Alaska Traveler

Alaska Traveler: Dispatches from America's Last Frontier

Dana Stabenow was born in Alaska when it was a territory, grew up on and around fishing boats, worked for an air taxi service, a cannery, and later, on the oilfields of the North Slope. Today, she's an Edgar-award winning mystery writer with over 25 Alaska-based novels to her credit. Stabenow knows Alaska.
Writing for Alaska Magazine, she revisited old haunts and explored many new ones to capture the vital pioneering spirit of the state she calls home. From cruising the Inner Passage to hiking the Chilkoot Trail, bidding on bachelors at Talkeetna's Winterfest, to a behind-the-scenes look at the Iditarod sled dog race, Alaska Traveler collects over 50 of Stabenow's columns about life on America's last frontier. It's Alaska in all seasons not just the summer months and in all its quirky, iconoclastic glory.
Travelers planning a trip to Alaska will find much to inspire them, as will those just interested to read more about the state that residents call The Great Land.
"Seldovia was where we were living when the 1964 Earthquake hit, right in the middle of my twelfth birthday party. I had a great time, including being evacuated to the high school gymnasium along with the rest of the town and standing outside, holding my mom’s friend Maka’s hand as we listened to the tidal wave come in. What wasn’t so great was when the Army Corps of Engineers came in, declared that there was no saving a town that had sunk five and a half feet, and did their dike-and-fill routine, which entailed literally ripping the Seldovia boardwalk up by its pilings and leveling the surrounding hills to create a flat gravel expanse that was as ordinary and ugly as the previous town had been unique and beautiful. The boardwalk was over two miles long and had served as our Main Street. It meant a lot to the kids of Seldovia; we rode our bikes on it, we fished for flounders and yellow bellies and bullheads from it, we played kick-the-can under it. Watching its destruction from the sidelines was an early and object lesson in the transience of manmade things, at least in Alaska."