denali | The Filson Journal

Rig to Flip, Dress to Swim: Prepping for a multi-day backcountry rafting trip

Adventure tales spun around the campfire always revolve around grit. These stories of adversity—like four days spent paddling in gale-force winds, getting to the first camp during a downpour, and then realizing the tent has been forgotten—are always the most vivid. Conditions can be tough on the river, but planning makes the experience easier.

3 Min

Profiles

Desi Sherwood: Off the Grid

Finding your passion can be a lifelong journey for some, but as simple as walking out your front door for others. For guide Desi Sherwood, growing up immersed in the Alaskan wilderness surrounding his home in Girdwood, Alaska (population 3,000), he knew from a young age that his true love was being outdoors.

3 Min

Field Notes

Exploring Denali: a wild & rugged wilderness

Denali is a land that quite literally ebbs and flows with the seasons. Spring and summer snow melts down from mountains that climb to the roof of the Alaska Range and swell the Toklat, Savage, McKinley, Sanctuary, and other rivers that ripple across Denali. Harry Karstens, who became Denali’s first superintendent in 1921, was one of the early explorers who navigated the basins of frozen rivers and streams while delivering mail to distant roadhouses and checking up on desolate miners’ camps. More than 100 years later, the waterways of this rugged wilderness are now the playground of well-experienced pack rafters, self-reliant thrillseekers who inflate their portable craft to run a river, then pull the plug, pack it away, and hike over a mountain to reach another headwater.

3 Min

Field Notes

The Tall One: The Story of Denali

In a land already renown for a larger than life landscape, the mountain known as Denali inspires awe from those that observe it. Wreathed in an eternal cloak of snow and ice, it looms over the Alaska range’s surrounding peaks like a reserved ruler, the king of the north. Rising over three and a half vertical miles into the sky, it was for most of its life one of the most remote mountains on the planet. Yet, it is visible for hundreds of miles on a clear day.

5 Min

old black and white photo of men standing in front of tent in snowy forest

Field Notes

Walter Harper: The First to Summit Denali

By the time they established their final high-altitude camp at 17,500 feet both Stuck, and Tatum were struggling. The archdeacon, in particular, was in trouble. A forty-nine-year-old lifelong smoker, each breath was a struggle, and he would periodically blackout. But the team decided to try for the summit. The decision to put Harper in the lead was a simple one. “Karstens recognized that any chance they had to succeed hinged on having their strongest climber lead, and that was Walter,”

10 Min