One day when I was biking around town photographing flowers and gardens (yes, I love my job!), I was surprised and delighted to discover a gem of a garden, farm even, behind the Fairbanks Princess Riverside Lodge. Both the size and appearance of the garden impressed me. I’ve seen tiny hotel …
This photo from the 1950s is a south-side view of the Fairbanks Fire Department and firefighters at Fifth and Cushman streets. The building later served as Fairbanks City Hall, Fairbanks City Museum and today as a distillery.
Alaska had been a state for one year in 1960 when its department of fish and game conducted a wolf-planting experiment on Coronation Island in southeast Alaska. At the time, the remote 45-square-mile island exposed to the open Pacific had a high density of blacktailed deer and no wolves. Tha…
We had paused after a creek crossing below the Alaska Range some 20 years ago — Julie, the pack horses, trail dogs and me — when our lead mare Lilja opened her squinty eyes wide, gazing studiously toward a hillside a half-mile away. She did not look alarmed, but her intent focus attracted my…
“For two days in July 1915, the George C. Thomas Memorial Library in Fairbanks was the scene of a remarkable meeting of fourteen Tanana River Athabascan tribal leaders with federal government officials, including Alaska’s delegate to Congress, James Wickersham,” historian Thomas Alton writes…
Birds that spent their summer next to muskoxen are now leaving Alaska to spend winter with zebras.
“I make big abstract paintings that happen to look like birch trees,” Kesler Woodward said, describing his locally iconic images of the Northern landscape.
Here is my secret desire: to own a Bobcat Compact Track Loader. At $77,000 it is beyond my means, but still I imagine myself hopping in and spending hours grooming my compost. That is what happens when you visit one of the largest compost piles in the world, at Kew Gardens in London — you ge…
In early 1915, anticipating construction of the Alaska Railroad, hundreds of jobseekers hastily erected a boomtown along Ship Creek in Upper Cook Inlet. Many in the camp were concerned for the spiritual needs of the boomtown’s residents. According to the book, “Our First 100 Years, Holy Fami…
Although competitive exhibits are at the heart of the Tanana Valley State Fair, you don’t have to be competitive to enter. The fair’s long-standing tradition also includes education. People love looking at the horticultural and crop exhibits.
As years passed, I always thrilled at the sight of our stocky little cabin each time I arrived. The sled dogs loved racing around the tiny yard after a long pull, and I loved how quickly the little 10-by-10 cabin heated up.
The researchers examined the diets of 68 residents in two Southwest Alaska coastal villages. Each resident participated in four extensive dietary interviews and provided hair samples.
“There is no time at the North Pole,” Robert Peary wrote in 1906, while still obsessively seeking to be the first man to stand atop the world, “there are no meridians, or rather all the meridians of the globe are gathered in one point, so that there is no starting point for time as we estima…
With 16 other experts from different countries, Tolly is writing about how the ocean is warming and expanding, and about the glaciers that are dumping so much water into the ocean.
Davison is one of nine composers who traveled from all over the world and from around the country for the eighth year of Composing in the Wilderness. This is an annual program made possible through a collaboration between Fairbanks Summer Arts Festival, Denali National Park, Alaska Geographic and the U.S. Forest Service.
As it melts, LeConte Glacier is behaving like almost every other glacier in our warming world, contributing to sea-level rise that threatens coastal cities from Sri Lanka to Sweden.
Weeds need to be killed off now because they are trying to go to seed. If you don’t keep at the task of lopping off their heads, they and many more offspring will return next spring to plague you.
After the end of the war, lodges providing food, gasoline and other services began opening along the road, by this time named the Glenn Highway in honor of Capt. Edwin Glenn, leader of an 1898 U.S. Army expedition that explored parts of the Copper River Basin. The highway was paved in the 1950s.
Originally from Kansas, McCue wandered north in 1988, looking for a few months of adventures. But like so many, he felt an immediate sense of belonging he’d never previously experienced. Choosing to stay, he soon migrated into Fairbanks, where he’s lived ever since.
In most accounts, Alaska’s territorial history consists of a few periods of intense activity, followed by leaps of several decades. The land was purchased from Russia in 1867, miners swarmed northward during the Gold Rush three decades later, then it’s fast forward to World War Two and state…
Place descriptions fail to convey the depth of enchantment, the sense of intimacy and security and of belonging that accompany the simple knowledge of the land, or the feeling of my emotional roots spreading throughout hundreds of square miles of wilderness.
A few years ago, scientists at Harvard, the University of Chicago and Columbia developed a mathematical model in an attempt to predict and duplicate the complex patterns within dragonfly wings.
There’s no need to let unplanted garden space fill up with weeds when you can still plant leaf lettuce, arugula, mizuna, mustard, cilantro and tatsoi. I’ve had great results seeding kale directly in the garden the third week in July.
No event in Arctic history holds more allure than that of the Franklin Expedition. In 1845, two ships under the command of Sir John Franklin departed England to discover the Northwest Passage, a fabled route through the Arctic waters above Canada that would provide a shortcut to Asia. Equipp…
“Old Town” Homer is located on the benchlands of Kachemak Bay’s north shore, southwest of modern Homer’s business district. The Sterling Highway delineates the area’s northern boundary, with Bishop’s Beach to the south, and Beluga Lake to the east.
Writers aren’t often asked by a publisher what they would like to write. But that’s what happened to me in 2014 while meeting with News-Miner managing editor Rod Boyce and features editor Gary Black. They hoped I could contribute something worthwhile and perhaps unique to the paper.
Marked by metal cones and a clear-cut swath 20 feet wide, Alaska’s border with Canada is one of the great feats of wilderness surveying.
I keep an ongoing electronic file of gardening articles I mean to get back to when I have the time. This week, I finally carved out some hours and found several pieces that may be of interest.
Numerous cat’s paws of ripples skittering across a placid surface indicate small wind gusts that suggest stronger winds aloft. Steep, choppy waves form with a rising wind, often followed by whitecaps.
They embarked on June 12, from Lake Bennet in upper British Columbia paddling two canoes that they intend to scuttle July 11, at Emmonak near the Bering Sea.
Fifty years ago this month, an indelible impression was made on the moon and our minds. On July 20, 1969, humans first walked on the moon leaving footprints that are still there today and capturing our collective imagination.
Alaska gardeners’ eyes light up when you talk about growing corn in a way you don’t see when you mention, say, kale, which is so much more reliable, nutritious and higher-yielding. Maybe part of the allure of growing corn is the challenge. Or maybe that it’s about 10 times sweeter than kale.
The story of the northern dinosaur is late in arriving because Alaska is late in being explored. But paleontologists have filled the basement of the university museum with the world’s largest collection of polar dinosaur bones and tracks encased in rock.
Plenty of new Alaska-themed children’s books are on the shelves, providing fun and educational summer reading fodder for the younger set. Beginning reading books are a great way to introduce children in Alaska and beyond to our state and its many cultures and wonders, and none of the followi…
In 1947, Carl and Betty rented a house at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Noble Street. Two years later Karl moved his business, which was still quite small, into the front room of the house, and Music Mart has been there ever since.
If you want to incorporate quality time with animals into your yoga practice, you have a lot of options these days. There’s puppy yoga, cat yoga and (perhaps the most famous) goat yoga.
I went to an elementary school where the teaching was in Lithuanian, except for one paltry hour a day devoted to English. As a result, I learned most of my English from friends.
“I was quite worried sometimes,” Till Baumann said about coming to Fairbanks for his doctorate studies. “I thought, if it sucks, and I’m committing for a Ph.D., I’m throwing away all my youth.”
NEW YORK — A decade after seemingly wrapping up “The Hunger Games,” Suzanne Collins is bringing readers back to Panem. A prequel, set 64 years before the beginning of her multimillion-selling trilogy, is coming next year.
“There’s no more time,” said Aaron Cooke, an architect who helped design new houses for the project. “The water’s right by the houses (in the village of Newtok).”
The camps allow opportunities for youth to create a deeper connection to Calypso Farm by providing an educational experience that extends beyond what’s offered during field trips.
During the last 40 years of gardening, I had not only learned numerous little tips and shortcuts but had also become set and inflexible in my beloved routines and techniques.
As we gained the first ridgetop, we entered a dream landscape of flowing white. From a distance, it looked like blowing snow. Cottongrass is a lovely sedge of waving white seedballs, as soft as a puppy’s belly. It grows throughout the far north, in acidic bogs.
In the not-so-distant past, if you gardened, you also saved seeds. You don’t have to now, but you still might want to. Saving seeds is like the black belt for gardeners. If you want to take your garden and your gardening skills to the next level, then start saving seeds. Next, select seeds f…
Eleven decades ago there were still places on Earth unseen by human eyes. The previous centuries had brought Europeans to every habitable — and profitable — location on the globe. A few remote realms, however, remained unreached. For those seeking glory for themselves and their nations, the …
Thinning beets is a bit different than thinning other vegetables. Take ahold of a young leaf and gently pull it away from the others to see if there are multiple stems. If so, pluck out all but one and leave a plant every 3 inches.
As Alaskans, our connection to the outdoors is reflected in art and in material culture.
It seems a bit ludicrous now, first to invest so much emotion in a tree, and secondly, to think whacking off the top would cure it. But our father, always obliging, climbed up and sliced through the 7-inch trunk to remove the upper third of the tree.
Of all the legends from Alaska’s pioneer era, few if any are as beloved and revered as the tale of the Sourdough Expedition.
Alive since the days Natives first noticed wooden ships in Yakutat Bay, the Sitka spruce died a few decades ago, when an unseen glacier drowned them.
Volunteers hauled in tires, yards of plastic, hundreds of plastic bottles — some filled with urine — beer cans, soiled diapers, dozens of blue and green plastic endcaps used to protect pipes, plastic bags and rusting metal.
