The Homestead. The Headquarters. The Kilcher mission.

The Kilchers. Stellavera is third from right. Photo is from the Kilchers and Today’s Alaska.

Picture this: Two Swiss teenagers growing up with a village lifestyle in their respective towns. They don’t know each other.

One is Yule Kilcher. He goes on to study Etymology, Film, and The Rise and Fall of Ancient Civilizations at the University of Geneva. While studying the collapse of ancient civilizations, Yule discovered a pattern.

“It had to do with the human population,” said his daughter Stellavera. “When the amount of people in an urban part of the population start to outbalance the remaining rural population, that civilization collapses.” With no sign of World War II at the time and based simply on his mathematical pattern, Yule believed something bad was going to happen in Europe. He convinced a group of his friends to drop out of University and settle far away in the wilderness of northern Canada. In preparation, the group spent a year learning a skill to survive with the desire to preserve their European culture and knowledge.

“My dad went to Norway where he learned how to build log cabins with only an axe. No nails,” said Stellavera. “Others in the group learned skills such as carding and weaving, or how to grow things. My father went ahead as a scout to find land for the group.”

Yule hitchhiked through America and headed to Canada. Along the way, someone picked him up. After hearing about Yule’s mission, the driver told Yule to go farther than Canada to Homer, Alaska. Homer wasn’t the map yet, but Yule was told it had great soil, fish and game. He got there and found land, an abandoned cabin and then summoned his friends in Europe to come.

By that time, World War II had broken out and visas were hard to come by. However, one girl was able to secure one. She was the other Swiss teenager and her name was Ruth Weber. Ruth heard about Yule’s vision through her fiancé at the time who was Yule’s friend.

The day she began her journey to Alaska, Ruth’s mother walked her to the train station to say goodbye. Her mother was a seamstress who sewed clothes for women. As she said goodbye to Ruth, she gave her savings to her -- savings that were earned by a woman, from women.

Heading by train from Switzerland, Ruth managed to catch the last civilian ship out of Portugal where she bravely headed to America, knowing no one on the boat or her destiny.

When Yule met Ruth at the boat, he asked her where everyone else was, to which she explained no one else could get a visa and that she had broken off the engagement to come. Yule asked Ruth if she had any plans, which she said she had none. So, Yule asked her if she wanted to get married. “My mom paused, reflected deeply, and then replied, ‘Why not,’” recounted Stellavera.

Stellavera asked her mother many years later about this story, especially about that pause. “She had so much courage doing what she did,” said Stellavera. “She realized she would do well with her courage and her mother’s little nest of money and told me, ‘I didn’t need to say ‘yes’ to the first man who asked me to marry him!’ But then she said, ‘I came because of Yule’s vision. And I wanted to align with that, so I said ‘yes’ I would marry him!’”

The next day, Yule and Ruth were married and began their new life in Alaska. They first started out in Anchorage and then eventually moved to Homer to the land famously referred to as The Kilcher Homestead.

“They created a life centered around the vision of preserving European culture and learning survival skills with deep appreciation of nature,” said Stellavera. “They ate off the land and wanted to learn from nature. As part of the Homesteading Act, they built a dwelling and cleared 50 acres of spruce all by hand - no chainsaw, no equipment - just saws, axes and a team of horses to pull out stumps.”

In the Alaskan wilderness, Yule and Ruth Kilcher raised their eight children – six girls and two boys. Their first four grew up in the abandoned cabin that Ruth ended up paying for with her mother’s money. While living there, they built a new sod roofed cabin on adjacent land that became the new Homestead to fit their growing family and mission.

“The Homestead would have never happened without my mother. Her money bought the original land and she worked side-by-side with our father building up our own Homestead” said Stellavera. “We had an incredible upbringing, but it was also harsh. It was an 18x20 foot cabin for 10 people. My mom was our schoolteacher, nurse and music teacher. She cleaned, cooked, washed and sewed our clothes, taught us manners and hosted all the visitors my father would bring in. In addition to that, she was my father’s equal and right-hand man in the fields.”

The mission work involved the whole family. They would make visits back to Europe where in movie theatres, Yule showed his films to talk about preserving nature and culture. His main thrust was to enlighten his audiences of the necessity to preserve that delicate balance that he believed had plagued civilizations for thousands of years: man-made reality vs natural reality, and the critical mass that was the tipping point.

Being fluent in 10 languages, Yule narrated in a different language through the films to suit whichever country his was in. At intermission, the rest of the family would sing and perform for the audience as “The Trapper Family Singers.” Singing was natural to them, since it was a required tradition at the dinner table where they had to join hands and sing a song together before eating. “If you didn’t want to sing, you didn’t eat,” Stellavera mused.

To secure the future of Alaska, Yule helped write the state’s constitution and became a state senator. The family often hosted political and influential dignitaries on their land. Ruth was the president of the National Women’s Press Association and wrote an award-winning column for the state paper. 

“My dad chose to be a state senator instead of a U.S. senator because state senators implement local law,” said Stellavera. “He strategically wanted to protect Alaska from going the way of ancient civilizations getting too urbanized. The laws my father enacted are pillars of Alaska law, that to this day, protect the environment and native rights. The natural resources that are protected in the state are thanks to Yule Kilcher.”

Today, with both parents having passed, the eight Kilcher children continue to live their mission through the Kilcher Homestead Trust. The Homestead sits on 620 acres of land and is run by the trust that Yule set up.  The Kilcher Homestead also is monitored twice yearly by  the Kachemak Heritage Land Trust (KHLT), with conservation easements to protect the land.

“My dad started the KHLT as soon as it was legal to do so in Alaska. They monitor all the covenants that our dad wrote, which we have to comply with,” said Stellavera. “We can’t have things like pollutants in the land or soil, the buildings have to look rustic, we have limits of how much we can build, protect wildlife habitat and more.”

Of the 620 acres on The Kilcher Homestead, each Kilcher child was granted five acres of land for their own use to be guardians of their parent’s vision. Another 50 acres remains specifically for the desired Headquarters, which is a place the family wants people to come to experience, learn and grow in nature. Those 50 acres is where the family’s original sod roofed log cabin sits, and where tourists come to visit The Kilcher Homestead Living Museum.

Stellavera mentioned that for decades, the Kilchers have been well-known throughout Alaska because of her parent’s contributions. There have been six films made about the family, along with photo spreads and articles in magazines such as Time, Life and National Geographic. It was purely by accident that the Discovery Network “discovered” the Kilchers all over again: the entire 620 acres of The Homestead is the showcase where scenes from the family’s hit reality show, “Alaska: The Last Frontier” is filmed.

“Much of how we are portrayed on the show is that we’re just people who work, eat, sleep, and so on…as if the point of life is just survival of our family,” said Stellavera. “That’s it. It doesn’t honor the trajectory of my parent’s vision.”

In fact, the Kilcher family purpose is quite opposite of that. Stellavera and her family hope to quickly build the necessary infrastructure on the Headquarters site, so it can be that place for anyone to come and learn and create change. “My parents were change makers,” said Stellavera. “The purpose of their meeting, marrying and everything they did had that intent to make a difference and transform the world. That is the Kilcher gene.”

“Their vision was to transform the world and to have others be change makers themselves,” reflected Stellavera. “And I really want in my lifetime to see my parent’s vision come to fruition. We have this beautiful land, dedicated to being a destination for educational and transformational workshops. We want to share that with anyone who aligns with this same purpose. I know they are out there. They just need to know we are here waiting for others to join us.”

You can watch the Kilcher family on the “Alaska: The Last Frontier” on Discovery, Discovery+ and DiscoveryGO. For a real look and experience into life on The Homestead, Stellavera has an Airbnb listing that’s available for bookings here.