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Ordering a Solar Strela 490: First Impressions Before Taking Delivery
After spending months researching boats and narrowing down what I wanted out of my first boat, I finally placed the order for a Solar Strela 490 paired with a Mercury 60/40 jet. At the time of writing this, I haven’t actually taken delivery yet. The boat is currently being rigged and set up through the…
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How to Choose the Right Freeze-Dried Food for Hunting (Without Guessing)
Choosing freeze-dried food for hunting trips seems simple until you start looking at what’s actually in most of it. At first glance, a lot of options look similar—same packaging, similar calorie counts, and marketed as “backcountry ready.” But once you start digging into ingredients, macros, and how they actually perform in the field, most of…
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Why I Chose the Garmin Fenix 8 Solar Over Every Other Smartwatch I Considered
What I Was Looking For I wanted a watch that could keep up with the way I actually live. I exercise regularly. I spend a lot of time hiking, backpacking, hunting, fishing, and exploring Alaska. I wanted something that could help me make better health and recovery decisions, accurately track my workouts, confidently navigate in…
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Stop Chasing Salmon
What Finally Made Kenai Sockeye Fishing Click for Me If you spend enough time around Alaska, you’ll eventually hear someone say, “The reds are in.” When that happens, people start calling in favors, taking time off work, loading coolers into the truck, and heading toward Soldotna. When the Kenai River sockeye run is strong, a…
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How I Fuel a 10-Day Sheep Hunt (And Why I Carry More Protein Than Most Hunters)
If you ask ten sheep hunters what they eat in the mountains, you’ll probably hear the same answers. Freeze-dried dinners. Candy bars. Peanut butter. Summer sausage. Tortillas. There isn’t anything wrong with those foods. In fact, many hunters have been successful using them for decades. But over the past several years, I’ve started looking at…
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What’s In My Pack? My Complete 2026 Alaska Sheep Hunting Pack List
Every sheep hunter’s pack is different. This isn’t meant to be the definitive list of what you should carry into the mountains. It’s simply the system I’ve built through years of backpacking and one successful Alaska sheep hunt. My priorities are reliability, durability, comfort, and versatility. I’m willing to carry a little extra weight if…
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How I Pack My Backpack for a 10-Day Alaska Sheep Hunt
If you ask ten sheep hunters how they pack their backpack, you’ll probably get ten different answers. None of them are necessarily wrong. Packing a backpack is personal, and it evolves with experience. My system today looks very different than it did during my first sheep hunt—not because I carry dramatically different gear, but because…
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Building My 2026 Sheep Hunting Gear System
Ask ten sheep hunters about gear, and you’ll probably get ten different opinions. Everyone has a favorite pack. Everyone has a favorite boot. Everyone thinks their tent is the best. After several years of building my own system—and learning plenty of lessons the hard way—I’ve realized that no piece of gear is perfect. Instead, I’ve…
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What My First Sheep Hunt Taught Me (And What I’m Doing Differently in 2026)
Every sheep hunter finishes their first hunt with a list. Not a gear list. A list of things they’d change if they ever had the opportunity to do it again. Some lessons are obvious. Others aren’t discovered until you’ve spent days climbing mountains with a heavy pack, living out of a tent, and making decisions…
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The 2026 Alaska Sheep Hunt: Why We Keep Going Back
There are easier ways to hunt. There are warmer places to sleep. There are certainly vacations that require less effort than carrying a heavy pack through Alaska’s mountains for days on end. Yet every year, people willingly sign up for one of the most physically and mentally demanding hunts available. Why? It’s a question I’ve…