Our aim is to create an intimate environment where you can sleep under the Midnight Sun and allow the landscape and the challenge to change you.

Our focus is fly-in backpacking and basecamp trips in some of the most remote and beautiful regions around the state. We are a woman-owned locally-operated adventure travel company located in Alaska.

The Alaska backcountry is nothing short of magical. Deep in the wilderness, away from roads, crowds, cell service, grocery stores, and interruptions, we encounter an honest rhythm of moving through the land. We experience the uninterrupted conversation of intact ecosystems that Alaska Natives have stewarded since time immemorial.

We handle all the logistics for your adventure, including managing bush flights, transportation between towns and lodging during your expedition with us.

Our professional guides have spent hundreds of days in the backcountry and have the experience and training to ensure a safe and exciting adventure.

Our aim is to create an intimate environment where you can sleep under the Midnight Sun and allow the landscape and the challenge to change you.

At Backpack Alaska our ethos is simple. Approach the land with respect, tread lightly, leave no trace, eat good healthy food, and allow the landscape to challenge you.

Our group sizes are small and we place importance on limiting the size of our groups so you can really immerse yourself into your surroundings without the hum of a crowd.

We move over the land as gracious visitors and try to limit our impact as much as possible. With that said it is undeniable and unavoidable to leave some impact with our presence. From utilizing bush planes to reach the backcountry to gear made from petroleum products to disturbing vegetation with our footsteps we aim to curb our negative impact. We focus our effort on reducing waste on our trips, feeding leftovers to our chickens and growing food used in our backcountry meals. We are always looking for creative ways to address that fact and appreciate that our guests work so hard to leave the land the way we found it.

Kathryn Walsh
Founder, Lead Guide

Kathryn was born in Nome to a gold-miner father and a beach-blonde mother. Her father’s family came from Ireland to Nome in 1899 in search of gold…and stayed.

The Walshes spent their summers around Nome and winters in Southern California. During those summers in remote mining camps, Kathryn and her brother had free range with a .22 rifle and a four wheeler.

After completing her BS in economics at Northeastern University and a stint in the world of suits and office buildings, Kathryn made her way back to Alaska. She drove up in the dead of winter and arrived on December 21st, the shortest day of the year.

She has explored far-flung corners of the state, and has an abiding passion for the endless Alaskan wilderness, where incomprehensible swaths of land are only accessible by plane, if at all. Kathryn founded Backpack Alaska so people from all over can reach the remote, in an intimate setting.

Backpack Alaska is the realization of her dream to connect people to the land and the bounty of the wild.

Reese Doyle
In Memoriam
Lead Guide

Hailing from New Mexico, Reese Doyle has been guiding intrepid travelers over glaciers and mountains and teaching outdoor-skills courses for more than a decade. He spent his childhood camping and was strapped into a pair of skis at the tender age of three. His love for the outdoors was nourished and led him to a life of continual exploration and instruction.

Reese spent more than six years guiding on glaciers in New Zealand, then was lured to the Far North, the Last Frontier, where he fell in love with the wild stretches of wilderness and decided to stay. He bought himself a raw piece of land in the heart of the Chugach Mountains and built an off-the-grid home so he could ski and climb right from his front door. Reese has guided in the Alaska Range, managed a team of glacier guides, and been an ice climbing instructor in Keystone Canyon. If he isn’t snowboarding, climbing, or backpacking he can usually be found sweating over a too-spicy burrito in his kitchen, looking up at Mount Billy Mitchell.

Riley Ebel
Lead Guide

Riley Ebel grew up skiing, climbing, and kayaking in the Colorado sunshine. She spent summers on the Colorado and Arkansas Rivers, autumns climbing in the Utah desert, and winters skiing all across the West. Her guiding experiences started in the mountains and rivers of Colorado and continued in the Green Mountains of Vermont, where she graduated with a BA in geology and environmental science. She came to Alaska to raft guide on the Matanuska in the summer of 2014, began guiding at that glacier, and has been “woo-hooing” around the state as much as she can ever since. In the off-season Riley is a ski instructor and travels abroad in pursuit of whitewater and powder. She also works in the geology realm, most recently as a field exploration geologist north of the Arctic Circle at Red Dog Mine. Riley is passionate about the wilderness and playing in any form of water, be it ice, snow, or the liquid type. She is also pretty into rocks, so you will never see her taking any of them for… granite.