Podcast
Crude Conversations
Hosted by crudemag · EN
”Crude Conversations” features guests who represent a different aspect of Alaska. Follow along as host Cody Liska takes a contemporary look at what it means to be an Alaskan.
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26episodes
Episodes
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EP 174 The Sharp End with Ashley Saupe
6d ago01:06:09Tap to summarizeIn this one, I talk to Ashley Saupe. She’s the host of the Sharp End Podcast, a show built around firsthand accounts of accidents, near misses, survival, and the complicated psychology of risk in the outdoors. But before she started the podcast, she was studying the mistakes of others, reading Accidents in North American Climbing, an annual publication by the American Alpine Club that documents climbing incidents, what went wrong, and the lessons people take away from them. She became fascinated not by triumphs or summit photos, but by the thin line between routine and disaster—the small decisions, overlooked details, and human tendencies that can shift a situation toward danger. Eventually, she began to think: someone should turn these stories into a podcast. That idea became The Sharp End. For more than eleven years, she’s been listening to people recount moments when things fell apart, and in the process her own relationship to climbing, risk, and the outdoors has changed. In her twenties and early thirties, she was more concerned with reaching the summit, but now, as she nears 40, she’s learned to enjoy the journey. These days, success means facilitating wilderness experiences for other people and getting down safely. She’s less interested in collecting accomplishments than she is in what the outdoors reveal about fear, ego, vulnerability, and identity. Now, she often spends time alone in the backcountry, where the silence and isolation force her to confront these things directly. She says time slows down in the mountains, that survival depends on paying attention: listening to your body, the weather, your partner, the rock in front of you. That way of moving through the outdoors has also shaped the way she thinks about Alaska, how it’s scale and mythology often distorts people’s judgment and can lead to a dangerous kind of confidence. Many people refer to this as “The Alaska Factor.”
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EP 173 The warden of Kavik River Camp with Sue Aikens
3w ago01:29:25Tap to summarizeIn this one, I talk to Sue Aikens — the warden of Kavik River Camp, a remote, self-sufficient outpost on Alaska’s North Slope. A collection of bunkhouses, fuel tanks, generators and equipment set against a wide, treeless, and unforgiving landscape defined by wind, cold, and distance. Just open ground, shifting weather, and a constant awareness that survival depends on preparation and respect for the elements. Hunters, scientists, photographers, and adventurers all travel there for work and pleasure, and it’s Sue’s job to help them navigate the landscape and prepare for whatever they came there to do. She’s spent nearly 30 years of her life here, long enough to know it down to the smallest detail. Every rock, every barrel, every bend in the river. And for more than a decade of that time, she’s shared her life with the world in Life Below Zero, a reality show that gives people a glimpse into what it takes to live in the Arctic. In her new book, North of Ordinary, she / Sue writes about a difficult upbringing, abuse, abandonment, resilience, and the unlikely path that led her to Kavik. And what emerges from that story isn’t just about survival, it’s a way of thinking. About solitude, about fear, and about what it means to rely on yourself when there’s no one else around. Like the time she was attacked by a grizzly who was trying to assert dominance around Kavik, at one point biting down on her head so hard she could hear her skull crack. After the bear left her for dead, she crawled back to camp and lay there for days until help eventually arrived. The injuries that resulted from that attack left her rebuilding her body piece by piece. It’s the kind of experience that would send most people running. But rather than pushing her away, it seemed to root her even deeper in that place. She had survived. And for Sue, survival isn’t just relief — it’s proof that she belongs in Kavik.
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Chatter Marks EP 133 Where science meets story with Caroline Van Hemert
Apr 2801:13:07Tap to summarizeCaroline Van Hemert is a wildlife biologist, writer, and researcher whose work moves between science, story, and the lived experience of wild places. She’s based in Alaska, where she’s spent years studying migratory birds and the shifting ecosystems they move through, paying close attention to how climate change is reshaping patterns that have existed for generations. She’s also the author of “The Sun Is a Compass,” a memoir that traces a 4,000-mile journey she and her husband made from Washington State to Arctic Alaska under their own power—by boat, ski, canoe, and foot. Across her work, whether in the field or on the page, she’s asking a version of the same question: how do we find our way through a changing world, and what can the natural world teach us about movement, attention, and belonging? Caroline’s writing merges the personal with the scientific, a perspective shaped by her early research into beak deformities in black-capped chickadees. That work led to a broader focus on wildlife health, studying everything from parasites in polar bears to harmful algal blooms and their effects on seabirds — and how disease, toxicants, and environmental stress ripple across entire ecosystems. Because a change to one species is never isolated, it’s a community-level shift. For a long time, that work felt heavy, like serving as a gatekeeper at the morgue, documenting decline. But more recently her focus has begun to shift. In her new book, tentatively titled “Upwellings,” she looks for moments of surprise, places where the natural world resists the expected ending. Because she believes that by recognizing what’s possible in the wild can reshape what feels possible within us. It’s a shift that also reflects a deeper question about science itself: whether data alone can still move people, or whether it requires a more engaged, more human voice.
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Chatter Marks EP 132 Haunted by Alaska with Don Rearden
Apr 1601:14:31Tap to summarizeDon Rearden is an author and an educator whose work is rooted in Alaska—its landscapes, its communities, and the complex realities shaping life across the North. His writing—both fiction and nonfiction—blends elements of survival, culture, and environmental change. Whether he’s exploring a pandemic unfolding in the Arctic or a coastal village on the brink of relocation, his work is grounded in lived experience and respect for place. That respect comes from his upbringing in Southwestern Alaska. He says he’s haunted by it, in a good way. Looking into homes left behind after an epidemic, running a dogsled team out across the ice to set a fish trap, how there was only one telephone in his entire community. Images like these he can return to anytime, not just for inspiration, but as a way of staying connected to where he comes from. He jokes that writing is his drug of choice because he’s able to step outside his body, away from old injuries and the noise of the world, and can move freely through story. It’s something he’s always turned to as an escape. It’s his way of traveling back to his youth in Southwestern Alaska, back to the tundra, the mountains, and the places that have defined him. It’s a place where survival wasn’t abstract, it was part of daily life. That time in a tight-knit community and nature has been a constant reminder of how much he still has to learn. It's also a reminder that Alaska isn’t a place of extraction, but a place rich with stories, culture, and meaning. Across his writing, he returns to these themes again and again. There’s survival, love, an appreciation for the fleeting nature of time, and a kind of magic rooted in the mystery of the world. He says that for too long these stories have been told from the Outside, but now it’s time they’re told from within.
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Chatter Marks EP 131 An Alaska made for TV with Sam Davenport
Mar 3000:59:58Tap to summarizeSam Davenport writes the AK IRL newsletter. It dissects Alaska reality television as entertainment and as a cultural lens that shapes how Alaska is perceived from the Outside — an idea often signaled right from the start in show titles filled with buzzwords like wild, survival, and frontier. As if there’s a checklist for how Alaska gets branded and sold. She writes about the manufactured drama, the narrative structure, the way reality TV can feel like a funhouse mirror — recognizable, but distorted. And yet, within that distortion, there are moments of truth. Shows like Deadliest Catch have introduced millions of viewers to the commercial fishing industry, offering glimpses into lives they might otherwise never encounter. There’s a reason people keep watching these reality shows about Alaska: there’s a fascination with remoteness, solitude, escapism, and the idea of living outside the noise. But Sam also looks at what gets left out of these shows. The recurring image of Alaska as an empty, unpeopled wilderness erases the Alaska Native communities who have lived on and stewarded this land for thousands of years. She points to how exaggeration, assumption, and spectacle can flatten the complexity of a place into something consumable, and how that flattening has consequences. Some shows approach that responsibility with more care than others, but the broader pattern of Alaska as novelty, extremity, and myth persists. From fishing boats to gold mines to even dating shows, the state has become a stage where outsiders project their fantasies. And what Sam’s newsletter does is turn that image back onto itself, reflecting both Alaska and the assumptions and expectations of the people watching it.
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Chatter Marks EP 130 Cold War cakes with Julia O’Malley
Mar 1601:21:31Tap to summarizeJulia O’Malley is a journalist, a cook, a baker, and lately she’s been researching and re-creating Cold War cakes. During the Cold War era—roughly the decades between the end of World War II and the early 1990s—cake mix transformed a food once associated with luxury into something democratic, something anyone could make at home. Julia says that those boxed mixes, and the recipes people built around them in the ‘70s and ‘80s, are more than just dessert. They’re cultural artifacts that reveal how women navigated creativity, expectation, and changing ideas about domestic life. They reflect a moment when women were entering the national conversation from within domestic space. Experimenting, adapting, and reshaping expectations. That shift raised a question inside the kitchen itself: What happens when packaged ingredients, appliances, and new food technologies promise women time—time to work, to control their finances, and to claim a larger role in public life? In Alaska, where fresh ingredients were often scarce and communities had long relied on shelf-stable foods, brought in through supply chains and institutional systems, cake mixes made a lot of sense. For generations, Alaskans have adapted to what’s available—working with canned goods, powdered ingredients, and foods designed to travel long distances before reaching the table. A box of cake mix fit easily into that reality. Julia has been tracing these stories through old cookbooks and community recipes, even digging into ones from boomtown Fairbanks in 1909, to understand how something as ordinary as cake can tell us about women’s lives, shifting ideas of feminism, and the creativity that unfolded in Cold War kitchens. Because food, Julia says, is always a story. It’s one of history, origin, climate, and longing. And in the Cold War kitchen, when the threat of nuclear annihilation hovered in the background of daily life, even something as simple as baking a cake could feel like a small act of reassurance.
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Chatter Marks EP 129 Branding the Arctic with Jeremie McGowan and Amund Sjolie Sveen
Feb 2801:15:17Tap to summarizeJeremie McGowan is an artist, designer, and researcher. Amund Sjolie Sveen is an artist. And together, they created Real. Arctic., an exhibition that examines how the word “Arctic” is used in branding, institutions, geopolitics, and everyday consumer products — and how the use of that word shapes what we think we know about the arctic. Their work blurs the line between critique and commodity, asking who gets to define the Arctic, who profits from it, and what gets flattened in the process. Throughout the exhibition, the work shifts form — from displays of “Pure Arctic” deodorant to an expanding archive of Arctic-branded objects — asking viewers to reconsider what is real and what has been manufactured. It explores how art and design can both construct and unravel powerful narratives about place, and what responsibility comes with working inside those systems. Jeremie and Amund collect and document products from around the world that call themselves “Arctic,” or borrow the image, the light, or the myth of the Arctic to sell something. Even when those products have no connection to the place itself. Deodorants that promise Arctic purity, chewing gum that offers polar freshness, outdoor brands that are marketed around rugged endurance and masculine extremes. Again and again, the Arctic appears as clean, untouched, and invigorating — a blank canvas for refreshment or conquest. As Jeremie points out, much of that marketing is driven by an outsider fantasy: the idea that you’re the first, the only one to witness the wilderness or the Northern Lights, even as that experience is packaged and sold en masse. Amund says that the Arctic’s power as a word may lie in its perceived remoteness. Because it feels unknown, it can be filled with whatever we want it to mean. And in that process, the realities of the place itself and the people who live there often fall away and what remains is a brand. And then, beneath all of that, is a deeper question about power: who gets to define a place, and whose version of that place becomes the story that guides our understanding of it.
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EP 172 The Pacific Coastal Temperate Rainforest with Paul Koberstein
Feb 1601:08:55Tap to summarizeIn this one, I talk to journalist Paul Koberstein, whose recent book, “Canopy of Titans,” explores one of the most overlooked ecosystems on Earth: the Pacific Coastal Temperate Rainforest. Stretching roughly 2,500 miles from just north of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge to the western Gulf of Alaska, it’s the largest temperate rainforest on the planet. Fueled by Pacific storms and cool ocean currents, it supports towering redwoods, Sitka spruce, western hemlock, and cedar — some of the largest and oldest trees in existence. Acre for acre, these forests store more carbon than tropical rainforests like the Amazon, with vast reserves locked in massive trunks, deep soils, roots, and centuries of accumulated woody debris. But even though it’s one of the most carbon-dense ecosystems we have, and a critical buffer against climate change, it remains largely overlooked in global climate conversations. Paul pushes back on some of the most common narratives about forests and climate. He points to those industry ads that promise for every tree cut down, three more will be planted. It’s an argument that sounds reassuring until you realize a young sapling can take a century to store the amount of carbon held in the massive tree that was felled. Trees are about 50 percent carbon. Through photosynthesis they pull carbon dioxide out of the air, lock that carbon into their trunks and roots, and release the oxygen we breathe. Southeast Alaska’s Tongass National Forest alone holds more total carbon than any national forest in the country. That scale of storage is central to Paul’s point: the science doesn’t say we’re powerless. It suggests that we can still influence the climate back toward something more stable. If fossil fuels loaded the atmosphere with excess carbon, then forests, if protected and restored, can help draw it back down. Forests have stabilized the climate for thousands and thousands of years. Whether they continue to do so depends largely on us letting them do their job.
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Chatter Marks EP 127 Shaped by land with Emily Sullivan
Feb 101:18:25Tap to summarizeEmily Sullivan is a writer, a photographer, and a director whose work is grounded in questions of land, community, and responsibility. Throughout her work, she focuses on uplifting Indigenous perspectives — not by speaking for communities, but by listening to what people are already saying and doing. Her first film, Shaped by Land, is currently screening at festivals. It’s a documentary about Greenlandic skiers and their connection to place, set against the backdrop of the new Greenland Tourism Act — legislation designed to protect land, center local ownership, and resist extractive tourism. Emily’s interest in Greenland is shaped by her experience in Alaska, where many of the same tensions play out under different economic structures. In both places, people arrive seeking experience, adventure, and meaning, often without reckoning with what those desires take from the communities they move through. Emily’s path to this work started when she was just a kid. She’s always been an observant person, someone who noticed small shifts in light and weather — that’s where her photographic eye comes from — and that sense of awe never really left. It grew out of curiosity, and later, into a belief that anything capable of stopping you in your tracks is probably worth paying attention to. And then, through her work and time spent in Alaska, climate change became personal and immediate — visible in rivers that don’t freeze when they should, unstable ice, unfamiliar weather patterns, and disrupted fish runs. Much of her education in climate change came from Alaska Native peoples, specifically women who have been leading this work for generations. That learning shaped Emily’s commitment to bringing Indigenous knowledge, solutions, and sovereignty to the forefront of her storytelling — using careful observation and conversation to explore the forces shaping our collective future.
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Chatter Marks EP 126 Cooking Alaska with Kevin Lane
Jan 2601:29:28Tap to summarizeKevin Lane is the executive chef and co-owner of The Cookery and The Lone Chicharron Taqueria in Seward, and he was recently named as a James Beard Award semifinalist. Reflecting on that recognition, he says it wouldn’t have been possible without his team at The Cookery, or the kitchens and crews from his past that shaped the way he cooks today. Those roots stretch back to California’s Sacramento area, where he was raised on crockpot meals, black-eyed peas, and lentil stew, before he found his way into kitchens in San Diego. Around nineteen, he was eating street tacos, shucking oysters, and learning the pace of restaurant life — first on the cold oyster bar, then on the hotline, where teamwork and discipline took root. Those early experiences still show up in his food today — the steady presence of Mexican influence, the belief that cooking is ultimately about making people happy, and he’s still shucking oysters. He was still early in his career when he moved to Juneau to work as a Sous Chef. There, and later in Sitka, he recognized the realities of Alaska’s food system, how kitchens relied heavily on frozen and canned goods because they were dependable. Orders had to be placed seven to ten days out, and even then, fresh vegetables and herbs might arrive frozen and mushy. It was a lot different from working in California, where you could order produce in the morning and expect it that afternoon. The learning curve was steep, but learning to adapt is what good cooks do. So, given Alaska’s abundance of fresh seafood, he adjusted his cooking and learned to let fish become the focus. And now that there’s more access to farm-fresh produce than ever before, the constraints that once defined cooking in Alaska have eased, expanding what’s possible on a menu.
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