Michael Engelhard

A 60-day trek across the 1,000 miles that serve as Alaska's spine is recorded in marginalia on map sheets taped together as I wormed my way into the wilderness.

Alaska Men magazine helped deliver a connection with Monique, a French woman living in Albuquerque. Too soon, we were saying goodbye at the airport.

These thick ANWR bugs are not your garden-variety mosquitoes. They rank among the fiercest of the 176 species of mosquitoes found in the U.S. They drive breeding birds from their nests.

Scents ground us in nature's cycles, in death and rejuvenation. They mark us emotionally, even physically.

Some Alaska students will follow invisible wakes and forever remember that the sea shifts in their bodies, too, when they are on the water.

After summiting North America's highest peak and waiting out bad weather, a pair of climbers finally reached Talkeetna, where the crowded craziness was welcomed.

Who knew Alaska's mountain goats could swim? Necessity can certainly be the mother of invention.

You’ll not find a more succinct natural history primer for the world’s northern latitudes, a nifty paperback costing less than a large pizza, and with a sewn binding that keeps the spine from cracking.

In the face of recent news that the Toklat wolf pack now is in trouble, I badly want to believe that perhaps there is hope. Perhaps, like the Koyukon, we can learn to live with teekkona.

A biological overview, a graphic novel, a travelogue, a pictorial anthology and a children’s book offer a wide cross-section of volumes featuring the charismatic carnivore that calls Alaska home.

Very few of us can eat polar bear — and even among those who can or have in the past, there's a wide range of opinion on how palatable or delectable it is. Its liver can contain lethal amounts of vitamin A.

Winter biking in Fairbanks means pogies, wool Army pants, mukluks, beaver-skin mittens and moose encounters. Sissies stay home.

Eight times warmer than sheep’s wool, qiviut keeps the creatures cozy at 50-below. Ranging from off-white to beige, smoke-gray and chocolate-brown, it is lustrous, soft and sells in stores for hard cash: $100 per spun ounce.

The mountain goat not only invites speculation but even more so the projection of desires. I would trade with this bearded recluse in an instant. I'd travel unburdened by gear. I'd grow hairy and hunchbacked and rank. I'd become agile enough to dodge grizzlies and wolves, fearless enough to bed down on vertiginous ledges-and smart enough to avoid our kind.

When Palin invoked musk oxen as a symbol in her State of the State address, she was anthropomorphizing and, even worse, using an image to endorse an agenda that endangers this and other species.