Alaska work “in my blood” says adventurer
An adventurous life - Janet Huddleston at Norwest Bay, Campbell Island, earlier this year. Partner Paul Kilgour is at centre. Photo: Adrienne Tubbs.
Rangihaeata resident Janet Huddleston left for Alaska on May 19 to work the summer season at Camp Denali, a tourism lodge at the old mining town of Kantishna, adjoining Denali National Park.
Here she will be an assistant cook and box truck driver, the latter duties involving a 150km run carting rubbish and delivering food scraps to an outlying dog team.
“It won’t be uncommon to see all the ‘big five’ along the way—grizzly bears, wolves, caribou, moose and dall sheep,” she said. “If I have to change a tyre I’ll be keeping an eye out for the grizzlies. In the land of the midnight sun there will be nearly 21 hours of daylight at summer solstice.
“Mountain-biking the park road at night is something I’m really looking forward to.”
Janet is no stranger to this type of existence. As well as assisting in food preparation in remote field camps and on boats around the world over the years, she once worked as a backcountry law enforcement officer and poaching ranger for the US National Park Service at Wrangell St Elias National Park, Alaska. “I had to carry two guns, a handgun for the poachers and a shotgun for the bears,” she recalls. “Fortunately, I never had to use either!”
She lived in Alaska for four years in the early eighties, but much of her snow and ice experience has come from working 11 seasons in Antarctica. Janet started working there in 1995 as a waste technician and janitor at McMurdo Station. She spent another season as a general assistant at Palmer Station on the Antarctic Peninsula, later returning to McMurdo station as a communications operator and dispatcher. She then took over responsibility for carpentry and other supplies. Her last season in Antarctica was in 2007, when she was guest services manager with Antarctic Logistics and Expeditions at the remote field camp of Patriot Hills.
Born in 1957 in Nashville, Tennessee, Janet had a doctor father and a teacher mother. After graduating from Rhodes College (Memphis) with a BA in psychology, anthropology, sociology and elementary education, she worked for the National Park Service, eventually shifting to Alaska where she became a primary school teacher of young native Alaskans in isolated villages. She first visited New Zealand in 1980.
It was after meeting a Kiwi chef in Kenya that Janet finally moved here in 1988, following a stint teaching English in Sapporo, Japan, a job she would continue in Auckland and Christchurch. She then took up four seasons as a hut warden in Fiordland National Park, moving to Golden Bay in 1998 to work on the Abel Tasman and Heaphy Tracks.
Janet’s latest job in Golden Bay has been as a didymo ranger and relieving hut warden with DOC. Her adventurous life has seen her lucky to be alive. In the course of her travels, she has survived many car accidents, two plane crashes and one mugging robbery in Peru where she was choked unconscious.
She says of her upcoming adventure: “Alaska is in my blood, which will soon be feeding the mosquitoes, jokingly known there as the Alaska state bird! I’ll be back home at Labour Weekend and I am looking forward to endless summer.”
Gerard Hindmarsh
