Budget woes prompted extreme cuts to service provided by the Alaska Marine Highway System. What is it’s future?
Kimberly Braun, founder of the Denali Film Festival, built a festival focused on adventure, sustainability and quality storytelling.
Chef Andrew Maxwell seems to have it mastered. At the first bite, author Michelle Theall believes she finally met the perfect chocolate chip cookie.
As Alaska’s climate and habitat change, red fox are migrating north and pushing arctic fox out of their territory. It could be the end of the artic fox.
Businesses in the tourism sector are taking steps to reduce the carbon footprint of the travel industry by planting trees, recycling, and other measures.
You’d expect a destination that’s 2.5 times the size of Texas to have a few secrets. Here are 14 hidden Alaska gems worth visiting.
Michelle Theall, Alaska magazine’s senior editor and a wildlife viewing guide, weighs the risks of travel during COVID-19.
Alaska Senior Editor Michelle Theall shares Alaskan portraits from her time traveling and meeting people around the state. For this photo Theall writes, “When you live in Utqiagvik at the edge of the world, you make your own fun. Three kids sit atop a roof to rest after a day of biking along the Arctic Ocean. In typical Inupiat villages, seal pelts hang off ATVs and meat dries on sawhorses in front of homes. Gas is $7.00 a gallon and a two-liter bottle of Coca-Cola will cost you $10. However, bike riding and climbing on a neighbor’s shed remain free for now.” If you live or work in Alaska, you know that life here is different: simultaneously slower, harder, and more adventurous than in the Lower 48. People are fiercely independent, yet friendly. Communities possess unique personalities, defined in large part by their denizens or tourist offerings. Climbing and mining…
Alaska’s Senior Editor saw 17 bears at Brooks Falls when she was one of the first visitors to Katmai National Park when it reopened in early August 2020.
A lone bear stakes out his fishing territory beneath Brooks Falls in Katmai. Photo by Michelle Theall. Alaska’s eight designated national parks cover over 41 million acres. For scale, that’s twice the size of all of the Lower 48 national parks—from Death Valley to Big Bend—added together. National parks are considered the crown jewels of each state—important enough to be protected for all—and Alaska is no exception. It just, well, has a bigger crown. Alaska is romanticized and revered for its wildness, its vast and forbidding landscapes, and its almost mythic number of creatures. The diverse flora and fauna here exist among famous mountains, but also unnamed and unclimbed peaks and salmon-rich rivers and remote streams. There’s a reason these areas are protected: their wild beauty and wonder represent the best Alaska and, thus, our country, has to offer. Visiting all of the parks requires some logistical gymnastics—ideally broken down…