At 51, instead of easing into retirement, Richard "Dick" Proenneke traveled alone into the Alaskan wilderness to build a log cabin by hand, and ended up staying three decades. This deep dive examines his experiment in total physical self-reliance.

We trace his Iowa upbringing among practical trades, the rheumatic fever that made him vow to maintain his body, and the twenty years of preparation that let him thrive at Twin Lakes as a self-taught naturalist and obsessive documentarian.

• Hand-carving saddle-notch joints that tightened as the wood dried
• A buried can system that kept food from spoiling or freezing solid
• His supply lifeline via bush pilot Babe Alsworth and the Sears catalog
• Decades of journals and microclimate data he recorded
• The "king of bears" myth he resented versus his real ethic of r ...