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Alaska is truly a land of badass, cool people. They live a simple life, a balance produced from the mixture of modern life and being so in touch with the wild that surrounds them.
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I have to admit that, when I was asked by Visit Anchorage to go on this trip instead of the first one I was assigned to (that involved exploring glaciers and wilderness, a chopper ride and all the crazy/fun stuff), I wasn’t sure if commercial fishing was for me; but they spoke so excitedly about it and were so eager to have this documented that I started rubbing off on that and got pretty excited about it.
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Being a commercial fisherman in Alaska is not just a profession, but a lifestyle, it is adventure and excitement at its best. They push themselves to amazing limits to do what they love, so you can imagine the kind of stories you can hear from them.

We wanted to make the most of the fact that our friend, photographer Katie Orlinsky, had time to take a trip with us to the Tolovana Hot Springs and do a photo shoot for murkl.com.

It turned into an amazing trip, a different kind of photo shoot, a feast for the taste buds and a great adventure! Even if, despite all our careful planning, things went rather Alaska-style...

The plan was to serve a gourmet dinner in a small cabin at the Tolovana Hot Springs – in other words, 'in the middle of nowhere' – and capture that exclusive luxury on camera. For that, we had to borrow Katie for a day from the "Iditarod". The Iditarod is a 1,000-mile sled dog race that Katie was covering for National Geographic.

Now, murkl.com obviously doesn't have National Geographic's budget... but we have good connections, and we have Katie! Katie managed to get us a "ride-along" on a small plane, pilot included. The pilot had been hired by a publisher to fly her reporters from checkpoint to checkpoint along the Iditarod. Katie knows this publisher, so she was allowed to use the pilot's services as well. Luckily, there's also a small airstrip at the Tolovana Hot Springs. So it sounds like we'd just borrow Katie for a quick shoot and then she'd be flown back to her actual assignment. But in Alaska, things often turn out differently…

Last fall, as part of the "Adventure Travel World Summit", murkl.com hosted a fam trip to the Honey Bee Lake Cabin.

Our goal was to show the guests as much of Alaska as possible in a single day.

So we had all kinds of boats and SUPs to play with on the lake.

Lance Mackey had come with 12 dogs, and the guests could join him on his ATV for a dog training run.

There were fat bikes, and fat bike legend "Kathie Merchand" was on hand as a fat bike guide.

Joe Hardenbrook of "Hard-Eats" served up a gourmet buffet with "only local ingredients".

Goeff Peterson, skipper of a fishing boat in the Gulf of Alaska, was there to answer questions. And he had brought two survival suits along.... So of course a little race to see who could get into a survival suit the fastest couldn't be left out!!!

I'm currently planning a photo shoot at the remote Tolovana Hot Springs. We'll be hauling everything for a shoot of a "luxury dinner in the wilderness" out there by dog sled and snowmobile. 

We got the unique chance to organize a shoot like this with the highly respected photographer "Katie Orlinsky", to capture in a few pictures what murkl.com does best: making dreams come true!

As you can imagine, a trip like this takes quite a bit of logistical planning... And today, just after I'd run all my errands and loaded up the snowmobile and a huge freight sled, my starter died. The car simply wouldn't start anymore! At minus 35°C (-31°F) you don't stand around thinking for long.... Thank goodness I was parked on a small road pretty much in the middle of the woods. So there were plenty of trees and a little slope. With a tow rope, a ratchet strap and a come-along, I was able to pull the car up the hill bit by bit (from tree to tree, basically), then let it roll back down and bump-start it. After about 3 hours of work, that actually worked great!

The only depressing part of the story: just as I almost had the car at the top, another car came by. Not only could he have pulled me up there in 5 minutes when it took me 3 hours. No, he then also told me that in Fairbanks there's a Facebook group for exactly this kind of situation: "Fairbanks Im stuck pull me out"!!!! 

Afterwards I took a look at the group. And sure enough, people post there all the time when they're stuck somewhere, and you can watch others reply within minutes – on average, people get pulled out in less than half an hour!!!! 

Something like that really only works here in Alaska!

"Aleyska" – the great land: that's what the Aleuts call their home. And great it truly is, this land of extremes, above all rich in enchanting nature and lonely landscapes. Only a few people live here, on an area four times the size of Germany – and they share this beautiful corner of the earth with more than 20,000 brown bears, thousands of bald eagles and the largest moose on the planet. In his show »Abenteuer Alaska« (Adventure Alaska), photographer Bernd Römmelt takes his audience on a journey into this one-of-a-kind landscape.

It's considered the toughest sled dog race in the world – the Yukon Quest. Following an old mail route into the gold rush country of North America, the trail stretches from Canada to Alaska. The race covers 1,600 kilometers (1,000 miles) through lonely forests, over frozen rivers and across mountain passes – in temperatures as low as minus 50 degrees Celsius (-58°F). The route runs from Whitehorse in Canada all the way to Fairbanks, Alaska.

Northern Alaska, with its empty expanses and largely inaccessible wilderness, is like almost no other place on Earth. Tourists flock to Denali National Park to marvel at North America's highest mountain, Denali, formerly Mount McKinley. In most other regions, visitors face real challenges: no roads, no hiking trails and no shelters. The wildlife has adapted perfectly to the Arctic conditions. The documentary »Expeditionen ins Tierreich« (Expeditions into the Animal Kingdom) takes you on a journey to huge caribou herds, grizzlies and Arctic ground squirrels.

1,000 miles straight through the wilderness – from Fairbanks to Whitehorse. Finally, it's that time again – last Saturday the starting gun went off for this year's Yukon Quest, arguably the toughest sled dog race in the world. And our guide and partner »Wild and Free Dogmushing« has not just one but two teams in the race.

Off to Alaska! The Dalton Highway, Alaska Route 11, is a legend in the US: it runs 2,300 kilometers (1,430 miles) through the wilderness of North America. In summer and winter alike, filmmakers Ernst Arendt and Hans Schweiger traveled in their Unimog motorhome for this three-part series – from Canada to Fairbanks and on along the supply road to Prudhoe Bay on the Arctic Ocean.