The traditional art of tattooing [by Michael Englehard] DESPITE TATTOO PARLORS IN ALMOST EVERY CITY and celebrities flashing chic subcutaneous designs, facial tattoos still carry a stigma—try landing a bank job, even suited up fancily, when you look like Ray Bradbury’s Illustrated Man. In the...
7 tips for sea kayaking like a pro [by Deborah Kearns] I ’VE NEVER CONSIDERED MYSELF TO BE MUCH OF AN ADVENTURE JUNKIE. I’m also not terribly athletic so when I travel, I tend to play it safe on excursions. But our first trip to Alaska last September was a time for self-discovery—and for...
Goodbye cruel winter IT’S TELLING THAT I STORE EACH YEAR’S March snapshots in a folder labeled “Spring” rather than “Winter.” By March, we in the northern latitudes are all too ready to call a sunny 20-degree day spring.
Visitors can see everything from bears and murres to sand dunes and salmon. [by David Shaw] It’s Denali National Park’s fault I live in Alaska. Fourteen years ago, I accepted a position as a field biologist, banding birds at the far end of the park’s only road. For two months I awoke every...
The remarkable story of Mary Makriko [by Laurel Bill] THE QUEEN OF REINDEER, AS SHE WOULD LATER BE CALLED, was born in 1870 as Mary Makriko to an Inupiat Eskimo mother and a Russian father who was a trader on the Seward Peninsula. Raised in St. Michael on the southern shore of Alaska’s Norton...
