Matanuska’s Obscene Heirloom: Hunting Alaskan Thunderf*ck

Nothing grows in Alaska like it does in the Matanuska Valley — well, nothing you’d find suitable to eat without the Last Frontier equivalent of a knife fight. Here, hundreds of farming families from the Midwest tried to make a go of it during the Depression. Only a few dozen stayed, but their descendants today grow some of the biggest cabbages, potatoes and other cold weather-tolerant crops in the United States: a few years ago, a dentist presented a 117.95-pound cabbage — that’s a lot of cole slaw.

Up the river from Anchorage, a little town called Wasilla produced a famous mayor who occasionally still appears on Fox News. And here in the Matansuka Valley, sometime in the past fifty years, somebody — nobody can agree on who it was or where they came from — planted the first crop of what was once the USA’s most famous native strain of cannabis; the original Alaskan Thunderf*ck.

A man known only as “Nordhoff” described ATF to a High Times writer who visited the valley in the 1970s:

“This weed is so strong it grows through the snow to find the sun. Its growing period is only five months long, counting the snow time, and it grows eight feet high. Farmers in the Valley plant it alongside patches of cabbage so big it takes two men to carry them, tomatoes so big you have to cut them off with a chainsaw.”

With massive bear-paw-sized buds, Nordhoff said ATF was “the finest pot grown in the 50 states.” The High Times writer, there on the scene with a pair of marijuana dealers, declared Nordhoff’s description no hyperbole.

That’s the legend. But like most legends, finding tangible proof in the here-and-now can be like chasing Bigfoot.

Nobody can seem to say what happened to Nordhoff. A modern-day High Times writer heard tell of two men who may know the strain. One tried unsuccessfully to trademark the name “Matanuska Thunderf*ck” in 2014; the other may be hiding out somewhere in the Alaskan bush, like a pot-growing “Grizzly Man.”

But this is the era of big business in cannabis. Thunderf*ck is an instantly recognizable name with deep marijuana bona fides — if you could find a real cut, it would have instant value among strain-conscious breeders and marijuana marketers. So it’s in demand.

The Thunderf*ck Whisperer

The Alaska Dispatch News recently spent some time with Roger Cobb, an ATF expert who first smoked the strain back in 1989. Back then, he remembers walking in rooms full of the stuff. But that source was busted.

Now, a generation and many hundreds of outlaw indoor grow cycles later, Cobb is in demand as a “Thunderf*ck-listener”–he’ll smoke your stuff and tell you if it’s the real ATF, a distant relative, or a total pretender.

Cobb was enlisted by Rob Bass, a local grower, to participate in a blind taste-test of several strains to see which — if any — had some relationship to the original ATF.

So what made ATF so special in an era when nobody had heard of terpenes and trichomes? Some descriptions make it sound like a Kush, with earthy notes and strong hints of lemon and pine. Others are right out of a hybrid’s book, with an intense head-strong euphoria melting into a mellow body relaxation.

But just as likely, some cynics say, is that Thunderf*ck was shorthand merely for “decent weed grown in Alaska.”

There are some seeds available online and some strains in Lower 48-based dispensaries with the name, but at least one Alaska grower says they’re all bunk.

“I don’t buy it,” grower Justin Roland told the Dispatch-News.

Further compounding the problem is that the only metric by which one can judge whether ATF is still among us (or vanished forever) is the least scientific of all: memory. Only old-school marijuana consumers with a four-decade history know for certain they’ve smoked the stuff. Are a stoner Baby Boomer’s taste and senses trustworthy?

Maybe.

Last summer, the search for ATF was narrowed down to five finalists, collected from all over the valley. Bass grew all five, right next to one another, and presented them to Cobb and his other judges for the smoke-test. All five-fingered the same plant as the real Alaskan Thunderf*ck — the entry from Wasilla.

But is it the real deal? At this point, the answer is a resounding, “probably.” As for when can we see some in California, Colorado and other cannabis markets beyond the Land of the Midnight Sun — that’ll have to wait.

TELL US, have you ever smoked Alaskan Thunderf*ck?