Tag Archives: alaska

Arctic Traverse, by Michael Engelhard; Mountaineers Books, Seattle, 2024   What makes a travelogue a great read? In my opinion, it uses the trip’s events as a springboard for reflection and exploration and asks important questions about our impact on the landscape and what we can do to minimize it. The basic story of writer Michael Engelhard’s book, Arctic Traverse, …

A lot goes through your mind while lying on the floor of a sushi restaurant in downtown Anchorage. Stuff like, “somebody needs to clean the underside of this table,” and, “why doesn’t anyone ask what I’m doing on the floor?” and, of course, “this is gonna make a great story if I live.” But I digress. Five days prior, I …

The plan was to retire, buy a truck, take my camera, and head north to Alaska. Two weeks later, COVID hit … In September of 2021, just a few days after the first opening across the British Columbia border, I was finally able to start on what turned out to be a month-long, 8,000-mile trip of a lifetime, made only …

There are moments in life that shine into that liminal space between who we were and who we may be. In those spaces are opportunities to sense the world in new ways. The choices we make are powerful. Camus said we might choose each day whether we want to step into the arena of life or remove ourselves from it. People …

  As a boy, I was introduced to the joy of paddling canoes on a small lake in Ontario, a generally placid body of water with little cause for concern about wind and currents. I was taught that the cardinal rule of paddling is to avoid overloading the canoe. And so it was that I found myself, forty-some odd years …

I had been thinking about Glacier Bay for a long time. I’d done my fair share of poking around on— and in— glaciers in the North Cascades, Canadian Rockies and Alaska. The sensuous forms and sculptural grace of icescapes had always captured my imagination. For me, glacial landscapes offered up a visceral sense of nature’s drama laid bare, the shifting …

Water is my element, where I feel most at home. Kayaking is my passion, bringing out the best in me and challenging me to be better. Bringing a camera on my watery sojourns helps me share this passion in a colorful, soulful reality. In spring 2010, with my world scaled down to an eighteen-foot sea kayak and a 1,200 mile ribbon of water …