Talkeetna Tears and Denali Smiles

At the right place at the right time, redefined.

August 2024

I just completed an incredible 11-day tour of Alaska for a magazine assignment. You can hate me later.

On day eight, the group I was with arrived in the wildly charming, tiny town of Talkeetna. When I saw this place on the itinerary, I knew walking the streets there would likely invoke some memories. It's one of many places in the region that Kara and I got to explore together as part of a plus-one personal press trip I was invited to take just a few months into our relationship. She had already come along with me on a few smaller local assignments, but this was our first big adventure together. And Talkeetna was a memorable and special place for us.

The day we arrived, I got checked into the lodge, opened up my laptop, and got smacked yet again by a Facebook memory with exquisite timing. Nine years ago to the day, Kara and I were exploring the same 1,000-person town I was going to spend the next two nights in. It didn’t dawn on me that the trips might have some crossover on the calendar, and it caught me a little off-guard. It makes sense though, the prime window for most folks wanting to travel to Alaska is a narrow one. But the same damn place on the same damn day?

So of course, I went back in my photos and looked at the whole trip again. And two things stuck out to me. The first was just how much of a two-person wrecking crew of love and bliss we were. We engaged in almost adolescent-like jollification from our full-grown physical forms, in practically every scene or scenario we encountered. I’m quite sure we were a lot for some people.

Secondly, I had also started to forget just how beautiful she was. Which I know is an odd thing to start slipping away from me, of all people. Maybe it’s because I keep taking breaks from torturing myself with photos of her. We were also about a decade younger, so I suppose that could be a factor. Or perhaps not seeing her every day anymore, I’m no longer consistently reminded of her allure.

Whatever the reasons, this particular walk down memory lane served to remind me primarily of those two things. That we were a mobile unit of uncontained joy incarnate, and she was just about as lovely as could be. Takeaways that I will gladly accept.

Sure, there were some tears shed while reliving that trip. But this incidence was far more pleasant than painful. A particularly pleasing memory came rushing back thanks to one of those photos. It was of Kara, myself, and our host for the trip, standing near the bar in the historic Fairview Inn, about to consume shots of Bulleit Rye, neat. So I made it a point to venture down there when I had the time the next day.

Upon entering the Inn, it appeared as though it hadn’t changed at all since my last visit. Maybe even over the last 50 years or more if I had to hazard a guess. I looked over at the wall with the moose antlers where we took the photo, and everything from that snapshot in time was still in its proper place. Then I approached the bar to order a whiskey and noticed that the person behind the bar was the same Talkeetnan woman who poured our shots nine years ago. I recognized her from the photos I had been sniffle-perusing the night before and it caused me to momentarily misplace my composure. Which, to her credit, she took in casual Alaskan stride. I asked how long she had worked there. “20 years now.” Indeed, not much, if anything there had changed. But I had.

Later that evening from my room, I watched Mt. Denali slowly shed her shroud of clouds to bathe in the pastel colors of sunset. Of course, she did. At that point, I wouldn’t have been overly surprised if I had zoomed in on the summit with my camera only to see Kara standing there waving at me. We didn’t get to see that mountain the entire week of our trip back then. And in all of my subsequent visits to the state since, I had never witnessed her with my own eyes until that night.

It would be hard to overstate how moved I was at that moment. The next day, our trip would conclude in Anchorage. Accordingly, I would arrive there having shed a few tears over Talkeetna but sharing far more smiles with Denali.