Hands and feet bandaged, 53-year-old Judith Willems -- another victim of Alaska -- left the Providence Alaska Medical Center on Tuesday bound for an assisted living facility. With her she carried a sad story of frostbite as old as the cold.

Willems owns remote property in the foothills of the Talkeetna Mountains near Montana Creek some 100 miles north of Anchorage. For reasons of which even she isn't exactly sure, she decided this would be the year to start construction of a cabin there.

"I've had this homestead for almost 25 years,'' she said from her hospital bed. "Don't ask me why we were trying to get in there in this brutal weather.''

The temperature when Willems, her partner Peter Hein and her son set out by dogsled from the end of Noel Wein Road a week ago was hovering near 30-degrees-below zero, and the trio was looking at somewhere between six and seven miles of bad trail -- narrow, winding, littered with stumps, overhung with branches, and in some places glaciated from the overflow of underground springs constantly bubbling to the surface and refreezing in the bitter cold.

In better times, there would have been an abundance of snow, and travel by dog sled would have been relatively easy. In these times, there was just enough snow to make trouble.

"My hands and my feet got a little bit wet,'' Willems said. "I fell in the snow, and I got snow in my mitts.''

Willems fell in the snow because the dog sled she was trying to drive -- a dog sled containing a heavy load of gear and one pregnant dog -- kept crashing on the rough trail. Greg Sellentin of Willow, one of a group local mushers who later went in on snowmachines to retrieve Willems' dogs, including the bitch which had since given birth to a litter of six pups, said the trail was beyond description.

"I couldn't imagine trying to mush on it,'' he said. Sellentin, who was at the Willems' campsite after all the people left and never talked to any of them, couldn't quite believe the dog sleds he saw outside a big, old Army tent had been in use only days earlier.

"There were two completely demolished dogs sleds there,'' he said, describing sleds with nearly every wooden or plastic part broken.

Those, Willems said, were the sleds she and Hein took into their temporary camp -- an 12-man, Army-surplus tent heated with a wood-stove, a tough structure in which to live at 30 degrees below zero even when everything is going well. Especially not for people marginally prepared for this.

"I had fairly good gear,'' Willems said, "but not proper gear.''

In better circumstances, good gear might have been enough. Even cheap boots with good felt liners for warmth are adequate for several hours in the cold before getting into a heated shelter of some kind, but Willems spent a lot more than a few hours in her boots.

"It took 8 hours to get in there,'' she said. "I fell down. I got wet. We were really pushing ourselves to get in there.''

Between the snow and the sweat, the felts liners in Willems' boots got soaked. She ignored it; she barely noticed it. Her thoughts and energies were focused on getting to camp.

"I didn't realize until I got in there what had happened,'' she said. "I got these purple toes.''

Purple toes are a sign of severe frostbite. So are purple fingers, which Willems also found herself sporting. One can function with extremities in this condition if they are allowed to remain frozen. Once they thaw out, however, they became useless and extremely, extremely painful.

Willems let hers thaw out. Hein recognized the danger and went to get help. The Talkeetna Fire Department made the tough journey into the tent and packed Willem out.

"It's what we're here for,'' said rescue team leader Tim Morgan. "It's what we love to do.''

Willems was taken to Providence where doctors began trying to save her fingers and toes. She's still not sure they're going to be successful, though she praises the efforts of frostbite specialist Dr. James E. O'Malley and thanks the heavens for the pain-killing power of morphine.

"I'm doing OK,'' Willems said. "This one hand, though, we still don't know....