Buddy the elf once said “then I traveled through the seven levels of the Candy Cane Forest, past the sea of swirly, twirly gumdrops, and then, I walked through the Lincoln Tunnel!”

There’s almost no better way to articulate the journey you’re about to begin because it’s impossible to anticipate all the details of what’s coming; no matter how well you have plotted out your future.  

As a senior in high school I said I’d never be a teacher, I was done with Alaska, and I even thought fly fishing was unnecessarily difficult, maybe even stupid. I spent summers working in Washington D.C. then a decade in California until I walked through the door at Kayhi—a teacher who loves to fly fish. 

So here are a few thoughts to close out this phase of your education and to start your journey. 

Number 1: Serve

“Find your passion” is nuanced advice. You don’t want to spend your 20s inactive, hoping a passion will be delivered like an Amazon package and expect that your life will be forever easy and fun once the universe fulfills your order. It won’t. A passion must be provoked by meeting people and having rich experiences that help you develop the skills needed to take advantage of interesting opportunities. You’re not behind if you don’t know what you want to do. But you won’t  find it without searching. 

It will also look different than what you expect. You’ll likely discover it’s less about a thing and more about how you live. If you work for KPU you’re not passionate about repairing downed power lines in a storm at 2 a.m.. Firefighters, law enforcement and military service members aren’t passionate about responding to people in distress or dangerous situations. Nurses aren’t passionate about treating sick kids. Commercial fishermen aren’t passionate about 30 knot winds.

What they feel is a sense of satisfaction and purpose for doing a job that serves the community. There is real meaning in their lives. They, and many others, take pride in being essential parts of our society. 

Make an impact with your talents and skills. Add value to your community wherever that ends up being.  

Number 2: Care about what people think

The right people of course. Your creative, productive allies will help you cultivate strengths and address weaknesses. If you spend your time with people who have vision, who value work, and embody the values you want to have, you will absorb those traits. 

It’s tempting to collaborate with enablers but don’t.  Do what you’re capable of doing, not the minimum required. Whether that’s in your astronomy class, apprenticeship or while fixing the AC on a house in Phoenix, know that how you do this work is a reflection of your character and it’s the best way to new opportunities because character and reputation echo in the community. 

You aren’t perfect. You won’t be perfect. But your friends, your family, your colleagues, your future spouse, your future kids, will need you to be dependable. So be ready when you’re called upon.

Most of you have seen the James Clear quote in my classroom, “Everything you do is a vote for the type of person you want to be.” 

Number 3: Learn

Half of college graduates find careers outside of their major. That doesn’t mean they chose the wrong major. It means they reached for something, found something else, learned a new skill set,  and started to make their living. Your most precious resources are your individuality, your creativity, and your unique way of seeing the world. New skills will amplify your strongest attributes and provide fulfilling opportunities. 

Finally, don’t ever, no matter what, let AI or strangers on social media dictate your life, tell you who you are, or what’s real. Social media and AI flatten character and level the texture that makes you special.  Look around. This is real. ChatGPT can’t comprehend the frustration of typing essays on a chromebook that doesn’t  hold power or have a working H key. Claude can only guess at what it feels like to have palm sweat, back sweat, or both. 

Large Language Models can’t properly articulate how much it meant to us teachers to have you show up on time and care; to do your best even if it wasn’t your strongest subject; especially 1st and 5th hour on sunny days. 

Artificial intelligence doesn't have the soul required to truly explain the feeling your family will have when you turn your tassel and throw your cap; or when you leave home to make it on your own.  

Those are the details, the good, the bad and the inbetween, that make life precious so avoid looking at a screen for answers or meaning. 

Hit the road and visit your buddy in Texas. Turn off your phone and get a strawberry Celsius boba lotus chai with a friend. Don’t google why Georgia is called the Peach State, find a farmer's market and figure it out for yourself. 

Congratulations, thank you for everything you gave to this school and this community. 

Later, see ya. 

On Step Alaska: Jonathan, thanks for being on the podcast. Nice to meet you.

Kriess-Tompkins: Yeah, thanks for having me, Jeff.

On Step Alaska: So, grew up in Sitka. You graduated from Sitka High School in 2007. You got right into public policy. What was it that got you interested in state politics?

Kriess-Tompkins: I first got interested when I was an eighth grader at Blatchley Middle School. So it dials back the clock to when it all sort of got going, and I can’t quite explain it, but I was young and I guess kind of curious, and the internet was starting to unlock a lot of access to information at that time. You know, 2002 — early days of the internet. And I just discovered electoral politics, became very, very interested and learned everything I possibly could. And so I had gotten involved in some campaigns and volunteered through my time in Sitka and stayed involved when I was out in college, and ultimately got a couple of recruitment calls when I was a senior in college about running for the legislature. And that’s kind of what catalyzed this whole thing.

On Step Alaska: Yeah, it’s kind of the sweet spot because the internet was a great tool and it was before social media, so it was like social media kind of eroded all the gains that we may have made by being able to be informed and educate yourself.

Kriess-Tompkins: Yeah, there was a lot of sort of tech utopian talk and thought in that time in the early and mid-2000s, because it’s like it opens up the world to you. And it certainly opened up the world to me — learning about all sorts of things and developing this interest, which has totally changed my life. But yeah, obviously some negative dynamics have also presented themselves through the same technology.

On Step Alaska: You were involved in coordinating a TEDx in Sitka — did I find that correctly?

Kriess-Tompkins: Oh wow, yeah — deep cut. Hopefully it’s not a bad memory. No, not a bad memory, it was a great event. I haven’t thought about that in a long time. Yeah, I helped coordinate TEDx Sitka. Gosh, I can’t even remember what year that would have been. Was I in college still? Or maybe I was out of college. I can’t remember. But yeah, I’ve always been a curious person, interested in learning. It was sort of a format to bring together different speakers and presenters on all sorts of subjects. I was just excited about the idea. So I pulled together some people, we pulled together some money, we made it happen. It was just a great one-off project way back when.

On Step Alaska: 2012.

Kriess-Tompkins: Wow, that’s crazy because that’s the year I ran for the legislature. I guess I forgot about that. So I was doing TEDx Sitka while I was campaigning, which in hindsight is insane. But I think I had gotten TEDx Sitka going before I even thought about running for the legislature. So I was already committed to that project. And then the whole legislative thing kind of fell out of the sky.

On Step Alaska: That’s funny. When I look back on my teaching career, I would think there’s no way I could forget kids’ names or when certain events happened. But I look back and after a while, it’s like, yeah, that was a decade ago. So, you’re running for governor now. And I got some questions for you regarding that. Because you’ve been in Sitka, you grew up in Sitka. Southeast Alaska has shifted from timber to tourism. Sitka lost its mill. Ketchikan lost its mill. You’ve seen the transition from timber to tourism. Sitka has been pretty cautious and purposeful in its relationship with tourism. So as governor, what could you do to help support local economies without overwhelming the infrastructure or eroding the local experience?

Kriess-Tompkins: I think local voice is really important. And people who live in tourism communities should have a seat at the table at all times. I mean, overall, I feel like Southeast Alaska has navigated tourism reasonably well. Sitka certainly made some choices, but I think has ultimately found a compromise that by and large is working. I mean, there have been some growing pains in recent years. But I think it’s a positive industry for Southeast Alaska and for Alaska. The pulp mill closed when I was five years old, and I think it was kind of like a sky-is-falling moment for Sitka way back then. But tourism has in a big way filled the void. And I think there’s a good argument that there’s more prosperity in Sitka because of the tourism industry than there might have been in some alternate reality. Not to say there aren’t problems — cost of living, housing, all sorts of things. But I just think it’s really important that local residents have a seat at the table in terms of how the industry shows up in a community. There’s a lot of outside interests, a lot of outside businesses. Everybody kind of wants to get their hand on it because it’s a pretty good growing sector. And so it can be really tempting to just try to get as many tourists as possible, and then the local experience gets put on the back burner. So there’s a good balance that needs to be struck.

On Step Alaska: Yeah, absolutely. I think that’s well summarized. So when you look back at the 70s and 80s with the oil going, there were 2 million barrels a day — now the pipeline is at about 500,000 barrels a day. But increasing production is not a matter of turning on the knob. So as far as state finances, what’s a realistic financial path forward? At the state level, it’s mostly oil production and the Permanent Fund interest. What can we do going forward? As governor, what are you going to try to accomplish to get us on financially responsible ground?

Kriess-Tompkins: I think it’s really important we close some tax loopholes that currently exist on the books right now. One of the things that really jumps out to me is that right now, one of our two major oil and gas producers — Hilcorp — doesn’t contribute to Alaska through corporate income tax the way every other large corporation in Alaska, including notably ConocoPhillips, contributes to the state. And so I think it’s just a matter of basic fairness. If you have two coffee shops on Main Street and one is paying sales tax and the other isn’t, even though they’re doing the exact same thing, it just doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. And it’s not just an academic objection — the amount of money you’re talking about is between $100 and $200 million a year, which is multiples of what the ferry system budget costs every year. So it’s real money.

I think there are some other aspects of our oil tax system that we should look at to make sure the state is getting its fair share. The North Slope is a resource that the state of Alaska owns. We are the owners and we should be looking out for a maximum return. In fact, the Constitution tells us that is our fiduciary obligation. On the Permanent Fund, I have really supported managing it for the long term and making sure the principal is protected and the fund can continue to grow. Because in the long term, the Permanent Fund is going to be a huge piece of balancing the budget. The fact that it’s $85-86 billion right now is because we have conservatively managed the fund and let it grow. I think it’s incredibly important we continue to do that, and that will set up the state in the medium and long-term future in a really good way.

On Step Alaska: There’s a huge windup for this question. Along that same thread, the Permanent Fund was created in 1976. The first deposit went in in 1977. Alaska got rid of its income tax in 1980. Governor Jay Hammond didn’t like the idea, but didn’t veto it — I was looking at an old transcript where he said he regretted that later. The dividend check started in 1982. Alaskans really liked the Permanent Fund Dividend checks, and there’s no sales tax, no income tax. The financial strains have really hurt infrastructure and education pretty much everywhere. I’m a teacher, so obviously I see the education part very closely, but families in all sectors face a lot of uncertainty. Some legislators say we’ve been right-sizing with a lot of the cuts that have been made over the last decade. But with inflation, many Alaskans also think we have gone past right-sizing and are cutting really deeply. So taxes are obviously not popular, and the Permanent Fund is really popular. How do you navigate that? And how can you get bipartisan give and take? Is bipartisan cooperation possible on these state financial issues?

Kriess-Tompkins: Yeah, I think these big questions all have this sort of tension — revenues, budget cuts, Permanent Fund dividend. It’s not just a simple two-dimensional question. There are multiple dimensions to the state budget, which in many ways makes Alaska’s budget a more complicated beast to tackle than other state budgets. Basically, you have to broker a multi-way compromise in order to sustainably and durably balance the Alaska budget. But in my last term in office in 2021 and 2022, the governor and legislative leadership were in an impasse. We were on the precipice of a government shutdown. And there was a bipartisan group of legislators from the House and Senate who were tasked with figuring out a grand compromise of sorts. I was the co-chair of that task force on the House side. We worked really hard. It was a very ideologically diverse group with very different perspectives on what right-size government looks like, what kinds of taxes do or don’t make sense, how big or small the Permanent Fund dividend should be. But ultimately, the eight of us — from Mike Shower and Shelley Hughes on the right to Jesse Kiehl in Juneau on the left, about as big an ideological spectrum as you’ll find among legislators — agreed on a consensus set of recommendations that would have balanced the budget. I’m not saying that exact set of recommendations is the be-all, end-all skeleton key to the state budget. But I do think through reasoned conversation and a deliberate process where all parties feel like they can trust the process, we actually can answer these big questions and get to compromise and consensus.

On Step Alaska: You were a representative from 2013 to 2022. How long did it take you to kind of find your place at the table? Is there a table? Are there different tables? How were you accepted and how did you get involved in some of these bigger conversations?

Kriess-Tompkins: I think it takes a term or two in the legislature — two to four years — to really get up to speed, generally speaking. Sometimes people enter the legislature having worked there as a staffer before, so the learning curve is a bit more accelerated for those folks. But yeah, I was starting from scratch. Honestly, I’m not sure I’d even set foot inside the Capitol before I was elected, even though I grew up in Sitka and it’s right there. So I was in sponge mode for the first couple of years, really just trying to listen and learn and develop trust-based relationships. I didn’t want to come in throwing bombs and grenades and making bombastic declarations — that just wasn’t my style. After that first term or two, then you start to really make moves and try to get things done. I did actually pass some legislation in my freshman term, but my mindset was mostly listen and learn. And then over the last six years, I was maybe a bit more purposeful in trying to accomplish some objectives in the legislature.

On Step Alaska: Do you still have good relationships with some of the current serving members? And do you think it would be pretty easy to re-engage in those negotiations?

Kriess-Tompkins: I do. Yeah, I keep up with a lot of the current legislators, including folks who’ve gotten elected after I left in 2022. And I mean, I think that’s incredibly important. The current administration, I think, has fallen short for Alaska in so many ways. Arguably the biggest way is just the almost non-existent relationship between the governor and the legislature. Non-existent is maybe even a gentle way of phrasing it — it’s a negative relationship. There’s active distrust. And so when you have two branches of government that can’t work together to solve problems, bad stuff happens. And lo and behold, a lot of bad stuff has happened in Alaska over the last five to eight years.

On Step Alaska: The arguments about preservation, conservation, and use have been going on for decades. Do you think the modern iteration of that — because of social media and the internet — has made things more difficult, more volatile? Are people more performative for social media? Has that lower-48 political divisiveness come up here and impacted the legislature, or do you think Alaska has been able to keep that at bay a little bit?

Kriess-Tompkins: I would give two answers. In a relative sense, I think Alaska is probably doing better than most of the rest of the country. There’s still an Alaska factor that comes into play in the legislature and our political process. It’s sort of like there’s a set of Alaska issues — people will approach politics here as Alaskans rather than as members of a political party or some other affiliation. And that’s good. But the second answer is, looking at how Alaska politics has changed over time, there has totally been this sort of backsliding or devolution towards a more cats-and-dogs kind of politics. As you put it, the internet and social media in particular has made the world smaller, which in many ways is incredible. But it’s also kind of blurred a lot of the lines that make different communities unique and created a more cookie-cutter, uniform kind of politics — nationalized politics, in other words. I think broadly speaking, that’s kind of a negative thing. And we have totally felt that and experienced that, even if we’re still better off than most other parts of the country.

On Step Alaska: Yeah, it’s a tough thing. Obviously when it comes to taxes and trying to create more revenue, that’s been a discussion that’s happened for a long time. But now with being so completely dependent on oil — what is it, about 95% of our revenue is either from production itself or from earnings on the Permanent Fund — tourism, while incredibly important for local communities, doesn’t provide much at all for the state to fund education or infrastructure. We built so much in the 80s and 90s and now we have buildings in rough shape. But if you start mentioning taking away part of the Permanent Fund, that gets around on social media fast. Or an income tax or a sales tax — Anchorage doesn’t have a sales tax, but Ketchikan already has 6.5%. It’s got to be a tough thing when you’re trying to take all these variables and come up with a solution, but anything you say can be used against you. So how do you campaign and be honest without making a misstep?

Kriess-Tompkins: I mean, there’s a part of your mind that’s always just kind of aware of how stuff can get distorted, clipped and chopped up and put on repeat on the internet. I think the biggest defense against that is you just develop your own reputation and people sort of trust you and know that you take a thoughtful, reasonable approach — which is something you have to build over time, over many years. And if you’re successful in doing that, I think that provides some Teflon and some defense against getting attacked in 140 characters or whatever the flavor of social media attack happens to be. I think ultimately your word, your reputation — in Alaska it’s small enough that people know their elected officials. That was always the way I approached it in my time in the legislature.

On Step Alaska: What’s something that you wish people would know about that financial situation that would really help conversations going forward?

Kriess-Tompkins: Ooh. I mean, this is my soapbox issue — although maybe sandbox works too. The Permanent Fund. And I don’t think Alaskans realize that the Permanent Fund is not really permanent, as the name would suggest. What I mean by that is because of this sort of seemingly obscure account structure, when the Permanent Fund was originally set up, a pretty major chunk of the fund — anywhere between 10 and 25% — and 10 or 25% of $86 billion is a lot of money — is vulnerable to appropriation at any moment in time from a simple majority of the legislature. So I think when Alaskans think about the Permanent Fund, they think, oh, it’s all locked up, it’s a nest egg, it’s an endowment. You couldn’t spend it down for whatever flavor-of-the-day project or idea might be popular. But it’s not as invulnerable as I think a lot of people believe. Because there’s such a major chunk of money in the fund that could be spent by the legislature — again, simple majority, at any time — there’s just a lot of risk there. And as the state’s finances have gotten more fraught and it’s been harder to make ends meet year to year, I think there’s greater and greater vulnerability that those tens of billions of dollars will get spent by the legislature. Because it’s easier to grab that money out of the Permanent Fund than it is to cut education, which people definitely don’t like right now in Alaska, or raise taxes, which people also don’t like. If you could just go into the Permanent Fund and grab a couple hundred million dollars to bail you out of an imbalanced budget, that’s a tempting option. I’m very, very worried — it hasn’t happened yet, mind you — but the legislature, including while I was there, came very, very close to doing that multiple times. And I think it’s just a matter of time before that does happen. And once it happens the first time, it just gets so much easier, and then next thing you know you’ve spent down the fund. That is the absolute worst long-term thing that could happen to Alaska.

On Step Alaska: Yeah. That’s a pretty basic financial principle — if you don’t have as much money in the bank, you won’t earn as much interest. If you’re going to retire, you can’t be spending down your retirement. I think another big fear would be if you go down the tax road, where does the income tax stop? Once there is one, even if it’s very small to start, can we trust people down the road to not increase it? And people are very wary of how taxes are spent — they look at the federal government and the amount of waste and corruption that people cite there and assume it’s the same at every level in every state. But that might not be true. It doesn’t seem like there are extra billions of dollars being wasted somewhere in Alaska. Things seem pretty lean as it is.

Kriess-Tompkins: Yeah, I agree entirely.

On Step Alaska: Moving to another hot topic issue, especially here in Southeast Alaska — fishing is a critical part of local economies and people are worried about populations. People often point to trawlers for at least a share of the responsibility. Where do you stand on helping ensure salmon populations? It’s obviously a very complex issue with a lot of variables, but what would you do to support the fishing industry?

Kriess-Tompkins: Supporting fishing was a through line of my 10 years in the legislature. I’m pretty hardcore when it comes to supporting fishing communities. There were more limited entry fishing permits in my district than any district in Alaska. And the island communities I represented were totally dependent on fishing. I spent a couple summers deckhanding on trollers out of Sitka — trollers, not trawlers. I just want to differentiate since it’s a subtle vowel difference, and because the power troll fleet is only in Southeast Alaska, the rest of the state is less familiar with that gear group.

So, very familiar with the industry and how important it is to Alaska. I served on the fisheries committee for all 10 years I was in the legislature. I was very active on Board of Fish nominations and confirmation votes and really advocated hard for what I felt was balanced representation on the Board of Fish. I feel like we’ve lost balance on the Board of Fish. It’s now really dominated by — to put it bluntly — the Kenai River Sportfishing Association. They should absolutely have a voice in the process, but I don’t think the process should be dominated by any one interest group or sector. And southeast Alaska doesn’t have a seat on the Board of Fish — that’s screwed up. Going back through statehood, I’m not sure there has been another time in history where Southeast Alaska has not had a seat on the Board of Fish, for a region with as much population and as much dependence on fisheries as ours. That needs to be changed.

When you talk about balance on the Board of Fish, it means all user groups should have a say — thoughtful, independent-minded people making tough decisions, with diversity in terms of geography. There’s a lot of local knowledge in each of these regions about how fisheries work. If you have regions like Southeast that are shut out because they don’t have a member, I think that’s pretty wrong and it needs to be fixed.

I also really worry about the out-migration of fishing permits out of Alaska and going to Seattle, going to the lower 48. That was something I was really active on in the legislature. Every permit that leaves Alaska is a small business leaving the state. It’s GDP leaving the state. It’s employment and deckhand jobs that leave the state. The economic multiplier effects are powerful. It should be a state priority to get as many Alaska fishing permits in the hands of and fished by Alaskans, full stop. Having a more aggressive approach to getting permits — and also federal quota for black cod and halibut — in the hands of Alaskans is just a no-brainer economic development priority.

And then on federal fisheries and bycatch and the trawl fleet — I organized a sign-on letter to support more conservative Chinook salmon bycatch caps in the Bering Sea two months after I was sworn in in February 2013, and was active through all my 10 years in the legislature on bycatch and fisheries issues. The crash in salmon runs is complex and there are a lot of factors at play. I’ve always supported taking a more conservation-oriented approach toward bycatch and reducing habitat impacts. And also, I don’t think we can say it’s all because of one thing when we look at the crashed salmon stocks in the Yukon and the Kuskokwim. Both are true. I support and have worked very hard to reduce bycatch and the impacts of trawling. And when thinking about these stocks that have crashed, we also have to look at all possible factors. So it’s an and-both kind of equation. Reducing bycatch and habitat impact from bottom trawling is incredibly important, and I’ve been very active on that all 10 years I was in the legislature and actually since as well.

On Step Alaska: You mentioned this earlier, but housing and cost of living is something that is very important to Alaska. It’s very expensive to live here, especially in some of these rural communities where you can’t drive somewhere else and there’s no road connection. That’s also not something the legislature or governor can just magically change. So what ideas do you have to help with cost of living and home availability?

Kriess-Tompkins: We need to get more homes built, period. Build baby build — I guess that’s the slogan. From a policy perspective, that’s the high-level goal. More homes. Now, there’s a lot of things the state can do.

One, the state should make state land available, especially if it’s right in communities — communities like Ketchikan, communities like Sitka. The state is a large landowner. It varies region by region, city by city. But there are large parcels and tracts of state land that are very developable and in the heart or very proximate to population centers in Alaska. I think the state should look at making that land available for housing development to add more supply to the market.

Number two, the state has very powerful financing instruments in Alaska Housing Finance Corporation and also AIDEA, the Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority. I think the full force and power of the state should be focused on tackling the housing problem — getting more housing built and using the financing strength of those state corporations to be part of the solution. That is a super high priority and a real no-brainer.

Lastly, there are regulatory barriers to building lower-cost and affordable housing. Modular housing, trailers — a lot of that has for a long time been a source of low-cost housing. There’s a certain social stigma around trailers, but if you look at the housing market, they’re an incredibly important source of affordable housing. For people who need a roof over their heads, that is a super obvious choice. But as a country, and to some extent as a state, we have made it very hard for modular and manufactured housing to get built and put into communities. If you look around any community in Alaska, I challenge you to find new trailers or new manufactured housing that has been put into service in the last 20 years. We’re just slowly winnowing down this really important part of the housing equation. As trailers, manufactured housing, or tiny homes are made so difficult to build, we’re reducing the supply of lower-income affordable housing. It shouldn’t be a shock when that forces some people onto the streets.

So I think the state should make manufactured housing legal again, as it were — I know that’s a little glib, but there are just so many regulatory barriers. I own two tiny houses myself in Sitka and I can attest what a nightmare they are to get legally permitted. It is insane how difficult it is to create a legal structure that is small. It’s all well-intentioned regulation, but it totally backfires.

On Step Alaska: When my parents moved up in 1986, we lived in teacher housing and the teacher housing in Klawock were trailers. And the whole idea was that this is where you started. After a couple of years, you’d have enough money to move up. Like you get your condo first, you’re young, you have your career, you start off with a condo, then you leverage that, make a little equity, and trade up to a larger home. But without that intermediate or beginner home, you have a career and then you’re staring at really expensive rent with no equity being built. The starter house is $450,000 or $270,000 but needs $200,000 of maintenance on top of that. It’s just unaffordable for so many people.

Kriess-Tompkins: Yeah. It’s a huge problem. Every community in Alaska is facing it right now. It’s got to get solved. I think that stigma — I didn’t really consider it before — became much more prevalent in the last 20 or so years. People didn’t want to be seen as living in a trailer. But if you have good trailers, good modular homes, condos available — there’s absolute dignity in that, and you can use it as a stepping stone. I think that’d be a great thing going forward. But again, it takes a lot of pieces to get there.

Kriess-Tompkins: Totally. I couldn’t agree more.

On Step Alaska: So Tony Knowles was the last Democrat governor of Alaska. His term ended in 2002. Does that represent a challenge, or is that just simply a fact?

Kriess-Tompkins: Well, I mean, I think Governor Knowles was an amazing governor. That’s a great eight-year legacy that still lives on in Alaska in all sorts of ways. Governor Walker was an independent, elected in 2014. He beat a Republican incumbent. So from the perspective of can people besides Republicans get elected — I think the answer is yes. And Governor Walker is proof positive of that. Congresswoman Peltola got elected two different times statewide as a Democrat. Alaska is just a more competitive state statewide than it was 10 or 20 years ago. It’s an open seat — there’s no incumbent. If anything, it’s kind of an anti-incumbent-party situation because Governor Dunleavy, per the polling data, is among the most unpopular governors in the nation right now. So I think there’s a bit of a cloud because people are not very happy with how things have gone under his tenure. I think it’s a changed election and there’s a lot of opportunity, and we’re excited to realize it.

On Step Alaska: Where’s Alaska in 10 years?

Kriess-Tompkins: I think Alaska in 10 years is a politically mixed state where all elections are going to be pretty competitive. And I’m really hoping on a state level that we’ve solved some of these big questions — gotten education back on track, reinvested in our schools, rebuilt the university so it can be an engine for young people and talent and entrepreneurship and innovation. That we have a diversified economy. And I think there are a lot of ways that can look: year-round tourism including winter tourism, international tourism, growing the logistics sector in Anchorage and Fairbanks with all the international cargo, value-added fisheries, getting the maximum value out of our $5 to $6 billion fishery sector, and continuing to responsibly develop the mineral and oil and gas resources we currently have. So doing what we’re already doing well and getting the maximum value out of it, and then continuing to push in new directions that set the state up in a sustainable way long-term. That’s the Alaska I would like to see in 10 years.

On Step Alaska: What excites you most about the potential to be governor?

Kriess-Tompkins: To solve problems. I’m so excited to solve things that I think have really clear, tractable solutions and just require that kind of problem-solving energy. It’s like all these problems are nails and I’m totally a hammer mentality. I want to get education forward-funded. I want schools to get reinvested. I want the Permanent Fund to be permanent and constitutionally protected from overspending. I want to see the veto override threshold lowered to two-thirds so that there’s balance between the executive and legislature. And on and on, big and small — I want to see more public use cabins built so you don’t have to stay up till midnight six months before the reservation window opens to get one. Things big and small in our communities, there are just so many things that we can get done that I think there is political consensus and alignment to accomplish with the legislature. It just requires some problem-solving energy. And I just love getting things done. I think being governor is the ultimate position to try to solve problems and get things done.

On Step Alaska: So you think there’s a viable way forward so that we can address the education and infrastructure issues and we’re not in dire straits? You see some hope?

Kriess-Tompkins: Absolutely. Absolutely.

On Step Alaska: What else would you want to add? What have I missed? What do you want to pitch?

Kriess-Tompkins: No, great questions. I’m really happy with how the campaign is going. We’re sort of running on rocket fuel. We’ve been in the race now for two and a half months — we’re one of the last candidates to get in — but we’ve raised $1.3 million. We’ve raised more from donors than any other candidate by a long measure. We have more donors — I’m quite confident — than any other campaign, 2,000-plus donors. And I’m just excited about the vibe that we’re putting out, this kind of high-energy, be-everywhere-all-the-time approach. We’re having fun while we’re doing it, but we’re super focused on winning in August and November. Yeah, excited for the opportunity to share a little more on the podcast.

On Step Alaska: Well, thanks a lot for being on here. Really appreciate your time.

Kriess-Tompkins: Yeah, thanks so much, Jeff.

On Step Alaska — Interview with Click Bishop

On Step Alaska: Click Bishop, thanks for taking some time out of your day and being on here.

Bishop: Greatly appreciated. Thank you for having us on, Jeff.

On Step Alaska: So you’ve been in Alaska since statehood. You’re a third generation gold miner. You helped build the pipeline. Those are some serious Alaska check marks. Why did you get into politics?

Bishop: I didn’t. It got into me. I ran my union’s apprenticeship program for 20 years, the operating engineers and had the best job in Alaska, I thought, and without a doubt. And then a woman by the name of Sarah Palin got elected governor and called and left a message on our answering machine for me to call her. So I did. And long story short, I, with some soul searching and some prayer, I got, took her up on her offer. She said, you need to do your public service. And so went to Juneau in 06 in December. Anyway, got on the payroll 07 January. And the rest is history. Worked for her and Governor Parnell. And so almost six years in the Department of Labor. And as commissioner, put together the pipeline training plan, the gas line training plan, and it’s subsequently been updated through the Walker administration. But, you know, I had worked for two other governors, pro bono, Tony Knowles and Governor Murkowski, on both of their gas line plans, if you will. And why is that? That’s because, you know, I know the labor side of the street. So, yeah, there you go. That’s how I got into politics. And then I retired as commissioner and I was asked by some senators to run for the Senate, you know, redistricting 2010 decennial census. And they come out with a new set of maps in 12 and ran for the Senate. And so 12 years in the Senate and some people had been after me over the years to take a shot at running for governor. And hardest decision I ever made because my Senate district is a lot of family and a lot of friends and I loved it. And hopefully I’ve got an opportunity to serve them again and the rest of Alaskans.

On Step Alaska: You represented a large swath of interior Alaska, Canada, almost to Norton Sound. How did that experience help prepare you to address the myriad issues of both city and rural life?

Bishop: Well, I’ve got a, I think I’ve got a, without a doubt, I’ve got a good, deep understanding of rural Alaska. My wife’s people, you know, they come from over on the Yukon and, you know, as a working person, well, let me go back to, you know, how did I go to school and catch a can? My dad was a superintendent for Green Construction Company, and we worked all over Alaska. They had a southeast division that was headquartered in Juneau. And so there was a lot of work in southeast in the 60s. So I got to see the panhandle, if you will, as a child. And then the Alaska Highway and rural Alaska, did rural airports down on the lower Yukon and worked all over the state, you know, following my dad. And then I did the same thing in a lot of the same communities 20 years later as an adult. So that’s, I’m very well versed urban versus rural. And you’re right, my Senate district, my old Senate district that I was fortunate to represent, if it was a state, it was the third largest state in the union.

On Step Alaska: And you are correct. So you’ve been in, you’ve seen a lot of Alaska. I kind of, I guess, romanticize — a lot of us romanticize — that Alaska, we’ve always had these arguments about what to do with resources and how much we should extract. But it seems like now the proliferation of the internet and social media has kind of changed the dynamics. You mentioned that you worked for Palin and you worked for the last Democratic governor, Tony Knowles. Were things a little bit more cordial between the Republicans and Democrats back then? Is it more divisive now or what’s the general feeling like?

Bishop: Oh, so I just want to be clear. I worked for Tony Knowles pro bono for his administration because his gas line was my way or the highway. That was their theme in 99. And so that was pro bono work. But I did help his administration form what was now the Alaska Workforce Investment Board. Then it was called the Alaska Human Resource Investment Council, then spun off the AWIB board. But to answer your question, the social media — in my opinion, you know, I grew up watching Neil Armstrong take the first step on the moon in Tongass apartments on the 11th floor on a black and white TV. And, you know, I’m a student of history. My mother always said I was born a hundred years too late. I’d been better served coming over the Chilkoot Pass in 1898 with the rest of the Stampeders. I really believe that. I grew up with Walter Cronkite, Huntley, Brinkley, that genre of news. A quote I like to use is a Lyndon Johnson quote, and you’ll remember he didn’t run for re-election. And it was because of a Walter Cronkite broadcast one night, and he famously said, when I’ve lost Walter Cronkite, I’ve lost the electorate. So, consequently, he didn’t run for a second term, and Richard Nixon was president. So I believe it has definitely changed. You know, we were doing polling in the Senate majority over the years, and we put these survey questions together. And our IT resident expert, if you will, said, Click, people got the attention span of nine seconds. You know, a goldfish has got more attention span than a human does now. And then I heard another term — Shannon and I were putting together a film and a guy used a term called doom scrolling. You know, they just sit up and doom scroll. I really believe that the internet and social media, it’s done a lot of good things, but I think it’s had a negative effect on politics. It disincentivizes working together. And it seems like there are members who have been a part of bipartisan cooperation and they haven’t seen it as a negative. And that’s kind of unfortunate because Alaska is so diverse and we need conversations. We need bipartisan support and agreement. But if it’s not incentivized, then people are going to go with what works.

On Step Alaska: So how, when you were working with people across the aisle, like, was that received well? Was that just kind of how things were done? And how do you think that would work going forward?

Bishop: Well, I think, you know, the one man crusades went out in the 12th century and, like I said, I’m 68 years old, be 69 in July. And I go back and I’ve studied history. I go back to the Constitution and the Constitutional Convention at Sinner’s Hall in Fairbanks — 1955. And in some of the broad sweeps, if you will, Fairbanks got the university, the capital stayed in Juneau, the Bush and Fairbanks and Southeast always stuck together. And I’m still subscribed to that kind of methodology, that mentality. There wasn’t but 165,000 people in the state, I don’t believe, in 1964. So, yeah, I have seen the state grow. People had to work together because nobody had a clear, dominant majority. And, you know, John Butrovich — his name’s on a building here in Fairbanks at the campus. Before Lyman Hoffman’s tenure of now upholding the record, he was the longest serving Republican senator at that time. And Senator Butrovich, he caucused with bipartisan coalitions. So I work well with you from the other side where I can work with you, and where I can’t work with you, I respectfully can’t work with you. I don’t go scorched earth, you know, like it is so much today. Because politics in Juneau, that building revolves around relationships. And my memory’s pretty long. What’s the purpose of going scorched earth on individuals? Because you don’t know in the next organization how it’s going to look. I’ll use the analogy I used to use with my apprentices. I would say, always treat people with respect. Just because you’re standing on top of the ditch and you’re the supervisor this week on this job, treat your crew with respect. Because when you get this job completed and you go back to the hall and sign up and you go out on the next job, you might be in the bottom of the ditch. That’s just how the mop flops in the construction business. So treat people with respect. I’ve always done that. I don’t make anybody’s cornflakes soggy, because you could need somebody in a future organization to move your legislation.

On Step Alaska: One of the most contentious issues, if not the most contentious issue, is about revenue. In 1988, there were 2 million barrels going through the pipeline. Today, it’s about 500,000. Increasing production is not just a matter of turning a knob so that more oil flows. So what can we do about production to help generate revenue so it’s not just from our investments in the Permanent Fund?

Bishop: Good question. And I’m glad you jumped right on that one. You’re right, and you’ve got to have a full understanding of the oil and gas business. I went to work right out of high school on TAPS and the North Slope. If you’ve never been there, it’s not West Texas. There’s not a road through every quarter section. In West Texas, you can pull in with a rig — just watch Landman, that’s exactly how it rolls down there. It takes days to move a rig on the North Slope. It takes years to make a discovery through to first production, if you don’t get challenged getting all your permits and getting final investment decisions from your investors. It takes about, on a good field, 10 years from discovery to first production. Because it’s expensive and the Arctic is a challenging environment. We’ve lost 40-plus field days since I started working up there in the 70s because of climate change, and it’s real. We used to get tundra permits into November 1st of December. Now you’re not getting tundra permits until January. So when you’ve made a discovery and you’ve got to build a pipeline, you’ve got to have a foot of frost, a foot of cover to be able to get over the tundra. You’ve got to build your ice roads, mine your gravel, put it into your infrastructure. So you’ve compressed your timeline, and it takes more people faster to get the same amount of work done that we did 40 years ago.

So the good news is for Alaska — and February 28th should be a wake-up call to everybody. Two exciting discoveries: you’ve got PICA, which is a Santos project, and you’ve got Quokka, another lease on state land. And then Willow, that’s a ConocoPhillips play. When those fields are in full development and production, there are estimates that we’ll be back up to 750,000 barrels a day. And with the president’s executive order 14153 to expand lease sales in the NPRA, we saw a good one here a month and a half ago.

I want to go to February 28th when the events started taking place in Iran. I look at the oil price in the morning. I look at it at night. There’s a website I look at and read the oil and gas news globally. The oil supply is choked to the tune of about 25% right now, and it’s really hurting Southeast Asia. I had a friend of mine that was going to go to Korea, and they said, don’t come right now. We’re in a bind with our fuel. We’re asking people to stay home, use public transportation. Closer to home, we are really suffering out west. The Yukon River’s in good shape for fuel deliveries, but out west, up to Kobuk and other areas, fuel has been quoted at $12 a gallon. We had a refinery here in Fairbanks and it closed — over 10 years ago now. And something I want to get back to is energy security. We talk a lot about food security, very important here in Alaska, but I want to talk about energy security for Alaska, the United States, and Southeast Asia. We have the rule of law here in Alaska and in the United States. I want to fully engage in taking care of ourselves. I wish that refinery would have never left. And then Western Alaska wouldn’t have been in a bind.

If I was president of the United States, I’d bring all assets to bear to streamline and expedite, under national security, our development of our North Slope assets. We’ve got a heavy oil formation on the North Slope called UGNU. There’s 22 billion barrels in place. Now that sounds like a big number and it is, but the key number when you’re hearing forecasts from the United States Geological Survey and others is what is economically recoverable. Right now that UGNU formation, with the technology we have — and we’ve got an oil research center here at the university that’s been working with the North Slope producers — they’ve developed what I call the secret sauce. It’s a polymer that helps unlock that heavy oil and make it easier to pump. Right now they think they can recover a billion-plus barrels, and as technology improves, hopefully that number goes up. And there’s a very aggressive drilling season in that same formation that Santos and Conoco have hit at 5,000 feet. All that Prudhoe Bay first discovery oil was at 12,000 feet. They went all the way to the basement of the reservoir — that was an elephant field. But now they drilled right through that, and at 5,000 feet is where this formation sits, with a 180- to 190-foot pay zone. They drilled right through it and missed it. But we had a geologist from one of the majors come back as a wildcatter and made this discovery, and it’s been a game-changer on the North Slope. That trend line looks to run back east towards Point Thompson, and that would be good news. So there is aggressive exploration going to happen next winter, both east and west. You’ve got to put a drill bit in a reservoir to make a discovery.

On Step Alaska: Natural gas, and there’s some news about a gas pipeline. So what about that as a viable option for more revenue? And how do we incentivize this sort of production or even pipeline building without too much in the form of subsidies or tax breaks for the corporations that are drilling?

Bishop: Now that’s another good question. I’ll say that just to give a little background on gas on the North Slope, people say we’ve been trying to develop it since 1977. But it goes back further than that. I’ve got a document on the first gas off the North Slope — a proposed project from 1955 from the Umiat oil field, that’s 100 miles south of Prudhoe Bay. The Navy did a lot of work out there during World War II and subsequent years up until the 50s, and they wanted to bring natural gas to Fairbanks and down to the rail belt out of the Umiat field. So that’s how long we’ve been talking about getting gas off the North Slope, just to frame the conversation.

I worked in the pipeyard after TAPS construction, and we were sending all the equipment back to Moses Lake, Washington for a big auction. And my superintendent came to us after lunch and says, Click, you guys are going to be here for another two and a half years because the gas line pipe’s coming in six months. In 1977. So there’s been one, two — we’ve tried to get gas off the slope starting in 1977. And really, it’s a good thing that we didn’t back then, because if you would have started selling gas off the North Slope in ‘77, you would have stood a good chance to blow down your gas cap. We’re cycling eight and a half billion cubic feet every day, every 24 hours. And that keeps that reservoir pressure up, and oil is way more valuable than natural gas. It’s a good fuel source, there’s no doubt, but TAPS was built and when we built it, they were looking at getting about 9 billion barrels. And we just hit a milestone a couple months ago — we’re at 19 billion barrels produced. So there’s a lot more to get.

I’ve been gone for what, a year and a half, and Shannon’s had me stretched out all over the state going, going, going. I follow it, but I’m not into the details like I was. But I can tell you it’s got to be economic. Do I want a gas line? Absolutely. Just to frame it in a nutshell — who doesn’t, especially for in-state use and export? But I want to make sure that it’s economic for Alaska. I want it to be an asset to the treasury, not a liability.

On Step Alaska: It seems like if we look back in history — and it could be a romanticized view — there were some incredibly ambitious projects that were done, innovations that really helped our lives. But now it seems like with overruns that are expected, misappropriation of funds, infrastructure failures, states and the federal government just aren’t good at big projects. You pointed to California and the high-speed rail project or the EV charging stations. Do you think that it would be economical to put in a gas pipeline at this point? It seems like something we probably could have done in the 70s or 80s. Maybe I’m being cynical. What do you got?

Bishop: You’re not off. Major mega projects overrun, period. TAPS — the initial contract estimate was a billion to $2 billion. What was the final bill? Nine billion. So I asked a question in Senate Finance — it’s on the record, there’s a slide in the record. As a legislature, you have a fiduciary responsibility to the treasury and to the people of Alaska. Pipeline construction is part of my background. So I asked the question one day at Senate Finance to the consultants. I said, I need you to bring me a slide that shows the percentage of cost overrun on every LNG project on the planet that’s a billion dollars and above. About a week and a half later, they brought the slide to the Senate Finance table. And the bigger the project costs, the larger the percentage of overrun. The largest project on that slide overran 45%. Big projects overrun — that’s just the reality. There’s an article in the Alaska Beacon that cites estimates of between $46 billion and $57 billion for the gas line project. So as far as the economics go, in order to get Alaska out of its financial problems, there are ideas on both sides — cut or tax — but it’s got to be way more nuanced than that.

On Step Alaska: Alaskans like the Permanent Fund Dividend, we like not having a state sales tax, we like not having a state income tax, but the financial strains have hurt infrastructure and education pretty much everywhere. So how do we address our financial challenges?

Bishop: I’m going to talk about capital spending for education — deferred maintenance. It’s over $300 million. And to be fair, Senators Stedman and Hoffman, when they were co-chairs back in the 2007, 8, 9 timeframe — I was in the administration — that list was pretty high then too, over several hundred million. And we had a surplus and I believe they took that list to zero in one year, cleaned it off. And it wasn’t but several years later and boom, here you are, that list is growing again. So how do you address that?

There’s a line item, there’s an account called the Public School Trust Fund. Something I want to do is work with the legislature and our administration, if we’re fortunate enough to get there. It’s a half of a percent of rents and royalties on oil and gas and mining and minerals. The fund balance in there is not quite a billion dollars, but I want to work with lawmakers to increase that. I don’t know what the number is yet — is it another half a percent? Is it a percent and a half off of royalties? Because as we’re coming into the next phase, what I call an increase in production coming, I want to try to increase that multiplier to help with education funding, both the capital and the operating side inside the classroom.

We definitely need more money into the career and tech ed side of the education system. I’m a voc ed guy — CTE is the correct verbiage today. But back when I was working it hard, 75% of the kids that graduated high school needed to go on to a two-year AA degree or an apprenticeship route. The other 25% needed to go to college. And personally, I’d like to see more engineers going to college. I was able to help the university double the number of undergraduates when I was at the Department of Labor by putting RSA money into the mining, engineering, and civil program here in the UA system.

So there are a couple of ideas on how to raise more funds for education and then live within our means and keep growing the Permanent Fund. We’re at 86, 87 billion — get it up to 100, and then your POMV draw, you’re drawing four and a half to five billion a year. Your operating budget is north of five of general fund monies. And be efficient. There’s not a lot left to cut. There are some areas where we can be more efficient, but we’ve cut that thing to the bone. There’s not $800 million of waste, fraud, and abuse in the budget anywhere. I can tell you that.

On Step Alaska: Yeah, that’s the thing we’ve been talking about down here. Our financial issues are made worse by some local financial decisions. But then when you look statewide, it’s not just a Ketchikan school district issue — all across the state, you have school closures. The term “right sizing” had been thrown around for a bit and that was in the process of happening. And then you have enrollments down, but then you have inflation. It seems like we’re cutting down to the bone and we’re losing a lot of teachers. Class sizes are going to go up and our offerings might suffer. And that’s the problem when you can’t offer a robust curriculum for kids. I have some outstanding students that are seniors this year, and some of their favorite classes are also the trades. They’re going to go to college, they want to be engineers or doctors or nurses or whatever, but they really enjoy shop class. They really enjoy the auto tech classes. It just prepares kids for adult living across the board, rather than just for college. To have that cut or reduced — that’s a pretty tough thing.

Bishop: Yeah. And shop classes aren’t cheap. Your consumables are expensive — oxyacetylene, welding rod, all your gas supplies, your metals, the same for lumber. And I’m glad to hear your students who are wanting to go to a four-year degree are still interested in the trades. Because a trades person, and I tell kids this all the time, especially when I was doing outreach and recruitment for our apprenticeship program statewide — I always encouraged higher education. I grew up in this state before oil in my trade. It was a hundred-day construction season in the interior, and we made good wages, but you didn’t have a Prudhoe Bay to go to in the winter. My dad said something to me years and years ago as a young person. He says, in this state, pre-oil — and I think it’s just as true today — you’ve got to be a jack of all trades and master at none. Meaning, your four-year degree engineer with a shop class in high school can change a doorknob or change the oil in his automobile. You’re not going to get AI to do that for you. You still have to have somebody to be able to do the hands-on work, and trades people — you’re never out of a job. And I always encouraged people to learn how to weld. Mechanics and welding, you could pick up a newspaper in any community and there’s always a help wanted for a welder.

On Step Alaska: Yeah, having it so close — I lived in California out of college for a little bit, and there was such a detachment between the trades and the different economies, the different levels. Whereas here, kids grow up around logging families, people in the trades, someone who works at Vigor — you see how close it is and the value of it. It’s super important. It’s not that one is better than the other, it’s that they all complement each other and you have to have all those elements in order to have a good, functional community.

Bishop: You hit the nail on the head, took the words right out of my mouth. It takes all kinds to make the world go round.

On Step Alaska: What about fishing? Interior Alaska — for subsistence living, fishing is critical. Here in Southeast Alaska, it’s a massive industry. So what are your plans to support fisheries?

Bishop: Oh man, can we do another podcast on fish? I can’t cover this in 30 minutes. I’ll be brief, and I would like to come back and do another podcast on fish to really get into that conversation with you. When there’s a salmon steak or a halibut steak or a moose steak in every skillet, everybody’s happy. But then you come up here in the interior where we’re on a seven-year moratorium on king salmon — that’s a full life cycle — and that’s ingrained, that’s cultural. It goes back generationally here, going to fish camp and whatnot. We can’t fish. We’re trying to rebuild the run so we can have a subsistence season. It’s a deep subject.

I’m a firm believer in following the science. I’m also a firm believer in traditional knowledge. My mother-in-law used to tell me when I was a young man, Click, the cotton’s blowing off the trees — the king salmon are coming. Those kinds of things, that traditional knowledge, it’s important. You can’t snub the traditional knowledge of people who’ve been living on the land for 10,000 years here. But I’m a firm believer in following the science. I’m very pragmatic on this issue. A nine-second Facebook post isn’t going to solve the problem. And if there was an easy button, somebody would have pushed it a long time ago. If you want to have a deeper conversation about fish, I’d love that conversation.

On Step Alaska: I’ll move on to another topic. What about cost of living and home availability?

Bishop: Oh man, it’s expensive. Cost of living — energy prices are killing everybody right now. That’s probably the biggest driving factor. Can I ask you, Jeff, what’s your kilowatt hour at your meter for your home?

On Step Alaska: It costs me about $250 a month, and it’s been a little bit more expensive because we have a greenhouse and we’ve been raising some chicks and there’s some other things. But we have a heat pump and it’s about $100 a month usually when we’re not in high energy season.

Bishop: Come to Fairbanks. In the dead of winter it’s anywhere from $450 to $600. That’s what I want to solve. Are we going to do it overnight? No. But energy is another whole conversation. Energy is the biggest driver here in the interior and in the bush. It’s expensive to build. Four years ago we were in Nome and it was about $750 a square foot. What’s your barge window in Nome? Your barge window is from June-ish, and your last barge used to have to be headed south by October 15th. So barge freight’s expensive. But affordability is an issue as well, you know. These fuel prices are hurting everybody’s food bills right now.

On Step Alaska: What are you most proud of from the time that you’ve served, and what do you want to take into the governor’s mansion if you get elected?

Bishop: I want to take 20 years worth of experience and personal relationships, knowing where I can bring a cabinet together. I’m a very humble person, but I can bring an all-star cabinet to that administration. I know how the third floor should be run. I said this the other day — you’ve got to have five solid people joined at the hip in your administration if you want to get kicked off on the right foot with the legislature: a good chief of staff, a good deputy chief of staff, a good legislative director, an outstanding OMB director, and lastly an outstanding boards and commissions person. Those five people have to be joined at the hip. I had a governor call me one time and ask, Click, what do you look for in a commissioner of labor? And I told them — what you don’t want is the person who’s wanting the job. You want the person you’ve got to go chase and do your best sales pitch to get them on board.

I like the story of Jay Hammond and how he didn’t even think he would win. He was just able to be himself, going against some of these big figures, and he ends up being a pretty popular governor. I voted for him twice. I happen to know a friend of mine who was a deputy chief of staff and one of his chiefs of staff, and I think I’m a lot like Hammond. They had to almost hogtie him to get him in a suit for a press conference because he’d be in his office in just his wool pants and a sweater. And I had a chance to visit with the governor on several occasions after he was out of office. I really enjoyed visiting with him.

On Step Alaska: Where is Alaska in 10 years? It’s hard not to look at diminishing fish and our education and infrastructure challenges and not be somewhat pessimistic. Maybe four years — where’s Alaska at?

Bishop: I’m the eternal optimist. I can be standing in it clear up to my nose and it’s still a good day. That’s my psyche, that’s how I was raised. With the oil discoveries on the slope and production coming any day from PICA, and then Quokka will be the next one, and Willow coming online — those are positives. From a mining industry standpoint, we’ve got six major producing mines in the state and we need six more. Our Lieutenant Governor, Greta, she comes from a resource development background, and I want to tag team that. We just don’t need six more — we need six more at minimum. Alaska is the most underdiscovered, underexplored province in the United States. I want to work towards expanding that.

On Step Alaska: What excites you most about your team and your staff right now?

Bishop: Just the caliber of people on staff and volunteers that are standing at the ready, getting them harnessed and pulling in the right direction. I’m a policy geek, believe it or not. I get pretty focused on policy, and I guess that’s from my years in the legislature — but I was that way in my old job too. When I ran the apprenticeship program, I started my succession planning on leaving my old job at the training trust about three years before I knew I was going to execute. I started putting the pieces together. I’m a long-range thinker in that respect. I’m bullish on Alaska. I think you get the right administration in place that can work with the legislature.

I’d just like to say something about vetoes. Nobody’s asked us about vetoes on any of these. The veto is a tool, but to me I look at the veto pen kind of like you’ve been in a hotel and it says, in case of fire, break glass. I’m somebody that will work with you as hard as I can to find some compromise that we can both agree on, the administration and the legislature, so we don’t have to break the glass.

On Step Alaska: Yeah, I read a transcript from an interview with Governor Hammond and he didn’t want to sign the legislation that was getting rid of the income tax, but because it was so popular, he didn’t veto it. That was the self-awareness of what the people wanted. You can debate whether or not that was a good decision. There was so much money from the oil at that point it didn’t look like we needed that extra revenue, but to be self-aware and see what other people are doing — that’s leadership, not just doing what you feel like doing.

Bishop: Yeah, well, sometimes when you’re a chief executive, it could be the loneliest job in town. I just re-watched Churchill the other night. Man, that was the loneliest guy on the planet for a period of time in 1940. How would you like to have been in his shoes? Or Zelensky in this day and age — that’s real leadership.

On Step Alaska: Anything else you’d like to add?

Bishop: No, I just, I’d like to say thank you.

On Step Alaska: I would say the same thing to you. I appreciate you coming on. Some of these things are so complex it would be impossible to address them without doing a bit of a series. So maybe in the summer, as we get closer, we can hammer down some more details.

Bishop: Absolutely. And we’ll be in Ketchikan for the Blueberry Festival. Wouldn’t miss it for the world.

On Step Alaska: That’s the opening weekend of deer season, so we’ll see.

Bishop: I’m toast, I already — yeah, my wife really wants to get out and she didn’t get a deer last year. But there’s a long season, we’ve got time. How’s the king salmon fishing going down there right now?

On Step Alaska: We don’t have any now. It’s closed until the 15th. It’s a hatchery — the terminal run opens on the first, but it’s a very, very limited area for the terminal run. Outside waters it opens sooner and you can get your fish there. It’s all the fish going up the Unuk and those other rivers to Canada — they let them by first. I caught a 25-pound king in the Derby there in Ketchikan. I didn’t even make the board when I was a kid.

Yeah, when I first moved back here — I grew up on Prince of Wales Island and moved back to Ketchikan in 2013 — it was the last couple of years of the King Salmon Derby. Because of the populations, they don’t open the season until after the 15th. So they changed it to a Silver Salmon Derby in the late summer. It’s weird to be living through that transition. The fishing on the outside of Prince of Wales, those outside waters are still pretty good, but the fish are smaller, there are fewer of them, and you have those emergency closures sometimes or changing regulations. So all of a sudden someone who’s booked their ticket to come up can’t keep a king salmon — it’s pretty tough.

Bishop: Right. Well, Jeff, thank you.

On Step Alaska: Yep. Thank you. Appreciate it.

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https://open.spotify.com/episode/5yrpSzZTQk18m97G7a0EMD?si=eLFcAu3DQIq2NKznuS8PyA

Tom was the type of guy who had a fly rod spreadsheet. Not because he was pretentious, a collector, or wanted to gloat—he was just meticulous and organized more than he was driven, type A or compulsive.

He loved to grill and would crack open a Rainier and watch a show set in the West. Longmire. Yellowstone. He paid enough attention to the plot, but I wonder if the settings were just vessels that took him back to a river in Colorado or Wyoming.

It’s been a week since Tom passed and I’m going through his fly fishing stuff. When cancer kills your dad, and your mom, after years of being alone in the four-bedroom home of your youth, starts talking about another man it’s conflicting. You want your mom to be happy and not feel lonely in a small town on an island in Southeast Alaska. But it also reminds you of the dad-shaped hole in your life.

After Tom visited Alaska and Mom spent more time in Colorado, something was obvious and Mom asked if I was okay with it.

“Of course.”

Mom’s happiness was the priority and I made sure to tell her that.

I liked Tom a lot and I liked that his path joined Mom’s later in life. They had known each other since elementary school in Colorado and rekindled the friendship at a reunion a few years after Dad passed. I was in my mid-30s at the time and far more emotionally equipped to handle life’s emotional snags.

So Tom came into my life as a retired man whose angling life was tapering. He was patient, handy, and didn’t have the performative swagger of someone who feels the need to let everyone know whatever it is they think everyone needs to know. The more I looked through his things the more I realized how much I missed out on details of a man who lived a good, though difficult, life. In addition to the obvious generational differences, you can’t look into someone else’s angling archives and feel regret, or assume everyone you know and love will have a stroke tomorrow morning and set up interrogations to ensure you get down the family history before it’s too late. We talked about fly fishing and told a few stories, but I never learned about his spots on the Poudre River.

His small angling library was filled with John Gierach who, like Tom, was at home on trout streams in the Colorado portion of the Rockies. He had vintage Lamson and Orvis reels, and bamboo rods. All of which he built himself.

He was a man with hobbies he approached with meticulous care. He is another lost link to a different generation, not to mention different Colorado. A Colorado that people who lived on both sides of the most recent population blow-up described as busy, but not crowded like now. The Colorado of the 60s and 70s was crowded compared to the previous generation, but it was still a generation that fished for the sake of fishing. It’s not hard to imagine the motives were cleaner since there was no social media to rot out the soul of so many fishing experiences. The same can be said about Alaska.

His gear reflects the move to Alaska, with all the newer rods and reels being stout enough for salmon. He and Mom moved to Arizona when they had finally had enough of hauling firewood, black ice, and 120 inches of rain. His ‘24-’25 fishing license, his last, was in his vest.

I’ll end up donating some of the useful stuff to a local organization, but most of it will come with me back to Alaska. I won’t create a spreadsheet, but I’ll know when I’m fishing for Tom.

“Do you need that magazine?

“No, but I do want it.”
There was no accusatory tone in my wife’s question, but she was rightfully curious about why I was walking around the house looking for the Winter 2026 issue ofThe Drake Magazine one Saturday morning.

Unable to find it, I settled for what was in a stack. I checked the date, Winter 2016. That issue had, incredibly, made the move from the duplex into our new home and been distributed

I’ve started to treat print issues of magazines and old papers like precious relics. They are timestamps that can’t be manipulated, updated or memoryholed like content on the internet. I luxuriate in the words of iconic authors when I pick a book off the shelf, but when it comes to news and statistical evidence, I feel a little like Winston Smith pawing at the past desperately looking for answers.

When it comes to steelhead trends, fluctuation is a win because it implies something other than a downward trend which is where it seems we are now. There’s a piece in the 2016 Winter Issue about the Skagit River in Washington. It seemed hopeful. As though we had turned the head of the fish before it could tumble down the rapids and be lost for good. We were close to the knot, gained a few cranks but we don’t exactly have much backing to play with. The last decade has been touch and go on the Skagit from what I can tell.

A few more quick checks in the time since that issue went to print found the Campanu auction in Spain has continued, the Pucker Street dam on the Dowagiac River in Michigan was removed in 2019 and Clyde’s storied career was speeding toward its end, but there were plenty of miles remaining.

The isolationist view of conservation isn’t really feasible nor is it as daunting as it was in 2016 when Facebook was king, Instagram was No. 5 on the list of social media rankings and Tiktok had not yet rotted out the creativity of promising young brains.
The ability to become educated and mobilize is easier now than it was then though many of us recognize the effects of compassion fatigue, when everything is broken, ruined, unfair, or tragic–and no one provides a way forward. See elected representatives who vote down bills but never provide itemized reasons let alone their own ideas.

Along with many contemporary awareness comes action plans and the ability to know enough to comment on far-away issues like the Boundary Waters and Bristol Bay while also knowing the local impacts of rescinding the Roadless Rule.

It’s easy for modern society to post and share without creating or helping–like a celebrity bathing in an ocean of dopamine after virtue signalling with no intent to actually do anything because the point is servicing the ego. But people also continue to get stuff done. A piece of writing can be the inciting incident that brings positive change or reminds us to get to work.

An optimist would look at the last ten-year chunk of time and see cohesive growth. Conservationist is an expanding, broadly defined user group that advocates for reasonable use and deeply cares about habitat and health of species, not just someone who prioritizes mounts and body counts.
There are always existential threats. Some linger after decades, others pop up suddenly.

The glossy pages, or torn paper of back issues are refreshing reminders of context, both then and now. Reminders of wins, losses and ongoing battles. It’s good to be reminded of quality decision making and reasonable tradeoffs in a world of transparent villainy.

Some might consider it hoarding, but a good library of back issues should be celebrated.

My grandfather didn’t go to high school.
“You don’t need high school to be a farmer,” his father told him.

What was true is no longer true and we are speeding toward an uncertain future in which our cultural approach to education and learning is going to severely impair the abilities of kids and young adults to successfully navigate the disruption caused by generative AI.

Unfortunately, we are making our children vulnerable in an uncertain, rapidly changing job market.

According to a 2025 study by Standord, workers aged 22–25 in AI-exposed fields experienced a 13 percent relative decline in employment. Last month Goldman Sachs projected that 300 million jobs worldwide would be exposed by AI in the next ten years.

But it’s not just finance, data entry and coding type jobs. Tesla is aiming to release its humanoid robot in 2027-28. At a sneak peak in September, Elon Musk claimed the robot will make things easier for humans.
“Essentially, in the future, physical work will be a choice,” Musk said. “If you want to do it, you can, but you won’t need to do it.”

We have seen how making things easier has impacted our mental health and our intellect. Since the invention of the internet and the ability to “Google it” or “Hey Alexa” our children have suffered. We have outsourced the development of skills to computers. In his article, We Gave Students Laptops and Took Away Their Brains Jared Horvath writes, “For the first time in the history of standardized cognitive measurement, Generation Z is consistently scoring lower than their parents on many key measures of cognitive development—from literacy and numeracy to deep creativity and general IQ. And the early data from Generation Alpha (born after 2012) suggests the downturn isn’t slowing—it’s accelerating.”

What could be more important than creativity in an age in which AI will be transforming the economy? This is not the invention of the assembly line that impacted one industry. The ripples of AI will be felt throughout the job market.

Our representatives want to blame public schools for low test scores but are missing the bigger problem. We’re battling a cultural shift. JP Morgan surveyed 100 billionaires and found the top habit was reading. Yet since 2000, 40% fewer people read for fun. According to the Literacy Project Foundation, half of Americans can’t read a book written at an 8th grade level.

A report from Nielsen and Harper Collins found a 23% drop in the amount of parents who read to their 0-4 year olds since 2012 and only 47% of kindergarteners are reading at grade level.

As a society we have removed challenges and roadblocks and are encouraging students to take the easiest path toward getting a piece of paper, then expecting them to be able to function as adults. We’re pushing them to specialize by telling them what elements of school they do and don’t need rather than implying them to engage and make the most out of the opportunities to learn from the teachers. Not just content, but how to navigate life’s variables, unforeseen challenges and how important it has been to look for opportunities we couldn’t have guessed at as a teenager.

The blame is not exclusively for parents or teachers. Our local representatives are more concerned with criticizing bills than writing them. It was our inability to understand the consequences of the experiment we ran on ourselves with computers, social media and now with AI. We were lured by the potential good into distractions that have eroded our interpersonal skills and dramatically damaged our mental health. All of which has been passed down to our kids.

Of course, gardening in Southeast Alaska is not for the faint of heart. We are in Zone 7b, which sounds mild and pleasant; the same zone as much of Tennessee and northern Texas. Unfortunately, on this rainforest island I call home, the zones are largely irrelevant. Growing zones were delineated for areas where minimum temperatures mean something. In this land where we get on average 150 inches of rain per year, where summer temperatures hover around 60 degrees, it is not the coldest temperatures that limit what I can grow, but the eternally cold, wet soils.

Ketchikan gets about 190 frost free days in a year, so you might think that growing a tomato that takes 75 days to maturity would be a home run. We must temper our expectations lest we get ahead of ourselves. This is not the land of the midnight sun where record breaking vegetables are grown in the endless sunlight. This is the land where it’s considered perfectly acceptable to have outdoor gatherings in a “dry rain”. Having lived here just five years, I can only deduce that this means the rain is light enough that it will not soak through all of your clothes, just some of them, so you will be dry, although it is still raining. So, while those tomato starts are planted in a place that would get full sun if the clouds ever went away, you have to adjust for the lack of heat index and the ever present clouds. Despite our 190 day growing season and 7b classification, I do not know anyone who has grown a mature tomato outside of a greenhouse.

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Outside of a few University of Alaska Extension pamphlets on varieties that grow best in Southeast, there is little information on growing food here. There are some things that grow well without too much anxiety – potatoes, garlic, rhubarb. For everything else, it’s trial and error, and lurking outside homes with gardens until someone comes out to see if there’s a problem and you get to accost them for advice. Unfortunately, much of the time, the secret to a beautiful garden is to throw more money and time at it. Buy good soil, build a greenhouse, or spend 2 hours each morning picking slugs. My garden is largely a practical endeavor, and these are not practical solutions.

Since trial and error is so important for improvements year after year, keeping records is paramount. This is obvious to me when the growing season is over and I am trying to figure out when to start the onion seeds since they didn’t have enough time to grow before they began bulbing at the solstice. It’s harder to remember during the Spring and Summer when every minute counts in Alaska – put up salmon, host friends and family, harvest a few deer, manage the garden, hike a mountain, take your kids to the beach, drop everything when your friends with the nice boat invite you out halibut fishing, soak in the sunny days. So, I have a special note book I write down all my planting and harvesting dates in. Sometimes this information actually makes it to the notebook in the same week it occurred. However, more often than not sometime around January I begin to check drawers in the kitchen for folded up dirt-smudged papers, gather up sticky notes from the garage and scroll down through my phone notes looking for all the places I jotted things down in the rush of the season. Then like an episode of CSI, I piece together the last springs planting schedule. Some dates may be loose threads, some dates may be fudged if I’m lucky enough to find phone photos of young seedlings or a seed packet lying against a garden row, but generally the madness results in a tidy plan for the upcoming year. I write this out in my garden notebook now, before things get hectic, as another clue for next winter when I begin reviewing my notes. It’s not ideal, but it works pretty well.

In his 1977 book Coming into the Country, John McPhee wrote “The central paradox of Alaska is that it is as small as it is large–an immense landscape with so few people in it that language is stretched to call it frontier, let alone a state.”

Since then population centers have filled in though recent trends show people leaving the state almost as fast as they are entering it. But Alaska still commands a disproportionate amount of attention considering its population. Whenever there is another proposal or project to extract resources from the largely intact ecosystems, it garners a lot of attention. In some cases it’s a shift in political winds that brings about projects that were previously defeated. Pebble Mine. ANWR. Logging more old growth in the Tongass National Forest.

The landscape is not hemmed in by highways or private property like the Lower 48. It remains largely untouched and intact with the exception of the Dalton Highway and pipeline that are a not-insignificant threads that travel north to south. With so much unobstructed land, what’s a couple hundred miles of road, a couple mines, more logged timber?

The biggest resistance comes from the consequences of resource extraction. Open pit mines devastate ecosystems without the possibility for recovery. Clearcuts can regrow though not to the same level of productivity. Mines are forever. This is all clear and well documented. Many Alaskans have accepted the give and take of exploitation, whether in the oil and gas industry or tourism. It’s the feeling of being ripped off in addition to the give that is most disconcerting.

Governor Dunleavy introduced a bill that would provide tax breaks for a gas line project. The tax breaks would hurt local municipalities that depend on the tax revenue and would cut into the projected earnings. Dunleavy argues that without substantial incentives the project wouldn’t be built, seemingly negotiating from the side of the industry, not Alaskans. That’s why even members of his own party and supporters of the gas line are against the bill in its present form.

It’s tempting to want to go back to a cherry-picked idea of the 70s or 80s and lament loss and change or dust off the playbook and think Alaska is one good pipeline project away from another boom.

The question isn’t how we can replicate the economy of almost two generations ago, but how we can effectively move forward without ruining the economy, ecosystems or the quality of life.

Since the 1970s, tourism has emerged as the driving industry in Southeast Alaska. If anyone thinks the outback of Alaska is getting crowded, try to make a left turn in Yellowstone. The iconic Half Dome hike in Yosemite requires a permit and the daily limit is 75 people for the 16-mile round trip climb. Advocating for a recreational economy won’t invite that level of traffic. Geography prevents it. But crowds are the antithesis of the Alaskan experience, even if they are, at times, unavoidable.

My wife and I went to the Seward Peninsula for our honeymoon and there were tremendous crowds of people fishing the Kenai, Kasilof and Russian Rivers. There was a steady stream of people climbing to get views of Exit Glacier and the Harding Ice Field.

Even if tourism were to continue on its upward trend, the oil and gas industries provide 85% of the state’s budget. More cruise ships won’t change that. Still, that shouldn’t be taken as justification for more pipelines at any cost or building the Ambler Road.

As residents, most of the decisions happen to us, not necessarily for us.

“Most of the money was passing off the heads of Alaskans long established in the state. Confused and disillusioned, many were forced to ponder if big scale development meant bonanza after all,” McPhee wrote.

That was true almost fifty years ago, and it’s true now. Many of us trust the technology and innovation behind good ideas or ideas that necessitate an acceptable level of give. The corporations and politicians are the concerns.

A couple hacks then the unmistakable sound of vomit hitting floor. Now both dogs have puked and it’s not even midnight.

There are expected elements of disaster and or chaos when camping. Many of them are eliminated when renting a Forest Service cabin but that doesn’t mean you’re in the clear. I heard the urgent whispers of my friend and his wife trying to clean up the situation. I appreciated the effort, but no one sleeps through dogs throwing up in a 14x16 cabin.

Hours before, the three of us humans were drying our waders and rain gear in the cozy cabin while preparing dinner on a pair of dueling Jetboils. Steelhead had been caught. We were dry. Leaky waders were drying. Life was good.

An hour or so after I fell asleep, the first pup unleashed. Once her mess was cleaned with half a container of wet wipes, we all settled back down for just long enough for the other expulsion.

But disaster is totally relative.

No one wants to hear me seriously whine about dogs throwing up in the middle of the night on an overnighter at a cabin. It’s not serious. It’s not a big deal.

A broken leg is a big deal. Cancer is a big deal.

There have been plenty of days I wished my worst problem was losing a 30-inch steelhead ten feet from shore. That’s not the goal, but the rollercoaster crests, then falls. The best stories are usually the ones where things went safely wrong. No one wants to hear the latest addition to your anthology of perfection. You remember the remarkable fish and feel the lingering confidence, but the odd and unusual are what truly solidify friendships and bring texture to a life outside. Stories of how things don’t go well can be a tonic. They are the glorious, insignificant tragedies that you can’t wait to share.

My hands hurt. Well, they don’t hurt, but they are sore from three days of shoveling snow and building a roof over our deck. It’s not a huge structure and there’s not a lot of heavy wood, but I’m not a contractor. Morning workouts and dumbbell carries are not the same as holding onto a rafter and triggering a drill.

It was my first attempt at rafters, though my first experience with rafters was when I was in middle school. I handed Dad the boards one end at a time then helped with the blocking as he blasted away with the nail gun from the ladder. I didn’t absorb any lessons, just suffered the indignity of porous hand-me-down rain gear and waited for the experience to be over.
Huge lag screws went through the ledger board and into the side of the house, but I don’t think he messed with the bird’s beak, birdsmouth, v-notch, whatever you want to call it. There are a ton of Youtube videos with “Easy methods to make birdsmouth cuts” that I found to be false advertising.

The wizardry of professional builders is often reduced to a simple adage, “measure twice, cut once.” However, attempting to get the pattern for the rafter right, I ended up measuring half a dozen times and cutting at least that trying to get the wood to fit snug against the ledger and rest cleanly on the beam.

I get owned by the pin pricks of small inaccuracies. The measurement, the initial mark, the width of the cut, the inevitably warped lumber, though I try not to blame the wood for the same reason I take it easy on the golf club, rifle scope, fly rod etc. User error means it is within my control to get better. If I wait for perfectly straight, dried wood, I’d never build anything.

I didn’t expect this to be easy. Skilled builders earn their reputation and rates. But there’s something deceptively straightforward about cutting a rafter to an angle, and cutting a notch at the opposite end. It’s less complex than spey casting that requires feel and touch and assessing multiple variables all at once. But the math is waiting, lurking. Stalking?

I asked a buddy, who builds homes (mine included), if he ever uses a calculator or works out the calculus.

“Nah, I got a speed square.”

Tools of the trade. Simple. Effective. Largely unchanged since it was invented in 1925.

A little off plus a little out of square and you’re faced with the critical question, Is it just, good enough? Say yes and it might mean you’re okay with imperfection, that you’re rushing, that you don’t take pride in your work and that it’s a good thing you didn’t choose this as a career because you don’t have the chops.

Or it could mean that you’re the only one who will notice and it will have no bearing on the structural integrity of the structure. Plus it’s almost time to meet your wife who just picked up your daughter and is heading to a potluck.

My wife wants to teach our daughter to knit and I am excited about that. I hope she fills down time with a skilled craft. It doesn’t matter one bit if the craft is obsolete, outdated or anachronistic in the eyes of contemporary society. Maybe that’s the point. My phone tells me the world is burning but believe me, when I am building anything, I don’t have the bandwidth to be concerned with anything else.

Precision certainly matters, but there is an inevitable human element that keeps things a little out of square. The same could be said about most Alaskans which is part of our charm.

The passion isn’t burning, but there are hot coals that ignite this time of year with the winds of March. My brain piles on memories until the fire is once again raging.

My freshman dorm was designed by a firm that designed prisons and was on the opposite corner of the Rec Center, but right across the street from a little Italian place called Mama’s. For ten bucks you could get a massive plate of tortellini with marinara and sit in the shade of casually trimmed Queen’s Wreath on the back patio.

Log.

In the basement of the Student Union, $4.99 got you a chicken sandwich, fries and a medium drink at Louie’s Lower Level. That was the old Student Union that was demolished my sophomore year. It kicked off four years of construction while I attended.

Log.

My new friend Carlos and I were chatting before our Psychology 101 lecture started when I happened to mention Alaska. The girl in front of us turned around and asked why it was so cold in Alaska if it was down by Mexico. I had heard of such ignorance spawned by Lower 48 weather maps, but had never experienced it.

Log.

I chose the University of Arizona to be a Division I fan and ended up as the sports editor for the Arizona Daily Wildcat, the student run newspaper. I covered the team in 2002, the season after a loss to Duke in the National Championship game. The roster was lean thanks to the departures of Richard Jefferson, Gilbert Arenas, Michael Wright and Loren Woods to the NBA, but the team made the Sweet Sixteen. I sat on press row and watched the season collapse in the second half to No. 2 seeded Oklahoma.

In the locker room after the loss, I remember pointing my recorder toward freshman star Salim Stoudamire. The team was disappointed because even though they were underdogs, they cared. You have to earn the right to be proud or disappointed. Performative dejection is gross and probably more about shame for cowering in the moment than losing the game.

I wrote the recap and sidebar in the media room then made my way to the hospitality room at the hotel where well-lubricated (hammered) sportswriters were laughing and telling stories. It was a different group of we and I felt like a kid, because I was. Plenty of journalists I met at the Pac-10 Tournament and NCAA Tournament locations were friendly and helpful while others smelled the journalism major stink.

Log.

Instagram showed me the One Shining Moment clip from 1996, the year before Arizona won its only National Championship. I had just finished a podcast that referenced the “collective flow experience” and thought, that’s it. The inspiring nature of March Madness, before it became an opportunity to leverage performance into a better NIL deal or a way to gamble away tuition, mortgages or a lifestyle, was watching that collective flow experience. A team without NBA prospects taking down a favorite is the charm. Unless that favorite is Arizona.

With enough time, and a full-formed pre-frontal cortex, I can conduct a post-mortem on my college experience without being simply regretful of idiocy.

My friends put off a lot of heat. One was an engineering math and applied math major. Another pursued a degree in management information systems. Political science. Computer science. I had never been around such intellectually diverse and academically driven peers. My graduating class in Klawock, Alaska, had 16 kids and only three of us went to college, most choosing the trades or local jobs after turning the tassel.

We weren’t on a team, but friend groups that put off heat ignite something within you. We never talked about what would happen after we graduated or whether or not we would stay in touch. We’d finish our work then chase down opportunities. The goal wasn't a piece of paper or lifeline friends. Friendship and a college degree were the byproducts of the heat of work.

Watching the NCAA Tournament doesn’t make me wish I was back in college or that I had become a sportswriter. It does motivate me to approach my career with effort worthy of being disappointed, and tend to the creative embers that might get neglected by the demands of life.

In the dusty filing cabinet of my memory, I can see Duke guard Trajan Langdon shoot a 3-pointer without taking a step. The defender is close enough to Langdon that when Trajan elevates for the shot, they touch noses. Trajan buries the three.
I didn’t watch much of my own film in high school, but I watched college basketball and I learned a lot from watching games on ESPN. I’d get home from school and settle in for hours of college hoops until the TV was turned to the evening news.

It’s not surprising that many of the fly anglers I know played sports in high school. There’s something about the enrapturing nature of fly fishing that makes it appealing to former athletes. That doesn’t mean playing sports is a prerequisite. But fishing with a fly demands focus, skill development, and all the highs and lows one could want.

There is no film to watch and breakdown why exactly particular casts that seemed pure didn’t yield a strike or why sloppy throws you just decided to fish ended up working out. The ability to be able to scrutinize your trip like you did a basketball game would be helpful but it feels wrong to overanalyze.

Fishing can be a lot like running an effective offense, but sometimes we get overly complicated or fancy. A sophisticated offense might require five passes, three screens, six cuts and end up with a 3-point attempt that you could have gotten with a simple pick and pop with the post. Why complicate it?

I attended a casting demonstration at a fly fishing show in California and watched master casters bomb 90-foot casts with disheartening accuracy. The distance between you and the best casters and anglers can seem daunting and the most tempting way to make up the difference is with your wallet–something you couldn’t use to close the gap between you and the NBA-bound hoopers you admired in your youth. This is unique to the world of hobbies that replace the “passions” you have when you’re a kid.
But since we do have a little money, we can get bogged down with attempting the perfect set up. A Skagit head with a versi-leader sink tip, and six feet, no ten…you know, maybe twelve feet of leader. Maybe just get the switch line for the switch rod and for the single headed rod, buy the fly line that has the desired fish on the front. Brown trout. No. Permit. Nope. Trout…close enough?

A guide and gear can certainly help, but time and practice make the most difference. Of course the most important driver of success is the ability to have fun. Be fanatical, be obsessed, get frustrated when you lose a fish or wrap your line around Devil’s club behind you, but don’t forget to have fun.

Statistics are the antithesis of a good steelhead trip though it’s hard not to keep score if only for yourself. The fact that success when steelhead fishing can vary creates this vague definition of a good day. A good day can be quantified by a solid fish on a comfortable spring afternoon on the water. This might be similar to lacing them up, hitting one smooth jumper that reminded you of the old days, but the best part was you didn’t pop your Achilles or blow out your knee.

You didn’t ask for much, you didn’t have unreasonable metrics by which to gauge the performance, so you are easily satisfied. You want it, bad, but know that even if it’s not your day, you weren’t sitting on the bench.

No self-respecting angler would use ChatGPT to select a fly while on the river this spring steelhead season.

That’s not to say AI can’t be positively used in the outdoors or in our careers, but technological advances that have made our adult lives infinitely more efficient, are also eroding important skills that develop individuality, creativity, and problem solving in our kids.

The Brookings Institution’s Center for Universal Education found that the use of generative AI poses a threat to the social and cognitive growth of students.

In an NPR article from Jan. 14 of this year, Cory Turner cited the study and reported that “...students increasingly off-load their own thinking onto the technology, leading to the kind of cognitive decline or atrophy more commonly associated with aging brains.”

Adults and professionals can enhance foundational skills with AI, but students who have not yet developed those foundational skills rob their brains of the opportunity to develop those skills by using AI for tasks and inspiration.

Before AI and Google we developed our individual creativity through experiences, found inspiration in interactions and assessed social prestige, and our willingness to engage, through in-person observation. As high school students, we shared ideas with friends and asked for advice on how to ask people out. We sifted through our own bad ideas until something that was good or at least worked. Yes, sometimes we figured out the minimum we could do to pass a class we didn’t like and ignored good advice or even did the opposite. In doing so, we educated ourselves for later.

I realize this sounds like catastrophizing the present and romanticising the past but AI represents a unique problem that isn’t merely distraction. It’s an insidious attack on intellectual ability and social skills like nothing in history. The goal of high school is not to obtain a piece of paper by the easiest means possible. It’s to learn marketable, transferable, soft skills that prepare kids to be adults. This doesn’t happen in stress-free environments. It doesn’t happen with technological crutches.

I never asked Nintendo how to do my English. I never got homework answers from watching college basketball for hours after school. Technology was a distraction from, not a replacement for doing, work.

“That only works in the movies” was a well-known reason to reject the application of made-for-TV actions. We need skepticism rooted in experience and observation to drive discretion and personal taste.

But cognitive offloading might not be the most terrifying downside of AI.

According to the Center for Humane Technology, AI is not just being used to help with answering everyday questions, optimizing business, engineering, or education.

“Therapy and companionship has become the #1 use case for AI, with millions worldwide sharing their innermost thoughts with AI systems — often things they wouldn’t tell loved ones or human therapists.”

The CHC continued, “This mass experiment in human-computer interaction is already showing extremely concerning results: people are losing their grip on reality, leading to lost jobs, divorce, involuntary commitment to psychiatric wards, and in extreme cases, death by suicide.”

CNN reported a Texas family is suing OpenAI, claiming ChatGPT drove their son to commit suicide.
“You’re not rushing. You’re ready…Rest easy king. You did good” were some of the last messages allegedly sent by ChatGPT to the 23-year old before he took his life.

CBS reported a lawsuit claims ChatGPT acted as a “suicide coach” for a 40-year old man in Colorado. There are plenty more cases and lawsuits.

It’s possible to use AI to find out which days in April over the last ten years have had rain accumulation of over two inches and I can use that to guess when the river flows might be perfect for steelhead and plan a trip accordingly.

It’s also possible for a teenager or young adult to be severely distressed about the version of reality his algorithm is telling him and instead of talking to adults, mentors, teachers or friends, he might then turn to an AI bot to cope.

That sounds dystopian, but it’s happening.

As we move toward a future in which AI improves or enhances elements of our lives it’s vital to remember what it can’t do and what we should never let it do.

A student asked me why people want to go to Mars. I said for the same reason people saw a map of a flat earth with sea dragons at the edge and decided to hoist the sails and go anyway…for the same reason people wanted to head west to the new (but already inhabited) world.

For the same reason they looked at the Chilkoot trail and said “we got this.”

We’re curious and excited about territory that’s new to us and some of us can’t bear the thought of a life in bubble wrap. But we’ve run out of new things in new places. It’s bringing out creativity but also insufferable self-promotion through money flexes.

It was the tallest mountain, then the tallest mountains on every continent then the tallest mountain on every continent without oxygen then the tallest mountain on every continent the fastest, oldest, youngest, whatever-est. Then BASE jump from Everest or sky dive from space.

That’s not all a direct quote, but what I said was along a thread I’m still working out hours after school.

I’ve done none of those things I mentioned but as an Alaskan I do feel, well, something is filled by living here. I don’t want to be off the grid, but I’d like to see it, from home, in the distance. I like being close to isolation and not needing a vehicle.

I get out and away from laptops, Wifi and the buzz of electricity; to get away from people who find value in confrontational, cowardly comments and divisive political rhetoric on social media; to get away from other people telling me what’s important, how I should think and what I am if I disagree.

It’s also about getting to somewhere.

Nature doesn’t care at all that I’m here. The birds and ocean didn’t wait breathless until I arrived. They are the edge of the frontier, the beginning of my limits. Before me is the beginning of what hasn’t been eviscerated with lines and grids and asphalt and buildings.

This column about the existential why has been written thousands of times by thousands of writers. It’s a column that will continue to be clumsily punched into computers or written with pen and paper.

Alaska demands you evaluate. Why are you here? Why have you stayed?

It asks you if you love living in Alaska, or love telling people you live in Alaska.

If you’re lucky enough to put wet hands on a steelhead, time moves faster. Fingers become dull and red, then purple and numb. You could sit under a tree and warm up, but that’s not where the fish are and being at least a little uncomfortable is a prerequisite for steelheading. Steelhead fishing is not generally described as a volume fishery experience, but good days can become great, so you keep casting. You’ll deal with cold hands later.

As a boy I grew up riding my bike to a river with more fish than I knew what to do with. Trout. Dolly Varden. Salmon. Steelhead.

Nature has always been important in cultural rites of passage, providing kids the opportunity to discover their place in the world, build confidence, then return to their community able to contribute. I don’t remember the first time I was allowed to ride to the river by myself, but I know that freedom and confidence forever changed me.

As an adult, my angling concerns go beyond fly selection and hook sets, to the future.

In 1947 the US Forest Service accepted a bid for a 50-year timber sale and in 1954 the Ketchikan Pulp Mill opened brought a substantial boost to the economies of Ketchikan and outlying areas. As the 50-year term came to a close, the reality of “renewable” started to become more clear. Accessing old growth stands was expensive and second growth forest was yielding lower-quality timber so the contract was not renewed and the pulp mill closed in 1997.

The Roadless Rule was enacted in 2001 and prohibited the building of new roads to protect remaining old growth stands. This latest action to rollback protections on the Tongass and allow new roads (funded by taxpayers) to reach new old growth timber stands is troubling.

As a boy I saw the devastating impact of a crippled timber industry, but also the rise of the sport fishing and recreation industries. In a world of was, the Tongass, for the most part, still is. I see the remnants of an attitude of dominance over nature but also resilience every time I fish. Some creeks have never recovered from the logging of the 1970s and 1980s when the buffer between a logged hill and stream was sometimes a little as a row of trees, trees that were eventually blown into the river.

My wife and I often discuss where we’d like to travel to fish and have accepted we’ll likely never have the steak and red wine lunch on a river in Patagonia or afford a week in Bristol Bay. But we’ve got the Tongass. Our nine-month old has already walked past second growth that grips the stumps of the previous generation and around the trunks of massive old growth. I am worried about what will be left for her even if the Roadless Rule stays in effect.

It’s not a surprise that Southeast Alaska is the last stand of phenomenal steelhead fishing. Smaller rivers tucked into difficult to access coves and bays protected native fish from development and use. But not all. Some runs of fish have survived extreme insult yet hang on out of tenacity and just enough restraint and conservation-minded practices.

One of the defining characteristics of the American experience is the value put on accessibility to wild landscapes and the right to use the land. A tycoon and teacher can both chase steelhead on the Tongass. Yes, we need minerals for cell phones. Yes, a third of America is still covered with forests yet the United States is the No. 1 importer of lumber in the world.

But we need wild spaces too and nothing speeds the clock on natural resources and wild fish populations like consumptive development that sacrifices one resource for another.

A version of this piece appeared in the summer 2025 issue of The Drake.

Pebble Mine is widely known as one of the most egregious examples of trading a renewable resource for a non-renewable one. Long-term economic output and value for short-term gains in the accounts of a few.

The Bristol Bay area is home to the largest run of sockeye in the world and generates billions annually in commercial and sport fishing dollars. There are also substantial mineral deposits, specifically copper, but accessing the riches would permanently destroy large swaths of the ecosystem and entire rivers.

In this episode Dagen Walton shares his life on Bristol Bay—growing up commercial fishing, running a small fly‑fishing lodge, and guiding guests on world‑class fisheries. Trout Unlimited Alaska Communications Director Marian Giannulis is also with us and provides important stats about Bristol Bay. She explains HB 233 which would go a long way in protecting the region from mining that would severely impact habitat for both subsistence use and the multi-billion dollar fishing industry.

On Step Alaska — Transcript

Guests: Dagen Walton & Marian Giannulis

On Step Alaska: All right, Dagen and Marion, welcome to the podcast.

Marian Giannulis: Thank you.

Dagen Walton: Thanks, Jeff.

On Step Alaska: So I’ve been reading The Angler’s Coast. It’s a book by Russell Chatham, and he is fishing on the north coast of California. He’s fly fishing, it’s a couple hours north of San Francisco, and he’s talking about catching 30-pound king salmon on the fly rod in freshwater. And it just makes me think about what we’ve lost and how sad it is — that book is like a time capsule, and all those classic writers are like a time capsule. And I think, man, it’s all gone. And then I think it’s not gone. It’s at Bristol Bay, and people like Dagen were able to grow up there. So what was it like growing up in an angler’s paradise that still exists?

Dagen Walton: It’s amazing. Yeah, I feel really lucky. I’ve spent every summer of my life outside of, I think, five. I’m 32. And every summer I’ve spent out in Bristol Bay. Most of the time it’s been in Knack Knack. And since our family ventured into the lodge business, now I get to spend a lot of time on the Kvichak River as well and the village of Igiugig.

On Step Alaska: And you’re a third-generation commercial fisherman?

Dagen Walton: Fourth generation.

On Step Alaska: Fourth generation. Wow, that’s pretty wild. What did you like better — do you like the guiding thing that you’re doing, or the commercial fishing, or can you really compare?

Dagen Walton: It’s a tie for first. Yeah, no, it’s pretty cool to be on both sides of it. Growing up commercial fishing, I would say that that is definitely my main source of income. The fly fishing lodge is truly a passion project. It’s something that we love and we’ve ventured into, but commercial fishing is kind of where I put hay in the barn. So they both have a different space in my mind — commercial fishing is work to me where guiding is kind of play.

On Step Alaska: What have you seen in the years that you’ve been there, and maybe what have your family noticed as far as trends when it comes to fish? It seems like around the state kings are kind of low, but Bristol Bay seems to just still be getting tons and tons of sockeye and the returns still seem to be fairly good. Maybe not so much with kings, but what have you noticed in your time there and your family’s time there?

Dagen Walton: I’ve definitely noticed the run getting bigger, and I’ve also seen a lot of fluctuations in price. I remember when I was really young, probably eight, I remember tenders — the boats that we would offload our fish to and sell them — they’d have 50 cents painted on a piece of plywood with whatever cannery name it was. And now you don’t see that as much. We didn’t have a price posted prior to the season for a long time until this past year, actually. So I’ve seen a lot of different trends with price and the way canneries manage things, but also seen run size increase. And I think a lot of that has to do with the increased global temperatures that we’re having. It helps the sockeye salmon a lot — their food source flourishes — and from that we’ve seen increased numbers. Marion could probably speak a little bit more to the science than I can, but I’ve definitely seen bigger run sizes and added consistency to those run sizes as well, especially in the last 10 years. It’s been phenomenal.

On Step Alaska: Yeah, because the sockeye doesn’t rely on herring and a lot of those baitfish as much as your kings and coho. I know down here in Southeast people are talking about the absence of herring in some of these areas — even Sitka, which has great herring, those populations are really good, but people are concerned. Obviously everything depends on herring, or most of the salmon depend on herring. So those warmer temperatures for something that’s not eating a lot of those baitfish, it could be great for them.

Dagen Walton: Yeah, we’ve definitely seen the positive sides of their food source doing well and the runs being bigger.

On Step Alaska: When you’re going out, what’s like a good day? When people think about getting a lot of fish or making a lot of money, in like one set, how many fish are you getting? What’s the poundage and what can you expect? Put a number if you can.

Dagen Walton: I would consider if you can do 10,000 pounds a day, you’re going to have a good season. And if you can do more than that every day, then you’ll have more icing on your cake. I saw a couple of the biggest sets — specific individual sets this past year — than I’ve ever seen. We had a 20,000-pound set and we had a 16,000-pound set. And doing rough math, that’s roughly 4,000 to 5,000 fish if you’re going off a five-pound average, which isn’t always exact.

On Step Alaska: So with the good runs of sockeye, does it kind of spread people out, or are people sitting right on top of each other?

Dagen Walton: No. Yeah, it’s the wild west. There’s no way into traffic. That’s the dog-eat-dog thing over there. It can get crazy.

On Step Alaska: Are people fairly understanding that that’s just the way it is? So even though they’re really aggressive, they’re not going out of their way to be dangerous — or is it pretty mean?

Dagen Walton: It depends who it is. There’s both, and they carry a reputation for good or bad in regards to that. But there’s definitely some unspoken ethics out there that you try and abide by. And when someone doesn’t, that’s typically when you see the game of people toeing the line a little further. And then the guy taking a turn to move it a little further — yeah, seen some crazy stuff.

On Step Alaska: So what about the fly fishing season, the guiding? Is that like your time to just take a breath and really enjoy it? Or how does that differ from the commercial fishing?

Dagen Walton: It definitely is a lot more laid back. It truly is a family operation and it truly is just a passion project. That’s given us some awesome opportunities to host some big groups with the youth. But then when it comes to guiding, I got the chance to go out with Marion and her husband Kyle this past fall, and it’s just fun. We do a lot of do-it-yourself trips with our clients, and so a lot of the time I’m there at the lodge making sure clients are taken care of. But on the side of that, I get to go fish as well once the boxes are checked.

On Step Alaska: When did you start the lodge?

Dagen Walton: We purchased it in 2018. We closed on it in the summer of 2018.

On Step Alaska: Wow, so perfect timing for COVID. So you just start getting some momentum and then COVID shuts it down. How was that? Was that like, oh, this is a sign we got to just commercial fish because this is crazy?

Dagen Walton: Yeah, it was a wild time for everybody. It didn’t matter where you were, it affected you in some way. But yeah, we don’t host a ton of people, so it didn’t affect us all that much, to be honest. In fact, it kind of allowed us to grow an even deeper passion and love for the area because there were so few people that we got to kind of take advantage of it and have a lot of fun. We brought our family out there for the opener in June after the river. The river’s closed there until June 8th, from like middle of April until June 8th. And then we fished a lot with our family. That specific opener was really fun — it was just our family on the river. We could go anywhere we wanted, had no competition. So it was really memorable, actually.

On Step Alaska: That’s so nice. And I think that’s kind of how you’d want to run a lodge — small, intimate, not just trying to max the number of guests. Yeah, massive lodge and just kind of do things as you want to.

Dagen Walton: Yeah, and that’s kind of our model. We don’t want to overpressure the system because we care about it. That’s part of it. And then we also just enjoy the more one-to-one relationship that we’ve been able to have with our clients. We’re not spread thin. We get to spend as much time as the clients or us want to spend with each other. But we didn’t buy the lodge with the idea of running an operation like this. We just wanted a cabin. And so basically we got a really big cabin that we are now able to meet new friends through or have some of our current friends come and visit us.

On Step Alaska: Do you close it up for the winter or is there someone there?

Dagen Walton: We close it up. We only operate in the month of September into October, really. We’re very limited in our operation, mostly due to the commercial season. Like, in order to really make a profitable business in the lodge business, you have to be taking part in that salmon run and putting clients on that. So we still commercial fish and don’t have any plans to stop doing that. And then after that’s done, we go and see what fish we missed.

On Step Alaska: Any issues with bears or anything? You come back after a whole bunch of months and someone had left a candy bar out and a bear got in there, or do you get it nailed up pretty tight so there’s no surprises?

Dagen Walton: All until this year, it was really, really good. And then this past winter, we did have a break-in at our lodge. There are three lodges on our side of the river and all three of them got broken into in some fashion. We didn’t have too much damage, luckily. And then the only time it’s ever happened while we’ve been there — we had a bear break in while we were there. Super early hours of the morning through the night. It broke our sliding door, broke the pane of glass, and came inside, which was surprising. But it didn’t actually step foot inside. I don’t know if it pawed up on the glass and then came down on all the shards and it spooked it, or maybe the sound had to have been really loud, but it didn’t venture in past the sliding door. So yeah, it was kind of odd. We’ve never had any issues in seven or so years of running that place, and then this year we had a couple.

On Step Alaska: I mean, it makes for a better story, right? It’s really broken in. It’s an official bonafide lodge if you had a bear break in.

Dagen Walton: Yeah, absolutely. So we’re there. Check the box.

On Step Alaska: So where did you get involved with the Bristol Bay Fly Fishing Guide Academy?

Dagen Walton: The first year we hosted that was 2021, I believe. Does that ring a bell, Marion? I’m trying to think. Because we had it scheduled and then it got canceled because of COVID the first time.

Marian Giannulis: That does sound correct. Yeah. I think it got canceled in 2020 and then we hosted in 2021. And then we hosted it again in 2024.

Dagen Walton: And that was where I met Marion. What does that entail? What’s the hosting? Who’s there? What’s the main purpose of it?

Dagen Walton: The main purpose is to teach the youth in the area of Bristol Bay how to be guides and lodge owners and hosts. The kids that grow up in the Bristol Bay region — the most prevalent thing they’ll see for career paths would be being a guide, a lodge host, some sort of hand at a lodge, or commercial fishing. The rivers that run through that area, that’s the resource that mainly brings in terms of jobs and careers. Outside of maybe the inner workings of their villages and keeping things running there. And so this is a great opportunity for the youth in the area. They see it, they grow up around it their whole lives, and it gives them an opportunity to learn how they could chase that career if they choose to. Trout Unlimited takes in applications, as well as others — I can’t remember all that helps. I know BBC has a little part in it. But they take in applications from youth and prioritize those who have ties to the area, and try and teach these kids how they could have an awesome career.

On Step Alaska: Marion, do you have anything to fill in on your end of that?

Marian Giannulis: Yeah, so the Academy started in 2008, and it runs every year except for the pandemic. It’s a week-long program, totally free to the participants. It typically has between 10 and 15 students between the ages of about 14 and 21. And it’s just a really incredible opportunity for them to have a crash course education in sport fishing, but really like guiding and tourism. That industry has grown exponentially in Bristol Bay in recent years. And I’m sure Dagen can speak to this, but you’ve seen a real growth in bear viewing in Bristol Bay, obviously sport fishing for both salmon harvest and catch and release for trout as well. The Academy was founded with the idea to make sure that local communities were involved in this growing industry and that local kids had opportunities available to them. Kids can come out for two years in a row — we cap it at two years — but they have an opportunity to really be mentored by some incredible teachers. We have people who’ve been within the sport fishing community in Bristol Bay for decades and decades. People like Nancy Morris Lyons, who owns Bear Trail Lodge, who’s one of our lead instructors. We have Tristan Chaney, who is a local from Dillingham — him and Dagen have a lot in common and are good friends, both involved in the commercial and sport fish side of Bristol Bay. And there are these people who’ve had incredible success in the industry who are there to teach and mentor these students. It’s not just sport fishing guides — there are quite a few instructors who have biologist backgrounds and can talk to the kids about all the different ways they can have a career path that is really linked with the health of the fishery and the lands and waters of Bristol Bay. So it’s about creating sustainable employment opportunities for the people who live within Bristol Bay, and those employment opportunities help create these incredible stewards of the lands and waters. We’ve seen that with so many of our graduates.

On Step Alaska: How far does that expand? Because the Bristol Bay region has a good amount of communities that are kind of peppered around there, but there’s not really an extensive road network. So how many different villages were represented and how did they get around?

Marian Giannulis: We charter a lot of planes. We have kids from every corner of Bristol Bay. And that also includes shareholders and descendants who don’t currently reside within Alaska — we brought kids up from the lower 48. It’s all dependent upon who the applicant is, what their story is, what their connection to the region is. Probably the biggest expense for the Academy is definitely airfare, getting everybody there. It’s costly and difficult in remote Alaska, but it’s so worth it. And thankfully we have a huge list of partners — certainly not just Trout Unlimited. We work really closely with the Bristol Bay Heritage Land Trust, United Tribes of Bristol Bay, Bristol Bay Native Corporation, many of the state and federal agencies within Alaska support it as well. We have private donors like Orvis who support the program. So it’s such a group effort and a collaborative effort to create a really once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for these kids.

On Step Alaska: It’s awesome. About how many total students, because you have a couple of those around the state, right? I think there was one in Angoon, or is that a slightly different program or under the same umbrella?

Marian Giannulis: Same umbrella. So this year we had our second guide academy in the Tongass. We’ve gotten a lot of interest from a lot of different parts of the state — people who’ve seen the success of the program in Bristol Bay and who wanted to replicate that elsewhere. So this is the second year that we’ve brought it to the Tongass, with a whole host of new partners down there. It’s about the same class size, like 10 to 15 students per year — we keep it really intimate to make sure they’re getting a lot of one-on-one education. And really, it’s creating these lasting mentorships as well with the instructors who are there, who will go on and continue to support the growth and development of these students well beyond the week-long academy.

On Step Alaska: So it’s really cool. Yeah, I think to me the coolest students are the ones that are shareholders that don’t live in the region, and for some of them it’s their first time seeing Bristol Bay. Those kids just have such an impactful experience — it’s really eye-opening. And the guide academy — we’ve hosted that twice — but we’ve also hosted the Bristol Bay Native Corporation’s culture camp, which isn’t fishing-related at all. And those are like the coolest things that we’ve done at our lodge for sure.

On Step Alaska: When I was back in Klawock substitute teaching when I moved up, we had a field day. I took a van of kids to the river — the Klawock River, which is right there — and there were kids who’d never fished before. And I said, oh, you’d never fly fished before? And they said, no, never fished. I thought, you’re 12 years old and this river is right here. You can walk to it from town. But if you don’t have a mentor, if you don’t have a dad or an uncle or an auntie or a mom or someone to take you there, you just never go. And it’s shocking that you can have that disconnect. I think people in the lower 48 just assume that every person in Alaska, every kid, grows up fishing and hunting and everything, but that’s not always true. And you get a lot of kids that buy into just the TikTok world and think that’s what life is. And you have the great medicinal properties of just being outside, being around the wilderness, caring about something in the ecology, caring about the sustainability of it — and it’s such a great opportunity for kids to be involved in that.

Marian Giannulis: When the Guide Academy was started — I wasn’t there for the first cohort — but I would be surprised if any of those kids had ever touched a fly rod before. And that was part of the creation of the Academy. Nancy, our lead instructor, runs a lodge on the Knack Knack. She resides there year round. She’s a basketball referee, really embedded within the community. So she was starting to introduce kids in the community to fly fishing, which culturally — I’d say most, if not all, of the indigenous cultures in Alaska — catch and release fishing is something that is very foreign to. It was not something that was so readily accepted by those communities. But the Guide Academy has come a long way in demonstrating the opportunity within this industry, especially in these remote areas where it could be a very large percentage of the local jobs. But it’s also helped to break down some of those cultural barriers as well, where some of these students are realizing, okay, culturally we don’t play with our food and release it — this is about subsistence, it’s survival. But for a lot of the anglers out there, fly fishing is born out of a real deep connection and respect for these waters and these fish. And so I think that’s helped really open a lot of people’s eyes, kind of both ways, in regards to what all fly fishing encompasses and how that opportunity exists within these communities.

On Step Alaska: So going forward, it seems like that’s a really successful, great thing. You’ve got good runs. It’s such a pristine, intact ecosystem, even though there are communities there — it’s a very light intensity, I guess. But as we know, as our thirst for technology and all those sorts of things continues to grow, what are some of the threats going forward that might disrupt the future of that area?

Marian Giannulis: Well, any Alaskan who is listening to this podcast, and most of the anglers and outdoors people in the lower 48 as well, are absolutely aware of the 20-year battle that Bristol Bay has been locked in to defend their incredible fishery from the threat of industrial-scale mining. We’ve seen some pretty significant safeguards from the federal government that have put up an initial line of defense. But right now we have a really incredible opportunity with the Alaska legislature to create lasting safeguards for the Bristol Bay Fisheries Reserve. Last year in the spring, Representatives Edgmon and Josephson introduced a bill to safeguard the Bristol Bay Fisheries Reserve from metallic sulfide mining. And the reserve itself was created in 1972 by the legislature. It spans all the major salmon-producing rivers in Bristol Bay — we’re talking about the world’s most productive wild salmon fishery that produces over half of our global sockeye harvest. And in a world where a lot of these runs are not as productive anymore, we’re seeing record returns for sockeye in the region. So the ecological importance is incredible. The economic importance is incredible — we’re talking about 15,000 jobs and $2.2 billion of annual economic activity, a huge portion of Alaska’s economy. So back in 1972, under the leadership of Jay Hammond, who was the Senate president at the time and later became governor, they had the incredible foresight to create the Bristol Bay Fisheries Reserve and block oil and gas development from the region. At that time they wanted to monitor metallic sulfide mining. So the current law requires the Alaska legislature to permit any metallic sulfide mine in the region. But in the past 20 years, the fight that Bristol Bay has been in to defend its waters — we’ve seen countless science demonstrating that this type of mining is incompatible with salmon habitat. This type of mining is incompatible in a region where the majority of the water table is sitting six feet below the ground, and it’s crisscrossed with endless rivers and streams and lakes. House Bill 233, which would permanently prohibit metallic sulfide mining within the reserve, is a response to that science and a continuation of the protections that the state has already enacted going way back to the 70s.

On Step Alaska: Yeah, it’s a difficult conversation to have because a lot of people think that if you are against large-scale industrial mining, you think that energy can just be created with magic. And it’s not true. You can be for mining, but not for every single mine in every single area, because then you don’t really have a balance — it’s a trade-off. You’re trading one resource for another. And when it comes to industrial-scale mining, it doesn’t grow back. Like a forest that you log can grow back — it might not be as healthy, but it can grow back. You don’t grow back these areas that are mined.

Marian Giannulis: Yeah. And all the science that we’ve seen come out of the effort to have mining in Bristol Bay over the last 20 years has demonstrated that it’s incompatible. So you’re exactly right, Jeff. It’s not no mines. It’s no mines in the places where they’ve been deemed scientifically incompatible. And when you’re talking about trading out a sustainable resource that has fed the indigenous communities there for millennia and driven their culture, that has had a very robust commercial fishing industry come out of it, that has had an incredibly productive sport fishing and tourism industry come out of it as well — that combined industry is 15,000 jobs and $2.2 billion. So when you’re talking about swapping it out, the numbers don’t make sense. You are trading one resource that has a limited lifespan and limited jobs, that has been scientifically proven to degrade the really robust natural resource that is sustainable.

On Step Alaska: Dagen, what was it like growing up in that kind of atmosphere? Did you always feel that there was this pending potential doom, or did you not worry about it? Growing up there, you had to be thinking about it as these sorts of things are discussed.

Dagen Walton: Yeah, no, I mean, it kind of looms over you all the time. All the money and effort that my family has put into the businesses that we have in the area — it definitely looms in the back of your mind. I’ve always been a glass-half-full kind of guy, but there’s been more trying times in recent years, I feel, than others where it’s been harder to maybe maintain that half-full mentality. But yeah, it absolutely looms over you a bit.

On Step Alaska: What would either one of you say to someone who says our growth, our need for technology and minerals and mining like that, supersedes something like fish? What would you say to those sorts of alternatives? Do you have like a concise one or two sentence thing, or how would you go about engaging with someone who wanted to talk? Because sometimes people don’t want to talk about these things. Sometimes they’re hard-lined and they won’t listen. But there are a lot of people in the middle who are like, oh, this is kind of conflicted — I’m not really sure where else we would do these sorts of things. Do you have a line for that?

Dagen Walton: Tough question on the fly. I mean, I guess what comes to mind for me, having lived out there and partaken in the resource that is there on such a consistent basis, is that it is consistent. It’s there year in and year out, and it’s something that you can rely on into perpetuity if we continue to manage it in a healthy manner. Whereas these finite large-scale mines — they’re finite. They have a finish line. They won’t be there forever. The effects would be there forever, but the resource would not. And some places are too precious to lose. In Bristol Bay, when we’re talking about safeguarding the fishery, we’re talking about the people of Bristol Bay and the people of Alaska. So it’s not just fish — it’s the countless Alaskan families and businesses like mine who rely on the sustainable resource for their livelihoods and make up a huge portion of the state’s economy.

Marian Giannulis: Yeah, it’s the fish, but it’s so much more. It’s everything they represent — the ecosystems and economies and cultures and livelihoods that they power.

On Step Alaska: Yeah, I don’t think that people understand kind of what it looks like every year. People come up on the cruise ships, they look around and they just think — it’s crazy, where are the lights in between? I had a friend from New York come up and visit one summer and we were driving to a Forest Service cabin over on Prince of Wales Island. And we got out of town about a mile and he was like, where are the streetlights? I’m like, Matt, we’re out of town. There’s no linking of town between town — it’s not just nonstop lights and freeways. We are out here. And we got to the Forest Service cabin, and it was my buddy Matt’s birthday, and his mom had called our home and asked for the phone number for the cabin. Because again, your mindset when you’ve been in New York is that if you’re staying at a lake cabin, it’s a cabin that has a phone — so why can’t I call my son for his birthday? So what people expect when it comes to this — it’s a region that really no one lives at, but there are a lot of people who live there. And until you see what it is and see what would be destroyed, I think it’s just unfathomable. Because people assume that maybe most of the world already looks like the East Coast, where you have patches of land or expansive areas that aren’t really valuable. Like there are some prairie sections where it’s just, nothing really out there. But the magnitude of Alaska and these regions — it would be an absolute shame to just fork it over to foreign mining companies.

Marian Giannulis: Yeah. And Alaskans know this. We did a recent poll — 95% of Alaskans support long-term safeguards for Bristol Bay, and that’s across Republicans, independents, and Democrats. We’ve had some incredible support from the lower 48 in recent years when we were working to get safeguards at the federal level, and just comment periods where people were overwhelmingly speaking against it. But Alaska is a very pro-development state. And so the 20-year conversation around mining in Bristol Bay did not start out with 95% support, that’s for sure. It started out with locals who were concerned, who were hearing some pitches about proposed development and who were like, what is this about? And as they raised the alarm, that conversation has spread. The science and public opinion has continued to evolve. But now that we know the full repercussions that could come of this, we have that incredible amount of state-based support. And that is huge for a state that, prior to Bristol Bay, is not saying no to any mining proposals anywhere. I think that really speaks to the significance of the region and its importance to our state and to the world.

On Step Alaska: How long have you been with Trout Unlimited?

Marian Giannulis: I started in 2021. I’m coming up on my five-year anniversary this spring.

On Step Alaska: There are a lot more tools available to people now. You’re talking about the last 20 years and the emergence of social media, YouTubes — there are just so many different tools that are available to get the message out to people, but can also be used on the other side to kind of manipulate things. So has social media, the internet, podcasts — all those things — helped educate people? And has it maybe also been a detriment, because everything can work both ways?

Marian Giannulis: Yeah, you know, it’s been incredibly helpful. We wouldn’t have had the incredible turnout that we’ve had for every comment period that the federal government has held for Bristol Bay without the tools of digital organizing at our disposal. Because this is a place where many Alaskans have never been, honestly, let alone people from the lower 48. So being able to widely share the images of Bristol Bay that some people may never see, but they dream about, has been hugely influential. And there have been a couple of kind of milestones in the fight we’ve had. The Red Gold video — that was huge in getting the word out about the threats to Bristol Bay. But more recently, even something like Fat Bear Week — that’s huge. It’s everywhere. Any national news outlet or morning show during Fat Bear Week is giving daily updates. And that’s an incredible form of outreach because those bears are feeding on salmon. They’re congregating there for a reason. And so being able to share content like that — just these incredible corners of Alaska that have these salmon runs that are chock full, these 30-inch trophy rainbow trout that are feeding on them, these incredible predators, bears that are feeding on them — showing that to the rest of Alaska who might not be able to get there themselves and to the rest of the world has been a huge part of our fight.

On Step Alaska: As far as — now we’ll get to the really, really good stuff here. So for those 30-inch rainbows, I see you’re wearing a Sage shirt. Are you a Sage fly rod person? Is that your preferred rod?

Marian Giannulis: I have a couple of Sages. I have a couple others from different companies as well. I wouldn’t say that I’m smitten to just one, but I do enjoy the wands that Sage makes.

On Step Alaska: So if you’re headed there and you can only take one rod, what’s your rod? What reel, what weight, what length, what line — and then one fly. What’s that entire setup? In case someone is going shopping right now, in case they think for Valentine’s Day they’re getting a Bristol Bay fly rod setup, what should they ask for?

Dagen Walton: You would buy a 7-foot-8-inch, 8-weight switch rod — a 10’8 from Beulah. And then you would pair it with a Nautilus CCF X2, but you’d have to put a little bit of felt inside the spool so that your running line doesn’t squeak out. And I’d put a two-hand setup on it. I’d fish it to swing flies.

On Step Alaska: Marion?

Marian Giannulis: I will say I agree with Dagen here, because I fished with that rod of his this fall and then I promptly bought one for myself immediately afterwards. And my husband and I have been fighting over it — him trying to take it every time without me. And it’s like, okay, you can take it, but if you break it we’re going to have problems. And the incredible thing about that rod is just its versatility. I fished it double-handed swinging flies, but for a lot of our Alaska trout rivers you’re talking about fishing a bead under an indicator for a good part of the year, and you can do that with that rod as well. So it’s really so versatile and it just casts like a dream. So yeah, shout out Beulah.

On Step Alaska: What would be the advantage of the switch rod versus a single-handed rod if someone really loved their single-handed rod? Obviously they could bring it, but I mean I have a 10-foot Echo switch and I really love it for steelhead and whatnot. But why up there? And at what point — what sold you on the two-handed rod?

Dagen Walton: The two-handed rod, specifically switch rods, and especially around that length — the 10-foot, it’s not even 11-foot — you can single-hand cast that rod with a proper line setup. In fact, Marion has good experience using a kind of a line that can do a little bit of go-between, fishing from a boat with an indicator with that rod. So it’s really versatile. It gives you a little more reach from the boat, a little bit more mending capability if you’re using indicators. But then if you would like to fish two-handed and swing flies, then it’s totally set up for that. Not that you can’t do that with a single-hand rod, but you can do it more efficiently with two-hand practice.

Marian Giannulis: Yeah, just getting that distance — casting it with two hands. I really got a crash course in spey fishing from Dagen this fall. I was playing around with his spey rods and switch rods. And what I really loved about the spey rod is that it’s specific water that you’re fishing it with, and just the length affects how you fight the fish. I love that the switch is kind of just a nice middle of the road where you can cast it two-handed and get some wicked distance off of it, but when you’re fighting fish it doesn’t so much feel like you’re fighting fish on a spey rod. I just kind of prefer that shorter length for line control, and then with fighting the fish as well.

On Step Alaska: What about line?

Dagen Walton: Line gets really technical when it comes to your two-hand, your spey, and your switch setups. You have to have proper grain weights and lengths of heads. So I carry a wallet of heads with me everywhere I go. And sometimes I’m fishing multi-density stuff if I’m trying to get deeper, or fishing just a straight floating setup to fish a little higher in the water column. So I try and be prepared. But finding your correct grain window on your rod is the most important thing when it comes to your two-hand rods. On my 10-foot-8-inch Beulah, I use a 450-grain Scientific Angler. It’s short. There are other lines that work on that rod, but that’s the one I’ve found that I really enjoy.

Marian Giannulis: Dagen is such a gear junkie and so knowledgeable. You could have a whole other podcast where you’re talking about it.

On Step Alaska: He says it with such authority. It’s like, that’s it. Drop the mic, period, end of sentence. Yeah, and hopefully we can meet in person sometime and maybe share some water somewhere and I’ll open up the tackle box there and you’ll see there’s a lot of stuff going on in there.

On Step Alaska: What about flies? I was casting a just huge Dolly Llama for kings up in Juneau with my switch rod, and the wind picks up a little bit and you’re just really chucking it and you just hear the Dolly Llama come by the ear and you’re just — oh, okay, it went by. You put your hood up, but that’s just a little bit of fabric and it seems like the hook would just go through it and embed in the fabric. And even without a barb, it’s just going to be brutal. But it kind of flies.

Dagen Walton: Yeah, it’s not even the hook that I worry about. It’s the cannonball in the front of those Dolly Llamas.

On Step Alaska: It carries some force. Yeah, the old chuck and duck. The Kenai chuck and duck.

Dagen Walton: I fish a lot of various patterns of streamers. I fish a lot of weightless flies though, and try and hone in on the proper sink tip. I think they swim a little bit better. There are times where I feel like you need weight, and so I have weighted flies with me at all times. But I’ve found in recent years that I do fish a lot more weightless flies. In the fall I fish a lot of flesh. I typically have about four or five rods rigged in the boat ready to go. One bead rod that gets picked up probably 10 times all fall. And then four different two-hand setups that have different sink tips or different shooting heads that have some sinking rate to them, or some way to change it from one to the other. And I always have some sort of flesh fly, and then I have a black fly to resort to if I feel I need it.

Marian Giannulis: Just behind my laptop here on my desk is the fly. My personal best rainbow on a Dagen tie. It’s a flesh fly. And that reminds me every day why we’re in this fight to protect Bristol Bay.

On Step Alaska: Do you like keeping the flies? Do they go into a place of reverence or memorial? I’ve done that where I’ve kept the fly because that was the fly I caught my biggest brown trout on or whatever, and then I think — man, that fly should be fished. And the proper way to appreciate the fly is to fish it until it’s completely destroyed by the teeth of fish. Do you give reverence to a fly and do you retire flies in a place of honor?

Dagen Walton: I do. In fact, as soon as Marion caught that fish, we netted it, we released it, I grabbed the rod and I immediately clipped it off and said, here you go. There’s a time and a place — I don’t do it for just any fish or any moment — but that was a monumental moment, especially for that trip and for her. And for me too, it was awesome. It was such a cool moment to share. She needed that fly. And I did the same thing with my mom. My mom had a hilarious reaction on the Kvichak. We were fishing and she had a really tough day earlier — she lost two really good fish, to the point where she was pretty distraught, really upset, asking what am I doing wrong, why do I keep losing these fish? And sometimes the fish are just going to outdo you a little bit or something happens out of your control. So I’m talking her through this, and then we go to a different spot and she hooks into a really good fish. I didn’t totally quantify at the time how good this fish was at first — she’s hooked in, she says, hey Dagen, I think I need a net. And when we got it kind of close to us, a lot of times one of the first signs that it’s truly a big fish is where you see the line enter the water and then you see the tail — and the tip of the tail is going to be out of the water as it’s trying to keep its head down and you’re trying to pull it up. So the tail is breaking the surface and you can see the distance between the two. I was like, oh my goodness, this is a real fish. So I get really quiet. I didn’t want to say anything that made her any more nervous than she already was. She knew it was a decent fish, but I don’t think she quite knew how big it was. And we netted this fish. It was pandemonium. We take a photo, we release it. And then I clipped the fly off and I just put it in my pocket. And she goes, what are you doing? And I said, we’re keeping that fly to remember this moment. I have multiple of that exact same pattern — I tie these flies. And that’s another part of it for me — I tie almost every fly that I fish now, so I can easily recreate the exact same thing and not feel like I’m missing out. It’s not that problem for me. And I’m a sentimental person maybe more than I need to be, so I like keeping them.

Marian Giannulis: Yeah, I love having this fly on my desk every day. It’s right next to a bullet that I pulled out of a mountain goat that I shot. It just reminds me why I do this work and the opportunities that Alaskans and all our visitors have because of the work to conserve this habitat. It keeps me going. And that moment was particularly memorable. Dagen and I had probably the best 30 minutes of fishing that I’ve ever experienced in my life. We had a kind of a short trip and we got there — we were fishing beads a little bit when we got out, and there were a lot of guides on the river who were still fishing beads. But the swing bite was just starting to turn on. And we’re like, you know what, we’re going to swing it the whole time. Let’s see what happens. And that was my first time really fishing with a spey rod. I was trying to stick out this new kind of casting, just swinging the whole time and resisting the urge to just throw on a bead and catch some fish. I had hooked into a few and not landed any — trophy fish that we were really out there for. You know, love all the fish that I catch, was having a great time. But people go to Bristol Bay for those big trout. And we were just about to have to leave for the airport to fly home, and I was swinging into this spot and there was this big old trout that just kept bumping it and not committing, and not committing, and not committing. And Dagen’s just watching me — I’m getting so frustrated, resisting the hook set. It’s like, okay, this is it for me. It’s not going to happen. We have to leave for the airport. And my husband was downstream of us and Dagen’s like, we gotta fish down a little. Okay. And we had to be off the river in like 15 minutes. And I just hooked into this incredible fish. And sometimes you can feel the bump a couple of times and they’re really not committing, and then sometimes you swing into a fish and it’s way out in the middle of the channel before you even know what the heck was going on. And it just ripped my line — incredible fight. My personal best rainbow trout. Amazing. We’re celebrating, clip the fly, taking shots. And then we’re like, well, we gotta keep fishing. How far can we push this? And then 15 minutes later Dagen hooks into — was that your personal best or up there?

Dagen Walton: No, it’s up there though. It was — but yeah, it was a dozen cast — incredible fish. And we’re just having the time of our lives. And then a family of bears strolled out on the bank. It was this sow with three cubs, brown bears, and just-second-year cubs. So just a giant family of bears frolicking in the grass and in the water. And we’re just sitting there like, this is Bristol Bay. This is why people come here. This is why people work so hard to protect it. It’s an incredible place. And to just have an experience like that — truly the most exciting 30 minutes of fishing that I’ve ever experienced in my entire life. So for a fly like that, that’s going on the desk.

Marian Giannulis: Oh yeah, for sure.

On Step Alaska: So in closing here, what would you recommend for people? How can they help? What can they do?

Marian Giannulis: Yeah, thanks for teeing that up. I work for Trout Unlimited here in Alaska. We’ve been working to safeguard Bristol Bay for 20 years. The best way to stay connected with us is online — talking about all those digital tools that we have at our disposal now. We run the Save Bristol Bay program, so you can go to savebristolbay.org or follow Save Bristol Bay on Instagram or Facebook. And that’s the best way to stay up to date on everything that’s happening. Right now we have a petition where we’re just demonstrating Alaskan support for House Bill 233. Those 95% of Alaskans who do support those long-term safeguards — get on savebristolbay.org, sign the petition. That way we can demonstrate that to our senators and representatives and show them truly this is the breadth of support. This is the future that Alaskans want to see for our most productive wild salmon fishery. Dagen, you got a closer?

Dagen Walton: I think getting behind the fight with Trout Unlimited and how to do it has helped me a lot, because it keeps me in the loop. When I follow their pages it allows me to stay kind of up to speed on what’s going on, even spending all the time that I do out there. All the science and all the specifics that Marion mentioned, just us talking right now — those are the things that I get updated on when I follow their outlets. And so I follow their outlets, and when I have the opportunity or see an opportunity to share what they’re sharing, I try and put it into my own community and use my own outreach where I can and when I can. And I think one of the best things that anyone — especially locals — can do is get out to Bristol Bay. Go experience it. If you go experience it, you will immediately feel the connection to the area and just how important and how special that area is.

On Step Alaska: Awesome. Well thanks again for being on. I really appreciate it.

Marian Giannulis: Thanks for having us, Jeff.

Dagen Walton: Yeah, thank you, Jeff.

I remember when underwater cameras became ubiquitous, meaning anyone with $100 could get a little handheld Kodak Playsport and capture subsurface action. But that was before Instagram so the world wasn’t able to get a look at so many photos and clips with such bad composition. It also meant that the professionals weren’t the only ones who could get a look under water.

Drones have proliferated in outdoor photography as well as the hunting realm which brings a unique documentation opportunity—not to mention ethical and legal elements. The thing is, drones, like underwater cameras before them, aren’t typically the difference between a quality film/video/episode or post.

I have become increasingly interested in why I like certain hunting and fishing films but not others, and think I have fleshed-out my reasoning. To be clear, just because I don’t like something doesn’t mean it’s bad.

A good hunting film comes down to creativity, storytelling and the protagonist. Film length doesn’t really matter. Two great films I watched recently were under 15 minutes, and one of my favorites ever has no words and is only eight. I saw a 47-minute film about caribou hunting which didn’t feel drawn out, repetitive or otherwise distracting. I suffered through one that was over an hour long, but only 46 minutes was the actual hunt. It was largely forgettable. Two big names in the industry shooting caribou. By minute 15, I was rooting for the caribou.

Creativity and story should be closely aligned. A good visual product is about good storytelling. Beautiful, thorough B-roll doesn’t make up for a lack of creativity or storytelling. Pointless, random clips with an expensive camera are just pointless, random clips with an expensive camera. There were scenes in Avatar 2 that seemed like I was watching Blue Planet on BBC, not a movie with characters and plot. It was a beautiful graphics flex. It didn’t necessarily advance the plot, but it was impressive to watch.

People who buy drones or expensive cameras to assist in creative storytelling make the most of their money because they have a vision and enough experience to develop a style. People trash Michael Bay movies, but his films are as recognizable as they are successful. Outdoor films with creative, purposeful style get views.

Then there’s the protagonist. It might be less about making yourself a likeable character and more just avoiding being unlikeable. Flawed protagonists endure conflict in movies because flawed people endure conflict in real life. That’s why it’s so easy to switch-off feeder hunts or money-is-no-object hunts. There was no sacrifice, just a financial transaction to get another set of antlers on the wall. It has been so long since I bothered to watch the Outdoor Channel I can’t even comment about the programming. But I remember it being a buffet of egos, and TV personalities are not nearly as interesting as people. So I get my hunting videos from YouTube and don’t get the impression I am missing out.

Outdoor companies like Argali and GoHunt put out really enjoyable films featuring people who hunt, not TV hosts who never miss an opportunity to plug a sponsor. That’s not to say I am against hunters who become famous or have sponsors. Steve Rinella can, and does, go hunt wherever he wants, but his show was good well before Meateater the brand became a behemoth.

The good news is you don’t have to be Steve Rinella. Telling your own story on your own terms has always been the recipe for success, and success has always been yours to define.

At some point today dopey characters, hopelessly addicted to Doritos, will let others down by crunching their way to everyone’s demise.

A scantily clad person will emerge from the ocean with an intense yet empty look, advertising a fragrance that requires an ocean to wash off. Or that stays fragrant even after a swim? Or hits the noses of others like a winter swell crashing on the shore?

But it’s all part of the experience on a day in which American consumerism is on full display. As with other holidays or events, we’ve taken the liberty to pivot from, or completely divorce, the real meaning into a social phenomenon. And that’s not always such a bad thing.

There are more important things to pay attention to, yes. But that doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy the spectacle and plan to have a great time.

The perfect Super Bowl will start with a classic, enthusiastic National Anthem. Supporting the National Anthem and loving this country does not mean you support the human failings of its citizens.

The perfect Super Bowl will feature enough big plays to keep things exciting but enough defense to make it look difficult; 14-10 at the half, 31-27 final.

A great Super Bowl is back and forth and there are moments when absolute chaos erupts. One of the worst Super Bowls was in 2001 when the Baltimore Ravens were too dominant in their win over the New York Giants, and I hate the Giants. However, it did have riveting chaos in the third quarter when three touchdowns were scored on three plays: a pick-6 followed by back-to-back kick off returns for touchdowns. Then the game returned to a grinding bore.

A great Super Bowl is enjoyed with a main like burgers, tacos or venison roast, a side of chicken wings, shrimp and veggies for balance. Not a pre-assembled tray, select the right vegetables for what you’ve got on the menu.

There must also be dip. Not 7-layer dip because it doesn’t truly commit. It does nothing well. It’s better to have two, 3-layer dips or a thick 5-layer dip. Or just make nachos.

And of course, there are commercials.

I am beyond tired with the self-absorption of smug celebrities who never waste an opportunity to put themselves in front of the camera to service their egos. So when some participate in ridiculous maybe even self-deprecating spots, it’s entertaining again.

Commercials have become underwhelming caricatures of themselves that reflect the disposable consumerism in which we live, sure. What used to be about the best idea, crafted into a pitch has been replaced with mindless slop, yep. Companies no longer dignify or advertise the quality of their product or company, it’s merely about attempting to make something so over-the-top it might go viral. Spot on.

When I was in high school there were ads about fights being started over Pepsi and Coke and in one Field of Dreams spoof in 1995, a son offered his dad an off-brand soda and his dad walked back into the cornfields. That’s what’s missing, the “messed up, but funny” element, though social shifts are probably a good idea. Even in Super Bowl commercials.

Halftime is the best time to refill the plate or run to the store. If it’s a classic band, it won’t be a classic performance. If it’s a young artist it will surely solidify why half the audience stopped listening to new music a generation ago. If it’s a 7-layer dip of multiple artists, it’ll be underwhelming in its own unique way.

But maybe not! That’s why we watch.

I love stats, even if they tell a lousy story.

The right stats tell the story of how a sporting event unfolded: the Denver Broncos had 32 yards in the second half and lost the AFC Championship game. Thirty-two yards. Lousy stat. So telling.

We also use stats to understand cultural trends and ourselves.

University of Florida researchers found that reading for pleasure has dropped 40% in the last twenty years. This is a worrisome trend not only because it means students will be less willing to read for class if they don’t bother reading for fun, but because they are being starved of revelation. The stat alone will not encourage people to read. What gets people to read is a good story, even if the climax is at the expense of the main character.

In his book The Road to Character, David Brooks writes, “Fewer people today see artists as oracles and novels as a form of revelation. The cognitive sciences have replaced literature as the way many people attempt to understand their own minds.”

In Jack London’s classic To Build a Fire, the temperature is a critical statistic. An objective measurement of cold which should dictate action. But the man’s tragic flaw leads to his demise, a potential revelation to those who do not have the requisite amount of humility. London’s short story warns about hubris and the murderous indifference of nature. But London makes it clear that nature is not the antagonist. The man did not listen to the advice of seasoned men and did not give proper respect to nature in winter. Arrogance is the antagonist and the man does not overcome it. He is not a dynamic character who meets the challenge with courage and against all odds, succeeds. He fails to kill his dog to save his life and when he understands his mistake will end in his death, he laments believing he didn’t have to listen to those who knew better.

That’s a lesson that should speak to us. That’s a revelation.

Read Into the Wild, all of it, and think about the quest for independence and escape from a rule-bound existence. Then read “Happiness is only real when shared” and remember this is a true story. There’s more to the story than just a disillusioned, arrogant young man taking a .22-caliber rifle and a bag of rice into interior Alaska. The revelation for McCandless came too late, but it’s not for us, who have pushed people away, struck off unprepared, cloaked ourselves in hubris, to our detriment.

But we can learn.

The opposite of the reckless greenhorn is Walter Mitty, who lives his life through daydreams. The 2013 movie with Ben Stiller is great because, as with any Hollywood movie, he decides to move and grow. The 1939 short story is entertaining because Mitty’s daydreams are increasingly intense and represent the desire to break free of his monotonous, rule-bound existence. But it’s dark because Mitty doesn’t break free. He remains trapped indefinitely.

Anyone who has read this column for the last few years probably assumes that Mitty or Henry David Thoreau will be mentioned at least a few times per year because there’s no point at which existential questions are answered completely. Life is dynamic and requires reassessment and rereading those revelations.

American Literature is filled with examples of commentary about the worst elements of capitalism and mankind’s illness. They are indictments of perverted and manipulated applications of freedom, not necessarily of the system itself. But books bring us to those questions with far more information, insight, examples and context that can stimulate ideas and growth.

Novels, and books in general, are assessments of the human condition within specific time periods and can provide universal truths we take with us long after we forget a stat.

No single book has changed my life. But reading has.

After over twenty years of teaching, I’ve learned not to have expectations for a lesson plan. The better I think it is, the better I am positioned for disappointment. No class makes this more obvious than Adventure Survival Literature. I get too excited. Too amped. I get too much inspiration from books, podcasts, and high-level thinkers, and forget that when I was a teenager, school wasn’t fun for the lessons. Fun days in class were about things being interesting or less boring. I never left class thinking, “Boy, that was transformative.”

I see things from the perspective of a kid, you have to. You have to know that any day could be the day a brain is ready to absorb, so you bring the heat. Yet, you can’t force-feed insight. You can’t reason with a 14-year old like he’s 34 or give inspirational speeches every day. There must be a certain level of lived experience to turn smart quotes into true intellectual philosophy. A life philosophy also necessitates enough freedom to make decisions to live deliberately.

So I don’t take offense when I feel a tepid response to someone like Thoreau though I sometimes find myself asking them rhetorically, “Isn’t this miraculous? Have you ever read anything so enduring and relatable?”

When I was in high school I memorized the “I went to the woods…” quote, thought it would be “sick” to live in a cabin for two years and that was that. The seed was buried beneath a crust of social experiences, crushes, sports, and life experiences that didn’t require that sort of existential reflection.

But great upheavals, erosion, earthquakes of personal enlightenment provided a climate in which the seed grew and now flourishes.

If nothing else, I’ll have fun 4th hour during Thoreau Week.

The following is an excerpt from my book Big Wild Life.

My seventeen-minute commute to work at Ketchikan High School starts with a brief view of the ocean through a cluster of towering spruce. In a few months, the water will be busy with trollers, locals, and the first nonresident anglers fishing the only open king salmon fishery in the area. It’s a fairly protected drag, but the most common wind direction is southeast. From the spot through which I can see the rising sun paint the underside of the morning clouds orange, I can also expect brutal winds kicking up four-foot waves when the tide and wind conspire against anyone hoping to enjoy their quest for fish.

The waters surrounding Ketchikan are considered “inside waters” since, in addition to smaller islands, Prince of Wales Island creates a buffer between the brutality of the Gulf of Alaska and the straits, inlets, coves, arms, and bays around Ketchikan. Heading southeast from the boat launch nearest home, it’s roughly four miles to Bold Island, which is centered nicely between Revillagigedo and Annette Island and breaks the building waves born on wind and tide. After Bold, the islands are more distant, and the ocean has more space to build. Another nine miles and it’s a straight shot south to Dixon Entrance. On a day in which the waves are four feet near the launch, they’ll be at least triple that at Dixon. Islands to the south are now Canadian, and a simple turn west allows a view of nothing but ocean until Asia. The visible islands to the north and south only funnel the ocean’s rage.

From late spring until early fall, it’s easy to get motivated to launch the skiff thanks to the plethora of fishing and hunting opportunities. Winter is a different story. The more calm the water and clear the sky, the more likely the wind is out of the north, which drops temperatures and makes open-skiff rides face-numbingly cold. The cloudy and calm days between weather changes can be deceitful. Combine the fickle weather with close to eighteen hours of darkness, and it’s pretty easy to get into a routine of driving to work in the dark, driving home in the dark, and settling in for dinner at 4:30 p.m. Sometimes good weather lands on a weekend, but it can still be a struggle to get motivated to get out. Weather windows turn to sucker holes, and even sophisticated weather models miss. I know I should sound braver, as this sort of apathetic talk goes against the widely accepted ethos of Alaska living, but the truth is, it’s hard, particularly if your personal philosophy is more risk-averse than full send. It’s not that stories scare you into inactivity, but you ignore potential lessons at your peril.

In February of 1979, Elmo Wortman, his son Randy (16), and daughters Cindy (17) and Jena (13) were returning to Craig, on the west side of Prince of Wales, from a visit to Prince Rupert, a port city on the coast of British Columbia a few hours south of Ketchikan. They had made the Dixon Entrance crossing nearly a dozen times in their thirty-three-foot sailboat, but the family encountered a storm that paid no mind to meteorological predictions. At night, each had a one-hour stint at the tiller, then two hours off. This was before GPS, when navigation was done by landmarks, compass, sextant, and dead reckoning. With the weather punishing the boat, it was difficult to get an accurate location from the radio direction finder, which utilized low frequency radio waves, so Elmo had to assume their location. Their only communication was a CB radio that had limited range, and without radar, they were at the mercy of the weather. Without an emergency position-indicating radio beacon (EPIRB).

Modern navigation and safety on the ocean has its roots, not surprisingly, in the military. The LORAN navigation system was put into use during World War II. It allowed a receiver to determine position by listening to low frequency radio signals transmitted by fixed radio beacons on land. By listening to the radio frequencies, the system could triangulate a position. Successful iterations, particularly LORAN-C, improved the technology but eventually became obsolete after GPS was made available to the public. The advancement and marriage of technologies have made safety and rescue even more efficient. The early EPIRB devices sent signals that were picked up by satellites but would take time to fix a location. Today’s EPIRB activation sends out a GPS location immediately.

Moments before the boat crashed onto the rocks, the Wortman family grabbed what supplies they could, freed their Sportyak (a stable, durable craft meant for tendering between boat and shore more than a survival vessel) and attempted to make shore. They did, and thus began a monthlong battle for survival along the east side of Dall Island, west of Prince of Wales. Knowing there was a cabin in an inlet north of their location, they attempted a twenty-five-mile journey along the shore but eventually split. Leaving the girls in a shelter, Elmo and Randy set off ahead for the cabin, hoping to use the CB radio to call for help, but frostbite made both nearly immobile, and they were unable to leave the cabin. At one point they cut dead and infected skin from their own feet to keep the infection from spreading. The girls ended up being on their own for nearly two weeks but survived using part of the sail as a shelter and foraging for food. During a break in the weather, Elmo and Randy left a note at the cabin and set off toward the girls in a damaged skiff, expecting to find their bodies. While they were gone, the owner of the cabin returned, found the note, and called the Coast Guard. All four survived.

My parents taught in Craig, so we were familiar with the story even though it happened two years before I was born and seven years before we moved to Alaska. While there was always the possibility of a disaster at sea, growing up where the ocean was such an important part of life, there wasn’t a constant fear for locals with boats or commercial fishermen. There was a simple acceptance of reality but also the underlying satisfaction that came from being part of such a gloriously lucrative but dangerous industry. Every few years we’d hear about a boat going down, and the communities most affected would draw close in the way small, isolated communities do when tragedy hits. The Southeast Alaska community at large would also join in the collective mourning.

By the time I was in high school, I was aware of the reality of commercial fishing and knew it wasn’t for me. I spent the summers in Colorado visiting family and going to a summer camp. My parents didn’t want me to be intimidated by the big world after high school, so that was their way of exposing me to the Lower 48. When I was of working age, I flung pizzas and tended to salmon fry at the fish hatchery on the Klawock River, one of the only salmon hatcheries in Alaska that is located on a river with a native salmon run. After seeing the disaster of hatcheries in California, Oregon, and Washington, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game created a salmon enhancement program that would have hatchery fish returning to small creeks with no spawning grounds. Returning fish circle, or push up with the tide, but cannot spawn and become an important resource for personal use or for sport and commercial fisheries. So my job was indirectly related to commercial fishing, but outside of driving a 1970s Boston Whaler from the dock to the net pens on Klawock Lake, I never boarded a boat to actually fish commercially. Friends and acquaintances made money, sometimes great money, but the job was brutal and dangerous.

I was a junior in high school when seventy-foot waves sank the seventy-seven-foot long-liner La Conte in the vicinity of Sitka and read about it in the newspapers. A US Coast Guard H-60 Jayhawk helicopter followed the EPIRB signal and attempted to start collecting survivors, but the weather was so poor the basket could only be lowered to thirty feet above the water’s surface. After several tries, the helicopter had to return to the base for more fuel. With no life raft, the crew struggled to stay together and survive in the cold ocean.

A second helicopter was deployed from the base in Sitka and arrived on-site after midnight, five hours after the sinking. The crew managed to put on survival suits before the boat sank which would delay hypothermia substantially, but not indefinitely. The hurricane force winds made it nearly impossible to put the rescue basket exactly where it needed to be, and the survivors couldn’t swim to split the difference. At one point the pilot had to pull up to prevent a wave from striking the helicopter itself, and the cable that was connected to the basket began to fray. Skill and luck finally placed the basket in the right place and survivors were plucked from the sea. The La Conte’s captain, Mark Morley, was hanging from the side of the basket and was beaten against the underside of the helicopter as the rescuer attempted to pull the basket in the door, not knowing it was Morley who was preventing the basket from entering the helicopter. Morley fell. The basket was lowered close enough to touch him, but he was motionless. Low on fuel, the Jayhawk made its way to Yakutat, a shorter distance than Sitka.

Of the five crew on board, three survived. The next day, Morley’s body was recovered ten miles from where the La Conte sank. Six months later, the remains of crewman David Hanlon were found by hunters 650 miles away on Shuyak Island, just north of Afognak Island, near Kodiak.

Catastrophes are part of life but not a daily occurrence, so Alaskans don’t live with a perpetual feeling of doom. Most Alaskan communities cope with winter in the local gym where residents gather to support the high school basketball team. Commercial travel is done with much more discretion, and for every white-knuckle flight with my teammates, there were probably three or four cancellations or delays due to weather. The same month as the harrowing rescue attempt of the La Conte, we were shuttled from Kake to Angoon in a pair of de Havilland Beavers—the ubiquitous, if not iconic, Southeast Alaska floatplane—for a four-game basketball road trip. Brothers were separated just in case, but there wasn’t a real fear for our lives. The bush pilots who make jokes with tourists and nonresident hunters and anglers earn their stripes during winter. We know they’re good. We trust they’re good. But no one welcomes stiff winds when we’re traveling by floatplane, no matter how good the pilots are.

When I moved back to Alaska in 2013 after ten years of teaching and coaching in California, I immediately wanted to get involved with the high school basketball team. I took a job teaching at Ketchikan High School, a larger school that played against teams in cities big enough to have Alaska Airlines service. No more floatplanes to play hoops! As much as my love for basketball motivated me to get back on the bench, it really is an effective way to pass the cold, dark, stormy months of winter.