Erin McKittrick

With the second-largest tides in North America, traveling Cook Inlet isn't easy. Capt. James Cook discovered that more than 200 years ago. We did much more recently.

Alaska is home to 50 volcanoes that have erupted since written records began in 1760. To a geologist, though, those 250 years of records are nothing. To look further back, they dig.

Four people who've spent a lot of time in the Alaska outdoors with notebooks and camera gear can help inspire you on your next adventure.

If Alaska expands how many pink salmon its hatcheries — such as the one in Tutka Bay — produce, will there be unintended consequences that harm Kachemak Bay?

Alaskans have been eating shellfish forever, in an uncomfortable, myth-ridden relationship with an invisible risk.

I finished my peppermint and popped another in my mouth. I unwrapped a dozen of the red-and-white striped balls and dropped them into a mug of hot water until they dissolved into something pink and glowing, reminiscent of a cartoon toxic waste spill. It was a wash of Pepto-Bismol-cotton-candy-toothpaste, and during one cold spring day … Continue reading The art of wilderness mooching: Giving thanks for anything edible

JAKOLOF BAY — I came to the beach to count sea star corpses. You might know them as starfish — stiff, five-pointed bodies like a child’s drawing of a star, crayon-bright. About 10 species once were common in the intertidal zone here, with different colors and shapes and numbers of rays — hundreds of which … Continue reading Kachemak Bay has seen massive die-offs of sea stars and other species. What’s going on?

TUTKA BAY — Sometimes the work is slow enough that you might as well sit down. Scoot on your butt and pull each blueberry stem in turn, until it curves under the moss, red and damp and rooty, and you can’t pull any farther. Snip the stem off, leaving the sharp stub tucked carefully beneath the … Continue reading Sharing the wild: Cutting a new trail to a lonely destination on Kachemak Bay

Oct. 17, 2015, Taan Fjord, Icy Bay, Alaska. The friction that held silt to silt and rock to rock began giving way. Those first rocks shoved more rocks, and then more still. Some 200 million metric tons of rock slid down the mountain in a crash that must have been deafening. It hit the ocean, … Continue reading Collapsing Alaska mountains: Southeast landslides and tsunamis on the rise

It always looks cold in old photos. Stark black and washed-out white. Grim and grainy. Little specks of people stand around in dark coats, bowler hats, and puffed-out dresses, or are blurred into gray shadows beside the boxy cameras they didn’t hold still for. They were the 1890s tourists of Glacier Bay, milling around a … Continue reading See for yourself: Alaska’s disappearing glaciers, then and now

More than 11,000 Alaska children, some 9 percent of the school-age population, are signed up with one of the state's 30 official home-school programs. That's a minimum number, not counting the families who home-school independently.

It was the middle of March, nearly a year ago. My family of four had flown into Nome around the time a lot of people fly to Nome. Iditarod fans filled the streets. But I was a hundred yards offshore of downtown.

Umnak Island is part of the Fox Islands in the Aleutian chain, one step farther west than Unalaska. Population: 22 humans, 7,500 cows.

This is the most remote run the Alaska ferry system makes. Every two weeks between May and September, the 51-year-old Tustemena leaves Seldovia for the 900-or-so-mile run to Dutch Harbor, stopping at Homer, Kodiak, Chignik, Sand Point, King Cove, Cold Bay, False Pass and Akutan along the way.

During low tide in Kachemak Bay, a beautiful and slimy world of sea stars, tube worms, anemones and more is within our grasp.