Alaska

Alaska Contemporary adventurers, seekers, and lifelong Alaskans take you into the "Last Frontier" for wild and poignant adventures. Walk among bears, witness the Inupiat taking of a bowhead whale, and spend time "weathered-in" on the Bering Sea coast. Follow the seasons of commercial fisherfolk in the world's most dangerous seas, sail the Inside Passage, or flight-see with bush pilots famed for high-stakes navigation around Denali, North America's highest mountain.[/fusion_tab]

With six college friends, I first arrived in Alaska in June 1963, having driven a VW bus up the Alcan (not yet the Alaska Highway) in order to assault the then-unclimbed north face of Mt. McKinley (not yet Denali). As we started hiking at midnight across the tundra toward the Peters Glacier, I was one scared twenty-year-old. At the moment, there were many other places I would rather have been than Alaska. The gigantic, avalanche-swept mountain wall we had chosen to attack, I felt in my gut, would prove too much for the modest talents of our gang, trained as we were on the diminutive crags and gullies of New England.