This is an I-Heart podcast.

Guaranteed Human.

This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, and we tell stories about everything here on this show.

And we love telling your stories. Send them to Our American Stories.com.

There's some of our favorites.

Up next, a story from Kent Nureburn, author of Letters to My Son, of Father's Wisdom on Manhood, Life, and Love.

Today, Kent shares with us the story of an unforgettable trip he took into Alaska as a young man.

Take it away, Kent.

The snow had been falling steadily since morning.

As we reached the last checkpoint it was coming down in blinding sheets.

Ahead of us, the brooks range loomed like a great black wall, shrouded in fog and mist and whirling torrents of snow.

The snowing like hell up there, the man at the checkpoint, Hutt said.

He cradled his rifle in his arm.

We'll be shutting her down for the winter any day now.

I looked at the narrow gravel roadway stretching off from the checkpoint into the fog.

Maybe it was passable, maybe not.

This roadbed had been hastily carved out for the construction crews that built the Alaska

pipeline between Fairbanks and Prudeau Bay.

It was nothing more than a hogback of gravel that cut a forlorn line across the jagged landscape of the Alaska wilderness.

Make-shift white crosses had been pounded into the roadbed where tanker drivers had lost control of their rigs and had plunged to their deaths.

Now we were standing at Disaster Creek, the last stopping point before the Brooks Range and the tundra.

After the heavy crags of the Brooks, there was no human habitation for 150 miles until the scattered trailers in Quonset huts of Dead Horse and Prudau Bay.

...