article & photos by Rusty Tews
EVENFH/SHUTTERSTOCK
My first trip to Alaska was in 2001. After landing in the state’s most populous city, Anchorage (population 294,000), we needed one more flight to reach our son’s house in Bethel, 400 miles west. On the flight to our destination, we had a surreal sense of wilderness and frontier as we passed over massive mountain ranges and glaciers. The next morning, as I lay half-awake with a cool breeze drifting through the window, something didn’t fit. I heard a rooster crowing! Four hundred miles from the road system, in a small town on the edge of the wilderness, it was certainly a rooster crowing.