Out of Office: Aaron Hines

When I was a kid—I’m the youngest of three—our parents got us a snowmachine when I was six or seven. We started riding around town on the trails here in Fairbanks. Then in my teenage years, I was able to drive and go to some more interesting places. We started riding more in the mountains.

I’ve spent most of my teenage and adult years riding in the Alaska Range in places where very few people have been. There are no trails—you just head toward the mountains, and you have to know where to go. You learn over time, but the Alaska Range is a pretty amazing place.

I spend most of my time riding in two different places, a place called the Hoodoo Mountains, which is about 170 miles south of Fairbanks, and then another place south of Cantwell, Alaska, near Denali National Park.

These are very undeveloped places. You can’t just drive to them. We usually park our vehicles in a turnoff on the side of the highway and then head as much as 50 miles up into the mountains. There’s nothing really up there; it’s beautiful. We usually ride anywhere from 3,000 to 8,000 feet, and it’s just mountains and landscape as far as you can see.