Expeditions Alaska Backpacking Blog, hiking gear and photo tours

What It’s Actually Like to Photograph the Aurora With Expeditions Alaska

July 2nd, 2026 by Carl D

Photo of the Aurora borealis over the boreal forest in northern Alaska. — One of the first nights of our Aurora borealis tour.

Intro

NB: Here’s a guest post from a photographer and writer who came up a few years back and had a great time photographing the aurora. Kim Merritt is an awesome person, great writer and a treat to spend a week with. Thanks Kim.

The first time I saw the aurora borealis was in Iceland back in 2013. In hopes of capturing some epic shots, I was equipped with a Canon Rebel T1i, its factory lens, and the kind of bubbly optimism that only comes from having no idea what you’re doing.

It started the way it does for most first-timers: our guide pointing out something that looked a lot like a cloud, and me thinking that’s it? But then it grew. Slowly at first, until bright green ribbons made their way across the sky, with color growing more intense and vibrant by the minute. The greens turned to reds and purples, all visible to the naked eye, swirling above a farm house that framed up the perfect shot.

Just as the aurora was coming to life I heard, “Alright, time to go!”

Hearing this pulled my eyes off the sky for the first time that night, only to realize everyone else on the “best aurora tour in Iceland” was already in the car. Yet here I was, standing in a field in thermals, snowboarding gear, and enough excitement to keep my internal temperature up for days, fully prepared to stay out until sunrise. But alas, our arbitrary curfew hit at barely midnight.

Backpacking the Arrigetch Peaks

March 27th, 2026 by Carl D

Camping on our backpacking trip in Arrigetch Valley, Gates of the Arctic National Park. — Looking straight up Arrigetch Valley

North of Everything

The floatplane banks over Circle Lake and you see the Arrigetch Peaks for the first time from the air. Granite spires stacked against the sky, walled off behind miles of spruce forest and muskeg. From the lake, you can’t see them at all. You just know they’re up there.

The pilot cuts the engine, the floats touch the water, and within a few minutes you’re standing on the shore with your pack and your group, watching the plane shrink to a dot over the Alatna River valley. Then it’s quiet. Properly quiet. The kind of quiet where you hear your own breathing and the water lapping and absolutely nothing else.

That’s how every Arrigetch Peaks backpacking trip starts. A lake, a pile of gear, and a long walk ahead.

The Approach

The Arrigetch Peaks sit in the central Brooks Range, inside Gates of the Arctic National Park. The name is Inupiaq, meaning roughly “fingers of the hand extended”, which is about as accurate a description of a mountain range as you’ll ever hear. From a distance the peaks look like a granite hand reaching out of the tundra.

Alaska Rafting Trips: Rafting the Canning River in ANWR

March 18th, 2026 by Carl D

Expeditions Alaska rafting trip guide, Rachel Taylor, guiding a rafting tour on the Canning River, Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, Alaska. — Expeditions Alaska guide Rachel, RayTay, guiding our Rafting Trip on the Canning River.

Rafting Trip Report

Taken from a couple of Trip Reports by our guides.

Most Alaska rafting trips start with a long drive. Ours started with two of them, a night in Coldfoot, and a de Havilland Beaver bush plane flight over the Brooks Range before we ever touched the water. That’s part of it.

Getting to a river like the Canning takes some effort. There’s no trailhead, no boat ramp, and no road within a hundred miles of the put-in. The logistics are a real part of the experience, and honestly, they’re part of what makes an Alaska rafting trip in the Arctic feel so different from anything else.

Christie Conway and I guided a trip in late June 2024 with a group of five. We left Fairbanks on June 25th and drove north on the Dalton Highway to Coldfoot, about a five-hour drive on one of the most remote highways in North America.

The Dalton runs alongside the Trans-Alaska Pipeline for much of the way, through boreal forest and over the Yukon River, and it’s a trip in itself. We overnighted at Coldfoot, a small outpost just south of the Brooks Range, and prepped gear that evening. Weighed everything. Food boxes, stoves, bear spray, tents, personal gear.

Every pound matters when you’re loading a bush plane.

The next morning we flew into the Marsh Fork of the Canning River in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. An hour and twenty minutes in the air, threading through the mountains of the Brooks Range. So many mountains. When you finally touch down on that gravel strip and the plane leaves, you feel it in your chest. You are out here.

Cougar, Puma, Mountain Lion: It’s All the Same Cat

March 10th, 2026 by Carl D

A mother puma or mountain lion, also called cougar, in Patagonia Torres del Paine, Chile. — Puma? Cougar? Mountain Lion? Catamount?

What’s In A Name?

Cougar, puma, mountain lion, panther, catamount, painter, ghost cat, mountain screamer, red tiger, deer tiger, Mexican lion, American lion. That’s twelve names for the same animal. There are at least 40 more.

No other mammal on earth has this many common names. Not even close. And the reason is simple: Puma concolor has the largest range of any wild land mammal in the Western Hemisphere. From the Yukon to Patagonia, across forests, deserts, swamps, prairies, and mountains, this single species has been encountered and named by people speaking dozens of languages across two continents for thousands of years.

So when someone asks “what’s the difference between a cougar and a puma?” the answer is: nothing. Same animal. Same species. Same DNA. The only difference is who’s talking about it and where.

One Animal, Forty Names

The naming confusion isn’t laziness. It’s geography.

“Puma” comes from the Quechua language of the Inca, where it meant “powerful animal”. It’s still the standard term across Latin America and in scientific literature globally. The species name is Puma concolor, which translates roughly to “powerful animal of one color”.

Why Do Humpback Whales Breach?

March 3rd, 2026 by Carl D

A humpback whale breaching out of the Pacific Ocean Alaska — A sight to behold – breaching humpback whale.

The honest answer is: we don’t know. Not for certain.

I realize that’s not the tidy explanation you came here looking for. But it’s the truth, and I’d rather start with that than dress it up. Researchers have been working on this question for decades and the best they’ve managed is a list of plausible hypotheses. None of them fully explains the behavior. Several of them contradict each other.

What I can tell you, after five seasons watching humpbacks in Southeast Alaska, is what breaching looks like when it happens 200 yards off your bow. And a few patterns I’ve noticed that may or may not amount to anything.

What It Actually Looks Like

Most photos of breaching whales show a single frozen moment. The animal airborne, water streaming off its body. What the photos completely miss is the speed, the concussion of sound, and the sheer absurdity of the scale.

A humpback whale weighs roughly 40 tons. To breach, it has to accelerate vertically from depth fast enough to launch two-thirds or more of its body clear of the water. The splash when it comes back down can be heard half a mile away. The first time you see it happen for real, in person, your brain genuinely needs a second to catch up with your eyes. Something that large is not supposed to do that.

Humpback Whales in Alaska

February 26th, 2026 by Carl D

Where They Go, When They Come, and Why Spring Changes Everything

A humpback whale feast. Spawning herring make a calorie-filled feast for the local humpbacks. — Watching humpbacks bubble-net feed is a treat.

Every year, thousands of humpback whales make one of the longest migrations in the animal kingdom. They leave the warm breeding waters of Hawaii, Mexico, and the western Pacific and swim north. Some travel over 3,000 miles, one way. They don’t eat during the trip. They arrive hungry, and Alaska feeds them.

Understanding why they come here, when they show up, and where they concentrate is foundational to everything we do on our Hungry Whales Photo Tour each spring. It’s also the key to understanding why early spring in Southeast Alaska offers something the summer whale-watching season doesn’t.

Why Alaska

Humpbacks spend winter in tropical waters where they mate, give birth, and nurse calves. But tropical oceans are nutritional deserts for a baleen whale. There just isn’t enough prey down there to sustain a 40-ton animal that needs to eat a ton or more per day. So they fast. They live off stored fat for months, and by the time they point north they’re running on fumes.

Alaska’s cold, nutrient-dense waters are the payoff. The coastal waters of Southeast Alaska, the Gulf of Alaska, the Bering Sea, these areas produce massive concentrations of the small schooling fish and krill that humpbacks need. The whales feed hard during the Alaska months, building fat reserves for the next winter’s migration and breeding.

The whole cycle is driven by food. Alaska isn’t a destination for humpback whales. It’s a grocery store. The biggest one in the Pacific.

The Herring Connection

In Southeast Alaska specifically, one species holds the whole thing together: Pacific herring.

Herring aggregate in enormous schools in the protected waterways around Sitka, Chatham Strait, and the surrounding channels to spawn each spring. Timing shifts a bit year to year, but the peak generally falls late March through April. When the herring show up, the whales are right behind them.

This isn’t a casual relationship. Researcher Joseph Liddle tracked humpback whale abundance in Sitka Sound alongside Pacific herring spawning biomass from 1981 through 2011. The correlation between the two populations was 0.87. For context, that’s about as tight a link as you’ll find between a predator and its prey in the wild.

Wildlife Photography Tips and Techniques

February 25th, 2026 by Carl D

Alaska bear photo tour; brown bear with red salmon. — My favorite bear.

Intro

I’ve been photographing wildlife for thirty years. Grizzlies on salmon streams or high in the mountains. Wolves in the Alaska Range. Pumas in Patagonia. Eagles in winter storms on the Chilkat River. I’ve also been roaming around Alaska’s backcountry since 1998, and guiding here since 2001, which means I’ve spent hundreds, if not thousands, of days in the field with wild animals, in every kind of weather (well, most kinds of weather), in some of the most remote country in North America.

Most wildlife photography content on the internet focuses on camera settings and gear. Those things matter. But they’re only a part of what determines whether you come home with strong images. The other ninety percent is fieldcraft: knowing where to be, when to be there, how to read an animal’s body language, and what it’s about to do next. That’s the stuff that’s hard to learn from a YouTube video.

This wildlife photography guide covers all of it. Gear, settings, fieldcraft, behavior, composition, ethics, and the mistakes that cost you and me the shot. It’s not theoretical. Everything here comes from decades of doing this for a living, in wild places where often times the animals don’t know you’re there and the weather doesn’t care about your plans.

Two Days for a Few Frames

I once spent two days in the Alaska Range following a band of Dall sheep rams. From watching the ewes’ behavior on day one, I guessed where the rams were headed, hiked to that spot the next morning, and approached slowly and quietly enough that one ram eventually grazed to within inches of where I lay on the tundra. Two days of fieldcraft for a few frames with a wide-angle lens. That’s wildlife photography.

Packrafting the Arctic: Float Trips in Gates of the Arctic and the Brooks Range

February 24th, 2026 by Carl D

Packrafting trip on the Noatak river, Gates of the Arctic National Park, Alaska.

Why lightweight boats unlock Alaska’s most remote wilderness

Gates of the Arctic National Park has no roads, no trails, and no services. At 8.4 million acres, it’s one of the largest wilderness areas in the United States, and getting there requires either a very long walk or a small plane.

This is where packrafts shine.

A packraft is a lightweight inflatable boat, typically weighing 4-8 pounds, that can be rolled up and carried in a backpack. When you reach water, you inflate it and paddle. When you reach land, you deflate it and walk. The combination of backpacking and paddling opens terrain that neither activity alone can access.

In the Arctic, where floatplanes have strict weight limits and portages are unavoidable, packrafts make trips possible that would be impractical with traditional boats. You can fly into a remote lake, hike to a river, paddle for days, then hike out to a different pickup point. The boat goes where you go.

Whale Photography in Alaska

February 19th, 2026 by Carl D

Tips From Five Seasons Shooting Humpback Whales

Humpback whale bubblenet feeding. — The feast for all!

Whale photography is humbling. You can have 30 years behind a lens, a camera body that costs more than your truck, and the fastest autofocus system money can buy, and a humpback whale will still make you look like an amateur.

They’re fast. They’re unpredictable. They surface where you’re not looking, breach when you’ve just put your camera down, and vanish when you’ve finally got your settings right. The ocean is moving, the boat is moving, you’re moving, and the whale is doing whatever it wants.

I’ve been running our Hungry Whales Photo Tour in Southeast Alaska for five seasons now. Here’s what I’ve figured out so far. Emphasis on “so far” because the whales keep teaching me things.

Why Southeast Alaska Is Different

A humpback whale fluke looks about the same whether you photograph it in Alaska, Cape Cod, or Antarctica. What sets Southeast Alaska apart is the context around the whale.

The backdrop matters. Moss-draped old-growth Sitka spruce, dark water, cloud layers sitting on the ridgelines. When a whale flukes against that shoreline, there’s no ambiguity about where the photo was made. Place changes everything in a wildlife photograph.

Then there’s the behavior. Spring here coincides with the Pacific herring spawn, which draws hundreds of humpbacks into concentrated feeding. The bubble-net feeding that results is among the most visually dramatic wildlife events on the planet. Groups of whales lunging through the surface together, mouths wide, herring flying. That’s a fundamentally different subject than a lone whale fluking on the horizon somewhere.

Pumas, Penguins, and the Rewilding Paradox

February 17th, 2026 by Carl D

Patagonia puma roaming the tundra near Torres del Paine, Chile. — She walked and walked looking for some Guanacos. Hungry cubs.

In the mid-2000s I spent four months living in Futaleufu, Chile, working with a rafting and kayaking company, guiding, and doing photography; eating a LOT of carne asada.

I spent a lot of time in the Andes backcountry around there. Never saw any pumas then. Not a track, not a kill, not a flash of tawny fur disappearing into the trees. That’s normal. Pumas are ghosts. You can live in their backyard for months and never know they’re there.

So when I started reading about what’s happening at Monte Leon National Park on Argentina’s Atlantic coast, it stopped me cold. Pumas aren’t just present there. They’re walking through a colony of 80,000 penguins in broad daylight, tolerating each other at close range, and hunting at the highest density ever recorded for the species anywhere on earth. These are not ghost cats. They’re something else entirely.

Three studies published between 2023 and February 2026 have documented a predator-prey interaction that didn’t exist a generation ago.

Three studies published between 2023 and February 2026 have documented a predator-prey interaction that didn’t exist a generation ago. Pumas at Monte Leon National Park on Argentina’s Atlantic coast are systematically hunting Magellanic penguins. Not scavenging. Not opportunistic snacking. Organized, sustained predation, with individual cats restructuring their entire lives around the penguin breeding season.