The first time I went paddle boarding was in the warm water off the Big Island. Dolphins played in the distance as I soaked up the sun on the water with my husband. From that point on, I was hooked. I needed to bring this feeling home to Alaska with me. After lots of research, I finally picked the...
I started back toward camp in lengthening shadows. With the slippery going along that narrow, loose-cobbled beach near the Hubbard Glacier, I was focused more on my feet than the brushy cut bank a few yards to my right. Weaving toward the bank to get around a scattering of boulders, I glanced...
“Easy girl …let me see,” Vic Walker murmurs, gently prying the jaws of his canine patient and leaning close to inspect teeth, then peering into the back of her throat. He examines paws, feels along flanks and belly. For Walker, it’s an everyday veterinary moment—except the formidable jaws...
The position in which we found ourselves, tucked in among the rocks on a peak in the Chugach Mountains at 7 p.m. on that August evening, was not exactly impossible, but it was looking more that way with every passing minute. A hundred yards below, sprinkled across a high saddle, were a dozen Dall...
Trout brought me to Alaska. I dreamt of fishing for them since childhood but never had the resources. I spent my mid-twenties fishing in Montana. Waiting at a pizza spot covered my necessities: food, rent and gas to reach the local rivers.
It had to be there, a bright red, six-gallon plastic can full of gas. I was depending on every drop. I’d marked the spot for my cache on my way upstream two days before: a high bank, just below a distinctive slough. Had it been stolen way out here?
For a couple of years in the late 1990s, I worked as a backcountry ranger in Denali National Park. The job was outrageous, in a good way. I and a handful of other college kids were required to work an allotted number of 12-hour shifts at the backcountry permit desk, and then, with the blessing of...
Crouching, I cast into the sort of clear, eddying pool in deep, mountain-edged wilderness that might bend any devout angler’s knee. My marabou jig swept off a gravel ledge and tumbled along the bottom, past a snag, and downstream, its movement telegraphed through my light rod and thin line.
Port Chatham, a bay on the southern tip of the Kenai and a former village of the same name, hardly seems like a setting for inexplicable terror and fright. But a series of mysterious disappearances and deaths where the Kenai Mountains narrow before plunging into the North Pacific gave birth to...
Artists of a unique medium converge in Fairbanks, Alaska every March to create masterpiece sculptures made from giant blocks of ice. Fairbanks’ ice, dubbed the Arctic Diamond, is renowned for its purity, which lures craftsmen from all parts of the globe to attend the World Ice Art...
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