Sheldon Chalet

The flight

The driveway is 75 minutes long

There is no road. Sheldon Chalet, a five-bedroom house on a rock in the Ruth Glacier, is an hour and a quarter by helicopter from Anchorage, or 30 minutes from Talkeetna. The chalet puts it 50 miles from what it calls civilization.

You come down on a ridge of rock in the middle of the ice, 6,000 feet up. Across the ice stands the summit of North America, 20,310 feet, about ten and a half miles away in a straight line.

The helicopter is the only way up. The park service’s news releases record one accident here, on February 20, 2020: a helicopter with a pilot and two passengers aboard, shortly after takeoff from a landing strip on the glacier. No one was hurt. The chalet does not say whether the flight is in the rate, or what happens when weather grounds it. Ask both when you write.

The rock

Five acres, and a set of plans

The rock is a nunatak, a peak that sticks out of the ice. In the mid-1950s the bush pilot Don Sheldon, who flew the mapping of the Alaska Range with Bradford Washburn, staked five acres of it. In 1966 he built a six-sided hut there for climbers, the Mountain House. It is still in use.

He planned something larger and died of cancer in 1975, at 53, before he could build it. After their mother’s death in 2014, his children, Kate and Robert, settled on a design for a chalet. A few weeks later they found blueprints for one, a “Sheldon Chalet” dated 1968. Building began in 2015, and the house opened in 2018.

The family says it is the only private landowner inside the park.

Five acres of private rock, inside a national park, inside a glacier.

First floor

A birch table and a library

The chalet is six-sided too, so the view runs all the way around. The first floor is one open space: the kitchen, a fireplace, wingback chairs, a library nook of Alaska books, and a dining table made by hand from Alaska birch.

The house comes with its own chef. Before you fly, the kitchen calls to ask what you eat. The pantry is the state: king crab, salmon and halibut; fiddlehead ferns, spruce tips and dandelion buds; jams, pickles and smoked fish in fall and winter. Vegan, kosher and medical diets are cooked for if you say so ahead. The kitchen is open to the room.

Second floor

Five bedrooms, two bathrooms

Upstairs are five bedrooms in a plain Nordic style, and two full bathrooms between them. No bedroom is the one to ask for: the chalet says every one faces the glacier and the mountain. The choice you make is the number of people. The house takes two to ten guests, and it is only ever booked whole.

There is no nightly rate on the site. You write to the family with the season and the size of your party, and the price comes back in conversation. It is all-inclusive: the house, the chef and the guides, for three nights or more.

The ice

Thirty-five square miles, roped together

Below the windows lies the Don Sheldon Amphitheater, a bowl of ice and rock of 35 square miles: the country named an amphitheater for him, the chalet’s history says, instead of a mountain. The chalet says 3,000 feet of ice lie under it, and more than 100 feet of new snow fall on it in an average year.

Guides take you out roped together. In winter you ski, explore crevasses and climb down into snow caverns inside the glacier. If you have never held an ice axe, they teach you on the property first, then take you ice climbing inside a cavern. There is also a sledding hill, with runs a quarter of a mile long.

In summer the sun hardly sets, and the melt fills turquoise pools on the glacier’s surface. Guests jump in. Lunch is laid out in a lounge carved into the glacier.

After dark

Back up to the helipad

The landing pad is also the terrace. In the day it holds the helicopter. At night it holds chairs, a fire and the people who will not go to bed.

From late September to early April the nights are long enough for the aurora, and the chalet keeps November to February as its season for it. In those months the sun rises late in the morning, and the guides lead glacier walks under the full moon. You can watch the aurora from your bed. Go up anyway. After a sauna, the cold on the deck is the point.

Spring, March to May, splits the difference: nights still dark enough for the aurora, days long enough for the glacier, and the winter’s powder still on it. Fall, September and October, brings the autumn colors, and the aurora back.

In summer there is no aurora and no real night. The deck is where you sit to watch avalanches come off the far walls, and listen for them. If you come in July, the bears of Brooks Falls, in Katmai, are a second Alaska trip, with a lottery of their own. Choose your season before you write to the family. It is the only real decision the house leaves you.