“This land will change your life if you let it.” Innkeeper and former professional Skier Donna Claus pulls a sheet of steaming scones from the oven.

“When people return from their first day of adventuring they can’t even speak. They are smiling, happy, and tired. They come up to the lodge I serve them a big dinner, and I watch them gather by the fire.  All kinds of people all sit down together. Groups you might not have guessed would get along.

“They turn to each other, and say...

'How are we ever going to explain this day to the folks back home?’

“Well I just smile, because they can’t. The only people who will understand are the people around you right now.

"By the end of the week they figure that out. When you sit down together at this table, at Ultima Thule, and talk, that makes all the difference.”

     

The People

Ultima Thule is a place to gather family and friends, or to visit alone and discover kinship with other travelers. “People come alone, and they connect,” says Donna Claus. “People come here with friends and family, and they go away with memories they will literally never forget.”

“Every soul yearns to explore. To see new places and do new things – something so unique you can’t even explain it to other people. When you come here, this is the real thing.”
 

The Family

“Dad, can I borrow the plane?”

When you raise a family 100 miles from the nearest road, you do things a little differently. The Claus family backyard is 13 million acres of the most remote wilderness on earth.

The Clauses are a family of adventurers, with this land in their hearts, in their blood. Three generations have grown up here. They know this land. They love it. And they love to share it.

Paul Claus

Outside Magazine calls him “King of the Bush Pilots.” Paul’s a native Alaskan, and he recently served as the wilderness survival expert on the Discovery Chanel’s Alaska Experiment.

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Donna Claus

Former championship skier Donna Claus was born in Colorado. “But when I was five,” says Donna, “the first song I learned on the piano was ‘North to Alaska.’”

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John and Eleanor Claus

In 1960, Grandma and Grandpa John and Eleanor Claus staked a land claim under the Homestead Act. That little patch of land on the Chitina has grown into Ultima Thule Lodge.

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The Staff

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