HAVE YOU EVER NOTICED what a puny little star Polaris is? If you didn’t have the Pointer Sisters on the Big Dipper steering you directly to it, you’d never find it. Except, of course, that it’s the only star that doesn’t move. Not to mention which it’s on the Alaska flag. I was standing outside…
IT IS A MARTIAN LANDSCAPE. A cliff descends from a dark sky, crowned with Rushmore-like heads, if Mt. Rushmore had been carved by Easter Islanders, and then erodes into a delicate lacework frame of what could be either the remains of a condominium for little green men or just the remains of a dear departed…
…give me a sunny day on the deck of the Millenium Hotel, with the float planes flying into Lake Hood overhead, a plate deep-fried halibut on the table in front of me, and a pint of Alaskan Amber in my hand, and I’m a happy woman. Which was why, when I went to Juneau recently,…
Read more This action was not necessarily inspired by a sense of devoted service to Alaska magazine
WHEN I WAS IN school at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, you could always tell the girls from Southeast by the fabulous silver bracelets they wore, exquisite, glowing pieces carved with Tlingit and Haida and Tsimshian symbols. It was then that I first learned the legend of Raven stealing the sun, the moon and the…
THERE ARE LOTS OF reasons to go to the Alaska State Fair in Palmer every year. Turkey legs and crab cakes and cream puffs. The Elks’ Rat Race. The giant cabbages. The Scheer Lumberjack Show, where my friend Rhonda Sleighter can sigh over Fred “The Silver Fox” Scheer’s biceps. Yodeling along with Hobo Jim at…
I’m in the back of the raft, also known as the “ejection seats” because of their tendency, upon the hitting of a rock, forcibly to launch the occupants into orbit. “One hand for the boat,” Mom always said when we lived on the Celtic, and while it is difficult to take notes while maintaining a…
THAT AFTERNOON I INVESTIGATE the camp’s nature exhibit, where I learn how to tell how old a Dall sheep is (think tree rings), examine resource files labeled Aurora through Giardia (from the sublime to the ridiculous), and reverently touch the wing feather of a golden eagle. “What is it you want guests to take away…
Read more I learn how to tell how old a Dall sheep is (think tree rings)
ON A SUNNY DAY in southcentral Alaska, an official indicator of just how nice a day it is is, “The mountain’s out.” Which mountain? Well, obviously, you don’t live here. “The mountain” is of course, Denali, all 20,320 feet of it. A hundred miles from Anchorage, it looms up substantially on the northern horizon nonetheless.…
Read more “The mountain’s out.” Which mountain? Well, obviously, you don’t live here.
THE LAST DC-3 I was on belonged to Mudhole Smith’s Cordova Airlines, on a trip to Cordova to visit family there. The plane was stripped down to the bare fuselage, half the seats had been removed to make room for cargo, and an army blanket had been stretched across the center of the plane, from…
ON FINGER LAKE, JUST this side of Rainy Pass in the Alaska Range, a hour by Cessna 206 from Anchorage and splat in the middle of the Iditarod Trail, is a little slice of heaven called Winterlake Lodge. Here, world-class chef Kirsten Dixon, and her husband, Renaissance man Carl Dixon, hold open house year round…