Profiles

Real stories about fascinating people across North America. 

Filson x Birdwell x Blackfern Surfboards_Featured
Profiles

Michael Hall: Portland’s Backyard Surfboard Shaper

In 2008, Michael Hall moved to Portland, Oregon, and was promptly laid off. A geologist by training, the 28-year-old Washington native had spent the past five years zipping around the Alaskan tundra and other equally remote locales in a helicopter, looking for mineral deposits. But the Great Recession clobbered the mining industry and left Hall out of work, in a new town, with substantial free time to burn. He enrolled in graduate school, at Lewis & Clark College, hoping to pivot into education. But he still had ample opportunities to surf, a hobby he’d taken up two years earlier. The problem was that “at the time,” Hall says, “surfboard designs were not very well geared for our waves, which tend to be flatter than, like, big barreling Hawaiian-reef waves.”

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5 Min
Filson x Birdwell x Blackfern Surfboards_Featured
Profiles

Michael Hall: Portland’s Backyard Surfboard Shaper

In 2008, Michael Hall moved to Portland, Oregon, and was promptly laid off. A geologist by training, the 28-year-old Washington native had spent the past five years zipping around the Alaskan tundra and other equally remote locales in a helicopter, looking for mineral deposits. But the Great Recession clobbered the mining industry and left Hall out of work, in a new town, with substantial free time to burn. He enrolled in graduate school, at Lewis & Clark College, hoping to pivot into education. But he still had ample opportunities to surf, a hobby he’d taken up two years earlier. The problem was that “at the time,” Hall says, “surfboard designs were not very well geared for our waves, which tend to be flatter than, like, big barreling Hawaiian-reef waves.”

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5 Min
Fly Fishing Los Angeles River_HERO
Profiles

The punk rockers of fly fishing – angling on the LA River

Few Angelinos are aware that prior to the 1930s, the LA River was home to native rainbow trout and seasonal runs of steelhead and Chinook salmon. The Los Angeles River was, in fact, a trout stream. Then, in 1938, the Army Corps of Engineers began a nearly 20-year process of channelizing the river, encasing its banks in concrete in an effort to control flooding. Today, the concrete canyon of the LA River is not the idyllic, catalog-ready backdrop that comes to mind when most people think of fly fishing. When the water is low, it makes a great location for Hollywood car chase scenes, but it’s not a typical destination for the average fly angler. Luckily, the community of misfit fisher-folk who call the LA River their home waters is anything but average.

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5 Min
aerial view of snow covered ice drifts amongst rocky outcroppings
Profiles

The Bering Strait Crossing

In the northernmost reaches of the world, just a few clicks south of the arctic circle, Russia and Alaska are separated at their closest point by just 55 short miles and the frigid waters of the Bering sea.
t’s believed that a land bridge once connected these two regions, and that 20,000 years ago, humans walked across that natural formation to settle in the Americas from Asia. In the centuries that followed, those land masses slowly pulled apart and became separated by the Bering Strait.
For most of modern history, traversing this passage meant braving the seas — and even then, only when the ever-shifting ice floes would allow it.
But where some saw only unforgiving waves lapping up against the shoreline, a handful of visionary engineers saw a golden opportunity — a crossing that would allow safe travel and even faster transportation between North America and Russia.

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5 Min
a large collection of old nautical
Profiles

Anacortes Junk Co.

Marine Supply? Hardware? Antiques? Museum and gift shop? It’s a bit of all of these. Wander over wood floors that creak like the deck of a ship to find less glamorous but just as useful galvanized cleats, cubbies of hard-to-find pipe fittings, and various sizes of chain and rope. That part for your vessel you were certain only existed in your imagination—it’s somewhere here—might be a bit dusty. Think some of the stuff lying around might be junk? Perhaps, but as Steve Demopoulos heard his grandfather “Mike,” say many times, “It’s only junk until someone needs it.”

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5 Min
person in a museum painting a mural of popeye
Profiles

The Underdog: Exploring the Origins of Popeye

His voice is one that is impossible to forget—sounding like a rusty chainsaw trying to cut through steel, it randomly swerves between high and low notes. An almost incoherent mishmash of words pours forth from his mouth. Simple words are mangled, and a nearly consistent mutter fills the space between his sentences. It’s like his mind is a leaky vessel that can’t quite contain all of the thoughts within.

But when you look at the individual from which that voice emanates, it makes sense. His screwed-tight face and bulging chin immediately draw your eye’s attention. As he talks, his corncob pipe continually bobs up and down, much like a ship on the sea. His sailor’s hat sits jauntily tilts forward, and his massive forearms, each one emblazoned with an anchor, provides a sense of menace, of someone not to be trifled with. He is unforgettable.

He is Popeye the Sailor Man, one of the most unlikely comic heroes ever created.

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5 Min
person swimming underwater with large flippers and a harpoon gun
Profiles

Subsea Hunter: Freedive Spearfishing with Lucas Murray

As many land hunters can attest to, part of the reason they choose to hunt is to get in touch with an instinctual, ancestral aspect of themselves. There is something primal about the pursuit of an animal that we find alluring. Breath-hold diving in the pursuit of fish is particularly addicting as it connects us to two innate and perhaps often-forgotten aspects of ourselves: the physiological dive reflex and the pursuit of prey.

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5 Min
person in white parka looking out over a vast snowy plain with mountains with rifle over his back
Field Notes

Ski Hunting the Alaskan Arctic

For untold millennia humans have been strapping skis to their feet and heading out to hunt prey. In the Altai Mountains of western China, 10,000-year-old rock art depicts paleohunters engaging in the practice, while 4,000-year-old rock carvings in Norway show the same thing. Its DNA is even found in the biathlon of the Olympic Games.

Hunting for game on skis is not easy. It requires commitment. The weather is often harsh, the trails challenging, and the quarry difficult to find. It’s a more organic way of stalking prey. The advantages that the modern hunter has are fewer. It’s more akin to times past when hunting was much more rugged and dangerous. Skiing into the backcountry off the highway can be deadly, especially in the spring. Storms can blow up unexpectedly, the temperatures often top out at twenty below, equipment fails, and there is no lifeline. You are on your own.

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10 Min
emily mullen in brown filson hat standing between two pine trees
Profiles

Emily Mullen: Uptown’s Merchant of Joy

Emily tried office jobs, but they never sat right with her, so she went back to her roots and worked as a counselor at a YMCA camp that she attended every summer growing up. For a while she chased summer, working in the U.S. before heading to Australia for their summer seasons, and back again. A native New Englander, Emily eventually settled in Montana while working for a few years as a tour guide for a company that focused on the American West. But when the tourism season—like most everything else this last year—was upended, Emily signed up for another job that tapped into her love of the outdoors. From July to September, she joined a crew that traveled between remote fire camps in the Western U.S. to keep frontline wildland firefighters fed. With long days in these tough conditions, the crew would set up as close as they could to the forest fire, cooking the 6,000 or more calories’ worth of food each firefighter burns a day. After a long, hot season, Emily returned home to the Northeast.

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5 Min
two pint glasses of hoodoo beer on a stainless steel counter with growlers of different sizes behind them
Profiles

Hoodoo Brewing co.

The sun has long gone down, although it’s a stretch to say that it really ever comes up on a January day this far north. On the corner of an industrial street in Fairbanks though, a 1970s pipeline-era warehouse is lit warm through the perpetual dark.
Two red, pug-snouted German fire trucks, like mascots of this place, frame the entrance to a courtyard dotted with wooden tables dusted in new snow. A soaring pergola winks with strands of lights. At the center of this scene, clustered around flames burning merrily in concrete fire pits shaped like icebergs, bundled-up figures bring pints of beer to fire-warmed lips, punctuating the 30-degree-below night with laughter.

Welcome to hoodoo brewing company in the core of Alaska.

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5 Min
wolverine walking on snow
Field Notes

A Wild Idea: The Attempt to Train Wolverines for Avalanche Rescue

Alaska has always seemed to be a magnet for dreamers and schemers, pirates and poets, a place where one could live a life less ordinary and challenge the status quo that most people follow in their lives. So, when four-years-ago word trickled out of the state that a gentleman was trying to train wolverines how to do search and rescue for avalanche victims, something that dogs usually do, it did not seem that far-fetched.

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5 Min
Richard Proenneke in his snow covered cabin in the forest
Profiles

Going It Alone: The Story of Richard Proenneke

In the summer of 1968, a tiny fixed-wing bush plane landed on the glacially carved shore of upper twin lake in southwest Alaska. A middle-aged man stepped down from the plane and pulled a few canvas bags with him, then turned to wave goodbye to his friends still in the cockpit. Richard Proenneke watched as the aircraft shrank in the sky and slipped over the Neacola Mountains of the Aleutian range, its vanishing thrum replaced by a windy quiet, leaving him profoundly alone in the deep of Alaska. The nearest road was little more than a dream at hundreds of miles away, the nearest human probably farther. And that’s exactly the way dick, as he was known, wanted it.

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10 Min
old black and white photo of men standing in front of tent in snowy forest
Field Notes

Walter Harper: The First to Summit Denali

By the time they established their final high-altitude camp at 17,500 feet both Stuck, and Tatum were struggling. The archdeacon, in particular, was in trouble. A forty-nine-year-old lifelong smoker, each breath was a struggle, and he would periodically blackout. But the team decided to try for the summit. The decision to put Harper in the lead was a simple one. “Karstens recognized that any chance they had to succeed hinged on having their strongest climber lead, and that was Walter,”

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10 Min
woman with rubber floves on using a large knife to gut fish
Profiles

Life Amidst the Tundra: Susie Jenkins-Brito

I was born and raised in southcentral Alaska to parents who instilled in me an appreciation of the natural world early on with a backyard sled dog team and a large garden. I grew up knowing we would count spring shorebirds on the Kenai Peninsula for the Audubon Society, go fishing for silver salmon on the Deshka River, pick ripening blueberries in Hatcher Pass, and that tracks from our dogsled would be seen leaving the yard as soon as the snow began to stick. Moose would eat our lettuce and at times fill our freezer, wood smoke often smelled like salmon in the fall, and the dogs would always howl on clear cold nights. Yet it wasn’t until I was grown that I fully realized how fulfilling a life in tune with the seasons, and the edible foods each season brought with it, could be.

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10 Min
portrait of the berington sisters in the woods
Profiles

Lives Defined by the Sled: The Berington Sisters of the Iditarod

“The most epic 24 hours of my life that i can think of was in 2014 on the Iditarod trail,” Kristy Berington declares from the home she shares with her twin sister, Anna, in Knik, Alaska. It was harder than any basic training in the National Guard, which the sisters joined right after high school, harder than the most rugged of the ultramarathons and triathlons the 36-year-olds complete together in the summer.

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5 Min
river-social
Profiles

River Running: Mahay’s Riverboat Guides

Standing at the edge of the river, captain Steve Mahay can feel the energy coursing through the Susitna river at his feet. After forty-plus years spent on its slate-gray waters, he understands it; their relationship is one that seems unbreakable. While most visitors to this area find themselves drawn to the towering bulk of Denali in the distance, Mahay feels the pull of the river. As the years flow by him, he sometimes has been tempted to slow down, but that isn’t very likely. He just wants to get back out on the water.

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5 Min
group of men working on clearing a path with a bulldozer in a pine forest
Profiles

Black Regiments of the Alcan Highway

Seventy-eight years ago, the Army Corps of Engineers completed one of its most ambitious assignments of World War II—the Alaska-Canadian (Alcan) Highway. After the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, the Alcan Highway became a high priority. Eight engineer regiments were assigned: 18th, 35th, 340th, and 341st, and Black 93rd, 95th, 97th, and 388th reluctantly added. Race relations in American were very different in 1942, which was still in the era of Jim Crow and a segregated Army. Opportunities for Blacks were rare, and expectations low. They were unwanted for duty in the front lines and often treated with condescension or contempt by their White leaders and other White soldiers.

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5 Min
woman leading a line of pack mules up the side of a mountain toward distant mountain peaks
Profiles

McGee Creek Pack Station: Sierra Nevada, California

Jen spent her teenage years doing everything she could to be at the pack station as long as possible during the season. She would figure out what schoolwork needed to get done, complete it early, and get to the pack station by late May and stay well into November until the first snow finally drove both her and the pack stock out of the wilderness. Susie not only shaped Jen’s life, but the lives of the other young women who would not have been hired as packers by other outfits. These traditional outfits would only hire women to cook or do day rides. Male owners of the eastern Sierra outfits dubbed the McGee Creek packers ‘Packerettes.’ A title worn with pride by the McGee Creek crew.

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5 Min
red ford bronco driving through deep water on a road spraying water out impressively on either side
Profiles

The Jackie Robinson of Car Design: McKinley Thompson Jr.

McKinley Thompson Jr., a Ford designer who helped pen the first-generation Bronco, was the first African American designer hired at Ford Motor Company after graduating from ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, California with a degree in transportation design in 1956. “McKinley was a man who followed his dreams and wound up making history. He not only broke through the color barrier in the world of automotive design, but he helped create some of the most iconic consumer products ever…designs that are not only timeless but have been studied by generations of designers.”

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5 Min