If you plant a flag a mile from the centre of town, next to the railroad that reaches its remote metal tendrils out across the great nothingness of Alaska, one of America’s last flagstop trains will apply its brakes to ensure it comes to a halt in time to pick you up from the tiny trading post of Talkeetna: population 876.

Each resident will welcome you with open arms, a warm smile and a can of anti-grizzly pepper spray that would surely be useless should an angry bear get close enough for to you to have to use it. Talkeetna is the base for expeditions into the wilderness: 10,000 square miles of Denali national park with Mount McKinley, the US’s highest mountain, at its centre. In winter, it can be as cold as -40F, but in summer I sat in shirtsleeves at the town microbrewery listening to locals’ tales of the Talkeetna Moose Dropping festival, a celebration of the creature’s dung. Lumps of moose poo are dried, varnished and individually numbered, before being dropped from a chopper as a kind of town lottery.

For a tiny town, it certainly courted controversy when US animal rights activists got the wrong end of the (presumably shitty) stick and tried to put an end to it, thinking that the festival involved lobbing the animals from helicopters, rather than their droppings. Long dark nights can last up to 19 hours out here, you have to make your own entertainment.

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