Magazine

This past summer I spent seven days in Glacier Bay National Park as photo leader for Dolphin Charters on board Ronn Patterson’s 52-foot M/V Delphinus. Eight photographers joined us for a full week in Glacier Bay National Park, and we had an amazing trip. Over the years I have spent somewhere...

Mark Bly has two passions in life: flying and cooking. At the tender age of 11, he won his class cooking competition. He baked a ham! At 16, he began flying lessons at Anchorage’s Merrill Field—without his mother’s blessing. When Bly left home, he took two of his most important...

I grew up in a small town in southern Wisconsin where I developed a passionate interest in nature and the outdoors. In 1981, after high school, I set my sights on Alaska, seeking adventure in a wilderness landscape, along with a university education in Fairbanks. Following graduation, I combined my...

The polar bear meandered along the water’s edge. Slanting through skeins of mist, the October sun bathed the scene in shimmering light. Photographer Steve Kazlowski and I sat, camera gear at the ready as Steve’s Eskimo buddy idled the big wooden skiff through the sandy shallows of the...

Excerpted from The Northern Lights: Celestial Performances of the Aurora Borealis by permission of Sasquatch Books Daryl Pederson figures that he misses capturing a great aurora image nine out of every 10 attempts. But 10 percent is pretty good, he figures, especially when the effort rewards him...

Fourteen thousand dollars. That’s the grand total of the camera equipment in my loft. I haven’t thought about how I’ll pay for it; I only know this—after photographing wildlife for most of my adult life, it was time to step up—to see what I might really do with the proper...

The shadow of our single-engine plane coasted north over a landscape that grew increasingly brown and bare. Serpentine rivers which once carved through a sea of trees near Fairbanks now ran naked beneath the sun. I craned my neck over the pilot’s shoulders, impatient for mountains to surface....

In 1904, Sydney Laurence, an artist approaching the age of 40, deserted his family and moved to Alaska. Though some may find his decision objectionable, his paintings would come to define Alaska’s image as the final frontier to Americans longing for a bygone era.

To say the suit is snug would be an understatement. I nearly broke a sweat pulling it over my calves, and it was frustrating having to furiously twist my arms to get them out the other side. Now I’m grinding my foot into the booties and working my fingers into the tips of the gloves. Standing...

A bitter westerly lashes off the Chukchi Sea, hurling skeins of sleet, fog and snow – typical early June weather for Point Hope, Alaska. This Inupiaq Eskimo village of roughly 700 perches on a weather-raked gravel spit a hundred-some miles north of the Arctic Circle, on the state’s...