Alaska
Take a trip to the Asian island that could play a role in Alaska's future • Alaska Beacon
Thirteen hours after boarding a jet in Seattle recently, I stepped off onto Asian soil, breezing through customs and into an air-conditioned subway.
I was bound for a city of skyscrapers, art, soup dumplings and glorious urban hiking: Taipei.
Maybe you already know a little bit about Taiwan, the nation of some 23 million people.
Some outdoorsy Alaskans have ridden the Huandao, a network of bike paths and roads that circumnavigate the mountainous island.
Or you’ve read about Taiwan on the news — how it’s under constant threat from China, its saber-rattling neighbor across an 80-mile strait.
Allow me to take you on a quick diversion to Asia from your regular life, to explain why Taiwan, which I visited in late October, matters to Alaska — and the rest of the world.
Martial law to progressive democracy
Two years ago, I took a trip to Japan, and while I was there, I made a side visit to Taiwan.
At the time, I was contemplating the idea of working as a foreign correspondent, perhaps in Hong Kong. But a friend who’d worked in journalism in Asia suggested I check out Taiwan instead, because Hong Kong’s future appeared increasingly depressing: The Chinese government had crushed the region’s pro-democracy protests, leaving little drama or nuance to report on.
The friend was right: Last week, dozens of demonstrators were sentenced to up to a decade in prison.
Taiwan’s future, by contrast, was setting up to be a compelling drama — one that’s still playing out today.
A quick history lesson. For centuries, Taiwan’s Indigenous population has shared the island with people of mainland Chinese heritage, who migrated there in waves. One of the largest waves came in the late 1940s.
That’s when more than 1 million Chinese nationalists, led by Chiang Kai-Shek, fled to the island after losing their country’s civil war to the communists, led by Mao Zedong.
Chiang became the leader of Taiwan, but once there, his government, in hopes of retaking the mainland, continued referring to itself as the Republic of China — a name that Taiwan still uses today.
Chiang’s rule over Taiwan was authoritarian and repressive: His forces killed tens of thousands of people during an 
But in the 1980s and 1990s, something surprising happened: Taiwan evolved into a thriving, progressive democracy.
Earlier this year, the Taiwanese people elected a new president, Lai Ching-te, in free and fair elections. Taiwan was the first Asian country to legalize same-sex marriage, in 2019. It holds an enormous annual Pride celebration in Taipei — this year’s included a speech from the vice president. There are regular protests and the country’s parliament hosts robust debate — including periodic fistfights.
The presence of that kind of open, democratic society — so close to China, and with a military supported by arms from the U.S. — risks serving as an inspiration to people living under Communist Party rule on the mainland. And it’s not the type of inspiration that the Communist Party likes.
Taiwan needs allies
On my previous trip to the island, I made some new friends and picked up on some of these political themes between bike rides, pork buns, monkey viewing and a Taiwan Series baseball game.
When I got home, I stayed up on Taiwan related news and kept talking about the country with an Anchorage friend of Taiwanese heritage.
He, in turn, connected me with the Taiwanese government’s office in Seattle. Which, as it turns out, is always looking for interested journalists to invite to the island.
After a brief correspondence, I was told, in February, to block off a week in October for an official visit.
I arrived back in Taipei on a Friday afternoon — just in time for dinner with a couple of Alaska friends who had also traveled to Taiwan for a bike trip. We sat outside next to a fish market, eating skewers of grilled beef, veggies and scallops, before I rode the mile back to my hotel room on one of Taipei’s ubiquitous shared bicycles — rentable for about a dollar an hour with a smartphone.
The next day I watched the Pride parade, a raucous festival of queer culture with floats sponsored by Uber and Google.
Another bike ride took me to a train to a bus, for an overnight stay in Taiwan’s northeast corner. I spent it in Jiufen, a mountainside getaway of tea rooms and guesthouses, then hiked and explored markets and museums the next day before returning to Taipei for the start of my official visit.
More about the official part: To preserve their relations with China, all but roughly a dozen of the world’s countries decline to give Taiwan formal diplomatic recognition — meaning that its government has to get creative to forge ties with sympathetic populations.
A few times a year, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, or MOFA, pays for an entire delegation of journalists to spend a week in the country — mostly for meetings with government officials, but also for gorging themselves on Taiwan’s delectable cuisine and viewing tourist attractions like a remarkably lifelike miniature cabbage carved from jade.
For me, this entailed criss-crossing Taipei in a curtain-festooned tour bus with a very solicitous MOFA staff member and a dozen other reporters — from Haiti, Slovakia, the Netherlands, Canada, Italy, Australia, Finland, Nigeria and South Korea.
The initiative is hosting around 100 reporters this year at a total cost of some $500,000, which largely pays for journalists’ flights and hotels, according to MOFA officials. To maintain my independence and credibility in reporting on Taiwan, I combined my trip with a vacation, paid for my own plane ticket to Taipei and found a cheap AirBnB; I did not pay for the group meals hosted by MOFA.
“We try to make friends with the rest of the world,” Catherine Hsu, a top MOFA official, told us over the fanciest lunch I’d ever eaten — seven courses dished out at a hotel restaurant inside Taipei’s main railway station.
Taiwan needs friends because without them, it stands little chance against its large, powerful neighbor across the strait.
Taiwan is an economic powerhouse: Its biggest company, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., is the global leader in high performance semiconductors and has been valued at more than $1 trillion; the island also is home to other semiconductor businesses and high-tech industries.
But even a country whose per-person gross domestic product is in line with Israel’s and Spain’s can’t compete with the blunt force threatened by China, which calls Taiwan a “sacred and inseparable part” of its territory and vows to reunify it.
Taiwan currently spends some $20 billion a year on national defense, and military infrastructure and bomb shelters dot the island. But China’s defense budget is roughly 10 times that, and it regularly conducts menacing military drills — in one recent case, simulating a blockade of Taiwan and in another, launching missiles that flew over the island.
As Lai, the Taiwanese president, visited Hawaii this week just after a newly approved U.S. arms sale, China’s military issued a statement saying it would “resolutely crush any ‘Taiwan independence’ separatists.”
‘We will play an important role’
Over our week in Taiwan, my group was ushered from ministry to ministry, with briefings on subjects like the nation’s network of high-tech industrial parks and its efforts to transition toward more climate-friendly energy sources.
But many of our meetings were dominated by a force that wasn’t in the room: China. We heard from criminal investigators about how Taiwan’s decades-long exclusion from the United Nations, at China’s behest, means it can’t participate in Interpol, the international policing organization. It has also been blocked from formal membership in the World Health Organization and the U.N.’s official climate talks.
Think tank officials reeled off polling data about Taiwanese citizens’ willingness to take up arms against China. And media fact-checkers told us about disinformation campaigns suspected to be seeded by China-aligned operatives.
Anchorage Democratic Sen. Bill Wielechowski also visited the country earlier this year and came away with similar impressions. 
“The whole country, their whole identity is wrapped up in this notion that, at any time, China could come in and take over,” Wielechowski told me.
Wielechowski, who traveled with another Alaska state senator, Anchorage Democrat Elvi Gray-Jackson, is the latest in a long line of Alaska politicians to establish ties with Taiwan. Republican former Gov. Frank Murkowski is also a longtime ally, having taken more than two dozen trips to the country and served as an observer at Taiwan’s presidential elections.
Wielechowski’s and Gray-Jackson’s primary interest in Taiwan was foreign trade and reviving once-robust sales of Alaska products to the country. The state formerly had a trade office in Taipei, supporting substantial exports of Alaska timber and oil, and the two are interested in reviving it.
But Taiwan’s future is also directly relevant to Alaskans because of how Chinese military action could prompt an American response.
Alaska military bases host dozens of U.S. fighter jets, and experts say that if there’s any kind of conflict over Taiwan, their pilots and support crews are very likely to be dispatched to the Pacific.
“Look, I’m not going into war plan stuff, because that’s all classified and everything,” GOP U.S. Sen. Dan Sullivan told me last week. But, he added, two hours before our conversation, he’d had a discussion with Admiral Samuel Paparo, the commander of some 380,000 U.S. Indo-Pacific forces and civilians.
“We will play an important role,” Sullivan said. “We have a lot of forces, who are very close to the theater — closer than Hawaii. A major conflict in the Taiwan Strait would significantly impact the active duty forces in Alaska.”
Uncertainty with a new U.S. president
Sullivan, a former U.S. Marine, was once deployed to the Taiwan Strait and has since visited the country several times as a senator.
He’s been a key Republican ally of Taiwan in the U.S. Congress, amid an increasing penchant for isolationism among members of his party.
His staff sent me a 24-page booklet — “A Test of Wills: Why Taiwan Matters” — that it had made out of a series of Sullivan’s policy speeches.
But it’s too early to say if his views will win out in the new presidential administration. A Wall Street Journal correspondent shadowed Sullivan in Asia earlier this year, with the 
“In Taipei and Singapore, Sen. Dan Sullivan looks to quell foreign leaders’ fears that the U.S. won’t stand by allies if Trump wins,” the subhed reads. The piece describes Sullivan telling Taiwan’s vice president that “you can count on the United States of America,” but added that that promise “wasn’t wholly within (Sullivan’s) power to keep.”
My visit to Taiwan was just before Donald Trump won his second term. The U.S. election came up at nearly every meeting, with my fellow journalists repeatedly pressing Taiwanese officials on how they’d deal with Trump if he took office again.
Previously, Trump has said that Taiwan should pay the U.S. for its defense and complained that the island’s semiconductor industry is stealing American jobs; a former top aide said Taiwan could be “toast” if Trump was re-elected.
Taiwanese officials largely brushed off those comments and said they could work with Trump; one jokingly told us that, as a businessman, perhaps Trump could broker a deal to sell Taiwan some state-of-the-art F-35 fighter jets.
(The very solicitous Ministry of Foreign Affairs staffer followed up the next day with a group text requesting that the comment be considered off-the-record; I politely refused, given that the relatively high-ranking official declined to walk it back himself when given the opportunity immediately after he spoke.)
In our interview, Sullivan pointed out that Republican U.S. Sen. J.D. Vance, the vice president-elect, has spoken “publicly and very strongly” of the geopolitical importance of Taiwan — even as Vance has been much more skeptical of U.S. support for Ukraine.
But there’s little doubt that the election results are injecting new uncertainty into what’s long been an important alliance between the U.S. and Taiwan — at a time when the island is under increasing pressure not just militarily but economically.
Earlier this month, Reuters reported that SpaceX — run by Trump booster Elon Musk — asked some of its Taiwanese suppliers to transfer manufacturing to other countries because of China’s military threat. The news agency also reported last year that offshore wind power developers are increasingly thinking about how to insure their projects in the Taiwan Strait against events like war.
How, exactly, the U.S. should respond to these developments isn’t a question for me — it’s a question for the American public and its elected officials. And the public just gave those officials some strong signals by electing Trump.
There are compelling reasons for America to avoid another foreign military entanglement, which, in Taiwan, would almost certainly put Alaska service members in harm’s way.
But I’ve also seen Taiwan twice now, with my own eyes, and I can attest to what’s at stake. Its mist-flanked mountains, modern skyscrapers and high-tech semiconductor foundries. Its nightclubs and queer culture. And, most importantly, a democratic society where political and cultural freedoms have flowered in the ashes of an authoritarian past.
“They say, ‘Today, Ukraine,’” one of the Taiwanese officials told us on our visit. “‘Tomorrow might be Taiwan.’”
Nathaniel Herz welcomes tips at [email protected] or (907) 793-0312. This article was originally published in Northern Journal, a newsletter from Herz. Subscribe at this link.
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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
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Silodrome was founded by Ben back in 2010, in the years since the site has grown to become a world leader in the alternative and vintage motoring sector, with well over a million monthly readers from around the world and many hundreds of thousands of followers on social media.
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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CORTINA D’AMPEZZO, Italy — Andrew Kurka spent his childhood roaming the outdoors of rural Alaska at his family’s homestead near Nikolaevsk, with 600 acres at his fingertips, sleeping inside only because he had to. But it was always fishing that was the lure.
Even as a 5-year-old, the now 34-year-old para Alpine gold medalist was resolute.
In those early years, his mom, Amy Bleakney, joined Kurka on the edge of a river for hours and hours as he searched for that one fish he was trying to catch. While temperatures might have dipped and time dragged on, there was no stopping Kurka and his child-sized fishing pole.
“‘We can come back,’” Bleakney would try to tell her son. “‘The fish is still going to be here tomorrow.’ He’s like, ‘No, I got to get it.’”
Bleakney would sit in the truck and watch her son.
“We didn’t leave until he caught his fish,” Bleakney said.
Thirty years later, Kurka still feels the pull of the water and Alaska. It’s been his home and the place that holds the next chapter of his life as he plans to step back from ski racing following the 2026 Milan Cortina Winter Paralympics. Shaped by the nature around him, he’ll be looking to help others find that sense of purpose with his next steps.
Just as he found his.
When Kurka was 13, he severely damaged three vertebrae in the middle of his spinal cord in an ATV accident. About three months after his accident, a family friend got him back in a boat and out on the water to go fishing. Kurka was in a back brace and still in excruciating pain, so the pair didn’t spend much time out. But that hour or so in the middle of nowhere was all Kurka needed.
“It was something that I wanted and something that I needed in my life, and he was able to help me get that, and then the moment that happens, he helped me set a new goal for myself: to be able to pursue being better,” Kurka said. “‘Hey, I want to do that, but on my own.’ You know?”
Two years later, he tried a different elevation of the outdoors — down the slopes on a mono-ski for the first time through a program called Challenge Alaska, thanks to the encouragement of his physical therapist. Kurka crashed at the bottom, going straight down.
Those who helped Kurka suggested he try turning on his next go-around. Instead, Kurka again went straight down.
“The moment that I slid down that mountain, the moment I felt that speed, I felt so alive,” Kurka said. “I remembered, ‘Hey, I can live. This is life. I can do things.’”
On a chairlift ride back up, his instructor predicted his future, telling him, “You’d be a pretty good racer. You don’t seem to be afraid.” Kurka learned about the Paralympics. For a lifelong athlete who wanted to go to the Olympics as a wrestler, the conversation renewed Kurka’s desire for “being the best.”
Kurka first qualified for the U.S. Paralympic team in 2014. But he didn’t compete after crashing in training. He made his Team USA debut in 2018, winning two medals (a gold in downhill and silver in super-G). He became the first-ever Alaskan Paralympic medalist. He is scheduled to compete this week in the super-G (Monday), combined (Tuesday) and giant slalom (Thursday).
Andrew Kurka celebrates with his silver medal from the super-G at the 2018 Paralympics. He also won gold in the downhill that year. (Lintao Zhang / Getty Images)
But with Kurka, there’s always something else brewing. And he knew his athletic career could set up his future. Not long after Kurka won his gold medal, Kurka started chatting to his now wife, Verónica, after the two met online. Kurka couldn’t stop talking about the property he had just found, telling her it was perfect.
“I was like, ‘OK, what’s your favorite color or something?’” Verónica Kurka says now with a laugh. “But he really, really wanted to talk about this project.”
Always a dream of his, he used his earnings to buy property and build cabins, looking to set up a retirement plan for himself. By the time Verónica visited Alaska some time later, Kurka was already living in one of the cabins. But in the process, after the 2018 Games, he realized he wanted it to be something more than just a build-and-sell investment.
Soon after, some of his friends came up to visit. So did someone whom Kurka barely knew, but he invited him up to Alaska on a challenge anyway.
When Derek Demun posted a photo of a personal-best-sized halibut he caught in his home area of Southern California, Kurka saw it on a mutually followed Instagram account connecting impaired outdoorsmen in the United States. Not long after, Demun received a direct message from Kurka that read along the lines of, “Oh, that’s your personal best. Why don’t you come up to Alaska and beat it?”
Kurka told him about his wheelchair-accessible bed and breakfast, the Golden Standard, and his backstory as a para athlete. The two chatted on the phone, and Demun checked him out to make sure he was a real person. A week later, Demun had tickets to Alaska for a trip that summer of 2020 with his dad and friend. Kurka picked them up in Anchorage, and the adventure was on as they drove to the property near Palmer, about 45 miles from Anchorage.
They spent the days exploring the scenery and taking in the moose that would frequently appear as roadblocks. Evenings were spent around a firepit. And there were two fishing excursions on Kurka’s boat, when they headed out to open water, a nearly 2 1/2-hour trek.
“I have no idea where we’re at,” Demun said. “It’s raining, it’s cloudy. We’re rocking with the waves. I’m like, ‘Dude, we’re in Alaska. I’m fishing for halibut. I’m going to die out here. No one is going to know. I feel like I’m on a TV show.’
“But he held by his word. I was able to go and catch the biggest halibut I’ve ever caught in my life.”
Since that trip, Demun has gone back to Alaska nearly every summer. The adventures have continued with airplane tours — Kurka has a sport pilot license and a plane is next on his to-do list — Jet Ski rides up to glaciers and plenty more fishing.
“When people think of Alaska, they think of igloos and polar bears and lots and lots of snow and just unaccessible terrain,” Demun said. “And me and Andrew, we have a little saying, like, complacency kills and comfort kills.”
Derek Demun (pictured) took Andrew Kurka up on his offer to visit Alaska. “He held by his word,” Demun said. “I was able to go and catch the biggest halibut I’ve ever caught in my life.” (Courtesy of Derek Demun)
As the years have passed between visits, the number of cabins on the property has grown, and Kurka has found his purpose.
“There was that sense of peace, that sense of freedom and that sense of fun that they got on the ocean has stayed with them forever,” Kurka said. “Nature was what helped me to recover from my injury. You know that peacefulness that helped me to recover from my injury, and I want other people to experience that also to help them recover from their injury. And it’s really easy for me to provide that.”
It’s the time with family and building out his next plans for the Golden Standard that has Kurka looking forward to stepping back from ski racing. But Kurka won’t be slowing down. He’ll just be spending more time in Alaska compared with the extensive travel that comes with being on the circuit. There’s a bike-trail trip in Japan with Verónica in the works, and he wants to spend time forging knives. He’s working with a nonprofit mentoring young athletes. For the Golden Standard, he plans on getting his commercial pilot license to become a flight instructor for others with impairments, along with providing fly-in fishing and hunting trips.
But beyond the occasional trips out, he doesn’t want to turn fishing into an extended job, as the water remains a sacred place for him.
“From my childhood, there’s been that outdoor sense of nature that has grabbed ahold of me,” Kurka said. “For me, nature and adventure is true freedom, because you stop worrying about everything else in life that doesn’t really matter. And that’s the piece of me that finds peace, and that’s what I search for. And I find bits and pieces of that inner peace while I’m competing. Because when I’m on the course and when I’m pushing out of the start gate, nothing else matters but that next one minute and 30 seconds worth of life-changing moments and dangerous speeds.
“But nothing about it compares to when I’m on the ocean in Alaska. … That’s the piece of me that I love and the piece of me that will always be in Alaska.”
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