My Strange Story of Getting Hypothermia in Alaska is a video that recounts Gabriel Morris’ experience of suffering from hypothermia while attending the University of Alaska in Fairbanks during the winter of 1991-1992. This video is part of Gabriel’s collection of travel stories and adventures that he shares with his audience on his YouTube channel.
Gabriel’s journey to Alaska was a result of him flipping through a booklet of colleges and universities around the United States, where he stumbled upon the University of Alaska in Fairbanks. Intrigued by the idea of studying in Alaska, a place he knew very little about, he decided to apply to the university and ultimately ended up attending.
After a semester of college in Yukaya, Gabriel took a break and embarked on a solo trip to Europe, where he backpacked through 10 countries for over three months. Upon returning to California, he found himself with no money and unsure of his next steps. This led him back to Alaska, where he experienced a unique and unexpected adventure that resulted in him getting hypothermia.
Gabriel’s storytelling style and detailed recounting of his experiences make for an engaging and entertaining video. His candid and personal approach to sharing his travel stories allows viewers to feel like they are right there with him, experiencing the ups and downs of his adventures.
If you enjoy travel stories and are looking for a unique and captivating tale, be sure to check out My Strange Story of Getting Hypothermia in Alaska on Gabriel’s YouTube channel. And don’t forget to support him on Patreon for more amazing travel content.
Watch the video by Gabriel Traveler
Hey there how’s it going good afternoon another lovely day here in Yukaya Mendocino County Northern California in the middle of winter the sun is back getting a break from the uh rain for the previous week I’m going to do the same walk that I did the other day
Up the uh TR Trail through low gap Park here and get the uh City View of the town of Yukaya here so this video is about the story of my getting hypothermia in Alaska way back in 1990 so I have to give some cont text
Here in my last video then I told the story of my first day of traveling in a foreign country in my life the uh first day when I landed in London England at the age of 18 with a backpack a roundtrip flight San Francisco California to London England
In May of 1990 and then flight back August 20th more than 3 and a half months later my first time traveling solo first time out of the country other than as I mention having been born in Canada and then moved back to California so the reason that I was in Alaska getting
Hypothermia was because I was going to University there as I just said this was in 1990 right after coming back from Europe so first thing I want to say is this is not quite the Alaskan hypothermia story you might be thinking about I was not camping in the snow
Or racing sled dogs or whatever it’s kind of a silly story but I’m pretty sure that it was a case of hypothermia so how I ended up going to University in Alaska to begin with is that I was going to Mendocino Community College here in Yukaya in the fall of 1989 I
Graduated from Berkeley High school down in the Bay Area in Spring of 1989 at the age of 17 because I skipped 8th grade and so I just turned 17 graduated from high school my grades were not great my family didn’t have much money I didn’t have any idea really what
Exactly I wanted to do I had hadn’t applied to any schools I don’t think at all at that point and so I decided to uh move back to Yukaya here I was raised in the town of Willets just north of here but my mom had moved down to
Yukaya and so I decided to move up here from the Bay Area and attend the Community College it was insanely cheap it was like $5 per credit I think so it came to like 50 bucks for the semester and so I just started taking General classes there lived with my
Mom my younger brother Christo was back down still living with my dad in Oakland going to the high school there finishing up high school and so I was here taking my college classes and thinking a bit about the future what else do I want to do where else do I want to
Go and so I got a uh booklet of colleges around the United States to just kind of flip through it and consider like where might I want to go to college after Community College disc golf basket there that’s where I met and so I was at my mom’s house there flipping through the
Book Alaska starts with an A and so it was at the beginning of the book colleges in Alaska universities and so I had never even considered the idea that there would even be universities in Alaska knew you know very little about it Alaska in general just kind of had this
Stereotypical image of it being kind of wild west Gold Rush country cold all the time not even sure how aware of the uh towns and cities there I probably knew that the capital was Juno because that is a you know thing you learn when you’re in elementary school
Here is all of the capitals of the different states but uh anyways I knew very little about Alaska but I came across the University of Alaska in Fairbanks so Anchorage is the largest city but the University of Alaska in Fairbanks which is the second largest city or really a
Town is the largest uh University in Fairbanks there and so I think I continued you know flipping through the book and checked out some other options but I was super intrigued by the concept of going to Alaska I had a generally adventurous spirit and I’d been a voracious reader throughout
My childhood and I think this along with various other factors had uh made me very curious to see more of the world so I uh applied to that uh School sent in the application and then forgot about it I then completed that semester at the community college
And then decided not to go back for the spring semester here in Yukaya and instead get ready for traveling to Europe so one of the influences for my wanting to go to Europe was certainly because my parents had done a backpacking trip there back in I think
1970 just the two of them and then another couple friend of theirs and so I’ve heard stories about that and so it was something that was a you know a realistic possib ility to me including the hitchhiking aspect which I ended up doing on that Europe trip but uh I
Decided to uh move back down to my dad’s house in Oakland in the Bay Area and uh I got a job at a ice cream parlor scooping ice cream making a few bucks and scraped the money together to go to Europe so I’m not going to uh you know
Get lost in the whole Europe story I should make another video telling more about about that trip but uh I fly to London May 2nd I land in London England 3 and 1/2 months in uh Europe 10 countries and then fly back to San Francisco August 20th I
Land my uh you know dad picks me up I have 0 literally my last several days in Europe I had like 50 bucks left and I was just trying to get to the flight with my last literally pennies or penes or whatever you know British money and so I arrived back in
California with no money no idea what I’m going to do and so at some point then it occurred to me oh yeah I applied to that University in Alaska I wonder if I got accepted I didn’t know yet and so I I told my dad and he called them up and
Sure enough I was accepted to go to university in Fairbanks so my dad set it all up he you know paid for tuition the flight everything you know as I said I had Zer dollar so my dad fully made that happen I fly to Fairbanks like I don’t
Know a week or two later or something and boom I’m in Alaska going to University that is where I ended up room Ates with Eric who lives in Salem who I’ve mentioned before and that is where I park my vehicle my Honda CRV when I’m gone traveling when I came
Back from this last trip to Europe Middle East Asia Etc then I flew into Portland picked up my car at Eric’s house Eric was my roommate in Fairbanks so getting to the story here I’m going to uh my classes getting into the Alaskan experience it goes into fall I forget exactly when
This occurred but it was when it was very very cold could have been November December January I don’t know but uh you know very very cold temperatures it got down to 40 below 0 fhe 50 below 0 f regularly throughout the winter and so I had brought brought
Cross Country Skis with me I guess I owned a pair I don’t remember how I got those skis but I brought skis with me up to Alaska and I would ski to my classes once there was enough snow on the ground I forget now if I was skiing two classes at the time
Of this incident or not but what happened is it was laundry day I need needed to uh do a load of laundry I get the laundry going I have a class later that afternoon I basically put the laundry in with exactly enough time to get to my class on
Time put it in the wash put it in the dryer maybe go take a shower or something come back to get my laundry and somebody had taken it out of the drive before it was fully dry and piled it up on top of the uh dryer and my class was in a few
Minutes and so I don’t recall if there was the possibility that my clothes had ended the cycle and just weren’t dry and somebody came along and saw my clothes there and just took them out I remember the time feeling like my impression was that somebody had
Taken my clothes out of the dryer before they were dry while it was still going because to the best of my recollection it shouldn’t have you know stopped without them being dry whatever happened there I had my class my clothes were damp they weren’t still like super wet but they were
Definitely damp I needed to get to this class and so I just had no choice I had no other clothes I didn’t didn’t have many they were all in there I had like no other options other than to put on these damp clothes and then get to my class and so I do
That and now I forget if I was skiing or walking either way I get out into the extreme cold air and walk to the class and then or ski and then I’m sitting there in the class and just start to feel chilled the clothes you know aren’t going to
Dry quickly when it is super cold temperatures and so I sit through the class and then I guess just you know walk or ski back to my room and then at some point during that day I get sick I don’t remember exactly the symptoms but you know super cold of course like shaky
Achy I don’t remember what else but it gets worse and worse and I end up being sick for like a solid week or something like that and probably had to miss classes as a result cuz I was quite sick from this and then somehow in the midst of
This then I determined that it was probably a like kind of mild case of hypothermia I think based on something that somebody else had said I don’t think that I really like knew enough about it to come up with that on my own but uh I don’t recall ever going to a
Doctor getting a for sure diagnosis or any medicine or anything I remember just friends at the time helping like bringing me food and maybe you know hot Cups of Tea or something like that and so it wasn’t a life or death situation or anything but uh it was a real bummer
And in hindsight I guess you know you can say well I should have just been late for the class waited for my clothes to dry and uh skipped a week of being sick and missing more classes but of course hindsight is 20120 and uh that’s just the way that the cookie crumbled so
And so that is basically the story not especially dramatic or adventurous or heroic or anything but uh captures a little bit at least of one of my adventurous experiences of going to Alaska going to University skiing experiencing the extreme cold temperatures I finished up that uh year in the fall of 1991
I got a job for the summer at Denali National Park which is between Fairbanks and Anchorage Anchorage is further south Fairbanks in the middle of Alaska Denali National Park with Mount Denali previously Mount McKinley tallest mountain in North America is a couple hours south of Fairbanks and so I got a
Job there and then Eric and I decided to change universities to Juno it was basically Eric’s uh thing for some reason I forget why but he wanted to go uh there and finish up his studies in Juno and so I decided to go ahead and change and uh go there as well
And so Denali for that summer and then Juno spent a year there the next summer once again I was in Denali and that was summer of 1992 which a few of you may recall is the summer that Chris McCanless the main character in the book and movie into of the wild was living
And ultimately dying there in Alaska just north of Denali National Park I have already told that story in another video but I might do another one revisiting it and also telling the story of seeing the real into the wild bus I made a video when I was working in Alaska back in
2017 in which I told the whole story of how I ended up hitchhiking from the pan handle of Alaska where Juno is taking a ferry and then hitchhiking up through Canada back into Alaska and this was just a week after Chris MCAS had done part of the
Same route and ended up just north of Denali and then I ended up IND Denali and was there working away while he was there scraping out an existence living in that bus so a couple years ago I went back to Alaska with a company and so I
Didn’t up filming anything there I just posted on Instagram a uh photo of me standing in front of the real into the wild bus because the one used in the movie had been down the road from where I was living in 2017 when I worked in Alaska once again
Just for the end of that summer and so I visited the movie Into The Wild bus but a couple years later they took the reel into the wild bus which was Way West out in the wilderness and you could hike out there but it was really a big track they
Had taken that bus because two people had died trying to get to it and so they decided to remove it and they put it in a building in the University of Alaska Fairbanks and so I went back to Alaska a couple years ago and went and saw the
Bus there in a room being restored on the University of Alaska campus so that was a really cool like kind of tying things together revisiting Fairbanks seeing the real bus Etc so maybe I will tell that whole story in more detail uh in another video we shall see but
Anyways here we go uh once again the Viewpoint Yukaya snow on the mountains there to the east Willet the town where I was raised to the north South Santa Rosa which is where uh Charles Schultz lived the creator of the Peanuts comic strip the airport in San Rosa is named after Charles
Schultz so a little bit of uh history around here and uh speaking of History Green Day the band Trey cool the drummer went to Willet high school we were friends along with my friend Abram he was uh I think the same age or maybe a year younger or something like that but
Uh he was in the same group of friends of mine I hung out with him he wasn’t like you know one of my best friends but I saw him regularly and then he went on to create the uh band the Lookouts and we all knew about that they
Were a little you know underground punk band and then years later he hit the big time with Green Day and they’re still going so anyways there you go enough uh random rambling more coming travel stories travel tips whatever something like that while I’m here hanging out uh in my hometown
Area take me easy happy trails
Video “My Strange Story of Getting Hypothermia in Alaska” was uploaded on 02/25/2024. Watch all the latest Videos by Gabriel Traveler on Gretopia