Outpost of Hospitality in Wilderness : Alaska Couple Snug in Former Rail Stop

On this still lake at the foot of the snowcapped Wrangell Mountains, Cliff and Jewel Collins live in quiet harmony with the Alaska wilderness.

They have hand-fashioned a turn-of-the-century railroad station into a tidy home. They are self-sufficient here, and hard-working. They shun clocks.

One neighbor is less than a mile away, but along the 50 miles of rough gravel road between Chitina and McCarthy, only a few dozen people live.

That suits the Collinses just fine.

“It’s wonderful to get away from people for a while,” said Cliff, who is 76.

It’s not that the Collinses dislike people. They are hospitable to the extreme, inviting strangers to dinner at the drop of Cliff’s droopy straw hat. A few yards behind their house is an old log cabin stocked with food and furnished for anyone who wants to stay. They won’t accept payment for its use.

“We know it’s a beautiful place, and we feel like we ought to share it with other people,” Cliff said.

No Telephones

To escape the pressures of a business they ran for years in Cordova, the Collinses looked for a remote corner of Alaska where telephones don’t ring.

Cliff asked a flying buddy if he knew where a man could buy some land. The pilot, Jack Wilson, told him that the most beautiful country he’d ever seen was around Long Lake, but that no land was available there.

There was, however, one 226-acre parcel tied up in probate court. The homesteader had left Alaska and died without leaving a will.

The Collinses hired a lawyer to straighten out the deed, and when the title was clear, they bought the land at auction for $6,700.

Their place is adjacent to the old Copper River & Northwestern Railway, an abandoned link to the rich copper deposits farther up the Chitina River, near McCarthy.

Once it was a farm, a place where grain was grown for draft animals and vegetables were cultivated for railroad and mine workers.

Old Homestead Overgrown

But land doesn’t remain cleared for long in Alaska unless it is tended constantly. An almost impenetrable jungle of willows choked much of the property.

The Collinses quickly made the long-deserted train station their home.

“It was kind of like pioneering,” Jewel Collins said. “I’d never been so tired, never worked so hard, never been so dirty--and I loved it.”

Cliff, a descendant of a long line of farmers in the Joplin, Mo., area, cleared enough land by hand for a garden.

The depot they turned into a home later was moved, and several rooms have been added.

Years of careful nursing of the garden have made it wildly productive. Last year, the Collinses harvested 700 pounds of carrots and 1,200 pounds of potatoes--not to mention all the strawberries and green vegetables, and the rows of brilliantly colored violets.

At first, the Collinses commuted by floatplane from Cordova to Long Lake on weekends. Cliff started flying in 1953, and still does. A Piper PA-14, a single-engine plane built in 1948, bobs at the dock behind the house.

48 Years in Alaska

The Collinses first came to Alaska in 1939, six years after they were married. They planned to stay a year. It was seven years before they even took a vacation outside Alaska.

Cliff was selling commercial refrigeration systems in Idaho when friends who owned a small cannery invited him and his wife to Cordova. He worked as a salmon fisherman until 1948, then decided to call it quits after three exceptionally good years.

The Collinses bought a jewelry-photography store, which they ran for 15 years. After they sold it, Cliff sold insurance for 10 years. But the lure of Long Lake already was overpowering.

Since 1971, they have spent summers at the lake and winters in Cordova.

It’s a life of comfort by rural Alaska standards, but not without hard work. Over the years, the Collinses have taken on more and more time-consuming projects.

First there was the runway. What started as a rough, 800-foot slash through the spruce and cottonwood trees has become a 3,000-foot strip so neat it looks like a golf course fairway.

Volunteer Service Pilot

Cliff’s love of flying led him to serve as Civil Air Patrol commander for the last 15 years. Long Lake frequently becomes the center of search operations for downed planes and missing people.

The airstrip and the lake also are the scene of the social event of the year in the McCarthy area, the Memorial Day fly-in breakfast. This year, 75 airplanes and more than 100 people showed up.

Then there’s the state fish weir the Collinses have helped to maintain since 1974. Thousands of red salmon battle almost 200 miles up silty rivers to spawn in the crystal waters of Long Lake.

Cliff helps biologists tag some of the fish and take scale samples. A few years ago, the state decided it didn’t have enough money to maintain the weir, so Cliff does it for free.