Behind America’s success story are untold tales of endurance. The people who succeed in this country come from sturdy stock, the ones who have always carried on when the going got tough. Their ancestors thought America’s streets would be paved with gold. What they found, instead, was opportunity to build, discover, create, achieve, survive, and grow.
For many that chance started in wilderness. They carved out lives, planted dreams and worked hard. In wilderness, time does not drift back into the past. It renews itself. People, too, or so I had heard. That’s why I went searching for a place few ever find. A moose munched his lunch by the side of a bubbling stream as my four-wheel drive waddled across the creek and continued up a mountain a few hundred miles southeast of Anchorage. At the top was a remote Alaskan village where the rhythm of life still resembled that in 1650.
