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Wildlife & Nature

Spring Breakup in Alaska

April 20, 2023 By Alaska Magazine

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…

Authentic Alaska

Hell and High Water

April 4, 2023 By Alaska Magazine

Advanced Lessons on the High Seas by Scout Edmondson It’s 2 a.m., dark and windy. F/V Epick bobs along in tumultuous gray water near the beach, while I sit on a buoy in the corner of the port side stern with tears streaming down my face. Just moments before, the towline connecting the net to the Epick’s mast got caught on something along the railing, sprang loose, grabbed my head, and smashed my face against the thick aluminum stern roller. My baseball cap, caked in sea salt and fish slime, flew off my head and over the stern and floated away in the dark. I’m crying because my head hurts, but also because I’m a scared, sleep-deprived 18-year-old in a harsh, dangerous place. My captain, fellow deckhand, and I are on set in the Nushagak district of Bristol Bay, trying to catch enough sockeye salmon to stay on quota for…

Wildlife & Nature

Macro Photography

February 24, 2023 By Alaska Magazine

The smallest beauty from the biggest state by Bruce Welkovich Alaska is a nature photographer’s paradise: Denali and glaciers, moose and bears, whales and eagles. But there’s more to Alaska than its mega-scenery and mega-fauna. Kneel down, look closely, and there’s another world of natural beauty: flowers and insects, mushrooms and slime molds, mosses and lichens. Badhamia utricularis is a species of myxomycete, or slime mold. The beautiful, bright, spottedyellow stage lasts just a few hours. (Anchorage, focus stacked photo) Meriderma is a genus of myxomycetes (slime molds) that usually occur at the edge of snow melt in early spring. (Anchorage, focus stacked photo Advances in technology allow us to get closer than ever. Mobile phones take great macro photos now, but can only get you so close. For the serious photographer, extreme macro requires a technique called “focus stacking,” which solved a problem that has plagued us since the…

Photos & Videos

A Season of Solitude

February 24, 2023 By Alaska Magazine

My Love for Alaska’s Winter Images and text by Carl Johnson It is 6 a.m., and, while it is still pitch dark, the nearly full moon floats over Cook Inlet on its descent behind the Alaska Range. Its bright light and surrounding stars reveal a hillside’s silhouette with a layer of fog enveloping the Anchorage bowl below. Mt. Susitna looms in the background as the winter tides zoom by in a long exposure at sunset.The blurring of pink and blue tones is a common pastel palate in the winter. This is one of my favorite times of winter—when several days of calm, cold, and clear conditions and persistent ice fog create a landscape that might have inspired the movie Frozen. It is a winter wonderland, where everything is fresh and new, magical and mystical, and utterly beautiful. This, for me as a photographer, is one of the many reasons why…

Activities

Face to Face with Knik Glacier

February 24, 2023 By Alli Harvey

How to visit this accessible ice Tom Faussett, owner of Knik Glacier Tours, is still awe-struck by his vast backyard more than 35 years after making the Matanuska-Susitna valley area home. He marvels at the fact that almost daily throughout the summer he gets to introduce people to the sweeping vista of Knik Glacier and call it work. Alaska is known for casual world-class views, but Knik Glacier is extraordinary in its accessibility. No matter the desired activity or ability level, explorers will find a way to get to the glacier via everything from helicopter and ATV tours to fat-tire biking, airboating, running or skiing. Only an hour’s drive north of Anchorage, Knik’s doable in a day. Easiest At 70 years old, my dad likes to inform me about the 20-mile run he completed before any of us ate breakfast. The truth is he is a whiz at bridge, but…

Travel

Keeping an Alaskan Tradition

February 20, 2023 By Molly Rettig

Becca Wolfe and John Wolfe Jr. Honor a Legacy Half a century after Helen Nienhueser published the popular guidebook 55 Ways to the Wilderness in Southcentral Alaska, her son and granddaughter have released a revamped and expanded trail guide to hiking, biking, paddling, skiing, and skating in the mountains and rivers around Anchorage, from the Kenai Peninsula to Mat-Su valley to the Copper River basin. In their new book, Alaska Adventure 55 Ways, authors John Wolfe Jr. and Rebecca Wolfe celebrate Alaska’s wilderness and their family tradition of being out in it. It’s so cool that this book now spans three generations of your family. How did it first come about? Becca: My grandmother found herself and found the love of her life in these mountains. She wrote the book with the intention of getting more people out to fall in love with the wilderness. It’s sort of endemic to…

Authentic Alaska

A Tiger Olson Story

February 5, 2023 By Bjorn Dihle

Taku Harbor’s Legendary Man and Myth I stepped into the low light of a derelict cabin and studied moldering walls, broken glass, and filth. My three-year-old son clung to me, scanning the shadows. “Daddy, there could be ghosts! We need to get out of here!” he said. The cabin once belonged to Henry “Tiger” Olson—a hermit, philosopher, and mystic who lived most of his life in Taku Harbor, 20-some miles south of Juneau. By the time we got there, it had been more than 40 years since he had occupied the cabin. To be honest, the place creeped me out a little as well. It wasn’t just Tiger’s cabin that felt haunted, though—Taku Harbor is filled with ruins and stories. Tiger Olson lived in this cabin in Taku Harbor for nearly 60 years. Photo by Chris Miller The harbor is part of the Tlingit T’aaku Kwáan’s territory. The Hudson’s Bay…

Authentic Alaska

A Culture of Caring

January 8, 2023 By Kaylene Johnson-Sullivan

Bringing Native Values to Work Sophie Minich and Sheri Buretta were both little girls in Alaska when, 51 years ago, on December 18, 1971, President Richard Nixon signed the landmark Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA). The act was the first of its kind in the United States’ long history of settlements with Native Americans. ANCSA created 12 Native regional economic development corporations in which the stockholders are the Native people who traditionally lived in these regions. The corporations were formed to provide economic, educational, social service, and cultural benefits to their shareholders. Today, Minich and Buretta lead two of these Native corporations. Buretta is the chairman of the board for Chugach Alaska Corporation. Minich is the president and CEO of Cook Inlet Region Inc. (CIRI). Sheri Buretta Growing up between Tatitlek and Anchorage, Sheri Buretta and her family drove from Anchorage, where she lived, to Valdez, where an uncle…

Authentic Alaska

Alaska is Hot

January 6, 2023 By Michelle Theall

Welcome to the future Alaska is hot, welcome to the future. It might be time for snowbirds to rethink their second home or retirement condo in Florida. The world is hot and getting hotter, and while Alaska is leading the way, I’d like to illuminate the bright side of global warming. Consider home gardening. In the 1970s, Anchorage was a terrible place to grow tomatoes. Now, you can harvest your own tomatoes and even okra—unthinkable even in the 1990s—in Alaska. Robins once migrated south to warmer climes in the fall (just like many Alaskans), but now they overwinter in Homer. Fireweed blooms no longer reliably predict the first freeze. Red fox have been moving north and taking over the territory of arctic fox. Heck, even the bears in Kodiak didn’t hibernate until late December last year, before announcing it was spring by emerging in early March. If the reactions of…

Authentic Alaska

Middle Earth in Bristol Bay

September 18, 2022 By Alaska Magazine

Get a cup to go at this unique coffee house Tolkien fans, take note. You don’t need an eagle from Mordor to visit the Heart o’ the Shire. Just catch a flight to Naknek. Heart o’ the Shire, a hobbit-themed coffee shop, sits at milepost 2 of the Alaska Peninsula Highway, a strip of pavement that connects Naknek to King Salmon and nowhere else. The two towns share 850 residents and only one taxi, but the region buzzes each summer with Bristol Bay cannery workers and tourists visiting Katmai National Park and Preserve. That means out-of-town travelers stumble upon the Shire each summer. “It’s kind of fun when people discover you and they’re surprised,” said co-owner Eseta Sherman. Eseta has run the coffeeshop since 2008 alongside her husband, Richard, and their four kids, Maica, Aniva, Bethany, and Jesse. That first season, they operated from a double-wide trailer and a tent.…

Anchorage

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