The Alaskan Trip

Alaska Trip Report, summer 2022 part 1 of 3, The Plan: Well this was definitely a trip with challenges and lessons learned, some funny stories, and some not so much. Traveling with heavy and expensive camera gear is always a challenge, but I envisioned this trip as more of an adventure than most bird photography trips, and that's about how it went. The planning started years ago, when a friend, Frank, invited me to join him on a bird photography trip to St Paul Island, in the middle of the Bering Sea. I couldn't make it that year, but the seed was sown. This year, I returned to the idea, and looked up the guy who Frank recommended. His name is Bryan Holliday. Bryan had a St Paul trip planned, and a back to back trip to Barrow with it, at the northernmost tip of Alaska. St Paul seemed like mostly easy cliffside shooting which I'd done before in England, and this would complete my Puffin collection (woo hoo!). Barrow was hiking through tundra, which was even more appealing to me. I wanted to see what tundra was like, before it all disappears. Barrow has polar bears, the sun doesn't set in June, the walks to find birds could be a mile, some of that through 3' deep ice water, and it was just a rough and tumble place. The adventure really called out to me. Bryan then had a client who wanted to go to Nome, and so he added that to his offerings, and I thought hey, I'm up there, why not? So I signed up for that too. Planning happened months ago and the stress began then. I had to find waders to walk through 3' deep ponds with icy bottoms. Nobody wades in LA, so they were hard to find. Fishing stores did the trick. Then, in the final few weeks before the trip, my father in law, Harold, 101 years old, began a steep decline, passed and was buried the day before I departed for Alaska. If he had passed later, I would have cut my trip short one way or another. Stress. We're really missing him, but he had an incredible life that was certainly not cut short. The itinerary was Nome (5 days), Barrow (6 days), and then St Paul Island (7 days). Each leg involved flying out of Anchorage, and then back to start the next leg, overnighting in Anchorage as required. Different birds in different places. I met up with Bryan (who just quit his day job teaching 8th grade science to do this full time), Kayla (a young biology student), and Mauro (a doctor from