The faded photo of Muhammad Ali holding 6-month-old Russ Linzner occupied a prominent place in the cabin, a vivid reminder of the day the boxing champ visited Summit Lake in 1978.

The encounter came at a low point in Ali's professional career, two months after Leon Spinks defeated him in one of boxing's greatest upsets, but the dozens of people who met Ali in the snow and the sunshine witnessed a man who was still fast on his feet and lightning quick with a comeback.

Ali, who wore an orange parka emblazoned with the words "Tested Tough," had come to the Alaska Range in April to shoot commercials for Ford Motorcraft parts.

His arrival at Fairbanks had been noted by a spokesman for Pan American World Airways who told a Fairbanks reporter "there was someone on the guest list called 'the greatest,' with his wife and a party of six." Ali spent the night at the Traveler's Inn, owned by boxer Wally Hickel, before heading southeast 170 miles on the Richardson Highway.

"You expect a lot of huts made out of ice and snow," he told an Anchorage reporter in a phone interview from Paxson. "But what you see are a lot of little towns like most towns in America."

"I've done quite a few commercials. What I really like about this one was that I had to come to Alaska. I wanted to see the pipeline," he said.

He saw the pipeline and practiced along the frozen shores of Summit Lake, delivering his rhyming lines in the style of prefight banter: "I am tough and I am tested. That's why by Ford I was requested. …"

At the time he was one of the most famous figures in the world, able to attract a crowd almost anywhere. He bought hamburgers for the kids at the Summit Lake Lodge, went into a motor home to say hello to Buzz Jackovich, then recovering from a leg injury, signed autographs, sat on a snowmachine and marveled at the scenery.

Dee Linzner remembers one of the world's leading tough guys for the gentle way he handled her infant son.

"He was very cordial," Dee said. "I asked if he could hold Russell so we could take a picture of him. He said, 'Sure.'"

Ali smiled and mugged for the camera, handled the baby with care and kissed the infant on the cheek.

Everyone wanted pictures with Ali, both at Summit and in the Paxson Lodge, where the TV ad entourage filled 16 of 19 rooms for three days.

The sports editor of the Anchorage Times, Steve Lindbeck, drove through the night to see Ali at the Paxson Lodge.

"The lodge in Paxson was closed when I arrived at about 3 a.m., so I slept in my car in sub-zero weather," he wrote on Facebook after Ali's death.

"I caught Ali at breakfast that morning, sitting by himself with his morning devotional. He kindly put it down and consented to an interview – before demonstrating his legendary jabs," said Lindbeck, now challenging Rep. Don Young for a seat in Congress.

Ali talked about how he had just signed for a rematch with Spinks in five months and how he fully expected to win, an accurate prediction.

Ali, then 36, said he was feeling the effects of age in his legs and back, "but I've still got some of this left."

At that, Ali stood up and pretending to aim left jabs at Lindbeck. "He throws the left hand to within inches of my jaw," he wrote in a 1978 account.

"The punches are too fast to comprehend. I get the impression that only on films afterward do his foes see that left hand clearly," Lindbeck said.

Ali's trip to Alaska came 33 years after another heavyweight champion drew admiring fans on a wartime Alaska tour. In 1945, Joe Louis appeared in exhibition matches both as a referee and a boxer from the Aleutians to Nome.

In Fairbanks, a waitress at the Model Café, Elanor Wirig, said Louis was gracious, kind and considerate no matter how many people kept crowding in to ask for his autograph.

"Perhaps it is crass to say he tipped liberally," Wirig told Fairbanks Daily News-Miner editor David Tewkesbury. "He did. Among his tips to me was a dollar bill I'll always treasure."

The big tipper never knew how important that dollar bill was to Wirig. Just as Muhammad Ali never knew that a faded picture of him holding a baby in a blue snowsuit became a treasured keepsake for the Linzner family.

At a gathering of hundreds of people in Fairbanks last month, tucked into a big collection of joyous photos with scenes of hunting, camping, fishing and family get-togethers, there was the champ and the baby on his knee.

The occasion was a celebration of life for 38-year-old Russ Linzner, who died in an avalanche April 11, not too many miles away from the spot where Ali's powerful personality brightened a spring day in 1978.

"I'm sad that I lost him," Dee said of her son, "but I'm happy with all of the happy memories that we have from our life down there."

Muhammad Ali's graceful handling of a baby on his knee is one of those happy memories.