We’re just wrapping up a month of guiding, hiking, snowshoeing, traveling by small planes, helicopters, and ice roads, totaling 2370 miles of travel across Alaska!

We ventured from the Chugach mountains of south central Alaska, all the way up to the Brooks Range, more than 100 miles north of the arctic circle. 

The Far North

Our first trip was guiding to photograph the northern lights in northern Alaska, from my old home in Coldfoot, more than fifty miles north of the arctic circle.

The first night was a bit of a bust with heavy cloud cover, but each subsequent night was standout. Our third night we were gifted with an incredible X flare and one of the fastest moving CME’s ever recorded.

If the aurora is good and everyone has a shot, I don’t like to waste time and stay in one spot. On this night we chased the aurora around multiple locations, getting a variety of compositions.

My favorite shot of the night was getting aurora directly overhead above the tree-line.

The daytime shooting was fantastic as well. My favorite month in Alaska is January, which has the best lighting and longest golden hour. The strongest case for coming here this time of year is this “sunrise” photo which was shot using drones just outside the Arctic National Wildlife refuge. (At 10:00am no less!)

Another standout was one of my favorite mountains and these incredible frost flowers. We even headed back that night and managed to photograph the aurora here. Which one do you like best? 

The winter golden hour lasts all day and gave AMPLE time for many compositions and “small scenes.”

After arriving in South Central Alaska, we promptly took a helicopter flight to explore a very remote ice cave in the Chugach Range. It wasn’t the biggest cave I’ve seen, but the ceiling and walls were beautifully sculpted.

After leaving the ice cave, we spotted this jagged peak I hadn’t seen before and made a detour to photograph it. Getting the right angle from the air was too difficult, so we had to find a flat place to land and from there flew drones to the summit in order to get this view looking along the ridge line. 

Ice Caves & Glaciers

Another flight took us to a part of Alaska that gets very little tourism, and almost none in the winter. We came to this area for one reason, ICE CAVES! There are many glaciers in Alaska, but the ones here produce massive icebergs which become accessible during the cold months. During our time here we found more than a dozen ice caves. The highlight for me was crawling through this tunnel of ice more than 100ft long.

While ice caves are the main reason to visit, we got lucky one morning and had a stunning sunrise at the face of the glacier. Foregrounds here were abundant. 

South Central Alaska

My final tour then took us to from Anchorage down through some of Alaska’s coastal mountains. The weather during this trip was a bit difficult, with most days being overcast and not much snow on the ground to work with. When you have a white landscape and flat light, it’s difficult to find a good composition. 

Thankfully the poor luck changed just in time for our helicopter charter. Several hours of flying among the most beautiful mountains in the state could have made up for anything. This was one of the most productive flights we’ve ever had, coming away with many compositions.

Our favorite moment was getting down low to a glaciers crevices and seeing the rotors kick up the snow. That provided the atmosphere to take this shot. 

On the way back to Anchorage, we again had some difficult weather of snow and fog. There was a short window where the sun broke through, right at the only snow covered trees we found and we made sure not to waste the moment. We parked and immediately went tramping through knee deep snow in order to find a composition.

It takes a lot of work to make sense of a forest scene. My favorites in Alaska always have one that’s bent over, but we just couldn’t find one. It took a couple of different spots to find what we were looking for, but eventually I came across this. The secret was getting very low and going very wide in order to get everything to be framed up and have the correct spacing.

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If any of this looks fun, consider joining me on a trip to Alaska. I spent years of my life guiding and photographing all over the state, and LOVE to help organize unforgettable tours to capture once in a lifetime photos.