The mountain doesn’t care about us. Huge, frozen and reaching into air too thin for human existence, Denali remains a hostile, immutable presence, with an allure climbers and other visitors find difficult to resist.
[by Seth Adams]
Two friends, one final adventure
[by Bjorn Dihle]
Leaving a piece of her heart, 1,600 miles behind
[by Elise Giordano]
Delivering plants and seeds and rototillers to Inupiaq Eskimo gardeners.
[by Seth Kantner]
The evening sun shone brightly in Anchorage’s Kincaid Park as I crested a hill, on my way to photograph the sunset over Cook Inlet. Walking directly into the sunshine, I heard something rustle in the brush close to the trail but couldn’t make out what it was.
The historic Ester Gold Camp was built in 1936 by the F.E. Company to house hundreds of workers needed for gold mining operations in the area. The abandoned gold camp includes a hotel, restaurant, mercantile, saloon and ticket office.
Of Alaska’s 6,640 miles of coastline, some of the most ruggedly beautiful encircle Kodiak Island. Clusters of islands and rock outcroppings rise up from just beyond its jagged shoreline, while massive cliff faces with their craggy-ledged complexions share the island’s coarse coastline with long, narrow beaches of black sand and expansive tidal flats fanning out from the mouths of mountain-fed rivers that empty into the North Pacific.
Alaskans and visitors from Outside are blessed with an incredible wealth of sport-fishing opportunities—from easy-to-reach streams that flow alongside highways or right through town, to remote waters accessible only by floatplane or raft.
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 through a break in the alders, up into the eyes of a female grizzly and her yearling cub.
“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 he’s spreading and the powerful musculature he’s probing belong to an adult wolf. Sure, Walker knows Isis well—for all but the first four weeks of her five-year life. But no matter that she’s captive-born, remarkably bonded to Walker and seemingly tame at this moment; a wolf is definitely not a domestic dog. Wolves are far more independent and complex, hard-wired to a feral consciousness that doesn’t tend to accept human dominion. Yet there are plenty of family pooches that are far less willing patients than Isis. Walker’s being paid a compliment of the highest order—one that he’s earned and doesn’t take lightly.…
