50 Years in Alaska

This is a special year for me — 2024 marked my 50th year living in Alaska.
Back in the summer of 1974 I was living and working as a laborer in Omaha, Nebraska. It was stiffing hot, in the high 90s with 100% humidity. I was cooked and needed a break. So, I hopped into my old Ford pickup truck just after my 21st birthday in July and headed up to Alaska with three 8-track tapes. They were the music of the times: Paul Simon, Gordon Lightfoot and Judy Collins. Three weeks later I arrived in Fairbanks in mid-August after driving some 3,200 miles, of which 1,400 miles were on the gravel road called the Alaska Highway. I enrolled at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and got a warm dorm room for the coming fall and winter. This photo was taken in Denali during the first week of arriving in Alaska and I am pictured on the right. At the end of my first semester, my photography professor, Jimmy Bedford, invited me into his office. He wondered what I was planning on studying at the university. I told him I was clueless and just enjoyed being in Alaska. He told me I had a lot of potential as a photographer and wanted me to enroll in the university’s photojournalism program. He would be my adviser and guaranteed that I would have a job as a newspaper photographer after graduation. I was sold on the idea. Three years later, diploma in hand, I had multiple job offers. Eventually, the Juneau Empire offered me a job as the newspaper’s first full-time photojournalist. I stayed 13 years, leaving the newspaper in 1993 to pursue the love of my professional life as nature/wildlife photographer. The rest is history in full color. I am forever thankful for my good friend, mentor, teacher and cheerleader, Professor Jimmy Bedford. He died several years after I graduated. It’s sad I never really got to share my success with him. May he rest in peace.