multinational mining corporation and a nongovernmental fish advocacy group might seem like strange partners—but not in Alaska.

Kinross Alaska, the operator of Fort Knox gold mine north of Fairbanks, has worked with Trout Unlimited to take military veterans and active members of the armed forces fishing for several years, and now the organizations are collaborating to reclaim historic mining sites in the Turnagain Arm area under the Alaska Abandoned Mine Restoration Initiative. The inaugural project focuses on Resurrection Creek in Hope. The multi-year undertaking has been progressing since 2021 and is scheduled for completion this summer.

The historic project brings together mining companies, conservation organizations, the US Forest Service, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the National Forest Foundation, and others—all sharing the goal of improving Alaska’s fish habitat.

he snow in Alaska is long forgotten as the heat of the desert hits you the moment you walk off the plane. However, the work to make the National Center for American Indian Enterprise Development’s Reservation Economic Summit (RES) a success starts well before the winter weather, and even before summer sockeye runs hit the Last Frontier. Once at the conference, handshakes and hugs turn quickly into strategy discussions. Old relationships pick up where they left off, and new ones form with a clear sense of purpose. At RES, connection is not a side effect of the conference; it is where it all begins. The theme for the gathering in late March was “Rising Together.”

For Alaska Native leaders, business owners, and tribal representatives, RES has become one of the most important national stages to understand where Indian Country is headed—and where Alaska can learn and grow within it. Each year, RES brings together tribal governments, Native-owned businesses, federal agencies, and corporate partners from across the country. It is widely recognized as the largest Native-focused business conference in the United States.

rom fishing line to fertilizer, food to medicine, kelp has a long history of use in Alaska Native technology. The state’s much newer formalized kelp industry, however, is still finding its way. When a major mariculture grant program ends this year, the kelp industry will face one of its biggest tests thus far.

“Shellfish and aquatic plants have historically been crucial to the subsistence and livelihoods of many Alaskans,” his order noted, yet the nascent industry had struggled to achieve more than modest profits. The stakes involved more than money; in the face of “future environmental threats,” kelp “can produce healthy foods and supplements, increase and preserve habitat for fish and invertebrates, and assist with bioremediation efforts in areas that contain excess carbon loads,” he wrote.

s Body Renew Alaska evolves into its next chapter under incoming owner Aaron Miller, its focus is less on expansion for expansion’s sake. Rather, the fitness franchise’s focus is on returning to what made it successful in the first place. That means continual grounding in a specialized business model that can be difficult to maintain but essential to successful outcomes: a personal connection with clients and their unique fitness goals and journeys.

“At one point there were five Body Renew locations,” says Miller, who grew up in Anchorage. “Body Renew started really small. It was really a personal training studio that happened to sell memberships, and that’s really what their core was. Over time they expanded, they got bigger, they introduced more premium locations, and it transitioned to where it was just another gym, and it lost that personal touch.”

or a seemingly quiet little port about 40 miles from Wasilla, Port MacKenzie has a lot going on. From hosting participants in a military training exercise to being the jumping-off point for construction projects in western Alaska, the port maintains a hum of activity.

With large projects looming in Alaska—including a possible LNG pipeline from the North Slope; the West Susitna Access Road that would open up state land west of the Susitna River; a possible coal mine near Skwentna and other, nearer-term critical mineral mining efforts in the West Susitna area; and the completion of a railroad spur line from the Houston area south to the port—supporters hope that hum will soon sound more like a steady roar of activity.

“The exciting thing about Port MacKenzie is that we’re, in many ways, a diamond in the rough,” says Matanuska-Susitna Borough Port Director David Griffin. “We’ve barely scratched the surface of our possibilities.”

n the aftermath of Typhoon Halong last fall, emergency management officials examined the storm’s damage in a swath from Kuskokwim Bay to Nelson Island, all without setting foot on the ground. From a thousand miles away they assessed the situation in western Alaska thanks to the deployment of drone aircraft.

“Instead of trying to get personnel out to assess all these areas, you have the drones that are able to assess all of this infrastructure in real time,” said Stan Caldwell, director of the US Department of Transportation’s Strengthening Mobility and Revolutionizing Transportation grants program. He added that evaluating damage to roads, bridges, and other infrastructure in harsh winter conditions took hours, rather than days, thanks to the use of drones.

ommercial aviation is the safest way to travel—or so airlines have been saying since at least the ‘60s. But the industry has changed a lot since the advent of the Jet Age: it’s gotten orders of magnitude safer. By the late ‘90s, commercial carriers had less than one fatality per 2 billion miles flown, and rates continued to improve. From 2009 through 2024, there were zero fatal crashes of commercial passenger jets.

Aviation is a key mode of transportation in Alaska, especially for 82 percent of communities not connected to the state’s main road system. Flight operations in Alaska require strict adherence to federal safety regulations to ensure that passengers and cargo reach their destinations. Moreover, air carriers go beyond Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) regulations by developing additional safety policies and using advanced technologies to reduce risks for everyone involved.

ire beats cold. That elemental understanding explains the intuitive preference for internal combustion engines in Alaska’s climate. Combine that intuition with the observation that batteries, when stored in a freezer, lose their get-up-and-go, and Alaskans reasonably cast a skeptical eye on electric vehicles (EVs).

Furthermore, in communities where electricity prices are crushingly high, plugging in a two-ton appliance for daily recharging seems like madness.

“I certainly started with the presupposition that—in these rural, outlying Alaska communities like Kotzebue and Galena that rely on a lot of diesel generation for electric power and that get pretty cold in the winter—it might not be a good economic transition,” admits Michelle Wilber, a research engineer with the Alaska Center for Energy and Power, a laboratory based at UAF. “There might be a lot of energy used to keep the battery in the vehicle warm; very few people have warm garages to store their vehicles in; there would be a lot of energy, and that would translate into really high costs.”

otion and Flow Control Products (MFCP) was founded in 1960 and offers customers distribution, services, and manufacturing support for hydraulic, pneumatic, electromechanical, and other industrial applications. Its goal is simple: “We strive to be your fluid power consultative advisor and premier solutions provider.”

Over the past sixty-six years, the company has built partnerships with sixty-nine manufacturers, suppliers, and third-party vendors—including being a leading distributor of Parker Hannifin industrial products—to ensure MFCP can meet customers’ varied equipment needs. And MFCP consistently finds itself on Industrial Distribution’s Big 50 list of the nation’s top industrial distributors, including as #39 in 2025.

Today, the privately held company has fifty-nine locations in eleven states across the Pacific Northwest, Western, and Rocky Mountain states, says Alaska District Manager Neil Shibe. Though headquartered in Littleton, Colorado, MFCP’s Alaska branches are run locally, which means the company has deep operational roots and teams who understand the state’s unique environment and industry requirements.

ong before any major mining company set foot in the Yukon-Kuskokwim region—where one of the world’s largest undeveloped gold deposits now sits—the gold was already known. Placer mining had been active in the area for decades, and the elders of the region’s Alaska Native corporations had taken note.

“Our elders specifically selected land in the hills above Crooked Creek because they knew gold was there,” says Andrea Gusty, president and CEO of The Kuskokwim Corporation, the Alaska Native village corporation that stewards the surface lands for ten villages along the middle of the Kuskokwim River’s course. “It was one of the priorities in land selections for the future of both our corporations.”

Beneath those surface lands, the mineral rights belong to Calista Corporation. Thom Aparuk Leonard, vice president of corporate affairs for the Alaska Native regional corporation, underscores the significance of the land claim. “By selecting the lands, the elders ensured that for any potential development, including the Donlin project, there would be direct oversight by the village corporation and the regional corporation,” he says.

icture it: an 800-mile engineering marvel traversing Alaska’s rugged wilderness. An immense zinc mine powering Northwest Alaska’s economy. World-class sustainable harvests feeding global markets with seafood.

The Trans Alaska Pipeline System, Red Dog mine, and the Alaska fishing industry: These massive ventures represent high-stakes investments in infrastructure and resources that have transformed Alaska into a powerhouse of global energy, minerals, and food. Today, we call these ventures inspired, but that label masks a fundamental nuance and common misconception: there is a distinction between the risky and the reckless.

That line between bold visionary and reckless gambler is usually written in ink only after the dust settles and the checks clear. Winners are often labeled as geniuses while thousands of leaders who made similar bets but went bust are ignored. When you see any winner in the marketplace, their strategy can look like a guaranteed blueprint for success. This is survivorship bias in action, obsessing over the front-runners while ignoring the graveyard of those who made the same choices. Recklessness is a classic leadership trap, in part, because it is very easy to mistake good luck for repeatable strategy. Our brains are wired to find patterns in chaos, even when they don’t exist, and when a gamble pays off, it is easy to invent a story to explain why it worked. This explains, in part, why high-risk behavior is often rebranded as “visionary” in the business world.

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