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 […]
On a recent river trip in northern Alaska, scientists from the University of Alaska Museum of the North found a lost world, a time of “polar forests with reptiles running around in them.” That’s a description from Patrick Druckenmiller, director of the museum and a paleontologist with the ability to look at river rocks and […]
In June of 1867 — a few months before Alaska would become part of the United States with the transfer of $7.2 million to Russia — William Healey Dall picked up a shiny black rock from a riverbank. Dall was near the mouth of the Nowitna River, which flows into the Yukon River between today’s […]