Jenna Schnuer

National Geographic Magazine: This U.S. National Park Above the Arctic Circle is an Adventurer's DreamApril 2021

 To accompany a photo spread shot by Kiliii Yuan, this short piece details travel to and around Alaska's Gates of the Arctic National Park. 

Read the piece online or pick up an April 2021 issue to read it in print.

AARP: Guide to Denali National Park

Denali National Park doubles as an immersion course in the cultures, landscape and wildlife of interior Alaska.

Along with Denali herself, a 20,310-foot stunner swaddled in snow and ice, the 4.74 million-acre park houses many of the Alaska Range's other famed mountains, including Mounts Foraker and Hunter. You'll also take in braided rivers carving out new paths, glaciers and wildlife: Bears (both black and grizzly), caribou, Dall sheep, moose and wolves roam these wild acres, as do 160 species of birds, including regal bald eagles, northern hawk owls and Swainson's thrushes.

Denali is no tame Disneyfied experience; your first bear sighting will zap any notion of that. Yet, no matter your level of comfort in the great outdoors, you'll find your place here.

Read the rest of my guide to Denali National Park on the AARP website.

National Geographic: Lynx Take Epic 2,000-Mile Treks—But Why is a Mystery

One of the Northwest Boreal Lynx Project’s star travelers, nicknamed Hobo, was radio-collared in Alaska’s Tetlin National Wildlife Refuge in March 2017, just over the border from the Yukon. The lynx took off from his home range in June 2017, and, by July 2018 had traveled a whopping 2,174 miles, across mountains and often powerful rivers.

“That was the first one that really took off. We had inklings of this, but we didn’t really know too much about it,” says Knut Kielland, a professor of ecology at the University of Alaska Fairbanks’ Institute of Arctic Biology. It “was pretty exciting.”

Read the full piece on NationalGeographic.com.

National Geographic Travel: The breathtaking beauty of Alaska's Gates of the Arctic National Park

Close your eyes. Imagine an Arctic landscape. What do you see?

Even for an experienced tundra traveler like photographer Kiliii Yüyan, the 13,238-square-mile Gates of the Arctic National Park & Preserve—which sits in the Alaskan interior, above the Arctic Circle—can be hard to picture.

“I think there’s this sense that the Arctic is a vast, barren plane,” says Yüyan. But the park, which protects parts of the 600-mile-long Brooks Range, is ridged with “incredibly photogenic and majestic” mountains unlike the coastal plains that make up most of the Arctic. “You’re in a true wilderness.”

Read the rest of the piece on NationalGeographic.com.

National Geographic Travel: Retracing the Explosive History of a Remote National Park in Alaska

Standing on a beach in late May 2018, surrounded by her team members and gear, Laura Stelson thought, “What have I gotten myself into?”

An archaeologist who started working for Katmai National Park & Preservetwo years earlier, Stelson was about to lead a four-week expedition, retracing historic routes by a National Geographic explorer in the 1910s. The modern-day expedition’s goal was to find and manage evidence of the trips a hundred years ago as well as the populations that had lived in the area before it was forever changed by a massive volcanic explosion. Stelson’s expedition would cover at least 200 hiking miles, using eight different base camps along the way.

Read the rest of the piece on NationalGeographic.com.