Healy

(Readers, I will be off the grid from Wednesday-Friday with no WIFI or cell phone range. I will be posting on Saturday and Sunday briefly, if you’re interested. No blog on Memorial Day Monday and back to well, normal, on Tuesday).

About 11 miles north of Denali National Park, there is a respite. A breather.

Healy is a small year-round town that sponsors many of the tours offered in Denali- ATV adventures, rafting adventures, and flying adventures among many others. What drew us to Healy, however, was something quite different.

(Beer. She probably means beer)

Fine, we wanted to go have a drink after our eight-hour sojourn into Denali National Park, but not a drink just anywhere. Our Denali guide Justin recommended highly The 49th State Brewing Company, not only for its funky cool vibe, awesome menu and great location, but also because it houses on its grounds the iconic Into the Wild bus where Christopher McCandless died in 1992.

Now, I’ve read and taught this book by Jon Krakhauer dozens of times and can recite the dialogue from the movie. Jon Krakhauer is one of my favorite adventure writers, and I’ve always dreamed of walking the muddy 20-mile Stampede Trail that McCandless so famously put on the map. So you can imagine my excitement that I was about to not only see the bus, but to also be given permission to walk around in it and take pictures in front of it.

Be warned: This bus is only a replica, not the actual bus McCandless used. That bus was removed and airlifted by a Chinook helicopter onto a flatbed truck last year, and delivered to the University of Alaska so it can be preserved and refurbished and one day placed in a museum. Let us never forget that it is where McCandless died, so the bus itself is sacred to his family, especially to his sister Carine. It turns out people were making pilgrimages to the bus to pay their respects to McCandless, and were drowning and dying in their attempts to reach it. In a museum, it can be visited respectfully and safely by all.

Justin was right, dinner and drinks were awesome. We sat on a packed deck listening to good music in blazing 80-degree sunshine, drinking mojitos and eating chopped salads- we could have been in Key West except for the serious looking groups shedding crampons while waiting in line at the hostess station.

The place does McCandless proud. The people visiting it were his kind of people- kind, strong, down-to-earth. I posed for a picture in front of the bus in the same pose he used for his last self-portrait before he perished. It seemed cheesy, maybe even disrespectful, but Chris had a great sense of humor, so I don’t think he would have minded. The inside looks just like it is described in the book, and the replica bus even has a line of printed journal entries McCandless made in his last weeks.

Healy. Worth the trip.