After transferring our gear and kayaks (and the dogs) to Ms. Hill’s motorboat, we started the eight-mile ride to the cabin. On the lake, the mountains, rising up 6,000 feet and stretching along the shoreline, stole all my attention. Tara and Ms. Hill were deep in conversation but, sitting behind them, the wind whipped their words away before I could hear them. The whole day had already been a grand adventure that left me crazy happy, but now my giddiness was going into overdrive. These wild places are why I love Alaska so, and why, after 12 years of trips to Alaska, this Brooklyn-born, New Jersey-raised, East Coast die-hard moved here full time five years ago.

The 35-foot- tall rock in sight, it was clear where Priest Rock’s Anglo name had come from — “Looks like a priest’s hat,” Tara said, helpfully — as well as its much older Dena’ina name, Hnitsanghi’iy, which means “the rock that is embedded.”

Ms. Hill helped us carry some of our gear into the cabin. We made a plan to call her by satellite phone Sunday morning to check that all was well for our Monday pickup, and then she loaded the dogs back into the boat and took off.

The cabin didn’t just feel like a home; it was a home. While looking through a National Park Service book about the area, I was tickled to see that some of the pieces in the cabin — a print of a bathing man surprised by a visit from two bear cubs, a wooden stool with one of its three legs extending out at a sharp angle — were original to the place. Outside, there was an old wooden ladder and a weathered hand-built handcart with a busted wheel; a clean outhouse (with a fancy toilet paper holder bolted to the wall); an old rowboat, clearly loved and well used, a tiny chip of paint still showing up as bright aqua; and enough wood to feed the stove and fend off any chill for weeks, maybe months. I wanted to stay, to keep the rest of the world at bay.