah yeah woohoo wo look at all that firewood too oh yeah could split it all but set all right well in other news that tree got me pretty good literally losing all my down pretty bad it's a ripper that was all right Timmy that was good by by that I mean it was wasn't that good all right oh nice we made it nugget Creek all clean look at that someone Stu stuck the kindling over there it's all that water coming out your pack bro a it's you that entire gallon jug damn yep all in my bag wish everyone would stop the C [Music] sweet [Music] yes [Music] [Music] wa I can't tell you how good it felt to sit around the warm fire with some hot food knowing that we had made it but tomorrow would bring a new set of Adventures we were going to try to ride our snow machines up onto the cuscal glacier and make it to the base of Mount Blackburn one of the tallest and most rugged peaks in North America so after a couple of card games and a couple of beers we decided to call in an early night and get some rest [Music] it's an uncomfortable bit we go what's a PR of that water yeah what kind of coffee we got a Starbucks instant Pikes Place oh yeah woke up this morning and our other gallon of water is totally shot I don't know what's going on there it's like inverted sit right beside it no it was on the ground over here in this huge puddle of water is all on the ground yep we started the day slow with coffee and breakfast instant coffee and dehydrated biscuits and gravy is not exactly what you call delicious but when you're out in the middle of nowhere in a cabin where it's -5° and that's all you got it actually is pretty dang good whoa educate us on the cabin for people who come back to this cabin must always ask who built it this area has always belonged to Mother Nature and the few atna Indians who used it as early as 1881 to 1882 there were Prospectors poking up the Copper River but it was James McCarthy among others who explored and prospected the tributaries and eventually found the copper deposits that led to the Copper boom of this region it was very difficult mining conditions due to the winters and weather and also leg itics of equipment and horses to transport Goods mostly they use sleds I found several in the area when the ground was frozen and the snow covered by 1902 and 1906 there were several mines located and working in the calana river in 1917 the road was completed from Stana Creek to nugget creek and a telephone line installed alongside wow is a telephone line yeah no way all the way to this cabin yep didn't see any P yeah well it's long gone that was in 1917 nugget Creek gets its name from a very large copper nugget several hundred lb that was found a couple miles up from this cabin now believed to have been carried there by glaciers 200 lb 200 lb nugget coet just sitting in the creek I stand corrected here it turns out that the Nugget they found wasn't several hundred lb in fact it was several thousand PBS anyway back to the story there are a few old trails in this area that the miners used and are established on Old Maps first of course is the Trail Road you came in from next came the big copper bust and the depression years and this area was again back in the hands of Mother Nature Along came a man by the name of Tom Byron who in 1966 built this cabin here on nugget Creek this is a nice cabin and we ask that you use it and take care of it like it was your own it is sort of signed JC wow so 1966 this was built yep well I thought I'd take a second to show you guys around the cabin it's not super big but it's actually quite a bit bigger than in the bunk house I just built and uh big enough for wood stove and all the bunks and whatnot but yeah anyway I'd say probably I'd say probably 14x 14 but it's just a guess this is another thing I got wrong when I got home I did some reading and found out the cabin's not 14x 14 but in fact it was 15 by9 which I find really hard to believe given that my cabin is a 16x2 it seems so much smaller than my cabin but I don't know next time we'll bring a tape measure out and see if it's true anyway I got a little kitchen area over here and uh actually hasn't brand new propane cook stove that somebody left out here recently we brought all of our own cook stuff just in case but it's nice to have it out here something a little bit more substantial we just have like little jet boils and uh yeah some shelves for keeping stuff on and uh some good emergency stuff like bailing wire like Extra metal there's some tool kits under here odds and ends saws screwdrivers wrenches things like that the wood stove is actually pretty awesome it uh drafts really well and when we got it started last night it just fired right up it takes a while for it to get warm cuz it's really well insulated but um got the cabin hot in about I don't know hour and a half to 2 hours probably before it was like I don't know probably 50° in here which was comfortable and uh the floor is not insulated on this cabin so stays really chilly down below and really warm up top like even when the stove's cranking pretty good it definitely gets pretty chilly down low so I took the bottom bunk over here cuz I like sleep cold and uh definitely stays a lot cooler down here than it does just up there so got a little dining area over here and it's got all these cool log books and history of the cabin which is amazing and then there's like shelf up here with cards and poker chips and odds and ends like that tons of nails and drying racks Tim's uh bag that had the water in it exploded on the drive-in and he soaked all of of his Gear with a whole entire gallon of water so he's hanging all of his stuff up to dry and uh yeah super rustic super simple this is kind of the definition of a Trapper's cabin my only complaint about this cabin is that it's really dark there's not very many windows out in this country bears are going to break in and rip stuff apart in fact there's an entry about a porcupine that had eaten through a section of the wall and they had to repair it with new logs uh you'll notice on the Windows there's steel bars outside the door is made out of steel any entry point is going to be covered with metal the only window that's not covered with metal is this little guy here and uh that's actually a glass bottle that somebody used as a window so that's kind of a cool little feature of this cabin but Tim brought a uh ecoflow little mini power station which feels weird to have out here but the reality is we're filming and we need to charge up all our batteries for the GoPros and cameras and drones so we brought that guy just to keep the keep the cameras running and that's really all we're using it for location of this cabin we're nestled right in the Wrangle mountains at the base of a massive Glacier and that Glacier takes you up to uh Mount Blackburn I think it's one of the 15th highest mountains in North America like it's just one of the top you know it's the top 17 to be exact Mount Blackburn is actually the fifth highest peak in the United States and the 12th highest peak in North America standing at 16286 FT which is 4,964 M just an ABS absolutely massive mountain and unfortunately it's snowing today and it's supposed to snow a lot so I'm not sure we're going to get very many good looks at it but maybe we'll get lucky maybe we'll get lucky yeah a sucker hole Yeah you want to get rolling do it anyway yeah nugget Creek cabin and uh we're going to get loaded up and head out for an adventure we're going to try to get up onto the glacier but we'll see there's almost no snow out here maybe half a foot 8 in really there [Music] we headed out from the cabin down a small trail that leads to an old Air strip it became immediately apparent that this was going to be difficult riding there was so little snow cover that we were hitting our skis on rocks and stumps and different things like that one of the things I love about this area is the old relics that still remain like this truck who brought this truck here how long ago did it last run and why did they leave it [Music] here [Music] our plan was to work our way down the airst strip and get on the cuscal River from there we're going to hang left and follow the river all the way up to the toe of the glacier and try to find a place to get up onto the glacier so we could ride to the base of Mount Blackburn but with the lack of snow it was going to be impossible to ride the river there was just too many rocks we tried picking our way through the forest but it was too dense and overgrown and again too many rocks and down trees to be catching skis on finally we found the remnants of an old miners Trail how far would it go would it get us to where we wanted to be after a few miles the trail started to Peter out and we are back in the same situation we started in but then we noticed something something spectacular there was a break in the clouds we got our sucker hole and we got our view of Mount [Music] Blackburn getting a view of the mountain was spectacular but it was also somewhat disappointing we could see that there was not enough snow to be able to travel across the glacier with our main objective Out Of Reach it was time for Plan B I mean yeah I don't know give it a go I think you go right up and you should go pass [Music] yeah well from here we'll just walk to the top of the Ridge and see if we can't get a fire [Music] going ton of down [Music] there oh yeah [Music] there's something Primal about starting a fire in the woods it just feels good I think it Taps into an ancient Instinct an instinct to survive it's the same thing that makes it so thrilling when a fish hits your line even if you're planning on letting it go and while our ancestors probably weren't eating jalapeno cheddar dogs from Safeway they were sitting around a fire cooking meat telling stories ever had one of these explode oh yeah the hot cheese we're sitting at a fire in Fairbanks and someone left like a full beer can like kind of in the Fire Johnny LS as plain as you right next to the fire and it exploded with like boiling hot beer the whole can just blew up [Music] [Music] it's good it was clear that any chance of big exploration was going to have to wait for another time so instead we put our efforts into something we could do I can't tell you how grateful and fortunate we were to come out to the cabin and find that it had firewood ready to go that is not a guarantee out here no one comes out here and stalks us with firewood so all the firewood you see is firewood that other other people have cut and left for the next people to come so we decided we'd pass on the good deed and make sure that the cabin is well stock by the time we [Music] left crappy axe piece of garbage the only problem was the mall they had out there was duller than a socka ranch the round Wood that was left was still pretty wet and very hard to split you guys haven't seen this guy split wood too he splits wood all the time that is a pretty bad mole there we gooo we decided our efforts would be better spent finding a dead tree to cut down and buck up for the cabin see hit all those [Music] rocks this is pretty dead looking right there it's uh it's close still a little green yeah a little green you stuck no way [Music] [Applause] yes these two trees are dead and uh not too many branches on them so think we'll go ahead and take this one on the right see where the leans at on it it's leaning that way yeah Chain's locked up oh yeah yep jaming there I think it just iced up in [Music] there [Music] a [Music] [Music] oh this is a good thing to do to whenever you show up to cabins uh usually there's some firewood when you get there and you don't want to just use it all and go it's good to restock that way the next people that come along just as lucky as you were that's what we're doing just for the record this is not alive tree this is a dead spruce beetle kill tree Spruce beetles are a big problem up here in Alaska they're getting really bad they're killing a lot of trees up here lately and uh the trees are still standing even though they're dead and if you look really closely at the trunk you'll see all these little holes from The Beetles where they're penetrating it killing it yep all right got some wood pretty good sled P yeah a do all [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] right [Music] [Music] a [Music] that's really quick [Music] started [Music] right steak on a stick oh yeah sear it yep never had steak in a stick Steve showed it to me yeah oh yeah Grizzle Town USA well what's nice about stick on the stick is that you don't actually have to keep it medium rare because it burns so hot that it renders all the fat in the steak so it's all edible and buttery instead of like big chewy pieces cuz it's just like melting so it renders it down steaking a stick oh there it [Laughter] goes did you drop it no no just the stick just broke oh like right there just burned through we that's pretty good told you that do M oh so juicy my Meats meat she wouldn't be EA like a salad or something oh I that night me and Tim sat around the fire and talked about old times we talked about all the adventures that we had and we laughed about our first trip out to nugget Creek 15 years ago we didn't have snow machines and Tim thought it' be a good idea if we saddled up on his Honda fourwheeler and Tred to ride the trail out here in the middle of the winter except that year the snow was over 3 ft deep needless to say it was nothing short of a disaster we got stuck probably 15 to 20 times coming in and had to winch out every single time leaving gigantic bomb holes all over the Trapper Trail we ended up making it to the cabin but the following day we woke up to 24 new Ines of snow and had to ride the four-wheeler back in the new snow and winch another 20 to 30 times to get back to the truck I barely knew the guy when we set off for the trip but by the end of it we were Fast Friends people think Timmy's crazy for these wild and unconventional ideas but it's also why people love him Tim's been a great mentor to me and showed me around much of the state of Alaska he took me four-wheeling whitewater rafting pack rafting snow Machining and lots of other things that I'd never done before so after 15 years of Adventures and Misadventures alike it was good to be back where it all started sitting around the fire sipping whiskey and giving each other a hard time I'm grateful for our friendship and even more grateful that we've lived to tell the tale [Music] as the fire started to die down the snow started to pick up we knew there was a big storm in the forecast but we didn't know how big would we wake up and find that another 2 ft of snow had fallen on us I definitely slept a little less easy thinking about how much snow we were going to wake up to we still had a long journey to get home the next day and after all this was nug Creek all right let's uh see how much snow fell the next morning we woke up to find that only 5 to6 in of snow had fallen I was relieved and disappointed all at the same [Music] time [Music] see anything black one of the best parts about the Nugget Creek cabin is the incredible log book people have the most insane stories from being out here whether it's hunting or mountain climbing or just trying to survive Tim did the honors of entering our nugget Creek story Into the log book and we started getting ourselves packed up [Music] sweet all right like that here we go a beer it's a pretty Burly piece of metal whatever that [Music] is [Music] the ride out was actually much quicker than the ride in the few inches of snow that fell helped improve the trail and all the big down trees we'd either cut out of the way or an established to workaround that's adding a track to it here it is it almost didn't feel right being back at the truck having avoided any major disasters but I'll admit I was relieved after all we still had a 300M drive to get back to my cabin for those of you who are still watching I want to give a heartfelt thanks for your viewership and if you guys haven't already checked out Tim's Channel truck house life please do I'm sure he'll be making his own videos on this trip and if you go back far enough you can even find the video he made where we got stranded here 3 years ago again thanks for watching and I'll see you on the next episode of Alaska cabin [Music] Adventures

Channel: Alaska Cabin Adventures

Views: 247,812

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Id: WAY_rvZJ8aY

Length: 47min 38sec (2858 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 02 2024