Two mountaineers who are also University of Alaska Fairbanks students were successful in their attempt to reach the top of North America’s highest peak in summer 2024. On June 7, while they were standing 20,310 feet above sea level, they pulled plastic bottles from their down jackets. They stuffed snow inside those bottles to sample […]
Skip Ambrose has floated the upper Yukon River almost every year since Richard Nixon was President. Back then, in 1973, only 12 pairs of peregrine falcons perched at nest sites over a 180-mile stretch of river. Ambrose saw that number rise to more than 60 in 2012. The birds’ subsequent rebound from the effects of […]
Their staccato voices can make a muskeg bog as loud as a city street, though most are so small they could sit in a coffee cup without scraping their noses. They surprise hikers, who notice them hopping around in a spruce forest, nowhere near water. Wood frogs, America’s farthest-north amphibians and one of our state’s […]
In 1935, in the middle of the Great Depression, President Franklin D. Roosevelt established the Federal Writers’ Project. His goal was to provide jobs for American writers who found themselves unemployed after the stock market crash of 1929. Merle Colby was one of those writers. As the U.S. economy tanked, his freelance work for the […]