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biologist Caroline Van Hemert, Ph.D., discussed her award- winning memoir, The Sun is a Compass. For six months, she and her husband traveled 4,000 miles by rowboat, ski, foot, raft, and canoe across some of the wildest places left in North America. Prominent Alaska journalist and commentator Larry Persily—who previously also held important state and federal government resource and finance positions—explained Alaska’s oil-driven politics, its unique position without a state sales or income tax while distributing oil-wealth savings dividends to the public, and the inevitability that nothing that good can last forever. Judge Jeremy Fogel (ret.) addressed the future of virtual proceedings and cameras in the courtroom after the eventual end of the COVID pandemic. Judge Fogel served as a United States District Judge for the Northern District of California (1998-2011) and as the Director of the Federal Judicial Center in Washington, D.C. (2011-2018). Judge Fogel presently serves as the Executive Director of the Berkeley Judicial Institute at Berkeley Law School. Our final speaker was Jeff King, one of the most famous individuals in Alaska. Jeff King holds four championship titles for the 1,049-mile Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race and has also taken first place in the 1,000-mile Yukon Quest. In 2006, at age 50, he became the oldest musher to win the Iditarod. Jeff King personifies the can-do spirit and sportsmanship that we all aspire to in our varied professions.
The meeting ended with a banquet at Alyeska Resort and an invitation by the Alaska Fellows for our guests to return again to the “Great Land.”
Neil T. O’Donnell Anchorage, AK
WINTER 2023 JOURNAL 70