The Filson Journal

Filson X Alaska Airlines

For more than a century, two iconic names from the Pacific Northwest—Filson and Alaska Airlines—have exemplified a steadfast commitment to quality and service. Together, they’ve helped define what it means...

The Pack Horses and Mules of White Pass Trail

The journey to the Yukon Territory during the Klondike Gold Rush was infamously arduous. Many lost their lives, including the overworked and overburdened pack animals. To this day, their loss...

Mollie Walsh: The Angel of White Pass

In the harsh wilderness of Alaska’s White Pass Trail, Mollie Walsh became a beacon of hope to struggling gold seekers. Known as “The Angel of White Pass,” she offered food,...

Ode to the Husky, Champion of the Great White North

In the Land of the Midnight Sun: “Our friend, the husky, has not been forgotten.” Words spoken almost a century ago, from one of the many who traveled hundreds of...

The Alaskan Cabins Project

The Alaskan Cabins Project is a collaborative effort between the NFF and U.S. Forest Service to repair, renovate, and build new cabins in the Tongass and Chugach National Forests. Learn...

Reborn Refuse: The Art of Allie Spurlock

Walking along Baranof Island's rugged and rocky beaches can be an adventure. On the leading edge of the Alexander Archipelago, it often bears the brunt of the Gulf of Alaska's...

Pure Passion: Tori Hickel

“On the pond, it didn't matter if we had icicles on our eyelashes or frostbitten toes, we were out there for the pure passion and joy of it.” –Retired professional...

Filson Life: Mush

In Alaska’s North Slope, professional dog musher Lauro Eklund and team set out to hunt the migrating porcupine caribou for winter sustenance.

Martin Buser: The Racer Comes Home

Running a string of sled dogs in the cold arctic night on the Iditarod Trail is not for the faint of heart. Ripping over frozen undulating terrain, dimly lit by...

Mary Goddard: Imprints of Copper and Community

Carved into silver, the fiddlehead catches my eye as light reflects off a displayed cuff’s surface. We are standing in Mary Goddard’s studio in Sheet’Ká (Sitka), Alaska. On the wall,...

Dispatches from the North: Kotzebue Sound Salmon

"Fish are hitting already, splashing. Seals surface nearby. Andrew whoops, “Rich!” and roars down-current to find a spot. I wring my sopping gray gloves, curl stiff cold fingers around the...

Filson x Canadian Arctic Producers

Canadian Arctic Producers (CAP) was formed to promote and preserve the art of First Nations communities in remote northern territories. Filson collaborated with CAP to create two unique pieces, featuring...

A Sea Change in Southeast Alaska

The USDA’s proposed Southeast Alaska Sustainability Strategy charts new management direction for the Tongass, centered on the responsible stewardship of public land and water. Learn more about the initiatives taking...

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...

Profiles

Alaskan Musher: Lauro Eklund

With his father, Neil Eklund, Lauro spends long days working with his dogs and exploring Alaska’s remote and rugged interior. With hopes his dogs will one day soon lead the...

The Dynamic of the Line: the anatomy of a dog team

Sled dog teams consist of 12-16 dogs to traverse difficult terrain, while following specific commands from a musher. Learn the anatomy of a sled dog team and what it takes...

The Survivors: Alaskan Arctic Musk Oxen

With no reason to fear mankind, the muskox was almost driven to extinction by the advent of guns that ripped through the slow-moving herds. In Alaska and on the rest...

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...

Profiles

The Fire Inside: Photographer Kiliii Yüyan

Award-winning National Geographic photographer Kiliii Yüyan, joined us on our recent trip to the Alaskan Arctic, where he was consumed in his mission to capture the stoic essence of a...

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...

Moosemeat John

Moosemeat John, with a nickname earned from generosity and the skills to not only survive, but thrive on the Alaskan frontier. When we built our first Alaskan Guide Shirt in...

Northwest Beaver Mechanics

Founded in 1988, Northwest Seaplanes is based in Renton, Washington, and has a fleet of five Beavers and one De Havilland Otter, aircraft called the "best bush planes ever built."...

Tonje Blomseth: From Norway to Alaska

Rumors were flying around like bugs in the small Norwegian town I lived in, and among people I didn't necessarily want to run into at my local grocery store. I...

Seth Kantner: Tracking the Herd

The day is gray and snowy on the tundra—visibility low. In the new drifts, I spot a line of tracks. For a moment my mind refuses to register caribou. The...

Extreme Cold Vapor Barrier Boots

The U.S. Army’s first cold weather boots were called “Mickey Mouse Boots” for their oversize appearance. Officially designated the "Type I" & "Type II" footwear model, it was first worn...

Deenaalee Hodgdon: Preparing for Winter

For Indigenous Alaskan queer artist, and nomad Deenaalee Hodgdon, preparation is just another word for adaptation. As the seasons change, the climate changes, and the world changes, Hodgdon seeks to...

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...

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...

Lessons from the Darkness: Southeast Alaska's Kóoshdaa Káa

The rugged coastline of Southeast Alaska is full of folklore. The Kóoshdaa Káa, a shape-shifting creature in Tlingit culture, is one such legend. The origin is much more profound than...

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...

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,...

Rig to Flip, Dress to Swim: Prepping for a multi-day backcountry rafting trip

Adventure tales spun around the campfire always revolve around grit. These stories of adversity—like four days spent paddling in gale-force winds, getting to the first camp during a downpour, and...

Desi Sherwood: Off the Grid

Finding your passion can be a lifelong journey for some, but as simple as walking out your front door for others. For guide Desi Sherwood, growing up immersed in the...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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,...

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,...

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...

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...

Food & Recipes

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...

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...

Bellingham to Alaska with Drifters Fish

In April 2020 the crew from Drifters Fish set off from Bellingham, Washington to Alaska - over a 3,500-mile journey - for the start of the annual salmon season. Read...

Inspiring Women of the Pacific Northwest & Alaska

We've all heard the stories of historic women like Amelia Earhart and Nellie Bly. Here we're focusing our scope to our backyard in the Pacific Northwest and Alaska, shining a...

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....

Food & Recipes

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...

Marian Beck: The Saltry Restaurant

The first thing you notice about Marian Beck is her hands. Graying Alaskan fishermen all have the same hands, swollen and powerful from decades of picking fighting salmon from gillnets,...

Profiles

Bay Weld Boats

The shop is loud. Metal screams on metal. Chop saws, band saws, air saws, table saws, skilsaws, drills, grinders, and welders all sculpt, slice, and meld aluminum plate and extrusion...

How To's

How to Preserve Your Catch

Winter brings slower days and time to cook – and a freezer full of fish after a summer of harvest. Nourishing and delicious protein, wild salmon brings brightness to the...

Profiles

Kate Mitchell - NOMAR

An old homesteader once told Kate Mitchell, “That was about the year you figured you weren’t going to starve to death.” By then, much of the community enjoyed wanton luxuries...

Profiles

New Arrivals

latest article

Filson X Alaska Airlines

Featured articles

How to Build and Use a Sling

The Pack Horses and Mules of White Pass Trail

Corey Forrest: Fishermom

Mollie Walsh: The Angel of White Pass

National Forest Elemental Series: The Breath of a Nation

How to Kill, Cook, and eat dungeness crab

A Life on the Water: Brett Fitzgerald and the Angler Action Foundation

Denali Damsels

Filson Food: Surf & Turf Alaskan Style

Discover the world of Filson

Filson X Alaska Airlines

The Pack Horses and Mules of White Pass Trail

Mollie Walsh: The Angel of White Pass

Ode to the Husky, Champion of the Great White North

The Alaskan Cabins Project

Reborn Refuse: The Art of Allie Spurlock

Pure Passion: Tori Hickel

Filson Life: Mush

Martin Buser: The Racer Comes Home

Mary Goddard: Imprints of Copper and Community

Dispatches from the North: Kotzebue Sound Salmon

Filson x Canadian Arctic Producers

A Sea Change in Southeast Alaska

Chloe Ivanoff: finding her sea legs

Alaskan Musher: Lauro Eklund

The Dynamic of the Line: the anatomy of a dog team

The Survivors: Alaskan Arctic Musk Oxen

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

The Fire Inside: Photographer Kiliii Yüyan

Oceans Initiative: on a mission to protect marine life

Moosemeat John

Northwest Beaver Mechanics

Tonje Blomseth: From Norway to Alaska

Seth Kantner: Tracking the Herd

Extreme Cold Vapor Barrier Boots

Deenaalee Hodgdon: Preparing for Winter

Zach LaPerrière: The Sage

Sailing The Inside Passage on The Raven

Lessons from the Darkness: Southeast Alaska's Kóoshdaa Káa

Filson Food: Surf & Turf Alaskan Style

Bringing the Ocean’s Bounty to Market in Southeast Alaska

Rig to Flip, Dress to Swim: Prepping for a multi-day backcountry rafting trip

Desi Sherwood: Off the Grid

Filson in the Field: Packrafting the Remote Waters of Alaska

Exploring Denali: a wild & rugged wilderness

Filson Food: Smoked Wild Alaskan Salmon

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

The Bering Strait Crossing

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

Mythology of the Northern Lights

The Yukon Quest: The Toughest Race in the World

Ski Hunting the Alaskan Arctic

Hoodoo Brewing co.

The Arctic Wall: The Brooks Range

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

Going It Alone: The Story of Richard Proenneke

The Tall One: The Story of Denali

River Running: Mahay’s Riverboat Guides

Rainy Pass Lodge

Black Regiments of the Alcan Highway

Walter Harper: The First to Summit Denali

Life Amidst the Tundra: Susie Jenkins-Brito

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

Bellingham to Alaska with Drifters Fish

Inspiring Women of the Pacific Northwest & Alaska

Zech Bennett: The Undersea Tradesman

You Take What You Can Get: Or Suffer the Consequences

Marian Beck: The Saltry Restaurant

Bay Weld Boats

How to Preserve Your Catch

Kate Mitchell - NOMAR

The Salty Dawg Saloon

Coldfoot: More than just another gold camp – a place that defined those who lived in it

The 210th Air Rescue Squadron

Filson Adventure Comic

Above Alaska: Bush Pilots of the Last Frontier