Twenty-five years ago, Sheila Nickerson, a woman who was the Alaska poet laureate when that meant something, wrote a book about those lost in Alaska titled “Disappearance: A Map; A Meditation on […]
Swallowed by Alaska
Second climbing death
On the day the National Park Service retrieved the body of one dead climber from near the 20,300-foot summit of Mount Denali, another was entombed in the Kahiltna Glacier. The as-yet-unidentified Kahiltna […]
Alaska kills
The 2022 climbing season in the Alaska Range is again off to a grim start with the first man up Mount Denali dead and a woman earlier flown out of the range […]
Greatest danger
WHITE RIVER, Yukon Territory, Canada – Water is what kills people in the wilds of the far north, but bears are what people fear. Why this disconnect is hard to say. […]
Rescue me
In the wake of what is being billed as the largest mountain rescue in Alaska history, it is hard to avoid pondering what the late and legendary Bradford Washburn might think. Washburn […]
Old dangers return
With the pandemic waning and travel resuming, people are back to suffering and dying the old-fashioned way in Alaska. Already it has been a tough year in Denali National Park and […]
Hidden dangers
The 2021 Alaska Range climbing season has begun tragically with an unroped Colorado skier dead in a crevasse fall on the south spur of the Eldridge Glacier. According to officials with Denali […]
(C)old Alaska
Global warming was out as April rolled into the far north. The bad cold days were back. And humankind was struggling to adapt. Along the Bering Sea in Northwest Alaska, the Kobuk […]
Deadly terrain
On Monday, Matt Tunseth, an out-of-work journalist in Anchorage, posted on his Facebook page a photograph of avalanche rubble on the flanks of the city’s most climbed mountain with a warning to […]
Disaster, take two?
UPDATED – Feb. 4, 2021 Canada appears to have now torpedoed a big chunk of the Alaska cruise business. A Canadian federal government order out of Ottawa today prohibits cruise vessels carrying […]
