Alaska
I stayed at an off-the-grid, all-inclusive remote lodge on an island in Alaska. It was incredible.
Driving from Anchorage to Seward, I was in awe of the mountainous views and glacial blue lakes as we drove south toward the Kenai Peninsula. I was on my way to stay at the Kenai Fjords Wilderness Lodge on Fox Island in Resurrection Bay.
Marketed as off-the-grid and all-inclusive, I couldn’t wait to get to the resort. I knew I was in for a treat when I heard I would stay in a cabin steps from the water, overlooking Halibut Cove, while seals and sea otters frolicked in the waves. I wasn’t sure what to expect, though – would there be heat, running water, and a flushing toilet? Would I be able to text my husband?
I’d been dreaming of visiting Alaska, and when Pursuit Collection invited me for a hosted stay at their wilderness lodge, I jumped at the chance. Here’s how to get there and why I would go back.
Getting to Fox Island
Seward Harbor in Alaska
To get to Fox Island, you have to take a forty-minute ferry from Seward. This small town sits on the coast between the mountains and Resurrection Bay. People come from all over the world to visit because of its proximity to Kenai Fjords National Park.
I boarded a white ferry with blue trim, named the Glacier Explorer, to Fox Island on a misty day in early June. I had no idea I would see a humpback whale spouting within twenty minutes of the ferry ride. It was the first of many days on my five-day trip to south central Alaska, where I would see incredible marine wildlife.
The Glacier Explorer dropped us off on Fox Island, and I walked along the dock until I reached the shore. The shoreline was covered in beautiful black rocks, some of which were even heart-shaped. I was greeted by the lodge’s naturalist, who immediately pointed out the seal splashing in the cove — likely peeking to see what all the human noise was about.
The main lodge is breathtaking
Inside of the Kenai Fjords Wilderness Lodge
As I arrived, it was cold and raining — typical of the early summer maritime climate. A group of us meandered down the coastline towards the lodge. Walking through the entrance of the lodge, I was blown away by the inside. It was all wood, warm, and welcoming. I immediately felt at home as the staff greeted us with big smiles.
The main lodge has an area like a living room with couches, chairs, and tables. There’s a woodstove and giant windows overlooking the bay. There’s also a bar. The dining area opposite this space is decorated with beautiful wood furniture, soft lighting, and delicate flower bouquets.
I couldn’t wait to see the cabins after seeing this place. But first, the staff served lunch – a gourmet Caesar-inspired salad, a side of fruit, and a hand-crafted cocktail.
The waterfront cabins are cozy
Cabin at Kenai Fjords Wilderness Lodge
After lunch, I wandered over to my private cabin, Kittiwake, tucked inside the tree line. I walked up the wooden stairs to the porch and opened the sliding glass door. Inside, I found a red leather couch, coffee table, bed, and a small bathroom with a shower. I was so happy when I realized there was a flushing toilet and on-demand hot water.
Though the property is off-the-grid and not connected to public utilities, the eight guest cabins have propane heaters and battery-powered lights. Since there are no electrical outlets in the cabins, bringing a power bank for your cell phone is essential if you plan on using it to take photos.
There was also no cell phone reception at my cabin. The main lodge did have a place to charge a few cell phones, though, and I could send my husband texts from there.
The food is excellent
Dinners at Kenai Fjords Wilderness Lodge
The property has a chef and wait staff on location. The chef decides on the menu based on local ingredients and seasonal availability, so the food selections are always different. Over three days and two nights, I was treated to halibut, steak, soups, fresh vegetables, and salads for lunch and dinner.
Before breakfast, I loved the coffee service, where staff brought coffee directly to my cabin around 7 a.m. Breakfast included dishes like eggs and crab cakes or eggs Benedict.
Tea and pastries were served in the afternoon, followed by happy hour and charcuterie before dinner.
I’m gluten-free and appreciated how the chef easily accommodated my dietary needs. You just have to inform the property before you arrive so their team can plan.
Things to do while you’re there
Kayaking around Fox Island / Kenai Fjords National Park boat tour
A two-night minimum is required to stay here. Along with relaxing on the porch and watching for wildlife, you can go sea kayaking, enjoy s’mores around a fire pit, or get warm in the wood-fired sauna.
On the second day, I took a half-day guided kayaking tour around Fox Island with Sunny Cove Kayaking. I had so much fun spotting sea otters and puffins. It was my first time seeing a puffin in the wild.
That afternoon, I rested and recharged in the Scandinavian-inspired wood sauna. The sauna is steps from the sea for those brave enough to cold plunge after getting warm and sweaty. Since I visited during the summer, it was still bright outside at 10 p.m., and we could fit all these activities in during the day.
On the third day, after breakfast, we packed our bags and left for an eight-hour boat tour of Kenai Fjords National Park. Viewing whales and the epic glacial landscape made for one of the most beautiful trips I’ve ever taken.
Being pampered at the wilderness lodge while enjoying the outdoor activities was the perfect way to complement visiting this part of Alaska.
Alaska
Alaska High School Girls Basketball 2026 ASAA State Championship Brackets – March 10
The 2026 Alaska high school girls basketball state championships begin this week, and High School On SI has brackets for all four classifications.
The brackets will be updated with scores and matchups throughout the week.
All four classifications will play their state championship games at Alaska Airlines Center in Anchorage.
The 1A and 2A championships run March 11-14. Classes 3A and 4A play the following week, March 18-21.
Alaska High School Girls Basketball 2026 State Championship Brackets, Matchups, Schedule – March 10
3/11 – Shaktoolik (1) vs. Arlicaq (16)
3/11 – Kake (8) vs. Tri-Valley (9)
3/11 – Fort Yukon (4) vs. Andreafski (13)
3/11 – Sand Point (5) vs. Napaaqutgmiut (12)
3/11 – Scammon Bay (2) vs. Nunamiut (15)
3/11 – Akiuk Memorial (7) vs. Newhalen (10)
3/11 – Davis-Romoth (3) vs. Cook Inlet Academy (14)
3/11 – Hoonah (6) vs. Shishmaref (11)
3/12 – Seward (1) vs. Chevak (8)
3/12 – Metlakatla (4) vs. Cordova (5)
3/12 – Craig (2) vs. Susitna Valley (7)
3/12 – Glennallen (3) vs. Degnan (6)
3/18 – Barrow (1) vs. Kotzebue (8)
3/18 – Grace Christian (4) vs. Galena (5)
3/18 – Monroe Catholic (2) vs. Delta (7)
3/18 – Mt. Edgecumbe (3) vs. Kenai Central (6)
3/18 – Mountain City Christian Academy (1) vs. North Pole (8)
3/18 – Colony (4) vs. West (5)
3/18 – Bartlett (2) vs. Juneau-Douglas (7)
3/18 – Wasilla (3) vs. Service (6)
More Coverage from High School On SI
Alaska
Made In The USA: The Alaska Wall Tent By The Alaska Gear Company
This is the Alaska Wall Tent by the Alaska Gear Company, each one is made in the United States from Sunforger 13oz DLX, a double-filled, pre-shrunk, marine-grade canvas ideal for longterm outdoor use.
The Alaska Wall Tent comes in an array of sizes and versions, allowing you to choose the one that best suits your individual use-case. They’re all individually made in Alaska, and perhaps even more importantly, they’re all tested extensively to be able to handle local conditions.

This is the Alaska Wall Tent by the Alaska Gear Company, each one is made in the United States from Sunforger 13oz DLX, a double-filled, pre-shrunk, marine-grade canvas ideal for longterm outdoor use.
History Speedrun: The Alaska Gear Company
The Alaska Gear Company was formerly known as Airframes Alaska, it’s an aviation and outdoor equipment supplier and manufacturer headquartered in Palmer, Alaska. The company is led by majority owner Sean McLaughlin, who bought the original bush airplane parts business when it had just two employees and $100,000 in annual revenue. McLaughlin has since grown it to approximately 100 employees and $20 million in annual sales.
The company can trace its early roots to a licensed maker of Piper PA-18 Super Cub fuselages at Birchwood Airport. Through a series of acquisitions, including Reeve Air Motive (an aircraft parts retailer operating out of Anchorage’s Merrill Field since 1950, Alaska Tent & Tarp, and Northern Sled Works, the company grew well beyond aviation into outdoor recreation and cold-weather gear.
That diversification ultimately drove the rebrand from Airframes Alaska to Alaska Gear Company in late 2023, as the old name no longer conveyed the full scope of what the company produces and sells.
The Alaska Gear Company now operates out of three locations – a 100,000 square foot manufacturing facility in Palmer, a production facility in Fairbanks, and a retail store with an in-house sewing workshop at Merrill Field in Anchorage.
Its product lines span two major categories. On the aviation side, the company is best known for its hand-built Alaskan Bushwheel tundra tires, FAA-approved titanium landing gear, Super Cub fuselage modifications, and a wide range of bush plane parts. On the outdoor side, it manufactures Arctic Oven hot tents, canvas wall tents, custom freight and pulk sleds, and a modernized version of the iconic military bunny boot designed for extreme cold weather conditions.
More recently in 2024, the Alaska Gear Company was named “Made in Alaska Manufacturer of the Year” by the Alaska Department of Commerce.
The Alaska Wall Tent By The Alaska Gear Company
The Alaska Canvas Wall Tent is a handmade-in-Alaska canvas tent made from 13oz Sunforger DLX double-filled, preshrunk, marine-grade cotton canvas that’s treated to resist fire, water, and mildew while still remaining breathable.
It comes in four sizes, including 8×10, 10×12, 12×14, and 14×16 feet, all with 5-foot wall heights, and it’s available either unframed (starting at $1,295) or with a frame (starting at $2,300). The unframed version can be constructed in the field using lengths of wood sourced from the area, reducing the initial pack weight – this is crucial for trips into the wilderness by bush plane where every pound of weight is critical.

It comes in four sizes, including 8×10, 10×12, 12×14, and 14×16 feet, all with 5-foot wall heights, and it’s available either unframed (starting at $1,295) or with a frame (starting at $2,300). The unframed version can be constructed in the field using lengths of wood sourced from the area, reducing the initial pack weight – this is crucial for trips into the wilderness by bush plane where every pound of weight is critical.
All tents include a 4.5 inch oval stove jack for use with wood or propane stoves, as well as a 56 inch triangular rear window with insect screening, an 18oz vinyl sod cloth around the base to block drafts and moisture, ridgepole openings at both ends, rope-reinforced eaves, brass grommets, overlapping door flaps with ties, a heavy-duty zippered door, and 100 feet of sisal rope for tie-downs.
The tents are now available to buy direct from the Alaska Gear Company here, and at the time of writing they have stock ready to ship out immediately.

Images courtesy of the Alaska Gear Company
Alaska
Lakes are growing in Alaska. That’s not entirely a bad thing
The St. Elias Mountains in southeast Alaska are dotted with over 100 lakes where glaciers crumble into milky, turquoise water. Those lakes are expanding at an ever-quickening pace.
The lakes will quadruple in size over the next century or two, scientists report March 9 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. This growth will transform landscapes, create new salmon habitat and may even change the course of a major river.
“We are seeing the great age of ice retreat” in Alaska, says Daniel McGrath, a glaciologist at Colorado State University in Fort Collins. “These glaciers are just peeling back from the landscape,” revealing deep grooves they carved in the Earth, where lakes are now forming.
Glacial hydrologist Eran Hood of the University of Alaska Southeast in Juneau, who was not part of the study, adds that “understanding where these lakes are going to emerge is important” because it “changes the whole nature of the downstream ecosystem.”
Hugging the coastline along the Alaska-Canada border, the tiny mountainous region that includes the St. Elias Mountains is losing 60 cubic kilometers of ice per year. Because lakes absorb solar heat, the glaciers that shed ice into lakes are shrinking faster than those that terminate on dry land. Across southeast Alaska, these lakes attached to glaciers have expanded by 60 percent since 1986, reaching a combined area of 1,300 square kilometers.
McGrath and his colleagues wondered how far this runaway expansion might go. So, they combined satellite images with estimates of ice thickness — mapping deeply eroded grooves that are still hidden under glaciers.
The results were “eye-opening,” McGrath says. The team identified 4,200 square kilometers of glacier-covered grooves adjacent to existing lakes.
He and his colleagues predict that the lakes will continue to expand — causing rapid ice retreat — until they fill those grooves, reaching a combined size of around 5,500 square kilometers, an area the size of Delaware.
“By the end of this century, all of these lakes will probably be more or less fully developed,” says study coauthor Louis Sass III, a glaciologist with the U.S. Geological Survey at the Alaska Science Center in Anchorage. But those growing lakes are already reshaping entire landscapes in a way that is often overlooked in public discourse around glacier retreat.
Many of Alaska’s glaciers terminate on dry land, and their meltwater often creates barren, rocky floodplains downstream, where the streams alternate between trickles and floods — constantly branching and shifting course as they lay down sediment released by the glacier.
“Those habitats are fairly inhospitable for a lot of fish,” including some salmon, says Jonathan Moore, an aquatic ecologist with Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, Canada. The water is too cold, and fish eggs “get swept out or buried by the floods every year.”
But as glaciers retreat into lakes and those lakes expand, their meltwater has time to drop its sediment and warm a few degrees in the lake before spilling into a river. Rivers that carry less sediment are less prone to shifting channels.
A 2025 study by Moore and remote sensing scientist Diane Whited of the University of Montana found that as glacial lakes expanded over 38 years in southeast Alaska, the downstream river channels stabilized, allowing willows and bushes to spread across floodplains.
“It creates salmon habitat,” Hood says. A 2021 study by Moore and Hood predicted that by 2100, glacial retreat in southeast Alaska will transform 6,000 kilometers of river channels into decent habitat for some local species of salmon. The lakes themselves will create spawning grounds for sockeye salmon — an important commercial species.
But these changes will come with upheaval.
For instance, one major river, the Alsek, will probably shift its course as retreating glaciers cause two lakes to merge, providing an easier path to the ocean.
People in Juneau are feeling another dramatic effect of expanding lakes. At least once per year, a lake dammed by the nearby Mendenhall Glacier spills out in a flash flood that gushes through town, forcing some residents to build protective levees around their homes.
These ecosystems “are going to be transformed,” Moore says. “But that transformation is going to be pretty violent and pretty dangerous.”
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