Nineteen-year-old Petri Alva’s favorite sprint-kayaking event is the 500 meter. “It’s just a fantastic race because it combines speed and endurance in a really challenging way,” he said. He laughed and added, “It’s about 90 seconds of all-out pain.” That’s the positive attitude shared by both Petri and his twenty-five-year-old brother, Zachary Alva. They are…

By Trisha Collopy From Star Tribune Glacier Bay National Park—A giant, hollow breath, deep as a crevasse, breaks the predawn quiet. Just off the lip of the shallow, rocky beach where my tent is pitched, a 40-ton behemoth is feeding at 4 a.m. The flat brightness, a civil twilight, looks like the same light I…

Using a paddle to guide my canoe through the rapids of the Allagash River in northern Maine, I thought of those who had passed through that area of unspoiled nature before me. The indigenous Penobscot tribe gave the 65-mile waterway its name, which means “bark stream.” In the 1840s dams were built to facilitate shipping…