Nancy Conklin
“I first started coming here across Cook Inlet from Ship Creek in Anchorage, visiting friends that were out here in about ‘76. My partner and I, he had been here a number of times before, and knew a number of people here, so we started spending more and more time coming over here. We built a little cabin up the creek in the ‘80s, and then decided we needed to be down toward the mouth of the river where the fish were and all the action was. So we bought a piece of property with a 16x16 cabin on it, and expanded it to what became Black Fox Lodge. And we ran the lodge there for 15 years, until 2001. Then we sold it, moved a half mile up the creek, and have lived in a house we built a half mile up the creek ever since.”
—Nancy Conklin, West Susitna resident
“I'm a country girl and I love the outdoors and living here. You get to experience the animals and the life and everything that you never get to experience when you live in town. You see the natural process of life as it is in the wilderness, and I like that.
We make friends with all the different animals. We have moose that we have names for because we recognize them and they know us. Not very many bears around right now. We used to have lots of wild foxes that would befriend us and play with our dog.
I grow all of our veggies in the summer because we don't go to the stores. I can't wait til the sun comes out long enough to make plants grow this year. I have four different plots. I have a greenhouse with tomatoes and things. I grow all that we eat in the summer, veggie wise, and potatoes for winter.
There’s picking all the berries and waiting for the mushrooms to come up and just all the natural cycles that we live with.
We live by the season, not by the day, never by the hour. Half the time, we don't even know what time it is or which day it is.”
—Nancy Conklin, West Susitna resident
“We either fly in with the air charter or with our own plane, when it’s running right, that we fly into a little airstrip two miles up the river and then come on four wheelers to get to our house here. Most of our travel is done in the wintertime. We leave Point MacKenzie and come across the flats on our snow machines. We haul in most of our supplies in the wintertime—all of our fuel, all that kind of thing—and go to town as seldom as possible in the summer.
The uniqueness of this area is that it's close enough to the city centers that people can get here, but you have to figure out how to do it. That's what people like. People like having to get here by boat or snow machine or to learn how to fly.
We've been fearing that someone would try to build a road across the Susitna for a number of years. There's been a number of other projects like pipelines and things and we always cringe when we hear people talk about it because what makes this area so unique is that there isn't a road. And that's why people come here—to get away from the town and the city life and unwind where there aren't roads.”
—Nancy Conklin, West Susitna resident