Jenna Schnuer

The New York Times: An Alaska National Park as Big as Connecticut. Annual Visitors? 23,000.July 22, 2018

Flying through Lake Clark Pass in a four-seater Cessna 206 (the fifth seat had been removed to make room for baggage), I felt like I had cheated some long-established rule: Visit a National Park on Memorial Day weekend and you’re required to sit in traffic hell for hours. But there are no roads into Lake Clark National Park and Preserve. Boats and planes are the only way in. Mine was a 170-mile flight from Merrill Field, Anchorage’s municipal airport, to the town of Port Alsworth.

Lake Clark was declared a National Park in 1980 as part of the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, in an effort to protect “multiple values,” including the waters that flow into Bristol Bay, site of the world’s largest salmon fishery, said Megan Richotte, Lake Clark National Park’s program manager for interpretation. The park is a veritable greatest hits of Alaskan landscapes and wildlife. It would take many lifetimes to hike all of Lake Clark’s glaciers, mountains, volcanoes and tundra; paddle all of the park’s lakes and shoreline; and spot the wide range of wildlife large — bears, lynx, eagles and wolves — and (very) small — collared pika and tundra shrew — that claim the area as home. And Lake Clark is also a culturally rich area, home for thousands of years to the Dena'ina Athabascan indigenous people.

Read the rest of the story about my trip into Lake Clark National Park.

 

Edible Alaska: Farm UFall 2017

When the new crop of farmer hopefuls arrived at Calypso Farm in Ester last April, there was no soil in sight. The farm’s acreage remained buried under thick snow. “Everything was dead,” says California native Holly Brookings. Interior Alaska doesn’t give up on winter easily.

The Farmer Training Program would start May 1, but for several weeks more, the students would just have to imagine climbing up and down the soil terraces, planting rows of flowers, vegetables, herbs, and, soon enough, crouching down to thin and weed the plants to encourage abundance.

Read the piece, the second of a four-part series, on Edible Alaska.

The New York Times: Outside Anchorage, a Chef Makes the Case for Local Alaskan CuisineOct. 29, 2017

Twenty-three miles south of Anchorage on the Seward Highway, the first glimpse of Froth & Forage’s turquoise roof comes two mountainside highway curves ahead of the restaurant’s gravel parking. Though the weathered wood building looks like the barbecue shack it was in a past life, it is now home to a 22-seat restaurant headed up by a chef who wants to prove that a restaurant in south-central Alaska can thrive using local ingredients or, at least, other small local purveyors, instead of goods delivered from, as Alaskans call it, Outside.

Read the rest of the piece on The New York Times site.

FarmLife: The Future is Clearwinter 2018

 

By 2013, the clatter and crash of tablet computers tumbling to the floor of AGCO’s Jackson, Minnesota, plant had become, to put it mildly, an issue. “There’s not really much of a flat surface on a tractor,” says Anthony Buckentin, a manufacturing lead at the AGCO^® facility. “One little bump and it’s on the floor.”

Such accidents proved as expensive as they were disruptive. Smash a tablet from a drop of 4 feet or less and the warranty covers the damage. The tractors rolling out of the Jackson plant stand quite a bit taller, and it wasn’t unusual—perhaps twice a month—for the tablets to fall from a height of 10 feet or so, break and cost AGCO a hefty $3,000 to replace.

The tricky bit: The tablets were supposed to be the solution. Read the rest of the story.

 

Edible Alaska: Home SliceSept. 2, 2017

During the first couple of years after moving to Anchorage from the east coast (NYC, mostly), I cobbled together a list of restaurants that could quell at least some of the missing-there and homesick-for-certain-restaurants feelings and hunger pangs that welled up.

One thing that seemed like it should be fairly easy to find eluded me: why couldn’t I find a pizza place that felt a little more like those back home?

Find out where I found my perfect NYC-in-Alaska slice.