Alaska & Van with PHAMUEL

My name is Mike Pham, a traveling photographer with a passion for the outdoors. I’m based in Southern California, but my trips seem to point me north just as much as south, east and west. 

This time I went far north, about as far as you can go, in the name of finding rugged terrain and lost frontiers and Alaska didn’t disappoint. This was my first time visiting and the only thing I knew was that it was going to be cold. I booked the flight: November 2016. Everything else? I’d wing it.

Since I can justify just about every trip with photography, I try to maximize as much as possible.  I’ll plan out where I need to be at what times, how to get there, what I want to shoot and my bucket list shots. For this trip, I knew I wanted to see the Northern Lights and, beyond that, I could let the rest fall into place.

For eight days we called a blue VW home. It was perfect and old with just enough character to be weird but still reliable. We went counterclockwise from Anchorage, seeing Girdwood, Whittier, the glaciers of Matanuska, Denali and the town of Talkeetna, and they were all worth it.

But Alaska in the fall is nothing but light. That’s what you should go for. The sun rises as 9 am and sets at 4 pm, never fully making it overhead so it’s perpetual sunset, no matter the hour.

Get out and go explore more! Chase light and lines