The last few weeks have been nothing but downsizing, packing, goodbyes, and driving. Lots of it. Alaska is now in the rear view mirror, and as we go further into the Lower 48, it almost feels like our time up north was a dream.

Life is just so different outside of Alaska. We are now down in the chaos of the Outside world. The massive population difference between the two places takes our breath away every time get stuck in traffic. But with all this driving, I finally got some time to write and reflect back on our life-changing experience.

Putting sixteen years of nomadic RV living on pause was not on my radar in early 2023.

But being longtime friends with dog mushers makes it easy to dip your toe into the pool of crazy. Yes, they are bonafide nuts! And in all the best ways. Watch a musher and their dogs blissfully glide along a freshly groomed winter trail in sub-zero temperatures, and you start to wonder: What do they know about living that I don’t? In early 2023, I needed to find out.

“What’s in Willow?” people asked when I announced our northbound adventure. Most people have never heard of it, or go there on purpose. And why would they? It’s a mosquito-infested swamp in summer, and in winter it’s colder, foggier, and more snowbound than Wasilla (just 30 miles south).

Willow is a small, overlooked community that’s mostly missed by the casual tourist, who speeds past to check out the world-famous hamlet of Talkeetna (the inspiration for the TV show Northern Exposure), located 40 miles north. Cruise ship tour buses never stop there either, and Willowites sure don’t complain about that.

But if tourists stopped in this quirky little community, they would find out that Willow is known as the Musher Capital of the World. It’s made for mushing! In winter, hundreds of groomed trails take mushers and snowmachiners deep into the wilds of Alaska. And how lucky we were to get to see some of it, and even drive our friend’s dog team! We even watched the Iditarod re-start, right behind our cabin on Willow Lake.

Getting to know Willow locals was the best part.

Before heading north, I watched this Willow tour video by YouTubers the Mitchell Brothers. But only when we got there did we discover the whole story. People were so welcoming to us Cheechakos, never once making us feel like wimps or idiots despite our occasional winter foibles.

Getting to know Willow came from being there, going out into the community, meeting people, and doing things in whatever weather was going on outside. It was always interesting and usually fun. I didn’t really know how much I missed connecting with a place until we stopped her for a spell. We organized a Turkey Trot, went to event fundraisers, spent time at the community hub, the library, and spent way too much time and money at the Willow Rose Thrift Store.

We also monitored the local Facebook group chatter for weather updates, trail conditions, and other winter perils. But the real entertainment value came from frequent group conversations that went from tame to raucous, always buzzing with the highs and lows of life in the community. Occasionally it felt like a scene from a derailed, drunken Thanksgiving dinner with bickering relatives.

The chatter among Willow Facebookers can get as mean and nasty as any other social media watering hole. But somehow, Willowbillies manage to rise above it. They still come together at important events. Many regularly pitch in to make the community a better place. If there are warring factions in Willow, I wasn’t there long enough enough to step into the fray. I’m sure they exist, like in any community.

But it’s the mushers and their dogs who are the heart of Willow.

As dog people, we couldn’t ask for a better group of Alaskans to welcome us into town. Mushers are the greatest dog people of all! They live and breathe the language of canis lupus familiaris. They showed us how to be better dog guardians, and demonstrated how the highest form of love anyone can give to their dog is to stop smothering them! Instead, honor their dogginess by adapting to their needs, not forcing them to adapt to ours by turning them into “fur babies.”

Even Nellie learned from the musher teams! Until we arrived in the north, Nellie had a track record of bad behavior when she spent time around other dogs. But in Alaska, she reclaimed her inner canine. She learned how to be a real dog! She learned to follow pack rules. And she finally realized that she didn’t always need to be on-guard, protecting us from interlopers.

We loved watching how mushers make the rest of us look like wimps in real winter weather.

If you watch mushers gear up to run their teams in sub-zero temperatures, you’ll see they’re as excited as the dogs are to run. Like the dogs, you won’t see mushers hiding inside or complaining about the cold. Instead, they’re reveling in the bitterly cold temperatures that are perfect mushing weather! Spend time on the trail with a dog team, and you will learn how to find the joy of gliding along frozen swamps.

Winter with mushers has given us a new benchmark for “cold.” It’s broken us of the habit of saying “I’m freezing!” whenever the weather drops below 50 degrees.

And then we saw something that’s rare in the Lower 48: neighborliness.

Not in the Leave it to Beaver kind of way, but in a “We’re all in this winter shitshow together!” kind of way. If a Willowbilly is in need of urgent help, someone local will always have their back as long as they aren’t afraid to ask for assistance. I’ve seen neighbors offer to bail out stranded strangers in the middle of a snowstorm. They raised money for neighbors who suffered a disaster. More than one snowmachiner was saved after they crashed through lake ice. And almost every day, a roaming dog was rescued from a horrible fate on the Parks Highway. Sometimes it feels like Alaska just wants to kill everybody in the state. But good neighbors take some of the edge off.

No place has ever felt like home as much our little cabin on Lakeshore Drive did.

We grew deeper friendships in Willow than we have in the last 17 years of full-time RVing. Moving around just doesn’t give you much of a chance to deeply connect with great people like our musher neighbors and friends, local YouTubers like Alaska Cut the Cord, or the fisherman next door. They were the most authentic people and best neighbors anyone could have asked for.

As our time came to an end, I battled my yearning to stay, versus the need to move south to be with my 90-year old mom on her birthday. I cried when we said our goodbyes to Willow, promising that someday we will return. And honestly, I will do everything in my power to make that happen. It might not be this year or next. But our goal is to buy a cabin that we can visit any time of year. Alaska has a powerful place in my heart. I can’t shake the feeling that we were meant to be there.

No, it’s not an easy way to live. But as my crazy musher friend said to us when we arrived last summer. “A simple life doesn’t necessarily mean an easy life.” And after this experience, I’m pretty good with that catch-22. Alaska’s mean winter weather is worth it. Plus it helped Jim and I score a Level 1 “rugged” credential according to our crazy musher friends. Now that’s an honor!

A rugged life in the north isn’t for everyone. But now we know that it’s for us.