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The Dogs Come First

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Wait, are cougars in Alaska?

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Adrenaline & Personal Growth: The School You Always Wanted

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Authentic Alaska

Unpublished Alaska

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Newly discovered images by Edward Curtis In 1927, photographer Edward Curtis left Seattle for Nome on the final leg of a journey that had taken him across the continent. He’d devoted three decades to a project called “The North American Indian,” a 20-volume collection of photographs of Native Americans taken on their lands. Alaska Natives along the Bering Sea coast would be his final subjects.  Upon reaching Nome, Curtis purchased a boat, hired a skipper, and with his grown daughter Beth Curtis Magnuson and his longtime assistant Stewart Eastwood, traveled to numerous villages, taking pictures of Indigenous residents whose forebears had inhabited the land for thousands of years, and who had only recently come into full contact with Europeans. Curtis was a portrait photographer by trade, and his work reflects this. “When you look at all the other photographers in the same period that were out taking pictures of…

Ken Chase
30-Second Reads

Who’s in a Name?

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Real people are in all those unnamed photos  In this photo taken by my mom when we lived along the Iditarod trail at Farewell Lake in 1974 and ’75, musher Ken Chase takes a break from the race to chat with us and rest his dogs. An Athabascan from Anvik, Chase ran the Iditarod 16 times, most recently in 2002. He placed in the top 10 three times. Hear his recollections about racing on photographer Jeff Schultz’s Faces of Iditarod site: faces.iditarod.com/ken-chase. Something that has always made me uncomfortable as an editor is using photos of people without naming them. Historical photos of Alaska Natives are notoriously nameless; the caption typically reads along the lines of “Native man in a boat,” or “Tlingit shaman in full costume.” So I’m particularly excited to share this issue in which nearly all of the images of individuals include names of Alaskans living (or…

30-Second Reads

Who’s in a Name?

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Real people are in all those unnamed photos mething that has always made me uncomfortable as an editor is using photos of people without naming them. Historical photos of Alaska Natives are notoriously nameless; the caption typically reads along the lines of “Native man in a boat,” or “Tlingit shaman in full costume.” So I’m particularly excited to share this issue in which nearly all of the images of individuals include names of Alaskans living (or who did live) authentic, complex lives. I attribute it to astute historical and contemporary photographers who either knew their subjects well or took the time and effort to record details. That’s not to say that unnamed pictures are products of lazy artists—anyone who’s photographed an event or even a family portrait in a public space knows it’s practically impossible to gather the names of everyone on stage for a performance or to run after…

Gear

Mystery Ranch Catalyst Backpack

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Gear Review By Bjorn Dihle When it comes to backpacks, Mystery Ranch makes some of the toughest, most long-lasting on the market. The brand is known for hunting, climbing, firefighting, and military grade products, so I was surprised when I got my hands on their new Catalyst 22L backpack. It was more “urban” than I expected. Imagine a backpack you’d use for work or school, but that’s also a good day hiking pack, and you have the Catalyst. Mystery Ranch designed it for office work, coffee shop life, and whatever else the urban wilderness can throw at you. It has a padded sleeve for a laptop and organizing sleeves for a tablet or notebooks. However, it’s still built tough enough for a wet, nasty day-long bushwhack up a mountain in Alaska. The Catalyst comes in three different sizes: 18L, 22L, and 26L. It has Mystery Ranch’s well-regarded, handy three-zipper access…

Authentic Alaska

Building a Home in Paradise

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The saga continues For those of you who missed an earlier column about the land my family purchased in Kodiak, the quick synopsis is this: We bought a couple of gorgeous acres in the only gated community in all of Alaska with an HOA that won’t allow us to camp on it or put a trailer on it (except temporarily or while building). It’s been two years, and so far, the only improvements we’ve made to the parcel are the wrought iron table and chairs I hauled out onto a knoll overlooking Middle Bay, where I sat enjoying a PB&J and dreaming about what it would be like to live there. My spouse has been a-okay with the fact that we’ve not spent any more money on the project, since interest rates are high, and it was my idea in the first place. As it is, I only get out…

Authentic Alaska

Ancient Arctic Cultures led the way

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High Tech I stood on a cut bank bright with autumn, the hoarse shouts of ravens echoing in the silence. Across the Kobuk’s clear, tannin-tinged flow rose a prominent, birch-spangled knoll; and beyond stretched an expanse of country, rising toward the looming, cloud-brushed pyramids of the Jade Mountains. This place, Onion Portage, known to the Inupiat as Paatitaaq (for the wild, onion-like chives that grow here), is marked by a great looping bend several miles long where the Kobuk reverses direction and almost circles back on itself before resuming its meandering westward flow. I lingered here as people have since time forgotten—not just centuries, but millennia according to the work of archeologist Louis Giddings. Roaming alone through the upper Kobuk in the early 1940s, Giddings, a researcher from Brown University, found his way to Onion Portage as so many had before him, following the river, drawn by the shape of…

Authentic Alaska

Maggie Shipstead

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Inspired by Alaska Maggie Shipstead’s novel Great Circle follows the life of Marian Graves, a female pilot who disappears near Antarctica in 1950 while attempting to circumnavigate the earth north to south. While the book is packed with shipwrecks, plane crashes, bootlegging mobsters, Hollywood scandals, and forbidden romance, a sizeable part of the story takes place in the glaciers, frontier towns, and wilderness of Alaska. The 600-page book—spanning three generations and nearly 100 years of history—took Shipstead more than six years to create, and was a finalist for the 2021 Booker Prize. In this interview, Shipstead describes how Alaska helped inspire her story of a woman breaking barriers, both personal and universal. —AS TOLD TO AND EDITED BY MOLLY RETTIG Your protagonist, Marian, had a pretty crazy childhood. She survived a shipwreck as a newborn in which her father, the captain, rescued Marian and her twin brother in a lifeboat.…

White Duck 13’ Regatta Bell Tent
Gear

White Duck 13′ Regatta Bell Tent

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Gear Review I got the Regatta Bell Tent intending to use it for glamping on an island near Juneau. My plan was to set it up in the spring on a piece of property my family owns, so my kids and other family members would have a nice shelter for the summer. It was late in the warm season when I got the tent and, since work had me out of town, I wasn’t able to make good on that dream. Instead, just as the late summer rains and winds were coming to southeast Alaska, I pitched it in my backyard. It was quick, easy, one-man set up. My four-year-old promptly moved in and insisted that we sleep in it for the next three weeks. During the day, he, his younger brother, and their cousins spent hours playing in it. White Duck uses a tent fabric they call DYNADUCK. The…

Anchorage City Parks
30-Second Reads

Hidden Histories in Anchorage’s City Parks 

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Each of the 223 parks has a story The Municipality of Anchorage manages 223 parks covering 10,946 acres. Some, like Kincaid Park, are sprawling, while others are pocketed away in urban neighborhoods. Each has a unique story, including these three: Delaney Park (the “Park Strip” along 9th Ave): This downtown centerpiece hosts military monuments and summertime fairs and music. It was first cleared as a firebreak in 1917, then used as a golf course and an airstrip. In the 1920s, it was lined with brothels, which Mayor James Delaney ordered shuttered in the 1930s. Kincaid Park: Stretching between Turnagain Arm and Knik Arm, Kincaid is a local favorite for biking, disc golf, and miles of groomed and lighted ski trails. It was withdrawn from the Chugach National Forest in 1915 and later served as a Nike-Hercules missile battery before the park was pieced together beginning in the 1960s. It is…

Alaska Native historian Holly Miowak Guise
30-Second Reads

Alaskan Voices

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Alaska Native Historian Holly Guise on the Value of Oral Histories Alaska Native historian Holly Miowak Guise (Iñupiaq) reflects on how recorded oral accounts connect Alaskans and incorporate Indigenous voices into today’s historical narratives. “Oral history is a powerful way to reach students, academics, and the public, enabling listeners to connect with a speaker, hear about their life, and perhaps more readily empathize with them. It’s also important for integrating Indigenous perspectives missing from Western archives. Oral histories are meant to be listened to. Even when a transcript is available, it’s best to listen to the audio, which offers human voice, character, intonation, and the interactions between the interviewer and interviewee. Today, websites or YouTube channels allow people to hear oral histories from their homes or classrooms. I created a website, ww2alaska.com, during a postdoctoral year at the University of California Irvine that hosts testimonies from Unangax̂ survivors of relocation…

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