Ned Rozell

00000192-9ca2-dda9-a1f3-defb7c9c0000The more Tony Fiorillo explores Alaska, the more dinosaur tracks he finds on its lonely ridgetops. The latest examples are the stone footprints of two different dinosaurs near the tiny settlement of Chisana in the Wrangell Mountains.Read more.

00000193-6344-d71b-a7fb-ebdf845d0000On June 6, 1912, if you happened to be sitting on a log outside your cabin near Fairbanks, Juneau or Dawson City, you would have heard an explosion.There was no way to know the boom came from hundreds of miles away, or that it was the starting gun for the largest volcanic eruption of the 1900s.Read more.

00000193-6344-d71b-a7fb-ebdf83010000After a winter of outstanding snow conditions, three scientists drove snowmachines up Valdez Glacier this spring, curious to see how far they could get. At about 5,500 feet above the salt water of Port Valdez, their machines rested on about 20 feet of snow that had fallen there during the winter. Read more.

00000192-9ca2-dda9-a1f3-defb66fd0000First, I’ll wear light-colored clothing. Second, I’ll bathe more often in an attempt to be as odorless as possible. Third, I won't exhale while I'm in the woods."Snow mosquitoes," the big, sluggish mosquitoes that are the first to irritate us, survive the winter by bundling up in leaf litter or wedging themselves under loose tree bark. Read more.

00000192-9ca2-dda9-a1f3-defb40090000While running through Bicentennial Park in Anchorage, biologist Jessy Coltrane spotted a porcupine in a birch tree. On her runs on days following, she saw it again and again, in good weather and bad. Over time, she knew which Alaska creature she wanted to study.“I thought, ‘Oh my god, how does he do it? How does this animal make it through winter?’” Coltrane said during the December defense of her doctoral thesis in Fairbanks. Read more.

00000192-9ca2-dda9-a1f3-defb329a0000There's a new kind of dinosaur out there, and it lived in Alaska.Its bones, long turned to stone, are part of a cliff in northern Alaska. That's where dinosaur-hunter Tony Fiorillo brushed dirt away from a portion of its massive skull something that most of us would mistake for a rock.Read more.

00000193-6344-d71b-a7fb-ebdf78670000Beneath a sky of stars and hazy aurora, the heat of an October day shimmers upward. The next morning, leaves, moss and tundra plants are woven into a carpet of white frost; a skin of ice creeps over the surface of lakes. Alaska is freezing once again, responding to the planet’s nod away from the sun and signaling one of the biggest changes of the year.Northern plants in these parts are standing at the ready, prepared for a long season of doing nothing.Read more.

00000193-6344-d71b-a7fb-ebdf77050000Somewhere in the rolling tundra east of Deadhorse, a lone wolf hunts. The 100-pound male will take anything it can catch, or find — a ptarmigan, a darting tundra rodent, a fish, the scraps of a carcass, or, if lucky, a moose calf or caribou. Hunger is a common companion, but the wolf somehow survived when his mate probably died of it last winter.Read more.

00000193-6344-d71b-a7fb-ebdf74120000In places where the air gets cold enough to freeze seawater, sea ice creates a world known by few people a shifting, ephemeral, both jagged and smooth platform of white that clings to the shore for much of the year.Click to read more.