Profiles | The Filson Journal

The Filson Journal

Forged from the Salish Sea: Artist Zack Leck

The stunning natural world of the Salish Sea continually influences and inspires Leck’s body of work. He looks for any excuse to venture out on the water, or under the water working as a commercial diver. One of his passions is foraging for the many ocean delicacies present in the sea, such as Dungeness crab, spot prawns, seaweed, oysters, and mussels.

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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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The Fabric of the Sea : Artist Cristina Maria Melito

“In your work I can taste the magic of undersea. You are in touch with the beauty of the world’s wildness alive in all things and people, the endless non-linear patterns of existence. You create a tangible sense of intimacy with the vast and mysterious powers of sea and animals.”

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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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Forged from the Salish Sea: Artist Zack Leck

The stunning natural world of the Salish Sea continually influences and inspires Leck’s body of work. He looks for any excuse to venture out on the water, or under the water working as a commercial diver. One of his passions is foraging for the many ocean delicacies present in the sea, such as Dungeness crab, spot prawns, seaweed, oysters, and mussels.

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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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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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The Arctic Wall: The Brooks Range

Above the Arctic Circle, in the far northwest reaches of North America, the Brooks Range lies remote and largely untouched and untrammeled except by herds of ungulates. Stretching from western Canada across Alaska, the range forms a pristine 700-mile, majestic mountain wall below the Arctic Coast.

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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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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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Richard Proenneke in his snow covered cabin in the forest

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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The Longest Road: The Expedition of Caroline Van Hemert and Pat Farrell

A journey both audacious and unprecedented. They would travel from the Pacific rain forests near Bellingham, Washington, into the Alaskan Arctic, solely self-powered. 176 days to cover over 4,000 miles of some of the most remote and rugged terrain on the planet

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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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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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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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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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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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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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N.M. Bachtel Forging Co.

No one knows this better than bladesmith Nicholas Bachtel. That’s why our collaboration, The Woodsman Knife, is forged from high-carbon 1084 steel, and the full-tang, straight-back blade is tempered to 60HRC hardness for outstanding edge retention.

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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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At Ease in the Wilderness: Ray Livingston

There is something therapeutic about being in the outdoors. A rebirth of the soul seems to happen each time dirt is ground under your boot, branches brush off your jacket, or an unfettered wind lightly chills you. It appears that the moment you leave the veneer of society behind and venture into the wilderness, things change for the better. It is that feeling that has guided Ray Livingston throughout his entire life.

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Who is Ducks Unlimited?

For more than 80 years, DU’s mission of waterfowl habitat conservation has resulted in work across the continent to restore and protect the habitats that make possible the abundance of wildlife. Waterfowl, other migratory birds, hundreds of species of wildlife and even people benefit from DU’s habitat work.

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Rainshadow Organics

Every day, Sarahlee Lawrence and Ashanti Samuels, the owners of Rainshadow Organics, a 27-acre farm located just outside Bend, Oregon, bring their passion into their fields to raise a crop of over 250 varieties of vegetables and grains, along with a wide array of meat and poultry. To ensure the fertility of their land, they use sustainable organic farming methods, ones that were common before the advent of commercial farming. “We focus on creating healthy living soil that gets stronger every year, not weaker,” says Lawrence.

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The Brothers Nielsen

For as long as either David or Robert Nielsen can remember, trees have surrounded them. In their youth, they romped among the towering white oaks, western hemlocks, and grand firs that surrounded their home on San Juan island just below the Canadian border. When their family moved to Bellingham, Washington during grade school, they spent their time hiking and riding dirt bikes through the forests bordering their town. So, when they both decided to go into logging after high school, no one was surprised. Chances were, a little of the sap they played in had soaked into their souls.

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Elizabeth Losey: First Female Refuge Field Biologist in the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service

Biologist Elizabeth Losey knew what she wanted to do with her life. “My favorite workplace was right in the middle of a marsh, listening to the birds and finding waterfowl nests and ducklings,” she said. But in 1947, such a career path did not yet exist for women. Losey—despite holding a Master of Science degree in wildlife management and conservation from the University of Michigan—couldn’t seem to land a job doing field research. She soon realized the disconnect. Potential employers, organizations like the Michigan State Game Division, were uncomfortable with the idea of a woman sleeping overnight in the field, even if that woman was a qualified scientist who didn’t mind using an outhouse.

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The Tree Publisher: Erik Linton

Erik Linton has been a full-time artist for five years now, and has spent much of that time looking at the things around us that are easily overlooked. He tries to present those things in unfamiliar ways in order to enhance our appreciation of them. “Working with these trees, I’ve begun to view myself as a publisher as much as an artist: I’m merely taking these stories that have been written by the trees, some nearly a thousand years old, and sharing them”

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Maxville: The Town of Oregon’s African American Loggers

Nestled in the dense forests of Northeast Oregon stood Maxville, a former logging town that granted residence to African American loggers during the state’s exclusionary period, which saw Black people outlawed from the state. Despite the odds, this timber town thrived and prospered amidst adversity to become a boon for Black men and their families to flourish.

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Adam Edwards: What It Means to Be an Arborist

What is an arborist? Some folks call us urban lumberjacks. Some, urban forestry professionals. Others, tree care providers or tree surgeons.
But what we are—at least our crew—is a group of tree nerds. A small, tight-knit family bonded through shared interest, work ethic, and a little bit of suffering.

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Horniest Tavern in the Northwest: The Lyman

Situated upon the banks of the Skagit River, next to the North Cascades Highway, the hamlet of Lyman has for over a century been the home to a varying selection of loggers, miners, fishermen, hunters, rivermen, and other jacks-of-all-trades. One thing most of these folks have had in common is they could, at one time or another, belly up to the wooden bar at the Lyman Tavern. They unloaded their worries to barkeeps, enjoyed some good conversation with neighbors, and eyeballed the occasional traveler passing though.

This is the part of America that, too often these days, seems to be disappearing. The local watering hole that served as the social hub, the place where—before we all became interconnected—one went to connect.

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Why We Must: On Diversity in the Outdoors by Eddy Harris

“It’s easy to imagine that Black Americans don’t ski, don’t fly-fish for trout, don’t camp out, don’t kayak or surf, and don’t appreciate nature – don’t do a lot of things. Somewhere along the way, the Black experience, at least in the eyes of so many people – Blacks included – became an urban phenomenon, as if living in cities precludes the desire and possibility of re-creating in the great outdoors and appreciating the natural environment.

I have done all of those activities, and then some. I fish, I camp, I hike in the woods, I hike in the mountains. I even like opera. I have canoed the length of the Mississippi River twice. If there is a reason we don’t see Blacks taking part in a lot of those activities, perhaps it has more to do with economics and exposure and less to do with the activities themselves.” – An excerpt from Why We Must, by author and storyteller Eddy L. Harris.

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Our Stewardship Imperative: The Great American Outdoors Act

OR HUNTERS, ANGLERS AND THOSE DEDICATED TO FINDING ADVENTURE IN WILD COUNTRY, OUR PUBLIC LANDS AND WATERS ARE MORE THAN BACKDROPS FOR THE OUTDOOR TRADITIONS THAT HAVE SHAPED OUR HERITAGE; THEY’RE THE CATHEDRALS OF FELLOWSHIP IN WHICH WE GATHER WITH FRIENDS AND FAMILY — PLACES WHERE WE CAN ALSO FIND SOLACE AS WE GET OUR BOOTS DIRTY AND SOULS CLEAN.

Sportsmen and women have a collective obligation to the stewardship of our natural resources and a duty to pass on this unique American legacy to the generations that follow us. Fortunately, we have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to do just that. Right now, Congress is poised to consider the Great American Outdoors Act, H.R. 1957.

read more about this legislation and how you can do your part to protect the future of our nation’s public lands.

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