Beer and salmon: A Perfect Pairing

Have you heard about the salmon scientific experiment underway in Oregon? Hakai magazine reports that field researchers may have found a way to persuade hatchery fish to swim upstream back to their hatchery home the way wild young salmon do. Now, as a cheechako to...
Sweet Bull of Youth

Sweet Bull of Youth

The celebration of the Golden Days Rodeo, the northernmost rodeo in America, takes me back to 2004 and my own rodeo adventure. After my marriage of two decades blew up, I chucked my living room furniture and put in a gym complete with metallic torture contraptions and...

Covid and twinkletoes

The Tanana Valley Farmers Market celebration this weekend made me curious about the first-ever event. I found the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner edition from July 20, 1973, with a short article buried on Page 3. The headline read: “Farmers market here Saturday.” The...
Free Willie: The Toad Not Taken

Free Willie: The Toad Not Taken

First published in the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, June 20, 2023 My wife, Gosia, and I were petless until a mid-size toad came into our lives not long before we moved to Alaska. He excavated a home in the second step of our stoop. A chunk of concrete fell out and...