depth in the field

four people on snow machines in the early light of day driving across an ice sheet in Alaska
Field Notes

Filson in the Field: Searching for Muskox in the Alaskan Arctic

As a company founded on equipping folks headed into the frozen desolation of the Klondike goldfields in 1897, we knew that we needed to do something that was a bit off the beaten path. With this in mind, we decided to head to the western edge of Alaska, above the Arctic Circle to tell the tale of the remarkable rebirth of an animal that was hunted to extinction in North America over a century ago, the musk ox.

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4 Min
a middle aged bearded white man wearing a yellow flannel shirt, dark jeans and a green hat holding a block of wood and a chainsaw looking up at a tree to assess it
Profiles

Zach LaPerrière: The Sage

Living in a small cabin immersed in the virgin old-growth with his family for the last twenty-five years, LaPerrière is a part of the wilderness. There is no television or road into it. Visitors park off the nearby road and walk in. As a result, they spend as much time outdoors as indoors. He spends long hours in his woodshop under the cabin, and he will spend months working on the creations that come from a single tree, turning it on his lathe, peeling back layers, and discovering the story in the wood.

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4 Min
view from the deck of a working sailboat that has gear and a motorcycle strapped to the deck while a woman looks out to the snowy mountains
Field Notes

Sailing The Inside Passage on The Raven

We ran into Naomi Spar on the piers of Sitka, AK, while they were driving their adventure touring bike over the dock onto the worn deck of their sailboat, a Sloop named “the Raven”. The scene was so unique that we had to ask them their story and how they came to be cruising the coast of Alaska with a motorbike strapped to their foredeck. They gave us a tale of navigating the Inside Passage, a lawless mystery ridden trial ground that so many prospectors had concurred before them.

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2 Min
black and white portrait of man with a van dyke in military uniform
Field Notes

A Soldier to the Last – Lieutenant Pierce and the Skagit Expedition of 1882

On July 18, 1882, a lieutenant in the US Army named Henry Hubbard Pierce received a letter from Brigadier General Nelson A. Miles, who was commanding the Department of the Columbia, which included the Washington Territory. This communication outlined Special Order no. 97, which charged Lt. Pierce with carrying out an expedition of the North Cascades. The primary goal of the expedition was to map his route of exploration, starting from Fort Colville on the east side of the mountain range to his terminus in Puget Sound by way of Lake Chelan and the Skagit River. As the instructions outlined, his “reconnaissance is to obtain such knowledge of the country and its occupants as may be valuable at present or in the future to the military service.”

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3 Min
team of vets and forestry service personnel inspect an animal on a towel on top of a table with a breathing apparatus attached to its face
Profiles

Conservation Northwest: Keeping the Northwest Wild

For the 7.5 million residents of Washington state, most, if not all, have used or will use I-90 at some point. This interstate connects the two largest cities in the state: Seattle to the west and Spokane to the east. It also runs right through the southern end of the North Cascade mountains, home to great populations of blacktail deer, Roosevelt elk, coyotes, and black bears, among other species. As you drive east from Seattle, you might notice a bridge with no roads connected to it that spans the interstate just before you get to the city of Easton. This bridge is a wildlife crossing that will help keep these animals safe from vehicles. The bridge is there thanks to a Seattle-based organization, Conservation Northwest, and is just one of many projects this organization has helped fund, design and implement in this region.

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2 Min
rocky mountainside and snow on mount rainier amongst low lying clouds
Profiles

The Glaciers of the North Cascades

North Cascades National Park counts more than 300 glaciers along this northwestern spine of mountains—and that’s just inside the park boundaries. The North Cascades are the most glaciated place in the country outside of Alaska, but this ice-clad range has remained relatively under the radar compared to places such as Montana’s Glacier National Park or Mount Rainier in the South Cascades. The landscape here feels wilder, at the edge of things, with a mystical feel of vastness and geologic time lent by the presence of these relics from the last ice age.

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5 Min
chest up view of person in scuba gear standing above water
Profiles

Zech Bennett: The Undersea Tradesman

When you meet Zech Bennett, he seems like a pretty ordinary guy. Not too tall or too short, he seems somewhat in shape but is not a chiseled gym rat. The brown hair sticking out from underneath his baseball cap is slightly askew, and his face breaks into an easy smile. He is the type of person you could share a few beers with at the bar while swapping stories about ferrying kids to events or catching up on the latest scores. It’s only when you hear what the 32-year-old Homer, Alaska, resident does for a living that you realize there is more to him than you see at first glance.

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4 Min
black and white image of people in antiquated clothes and hats standing behind a large stack of bound wooden boxes reading
Field Notes

You Take What You Can Get: Or Suffer the Consequences

The stampede for gold into the Klondike of the Yukon territory reached a peak in 1898. In that same year, 1,200 other miners set out for other regions of the far north, including to the Koyukuk and Chandalar river drainages in the remote Alaska Territory interior, in a desperate search for similar riches. This region is situated in the northwestern part of Alaska, with the Koyukuk River flowing through it from the borders of the Arctic Ocean to where it enters the Yukon at Nulato.

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3 Min
Kathy Burek in green overalls gathering organic material from a beachhead
Profiles

The Puzzle Master: Kathy Burek

Anyone who has ever spent hours huddled over a puzzle knows the joy of finally figuring it out. Whether it’s an obscure image coming together piece by piece, that head-scratcher of a rhyme finally making sense, or completing the last box in a crossword, the endorphin rush of finally getting the right answer makes all of the effort worthwhile. But imagine devoting your life to untangling complicated mysteries but rarely knowing if you have solved the puzzle correctly. Most people couldn’t handle it, it might even drive them mad. But, Kathy Burek has done this almost every day for the last twenty-five years, and she loves it.

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5 Min