Emily Gresham Beamer
The summer of 2019 brought hundreds of wildfires to Alaska's vast tracts of forest and tundra, fed by conditions largely the consequence of human-induced climate change. As they burned, immense smokey wakes billowed in unpredictable gestures around the region, transforming everyday life for those who call it home. By the end of wildfire season, a bitter patchwork of burn areas remained, totaling two and a half million acres.
In the heart of that fiery Alaskan summer, I accompanied Captain Mackenzie Barnwell and her sister, Isabel, on a trip through southern Alaska's Resurrection Bay. Like the rest of the state, an unusual number of fires occurred on the Kenai Peninsula that year (the Resurrection Bay nestles its eastern coast), due to severe drought and increased lightning strikes across the region. This series follows the sisters as they navigate their vessel, The Gambler, through extreme whiteout conditions, caused by the fusion of the bay's fog with the thick smoke of the Swan Lake Fire burning to the northwest.
As we cut around the bay, smoke burned our lungs and lightened our heads, while visibility fluctuated minute to minute. Beyond the Gambler's glass panes, sunlight deadened and coastlines obscured behind the fog-smoke fusion. Looking upward, we saw the snowpack stained grey, and our heads lightened some more. Filters, those intermediaries of distortion, became central to the series that followed.