About the time we were seriously contemplating cutting the fishing line, we began to see a dark, looming figure begin to emerge from underneath the boat. We pushed the Zodiac into the surf, fired up the motor, angled the nose into the oncoming waves, and skipped the motorized raft toward the smoking volcano, some 26 miles straight across the frigid, moving waters of Cook Inlet.

My ears went completely silent as if I’d sunk to the bottom of the deep end in a ten-foot swimming pool. The 9MM pistol we were using to shoot halibut after getting them along-side the boat discharged less than two feet from my head, and just missed puncturing the side of the inflatable Zodiac raft we were fishing in by less than one inch around!

In 1985, I was back in Alaska for my second time. I was working on a commercial fishing boat out of Bristol Bay using gill nets to catch salmon. Gill nets are designed so that when the fish swims into its webbing, its head gets lodged and it can’t pull out. When we’d pull the gill nets over the side, we would use something called a fish pick that resembled a curved ice pick to pull the net from around their gills.

One of my favorite things to do is digging for Razor Clams in Cook Inlet, Alaska. Cook Inlet was named for none other than legendary explorer, Captain Cook, who happened along this way while looking for the Northwest Passage in 1778. While searching for the elusive passage, something that was never there to begin with, some of Captain Cook’s crew were nearly swamped and drowned by the extreme tidal change in an offshoot of the inlet.

The three of us loaded the gear, packed the couple hundred pounds of caribou meat into the rear of the plane, and taxied across the tundra. As the pilot turned the plane to fly into the wind for takeoff, he suddenly decelerated and said; “Boys, we’ve got too much weight in the plane. We need a plan B.”

One of the scariest nights I have ever spent was in a small, fenced-in camp in Balule, South Africa, on the southern banks of the Olifants River in Kruger National Park. At night you can hear the lions roar from as far as five miles away – it’s an AWESOME sound.

A wall of calving glacier sheared off and a chunk the size of Walmart thundered into the ocean creating a wave over twenty feet high! We’d been anchored in a place called Three Hole Bay for the past...

We’d been clamming across from Redoubt for two days and it was time to pack up our gear and head several hours over to Seward. We were going to go halibut fishing on my friend, Ralph’s 28 foot Bayliner cabin cruiser for two days out of Resurrection Bay. The cruiser was fittingly called the “Think or Thwim”, the same name as his father’s commercial fishing boat I worked on out of Bristol Bay, Alaska in 1985.

“The sound was like two rocks grinding together as the bear drug his canines across my scalp.” ~ Brown Bear Attack Survivor Wild bears are scary – period. They are not the well-kept, docile bears...

In July of 2009, a friend and I were camped not far from a salmon hot spot near Cooper’s Landing, Alaska, on the Kenai Peninsula. We’d just stowed our portable gas grill and were unpacking our sleeping bags for the night when an ambulance came flying by, sirens wailing. I looked at my friend, who cocked his eyebrows as he said, “Either there’s been a wreck, or someone got hammered by a bear.”

I spent most of my days after school and in the summers exploring the mountainside where we lived. That’s where I came alive. It’s where I learned to hear God speak to me. I didn’t have to compare myself with anyone; I could be whoever I wanted to be and always be the best at it. I wore hiking boots, ragged blue jeans, and a flannel shirt, and carried my BB gun, a pocket knife, and a hand-drawn hunting license I pinned to my back just to prove I belonged in this wilderness environment.

On July 9, 1958, one of the most remarkable events in recorded history occurred in a place called Lituya Bay, Alaska. A massive tsunami washed across the bay, wiping out everything in its path. At its peak, the wave stretched 1,720 feet toward the sky – 250 feet higher than the Empire State Building. Entire forests were annihilated in its wake and land stripped of soil down to sheer bedrock.