fbpx
Alaska Magazine
19 Results

tanana river

Search
Junjik River with fall colors
Northern

Last Run up the Junjik River

By

The Junjik River runs south under Burnt Hill, bright with fall colors. Photo by Keely O’Connell We woke in the tent, dazzled by the morning sunlight fracturing in the frost on the dry fireweed stalks and the tundra moss. With the door unzipped and pegged open—there were no mosquitoes so far north in September—we could look east, out over our feet in sleeping bags, clear across the Junjik River. The Junjik is a clear, shallow river with its entire length in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. It flows into the Chandalar just north of Arctic Village. That afternoon we wanted to see, just for the fun of it, how far we could get before bottoming out. In my freight canoe, Lyra, we hugged cutbanks, keeping just enough water under the hull to feed the prop. Blueberries on the bank hung limp on their stems, fragile, but syrupy sweet after the…

Shalane Frost skis down the divide in the White Mountains 100 race in 2023.
Activities

Shalane Frost

By

Backcounty Ski Racer Embraces the North Shalane Frost has won  pretty much every ultra-distance ski race in Alaska. In March alone this year, she cleaned up in the Homer Epic 100k, the Chena River to Ridge 50-miler, and the 45-mile Tanana River Challenge, closing out the month by defending her title in the White Mountains 100. The 100-mile ski, bike, and footrace is held in the White Mountains National Recreation Area outside Fairbanks, a one-million-acre wilderness whose fairly modest exterior disguises sweeping valleys, jagged limestone mountains, and clear-running creeks, all tied together by groomed trails and 14 public use cabins. In her last two years in the race, Frost has finished first among skiers (women and men) and set a women’s course record at 12 hours 42 minutes. While she won’t deny being ultra-competitive, she says the real draw of racing in Alaska is getting outside, seeing new country, and—every…

The Planet Walk begins just west of the UAF Museum of the North.
Activities

Planet Walk Puts Things in Perspective

By

A stroll through space in Fairbanks It is a pleasant day for a walk in the middle of Alaska, with blue sky overhead, and people perhaps looking for something to do outside, with lots of space and sweet-scented summer air around them. Not long ago, I hiked the length of a new planet-walk display on the University of Alaska Fairbanks campus with Peter Delamere. In a little less than one mile, we spanned the relative distance from the sun to dwarf planet Pluto. Delamere is a researcher and teacher at UAF’s Geophysical Institute and Physics Department. He knows a lot about each of the heavenly spheres mounted on signs along Yukon Drive, which is arrow-straight and runs up to the high point of the campus. I have known Pete for a long time. When he was a Ph.D. student here in the 1990s, I interviewed him for this column about…

Sping Breakup Alaska
Wildlife & Nature

Spring Breakup in Alaska

By

High Drama When the River Runs Again by Beth Grassi In late April 2014, I stood on a bridge in Fairbanks watching the Chena River waking up under my feet. Flat chunks of ice bumped and bobbed down the river, some a thin, translucent gray, others rafts of white several inches thick. Ice floes and slush hissed through the rush of river water. It felt like standing on the prow of a ship, pushing through to spring. “Spring breakup” may sound like a sitcom episode, but in Alaska it’s a landscape-size drama. Most of Alaska’s rivers freeze over in winter, with ice up to several feet thick. When the rivers finally break free, usually in April and May (or even June in the Arctic), ice floats downstream. Sometimes ice jams—jumbles of ice floes—dam up a river. Large ice jams can cause dangerous flooding. Breakup plays out differently each year on…

Travel

Alaska’s Parks Offer Varied Treasures

By

Visitors can see everything from bears and murres to sand dunes and salmon.

[by David Shaw]

It’s Denali National Park’s fault I live in Alaska. Fourteen years ago, I accepted a position as a field biologist, banding birds at the far end of the park’s only road. For two months I awoke every clear morning to a view of Denali itself, the Great One rising 20,320 feet into thin air. I was hooked, and have been here ever since.

The Upper Tanana Dene, People of this Land (University of Alaska Press),
30-Second Reads

In their own words 

By

Oral history on the upper Tanana Dene released The Upper Tanana Dene, People of this Land (University of Alaska Press), offers a portrait of an Alaska Native people both before and during the transformative changes of the 20th century. It centers around oral accounts from Dene elders born in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Additional historical and anthropological information provides context. The upper Tanana region of eastern Alaska is bordered on the south by the Wrangell Mountains and on the north by the rolling Yukon-Tanana uplands. It’s a boreal forest landscape with broad river valleys, expansive wetlands, and abundant fish and wildlife that includes migrating herds of caribou. “It is a landscape lived in and lived with,” writes author and anthropologist William E. Simeone, who has lived there for 50 years. While parts of Alaska felt Russian, missionary, and other influences earlier, the upper Tanana remained largely isolated…

Sign up for our newsletter for more exciting Alaska travel content.