alaska

Aerial of ocean in Alaska
Profiles

Oceans Initiative: on a mission to protect marine life

Conservation scientist Erin Ashe, PhD, says we all have a “cetacean story”: the moment in our lives when we realize that whales and dolphins—the spellbinding mammals she studies—exist. Ashe was four years old when hers happened. A family of orcas swam below her aunt’s cliffside home on San Juan Island in the state of Washington, announcing their presence with the unmistakable whoosh of air being exhaled through blowholes. Ashe was awestruck, and insatiably curious about the 12,000-pound creatures—a feeling that would direct the course of her studies and, eventually, her life’s work.

Read more

2 Min
Portrait of female fisherwoman Chloe Ivanoff
Profiles

Chloe Ivanoff: finding her sea legs

Shortly after Ivanoff began working seasonal jobs in geology, she started to feel she’d missed an important rite of passage by not having spent a summer living and working aboard the New Dawn. She decided to train for it by joining her father’s crew for the annual sea cucumber harvest, typically done in October. The excursions were short, just 3-5 days at a time, and took place in calm bays, which helped Ivanoff build her confidence aboard the New Dawn.

Read more

3 Min
four people on snow machines in the early light of day driving across an ice sheet in Alaska
Field Notes

Filson in the Field: Searching for Muskox in the Alaskan Arctic

As a company founded on equipping folks headed into the frozen desolation of the Klondike goldfields in 1897, we knew that we needed to do something that was a bit off the beaten path. With this in mind, we decided to head to the western edge of Alaska, above the Arctic Circle to tell the tale of the remarkable rebirth of an animal that was hunted to extinction in North America over a century ago, the musk ox.

Read more

4 Min
a middle aged bearded white man wearing a yellow flannel shirt, dark jeans and a green hat holding a block of wood and a chainsaw looking up at a tree to assess it
Profiles

Zach LaPerrière: The Sage

Living in a small cabin immersed in the virgin old-growth with his family for the last twenty-five years, LaPerrière is a part of the wilderness. There is no television or road into it. Visitors park off the nearby road and walk in. As a result, they spend as much time outdoors as indoors. He spends long hours in his woodshop under the cabin, and he will spend months working on the creations that come from a single tree, turning it on his lathe, peeling back layers, and discovering the story in the wood.

Read more

4 Min
view from the deck of a working sailboat that has gear and a motorcycle strapped to the deck while a woman looks out to the snowy mountains
Field Notes

Sailing The Inside Passage on The Raven

We ran into Naomi Spar on the piers of Sitka, AK, while they were driving their adventure touring bike over the dock onto the worn deck of their sailboat, a Sloop named “the Raven”. The scene was so unique that we had to ask them their story and how they came to be cruising the coast of Alaska with a motorbike strapped to their foredeck. They gave us a tale of navigating the Inside Passage, a lawless mystery ridden trial ground that so many prospectors had concurred before them.

Read more

2 Min
Salmon and venison cooking on an open flame.
Food & Recipes

Filson Food: Surf & Turf Alaskan Style

Anchored to Alaska’s rainforest-shrouded coastline, Barnacle Foods shares the flavors, sights, and stories of the uncommon delicacies from the surrounding region. Founded in 2016, Barnacle Foods makes pantry goods from Alaskan kelp (yes, seaweed!) sourced through sustainable wild harvest and regenerative rope-grown sea farms. The flavor-boosting kelp is the first ingredient, adding richness and depth to mouthwatering hot sauces, seasonings, salsas, BBQ sauces, and more. At Barnacle, they’re on a mission to share foods that do good for the ocean and coasts, the local communities, and the future. It doesn’t get more Alaskan than this.

Read more

3 Min
Aerial image of a mid-size boat in the middle of a dark green ocean surrounded by bull kelp.
Profiles

Bringing the Ocean’s Bounty to Market in Southeast Alaska

Barnacle, by producing food products that require large amounts of kelp, and purchasing that kelp from the communities who are farming it, is helping to build not only a business, but an eco-friendly, sustainable, and renewable industry and future for Alaskans. “The march that we would like to lead with Barnacle is to do as much good as we can for our oceans and our communities,” says Heifetz, “and to keep the value from our edible resources here in Alaska with the people who have the skills and knowledge to best steward the coastline, and have been doing so for millennia.”

Read more

3 Min
map2
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.

Read more

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.

Read more

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.

Read more

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.

Read more

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.

Read more

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.

Read more

10 Min