Category: Alaskan Adventures

Find Your Snack: Chilly Dogs

The rest of that winter was rough, so I made myself a promise I knew I could keep: Like war-ravaged Scarlett O’Hara right before the intermission of Gone With the Wind, I vowed, I would never be hungry again.

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The National Park Service turns 100 years old in 2016, and dirtbags nationwide are finding creative ways to commemorate the NPS Centennial. (My favorite so far is the Dirtbag Diaries’ Milepost series.) I, on the other hand, lack artistic sensibilities, and am thus marking the occasion in the same way I celebrate everything else: by eating. Without further ado, then, I present the next installment in this series about things I’ve eaten, or seen eaten in national parks.
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Smoke ’em if you got ’em

I’ve always had champagne taste and a beer budget, though that’s rarely stopped me from doing what I want—borrowed gear, nights spent in the back of my car, and a healthy relationship with Top Ramen have gotten me to plenty of summits. When it comes to adventure planning, I tend to shoot first and ask questions later.

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A few weeks ago, Bix and I got an exciting invitation: a ten-day trip to Hawaii, where we’d run a few legs of a 200-mile relay and backpack in Hawaii Volcanoes National Park.

We instantly went into trip planning mode. How much would airfare be? Could we get the time off work? Would TSA confiscate our JetBoil? What’s the likelihood of my being eaten by a shark when Bix talks me into taking a crack at surfing? Continue reading “Smoke ’em if you got ’em” →

North to the Future! (In which I experience a quarter-life crisis, Alaska-style)

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When I first started making noises about moving to Alaska, it seemed like everyone had a Last Frontier story to tell—a cousin who’d come up to work in Denali for a summer and never left, a cruise or RV trip taken by a grandparent, a piece of Palin trivia, that sort of thing.

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Solstice celebrations, the joy of commuting(?), and other mid-winter musings

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The winter solstice marks the official start to winter, which, until I moved to Alaska, always seemed sort of extraneous to me: there had been snow on the ground for weeks, usually, and I’d long since traded in shorts and sandals for mittens and boots.

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Emma Walker: International Snow Science Geek

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Despite that I’ve spent most of the last two decades enrolled as a student in one way or another, I’d be hard-pressed to describe myself as an academic. Perhaps it’s that my most-of-a-master’s is in camping, a degree most would probably consider too casual to be called scholarly, or maybe it’s that I dread the socializing: the answering of questions I’m unsure about; the politics of academia.

Whatever the reason, I feel fairly uncomfortable with jargon like “synergy” and “network,” a point on which Alaska and I see eye-to-eye. Besides occasional department open houses and parties for retiring faculty members, my presence is required at few university-related events, which suits me just fine.

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