Here above sixty degrees north latitude, mud boots are both fashion and function. From the banks of the Susitna River to the swankiest steakhouse in Anchorage, mud boots may as well be the official footwear of Alaska. To the uninitiated, Alaska conjures images of towering mountains in the imagination. Fjords and glaciers, Denali – the Great One, snowcapped peaks, and all of that. While Alaska has had more than its share of orogenies (the official term for mountain building in the male dominated field of geology), it’s what lies between those mountains that defines this place.

Home to more than three million lakes (sorry Minnesota), twelve thousand rivers, and some forty thousand miles of coastline (more than the entire continental US combined), it is water, more than anything, that makes Alaska, well, Alaska. To experience this land on her terms, one must embrace the wet. All these lakes and rivers come with a bewildering one hundred and seventy-four million acres of wetlands, which is also more than the rest of the United States combined. And it's for this reason that it feels like mosquitoes, moose, and mud boots characterize my life here above all else.

Here in what locals call the Mat-Su valley, or just “The Valley” for short, where the Matanuska, Susitna, and Knik Rivers combine to create the headwaters of Cook Inlet, life would be almost meaningless to me as a wildlife photographer without access to a veritable arsenal of kayaks and packrafts – and my mud boots, of course. While most think of bears and moose when it comes to wildlife in Alaska, all these lakes, all these rivers, all these wetlands combine to create what may very well be one of the greatest bird photography destinations in North America – at least in my humble opinion of such things.

North America plays home to just over nine hundred species of birds across all the many biomes and ecosystems that make up this place. From pelagic seabirds like the Bermuda storm petrel to prairie specialists like greater sage grouse to the tiny ruby crowned kinglet who thrives when temperatures plunge to minus 40 degree in the boreal forest, North America is a big place with many species as finely tuned to their ecological niche as that of Darwin’s finches on the Galapagos. And yet, Alaska harbors over five hundred of these species, including all five races of loons and the largest concentration of shorebirds on Earth.

All this water is what has me standing in 4 inches of the stuff with an array of gear wrapped in the protective material of dry bags and floating beside me in a packraft this morning. Before moving to Alaska, I had never had the pleasure of working with packrafts. But once here, they quickly became an indispensable part of my kit.

The road system in Alaska is practically non-existent, at least compared to that of any other place that falls inside of US jurisdiction. Technically speaking, there are only a small handful of highways in this state so large that both Texas and California could both fit inside of it, and nearly a third of those so-called highways are nothing more than dirt roads. This suits me just fine. Roads mean extractive industries such as oil and gas. Roads mean more people, less wildlife, less wilderness. The lack of roads is largely what keeps Alaska the way it is. But it also means that if you are going to explore this land, you must be creative – which is where the