This piece concerns a Chukchi high school honors student's first flight into Kotzebue, Alaska, thousands of miles away from the East Coast, a time zone he had never left before:

Purely Alaska showcases "ordinary" people with extraordinary insights amid some of the most magnificent, rugged, wild and exotic places in America's largest yet by far most sparsely populated state. Purely Alaska was not written by outsiders, including not even "outsiders" from urban Alaska. Indeed, these writers share experiences only those who live in rural Alaska can capture as authentically, as unassumingly.

In a state where more than half the population lives in the Anchorage area, life outside the more urban centers (called rural Alaska or the Alaska Bush) embraces a remote, exotic, mostly roadless northern land where most people who travel must fly, or ply often-treacherous waterways in summer, or in winter follow primitive trails over frozen land, lakes, rivers, and even the sea. Purely Alaska showcases a diverse assortment of rural Alaskans who hail from the forbidding shores of the Arctic Ocean to the lush rainforests in Southeast Alaska a thousand miles away.