Schwager Haus Lodge gives couple new lease on life

WILLOW — At Schwager Haus Lodge, the motto is “Alaska Life — 180 degrees from Ordinary.” But what Herb and Tina Schwager consider ordinary has changed a lot over the past 17 years.

In 1995, they were living in Arizona. Herb was a behavioral medicine pain management consultant with a string of local clinics and Tina an operating room nurse at a nearby hospital.

They’d planned to retire in the 1990s, but a trip to King Salmon where Herb was invited to be part of a think tank seminar of pain management doctors changed their course.

Friends from Arizona who spent summers at their place in Willow told the Schwagers if they were ever in Alaska, to look them up.

“We had a spare day so we called them and they came and picked us up and drove us to Willow,” Herb said.

They stopped the car at the end of a cul de sac off Long Lake Road.

“We’d really like you kids to have this property,” their friends said, nodding to the forest at the end of the road.

Intrigued, Herb and Tina set off exploring. After about 30 minutes of scrambling through the underbrush, Tina spotted something.

“Hey, there’s a lake out here,” she said.

They hadn’t planned a second life in Alaska. They’d planned to retire, but the medical professionals saw opportunity in the woods near Willow.

“If we do this, we’ll live 20 years longer,” Tina told Herb that day.

After a few weeks, they made an offer and bought five acres, and then another five, and finally the rest of the couple’s homestead a few years later.

At first the plan was to build a home and retire on the shores of quiet Jean Lake. But the longer they lived there, and as more and more friends made the trip to visit, a new idea began to take root among the trees.

“This was the first building,” Tina said while sipping coffee in a favorite corner chair in the lodge’s sunny solarium.

Of course, in true Alaska fashion, back then this part of the lodge was the garage.

“We never envisioned this,” said Herb, who owns Schwager Haus Lodge with wife Tina.

They did dream it, one cabin, deck, dock and flowerbed at a time. But they didn’t plan it; it has evolved.

Now there is a main lodge, three cabins and the Grill Haus to cater to guests’ imaginations.

The Schwagers’ share their living quarters upstairs in the main lodge with Atka, their devoted golden Labrador.

“We love to cook. We love to entertain,” Tina said. “I’d always thought a bed and breakfast would be fun.”

Each year they seem to add something new to the Schwager Haus’ list of amenities. This summer, a new deck was added to the backside of the Grill Haus.

Next summer, they say they have plans to add a meditation garden and greenhouse. The food grown in the gardens also will be served to guests in the dining room, Tina said.

In addition to the main lodge where Tina and Herb share the chef’s hat, guests can also use the kitchen in the Grill Haus to cook their own meals. There’s a hot tub inside the Grill Haus for guests use, too.

For now, guests can book the Garden House or the Harmony House, but a long-term guest has taken up lodging in the Country House.

Each has two queen-size beds, a kitchenette and a bathroom. And both cabins include a second bathroom in a bathhouse behind the cabin, too. Two of the three cabins, the Grill Haus and the dock area on Jean Lake also have woodstoves for guests’ enjoyment.

There is a quiet sitting area and a second dock with a rowboat and paddleboat tied alongside on the lake’s edge. There, guests can use the grill, take the boats for a paddle around the lake, warm up in front of the woodstove or climb to the top of the 40-foot lighthouse, a replica of the Split Rock Lighthouse in Minnesota.

Tina loves lighthouses and Herb and his friend Larry found the plans online and built the replica for her as a birthday gift.

Living in Alaska has taken getting used to. For instance, there are not many days of truly warm weather each year, a calculation the two failed to make when they begin building a screened-in garden house.

Since screened porches and coats don’t go together, the two changed directions and replaced the screens with windows. And so was born the Garden House — well, the front half anyway. Its back bedroom began life as a garage for the couple’s travel trailer.

“We lived in the travel trailer while we did some clearing,” Tina said.

Thus far, they’ve done all the work themselves. Herb said they have had friends help with the labor. But he worked construction to pay for school and is handy with a hammer, he said.

One handyman they hired to help years ago has since grown to be part of the family, too.

“We played matchmaker,” Tina smiles.

Alex Miller was working for them on the property when their daughter, Jennifer, came home. The two hit it off and are now married and raising their three children together in Palmer.

“She’s a big, big part of helping get this going,” Tina said of Jennifer.

What’s more, advances in technology mean the couple can still see patients via telemedicine while living in Willow and operating a bed and breakfast on the shores of a quiet Alaska lake.

“We are here full-time running a full-time practice,” Herb said of his and Tina’s behavioral medicine pain management practice.

Contact managing editor Heather A. Resz at 352-2268 or heather.resz@frontiersman.com.