Location: McCarthy, Alaska
Occupation: Carpenter and dog musher
Next Race/Adventure is:
A drainage off of the Nizina River.
Another musher out here went up there last winter, and I heard it’s cool. And, it’s a smaller river, so it’s safer. If you break through, you’re not going to get sucked under and drown. So it’s going to be, I think, more of a fun run because it’s going to be twisty and turny instead of just flat, straight river miles. And you can get all the way up into the high country.
We had the pleasure of sitting down with Aidan and his partner, Kenna, at their beautiful place, surrounded by mountains, glaciers, and rivers just outside of Wrangell St. Elias National Park.
Did you know that he always carries a multi-tool? He usually listens to a lot of bluegrass, country, and kind of folk music. “I like Coulter Wall, Tyler Childers, that kind of stuff. My favorite song lately is called Lights on Me by The Devil Makes Three.”
For reading, he said, “I would recommend Cold Mountain Path. It’s a book about the history of McCarthy during the ghost town era and the characters that lived out here. Pretty, pretty cool. The way people used to live.”
Socials: Waylons Way
Just traveling with our dogs.
Over the Wrangells. I would like to get from McCarthy to Nabesna with a dog team.
I’m OCD, so I’m very organized. So I just cannot stand clutter.
The wilderness
Slow down and enjoy the little moments.
It’s the same sled that Kenna runs. It’s a Dog Paddle sled that we got, or was originally Brent Sass’s sled.
I’m not a huge fan of it. Honestly, it’s too small for me. Yeah. Okay. She loves it. It’s the perfect size for her, but we need to get another sled for me. The handlebars are right in my belly. So little short.
For my first, I guess, couple of years of mushing, I didn’t ever have like a super bad event, and I got too confident, and I feel like that was my biggest blunder is getting a little too complacent and confident.
You just have to pay attention all the time. No matter if things are going good or bad, you always have to be prepared for them to go bad.
logistics and also creating a team– that I don’t have a lot of experience with, a team that is more old school, that can break trail and slog with a heavy load through deep snow.
I’ve never, in our experience, we’ve never done anything like that. So that’s going to be a new thing for me to learn how to build a team that can do that.
Don’t be afraid to take the leap.
It’s very overwhelming, and it’s not going to be overwhelming, but that shouldn’t be a reason not to do it. If you want to get into it, just jump in.
Freedom.
Yep. Freedom to do what makes you happy.
I’m going to say the T-Dog, too. At the start, the mass start was very challenging.
It was so many teams, like clogged up in a line, and we would just leapfrog each other over and over again. Got super frustrating.
Rivers. And it’s more of a respect out of fear. But they can kill you just like that. If you fall through a big river, you’re gone. And out here, we’re dealing with glacial rivers, so they’re constantly changing. So even if the weather is the same, where you cross the river, it might be different up river. And so you can cross the river at nine in the morning. And when you try to come home at, you know, 6 PM, you could have to go through two or three feet of overflow, or it could be open. It could have completely opened up.
Kenna’s peanut butter balls are very good.
Connection to something that’s real and other living beings, and the freedom to accomplish cool things with those living beings, like with your companions.
One thing I’ll never do again, or I really don’t want to do again, is live in a city.
