Anna Petersen
Anna with a rainbow trout
“I have a cabin in Deshka Landing, on the Susitna River. Originally it was my parents’. They bought the property when I was 10 or 11, but even before then, we would go up there all the time to do a lot of salmon fishing, and go camping there.
Eventually there was a two-acre property for sale. It didn’t have anything on it. It was full of cottonwood and birch trees, and sand. Someone had planned to build a laundromat there, so there was the rotted out beginning of that building. My parents bought those two acres of land and started making what they wanted of it.
My dad cleared the entire lot himself, doing most of it with no power. There were no hookups or anything. For the first couple years we would sleep in the camper, and bring the boat up there. We used to travel all around and go fishing. My parents dreamed of retiring there, and of spending their summers at the cabin with their grandchildren, on the land. They said ‘This is where we’re setting up our dream. This is where we want to be.’”
—Anna Petersen, Anchorage resident and Deshka Landing cabin owner
“Eventually my parents bought a smaller cabin — one of those cabins you can get from the construction school. My dad bought battery-operated tools. He would go down to our friends’ cabin, power his tools, and come back and start working on stuff again. He built an entire shed that way. It’s not very big, but he spent all summer doing it.
That summer we got two four wheelers — this bigger one my dad would drive, and I got a small little red one so I could drive around the community myself. When my dad was done working, we would take our four-wheelers down to the slough — a little offshoot of the Susitna. And we’d go into the swamp, or the meadow down in that area.
On some occasions, my dad and I would take the boat out and go to a sandbar, and grill hotdogs, and let the dog run around in the water. It would be the dog and me in the front, and my dad driving, and we had a tiny little coal grill he’d set up. He’d drink a couple beers, and I’d drink some sodas, and we’d grill hotdogs and listen to music. He’d throw the stick for the dog. Those are some of the fondest memories I have. My parents pretty much just built our place all themselves with their hands.”
—Anna Petersen, Anchorage resident and Deshka Landing cabin owner
“You get to Deshka Landing by driving north from Anchorage. You go towards Willow, and you turn off the highway and go down this group of roads that goes to a bunch of different lakes and cabins in the area. It’s a big, main point for people that want to enter the Su. There are a lot of fishing guides and lodges that launch there. In the actual community, there’s maybe 30 or 40 properties. When I was going there as a kid, they were all cabins. Now, it’s a community — a school bus comes there. At one point, they had an airstrip, but now it’s storage.
The Iditarod goes right through there as well. Last year or the year before, my fiance Ryan and a bunch of our friends and I went up there and snowshoed behind the property and watched the Iditarod happen. Every year, you can watch it go right through there.
It’s a smaller area, but it’s a really big attraction for people going in there, for a lot of people who access their remote cabins on the Su that way.”
—Anna Petersen, Anchorage resident and Deshka Landing cabin owner
“When my parents were building the cabin, there was a lot of waking up at 3 a.m. to go fishing, so you could have a spot at 6, when it opened. I’ll be completely honest — I sat there and read books. I wasn’t really into fishing until I met my fiance, Ryan.
But we did a lot of exploring, and when I was a kid, I was able to drive the boat. I knew the river. I knew where the sandbars were; I was able to read everything. I was able to launch the boat, and take it off. As I got older, I didn't really like going up there as much, because there were no kids my age and I didn’t have any friends up there. I was too cool for it. But my parents continued to build. They really enjoyed the area, and that’s where they were planning on retiring before they passed.”
—Anna Petersen, Anchorage resident and Deshka Landing cabin owner
“After I became an adult, I learned how to fly fish. My fiance Ryan and some friends and I were on the Willow, and I caught my first grayling ever. It was huge, and I didn’t realize how cool it was until I saw three grown men running back to a raft to get a net. And I was like, ‘I think I kind of like fishing.’ Ryan said ‘We should get a raft.’ I said, ‘You’re crazy, we’re not getting a raft.’ And I came home five days later and there’s a raft in our driveway. He said, ‘You said you like fishing, so I got a raft.’ So I guess we’re raft people now.
Ryan and I started rafting more, and going up to the Willow and the Little Willow. We floated the Little Willow and decided it would be kind of cool to do something different and float all the way down to Deshka Landing with the rafts. It was intimidating to be on the Su, because it’s such a big, fast moving river. You move from this small creek and you’re on this huge river. And we had all this gear, and the dogs. The water was moving so fast. We floated all the way down to the Landing, and we had to pull out and get the truck that had the trailer on it, which was a ten minute walk from the boat launch. And all these people are staring at us, because they all have these jet boats. We had two 14 foot rafts and 2 packrafts pull into this boat launch. I’m pretty sure people in the community heard about what we had done and thought it was really weird. But it was super cool to be able to do that, and to be farther upriver. Because as a kid, we went up there occasionally, but it wasn’t an everyday thing.”
—Anna Petersen, Anchorage resident and Deshka Landing cabin owner
“I had a dog named Dutch growing up. Dutch was my dad’s very best friend. Followed him everywhere. As my dad was building the cabin, Dutch was right there. He was a 100 pound dog, a huge chocolate lab, all muscle. If my dad was on the other side of the property, Dutch was right there, He had to be there with him. He was about 16 years old, and could barely move. But he had to be there.
There’s plenty of times Dutch and I would be sitting in the front of the boat, on the Su. There are a lot of little offshoots of the river you can go down, but our boat was not a new boat — it was my mom’s “wedding ring,” since they bought a boat instead of a ring! She got a ring eventually, but the boat had a lot of meaning. It wasn't very light, though. So there was this one time Dutch was still with us. We go down a little side shoot of the river, hit a sandbar, and run into a tree. I’m in the front, so I duck down. And my mom is so mad. She’s so mad that my dad did this. So I’m getting out of the boat to push it — it wasn’t very deep, probably up to my thighs or something — and my mom was just screaming. And we’re completely wet, trying to pull this boat out. It was freezing. It later became a really funny family story.”
—Anna Petersen, Anchorage resident and Deshka Landing cabin owner
“Something that I alway enjoyed doing when I was a kid was going to the Lookout. My dad made a trail so we could go to look at the river. I would take the four wheeler out and look at the view. It’s not like you can see all the mountains, or something really spectacular. But it was calming, and you could watch the river, and hear the river, and see all the boats going fishing, or hunting and on a good day you can even see Denali.
I just always find that view so — it reminds me of growing up there, and how vast that area is, and how important it is.
I can’t imagine something coming in and dividing it. It just seems so dumb, for lack of a better word. For such a big area, and how many people go out there. It just seems like a really terrible idea to have the state subsidize an industrial road for Outside mining corporations, and it’s not really benefiting Alaskans.”
—Anna Petersen, Anchorage resident and Deshka Landing cabin owner
“When I was a kid, we used to do a big loop on our snow machines. All the lakes and the swamp would freeze over, and they have groomed trails in the winter time. My fiance Ryan and I have fat biked on them more recently.
But when I was a kid, it was a big thing we did in the winter, go up there and go snow machining. You could use the river, go on the lakes. We went to Big Lake and back up. It’s where the Iditarod Trail goes through; I remember riding snow machines to where the Iditarod started one year.
In the summer, Deshka Landing’s boat launch is so important and in the winter, the boats are swapped out for snowmachines. It’s a main access point for sport fishermen, people going up to lodges for fishing and hunting. When it’s busy three boats can launch there at the same time. It’s such a huge part of the livelihood of Alaska. To even threaten that in the slightest just seems insane to me. To threaten the livelihood of salmon, and hunting, of just enjoying the outdoors for a road that is going to be used to access mining easier just seems not sustainable for the livelihood of Alaska.
When I first heard about the proposed road, I said ‘What the heck. This doesn’t make sense.’ And there’s a lot of people in that area — it threatens why they live there in the first place.
The West Su is about the wilderness of it. That area is such a special place, and there’s so much that you can explore out there in different ways. And you just have to want to try. Having a road that probably won’t be truly accessible — that’s not going to show you everything you could see. We’d lose so much of what we love to do without that wilderness.”
—Anna Petersen, Anchorage resident and Deshka Landing cabin owner
“The West Su is such a vital area, and so many people depend on it. It has to be thousands of people that go up there each year, especially at the heights of fishing season and hunting season.
It’s such a great place to explore. It has so much to offer outdoors people. And as long as it’s taken care of, the land is going to keep providing for people who depend on it for survival and livelihood. And this proposed road would ruin that — ruin the beauty and magic that is the West Su.”
—Anna Petersen, Anchorage resident and Deshka Landing cabin owner
Debra Ann Petersen 03/19/1953 - 02/24/2019
Gary Hans Petersen 02/29/1956 - 04/01/2020
“My parents planned on using their property at Deshka Landing as their summer retirement home, but unfortunately were not able to enjoy it to its fullest. My mom passed away in 2019 and my dad followed only a year later in 2020. When I look at this property I see them. I see the dream that they were creating and the lifestyle they wanted to have. They wanted this area to encompass all the activities they loved doing. Whether it was reading a book on the porch swing on a hot summer day or taking the boat down the Su to go fishing, this was their dream. An industrial road meant for mining cutting through this area they loved so much is something I can not imagine them supporting. They spent almost 15 years building the property into what it is today.
I hope these posts and stories help inspire someone to experience how amazing of an area this is and how important it is to the community.
I dedicate my stories shared here to my parents. This cabin was their dream, their retirement and their joy. Seeing an industrial road go through that is something I could not stand by and watch.”
—Anna Petersen, Anchorage resident and Deshka Landing cabin owner