alaska

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Field Notes

Filson in the Field: Packrafting the Remote Waters of Alaska

The state of Alaska tends to breed ideas larger than life. There is just something about the sheer amount of untrammeled wilderness there that seems to spark a fire in folks. So, when we decided we wanted to put some of our newest gear to the test, we reached out to some of our favorite guides for outing ideas. Eschewing more traditional adventures, we decided to spend five days exploring the rivers surrounding remote Chelatna lake just outside of Denali national park and preserve. This is the story of that trip.

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3 Min
Exploring Denali_1200x628_V2
Field Notes

Exploring Denali: a wild & rugged wilderness

Denali is a land that quite literally ebbs and flows with the seasons. Spring and summer snow melts down from mountains that climb to the roof of the Alaska Range and swell the Toklat, Savage, McKinley, Sanctuary, and other rivers that ripple across Denali. Harry Karstens, who became Denali’s first superintendent in 1921, was one of the early explorers who navigated the basins of frozen rivers and streams while delivering mail to distant roadhouses and checking up on desolate miners’ camps. More than 100 years later, the waterways of this rugged wilderness are now the playground of well-experienced pack rafters, self-reliant thrillseekers who inflate their portable craft to run a river, then pull the plug, pack it away, and hike over a mountain to reach another headwater.

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3 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
smoked salmon chunks on a grate on a wooden bar top
Food & Recipes

Filson Food: Smoked Wild Alaskan Salmon

Nearly every Alaskan who harvests salmon has a smoking recipe or two (or a dozen!) Up their sleeves. Including everything from traditional strips to kippers and pressure-canned to frozen, pieces of smoked salmon grace freezers and line pantry shelves in many Alaskan homes. The following is a basic recipe that was passed onto me by my dad and tweaked to suit my own taste. Smoking salmon always involves a learning process no matter how many times it is undertaken, and flavor profiles can easily be adjusted to suit.

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5 Min
metal bust of caribou
Field Notes

Forever on the Move: The Isolated Existence of the Arctic’s Caribou

By the time that they have lived out their life cycle, a caribou of the Alaskan herds will have traveled enough distance to have circled the globe. Like so many of their other animal brethren, humans included (though are more sedentary in modern times), movement is what they are designed to do. They live their isolated existence, far from human eyes, forever on the move, forever on the hunt, as they have been forever.

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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
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
black and white image of denali peak
Field Notes

The Tall One: The Story of Denali

In a land already renown for a larger than life landscape, the mountain known as Denali inspires awe from those that observe it. Wreathed in an eternal cloak of snow and ice, it looms over the Alaska range’s surrounding peaks like a reserved ruler, the king of the north. Rising over three and a half vertical miles into the sky, it was for most of its life one of the most remote mountains on the planet. Yet, it is visible for hundreds of miles on a clear day.

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5 Min
snow covered lit cabin in forest with green northern lights above
Field Notes

Mythology of the Northern Lights

When the northern night skies light up with brilliant streaks of light during the long winter months in a phenomenon known as the Aurora Borealis, it can take people’s breath away. As the multicolored ribbons of ghostly light twist and dance across the sky, they seem almost to come from another realm, one out of reach to those of us on earth. As long as humans have roamed the planet, they have created myths and legends to explain these ever-elusive denizens from another realm.

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5 Min
yukon Quest promo image
Field Notes

The Yukon Quest: The Toughest Race in the World

Toiling along in relative anonymity, Yukon Quest is a much grittier and demanding race than its older and more established cousin, the Iditarod. t has a relationship akin to that of K2 and Mt. Everest in the Himalayas. While the latter is the tallest peak on the planet and acts as a magnet for public attention, K2 is renowned among climbers as the harder and purer peak to summit. It’s the one that doesn’t have huge lines of people snaking up its slopes.

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5 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
plane parked on a snowy runway in a pine forest
Field Notes

Rainy Pass Lodge

At age 17, Steve Perrins paid $1 to watch a home movie that rearranged his brain. It was March 1974. The 16mm reel, screened at a New Hampshire high school, was filmed by Buckey Winkley, an Alaska hunting-and-fishing guide, who was there fresh from the backcountry. Sitting in the audience, Perrins was transfixed by the images of bears, Dall sheep, trout, and salmon. Afterward, thirsty for adventure, he approached Winkley. “I’m going to Alaska,” he said, definitively, and he asked the guide for help.

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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
chest up view of person in scuba gear standing above water
Profiles

Zech Bennett: The Undersea Tradesman

When you meet Zech Bennett, he seems like a pretty ordinary guy. Not too tall or too short, he seems somewhat in shape but is not a chiseled gym rat. The brown hair sticking out from underneath his baseball cap is slightly askew, and his face breaks into an easy smile. He is the type of person you could share a few beers with at the bar while swapping stories about ferrying kids to events or catching up on the latest scores. It’s only when you hear what the 32-year-old Homer, Alaska, resident does for a living that you realize there is more to him than you see at first glance.

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4 Min
black and white image of people in antiquated clothes and hats standing behind a large stack of bound wooden boxes reading
Field Notes

You Take What You Can Get: Or Suffer the Consequences

The stampede for gold into the Klondike of the Yukon territory reached a peak in 1898. In that same year, 1,200 other miners set out for other regions of the far north, including to the Koyukuk and Chandalar river drainages in the remote Alaska Territory interior, in a desperate search for similar riches. This region is situated in the northwestern part of Alaska, with the Koyukuk River flowing through it from the borders of the Arctic Ocean to where it enters the Yukon at Nulato.

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3 Min