Jenna Schnuer

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.

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: 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.

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 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.

Fortune.com: How the Coronavirus Pandemic Impacts Seasonal Tourism Businesses

When you run a seasonal tourism business, there’s no making up the revenue later.

Colleen Stephens, president of Stan Stephens Glacier & Wildlife Cruises in Valdez, Alaska, grew up with that knowledge. 

As the coronavirus epidemic started to spread this past winter, Stephens watched carefully to see how it might end up impacting Alaska’s short tourism season. The company—which has three other full-time employees and a team of seasonal employees, all from the town of Valdez (population 4,000)—usually sends day cruises out between mid-May and mid-September. That’s just four months to take in a year’s worth of revenue with the company’s two 149-passenger vessels. Approximately 75% of the day-cruise passengers come from outside Alaska.

Fortune spoke with Stephens for a new series, The Coronavirus Economy, to find out how she’s navigating the pandemic for her business and crew.

Read the Q&A on Fortune.com.

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.

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.