Most of us can’t survive a weekend without Wi-Fi. Richard “Dick” Proenneke went without electricity, running water, and a phone for decades and, by most accounts, was perfectly content with that. Proenneke kept a journal during his years at Twin Lakes, according to the National Park Service, and after leaving Twin Lakes for good in 1999, he and his brother donated the complete run of 255 journals that weigh nearly 90 pounds to the park the following year. Those pages are the actual record on which this story is built, down to the night he woke at half past midnight to the sound of lake ice cracking apart.
From diesel engines to a hand-built log cabin
