Jenna Schnuer

Anchorage Daily News: From Wee Tots to Trained Professionals, There’s Room for Every Artist at the Alaska State Fair

Enter the Alaska State Fair through the green gate and there’s no avoiding the instant assault on your senses. Even before the flashing lights of the rides and games fan out in front of you, the scents of sugar and barbecue smoke smack you headlong. Yet on this grim gray afternoon, it took the stunningly loud pop of the Mash-a-Mouse game’s oversized balloons to snap me out of what had become an overwhelming desire to take a nap.

Even a Monday at the fair can feel very Monday.

Gray day or not, I maintain that any adult in need of a one-day pre-winter vacation from reality should head out to Palmer on the second Monday of the fair season. Solo.

Read the piece.

Via Podcast

I worked as the editorial consultant and launch producer to help get the Via Podcast up and running. Was a great joy working with the team at Via to develop a show that would get people dreaming about their next great trip in the American West. 

Listen to the show. 

National Geographic: 10 Best Things to Do in Alaska

Alaska’s more than 663,000 square miles of land and 66,000 miles of shoreline offer an almost embarrassing abundance of idyllic landscapes and bucket list experiences. From spotting whales and bears to discovering Indigenous-made art, here are the best ways to delve into the northernmost state in the U.S.

Read the piece.

National Geographic: Visiting Alaska? Here's What the Locals Love.

 Thanks to Alaska’s size, limited road system, and often overwhelming array of outdoor activities, mapping out a trip to the 49th state can be challenging. Cruise the Inside Passage or drive the Interior? Day trip out of Anchorage or basecamp in the backcountry? To help you plan the best trip, we asked locals—writers, adventurers, artists, museum curators—for their secret spots and favorite hangouts.

Read the piece.

National Geographic: The Essential Guide to Visiting Alaska

Here’s everything you need to know about exploring the cities and vast wilderness of Alaska—when to go, where to stay, what to do, and how to get around.

Read the piece.

Anchorage Daily News: Singer-songwriter Annie Bartholomew Shares Stories of Gold Rush Women on 'Sisters of White Chapel'

“Alaskan Storyteller.” That’s the phrase Juneau-based Annie Bartholomew uses to describe herself on her website. Simple and to the point but way too modest.

Just one round of listening to Bartholomew’s first album makes that clear. “Sisters of White Chapel,” which tells the stories of the women who did sex work during the Klondike gold rush, was released earlier this month. The life stories woven into the album’s nine songs took Bartholomew several years to research and write.

Read the story on the ADN website.

The New York Times: In Alaska, Slowing Down to Take Things In

 With rain hitting the roof, the temperature outside hovering in the low 50s and a cast iron stove keeping things warm inside the cabin that, on this July weekend, is serving as an art studio and classroom, I feel a nap coming on. Summer days in Alaska. They are not always the bluebird skies promised in travel ads.

But there’s no time for napping on this trip to McCarthy, a bustling summer community of artists, writers, seasonal workers and visitors that sits 60 miles down a gravel road in Wrangell-St. Elias National Park & Preserve.

I’m here to expand the techniques I use to observe and record the natural world, to gain a deeper understanding of the animals, plants and geology of the state I’ve called home for eight years. Over the next two days I’ll attend a field-sketching workshop taught by the science illustrator and natural history artist Kristin Link through the Wrangell Mountains Center.

Read the piece on the NYT site.

Popular Science: The infrastructure package boosts an unsung hero of rural transportation: ferries

The $1.2 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act President Biden signed into law on Monday included more than $1.6 billion for a form of transportation that many people don’t think about much: ferries. While some Americans might consider ferries to be mere pleasure cruises, boarded during vacations for voyages to remote destinations, many people around the country rely on them for everyday life. 

That daily use goes far beyond hopping the Staten Island Ferry to get to jobs in Manhattan. People who live in remote locations in Southeast Alaska or down the Aleutian Islands often have no other options, save perhaps flights that are weather dependent and expensive. And if they want to transport their car, ferries are the only way to go.

“Ferries are part of our road system,” says Douglas Olerud, mayor of Haines, Alaska. 

Read the piece.

National Geographic: 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.