Podcasts about Alaska, United States

Somebody is always missing. What a listener hears first from the Alaska shows is a search: Bill Romberg describing six straight days looking for Bradford Broach without turning up clothing, equipment or a body; a narrator on the gravel banks of Glacier Creek in Girdwood, certain that someone out there knows what happened to Erin Marie Gilbert; coffee still in the cups aboard the John and Olaf after its four-man crew and its life raft were gone. True crime is one of the larger beats here, and its clips keep returning to people the state has swallowed. The counterweight is the working state talking to itself about hay and honeyberries, Anchorage lot sizes, the Railbelt grid, volcanic ash and a cancelled ferry, and beneath both a deep layer of the past, read aloud from gold-rush memoirs and pulled from customs-house records and archive tapes. There is no sports talk on this page.

What Alaska is

Alaska is the largest state in the United States by area and one of the least populated, separated from the rest of the country by Canada and stretching from the rainforest islands of the Southeast panhandle to the Arctic coast. Anchorage is its largest city and Juneau its capital; it became a state in 1959. Fishing, oil, aviation and the outdoors carry its economy, and it is home to many Alaska Native peoples, whose land claims shaped its modern politics.

The missing

Alaska Unsolved and Up and Vanished work the same subject from opposite distances. Alaska Unsolved is the home-built one. Its "Girdwood" episode puts the narrator at Glacier Creek and has Evan Phillips lay out the several ways Erin Gilbert could have vanished from a crowded festival; its 2022 and 2023 episodes widen to five disappearances at once and to a survivalist who disappeared.

Up and Vanished is Tenderfoot TV's national series, hosted by Payne Lindsey, and its current season sits in Nome following two disappearances. The voice is patient and plainspoken, a host walking the listener through a case file at a kitchen table, and the clips carry the method: a witness asked to rate on a one-to-ten scale how sure he is that the blue single-cab truck he saw was Joseph's (he says ten), a secretly recorded call in which Kirk Pasquoia calls the podcast lies while letting slip that he knew Joseph had no gun, and Kirk and Bonnie insisting the police already cleared everyone.

Robin Barefield's Murder and Mystery in the Last Frontier is the historical register. It follows the John and Olaf's raft to an island 75 miles from the bay it blew out of, with a law student who had taken his brother's place on the crew over Christmas break among the lost; it works through how the Americus and Altair went out on another vessel's stability letter in "Disaster in the Bering Sea"; and in "Alaska Ghost Stories" it puts Fanny Beam in room 12 of the Van Gilder Hotel in 1950, where staff still report a woman in white. Soapy Smith, the Alaskan Avenger and a serial killer who hid in the state are in its run of titles.

Hay, lots and the grid

The working-state shows share a plain register and differ in what they are curious about. Ag Matters Alaska is a farm-store conversation that asks direct questions and admits what it does not know. Dylan Blankenship explains that a picture of hay for sale did nothing for him on social media and that the growth came once he posted jokes and interactions with his animals and family, adding that people living in Alaska forget how interested the lower 48 is in the place. Steve Minima describes a used harvester from Washington that lets him pick honeyberries by the thousands of pounds, and another clip sets out the FFA state convention at the Glenn Massey Theater and Mat-Su Middle College. The titles go on to fungi, a Wrangell garden, the Brewers Guild of Alaska, an auction company and a farm on the Kellogg Campus.

Alaska Real Estate Podcast is the same question-and-answer register pointed at property. Its strongest clip has Anna Brawley, the Anchorage Assembly chair, drawing a Venn diagram of who owns property in a place and who lives there, from the company town where the circles do not overlap to the suburb where they nearly do, and arguing that Anchorage cannot complain about housing while rejecting every tangible change that would address it. Lottie's advice that a good investment matches your timeline rather than your wish list is the other side of the show; the titles run from 100% financing to "Rates and the Million Dollar Market" and "Sight Unseen".

Renewable Radio, from Renewable Energy Alaska Project, is the policy end of the same conversation. Chris Rose explains why six small balancing areas make wind and solar hard to integrate across the Railbelt, another clip lays out the three dockets SB 123 gives the Railbelt on governance, planning, reliability and transmission costs, and Alan Mitchell shows how building data turned up $60,000 a year in school energy savings, with a passage on why consumers price a heating system over two or three years rather than its whole life.

Weather, ash and the ferry

Alaska Climate and Aviation Podcast comes from Katie Writer's view of the state through a Super Cub windscreen. David Kochevar of the Alaska Aviation Weather Unit describes the partnership with the Alaska Volcano Observatory, ash from Katmai's 1912 eruption still being resuspended in 2026, and why aviation is essential infrastructure for remote Alaska; Denali guide Brian McCullough skis twelve miles through a December storm to reach a crashed plane. Titles bring in Brian Brettschneider, Rick Thoman's Arctic Report Card and the Arctic Encounter Summit.

Raven Radio News is Sitka's local news and the coast's. Its ferry clip runs the Southeast route, Bellingham to Sitka, Petersburg, Wrangell and Ketchikan, then to a village of just over 500 people seeing a few sailings a month, where a council member says a cancelled trip meant the mammogram van could not come and residents who turned out to have cancer were not seen until October; Yakutat gets one visit from the Columbia all summer. The other clip is Sitka's snow crews worn out, equipment broken and an extra $250,000 on the city's books after record snowfall.

KVNT 1020 AM Local Shows carries The Thomas Lovings Show, which is where politics gets argued on this page: Thomas Loving on Alaska Republicans needing a leader who can enforce the party platform against elected officials, and on police having a duty to respond rather than a duty to protect any one person in time. Its most memorable clip is quieter, someone recounting how close a police impersonation scam came to working, with a spoofed APD number, a $15,000 jury-duty threat and a case number and badge number ready, until an email arrived from a personal Gmail.

The past, read aloud and from the archive

Wrangell History Unlocked builds multi-part stories from records. Its Strange Customs series follows an army raid on Fort Wrangell's merchants and the customs cases that came after: W.K. Lear fined at Glenora Landing over goods from the steamer Hope, his pickles-by-false-declaration charge dismissed, William P. Wilson's affidavit tying John Carr to false clearances and a $4,000 extortion, and a man named Fernandesti found in a stateroom on the Gussie Telfair with his throat cut. A Star of Bengal bonus has Captain Farrer calling all hands to be ready to jump as the smokestack came adrift.

Archiving AK with the UAA/APU Archives is the archivists talking about their collections and playing the tapes. A Hilscher family oral history tells how a great-grandfather, Julius, left Prussia hidden in a barrel aboard a sailing ship during the peasant uprising, landed in Philadelphia and became a minister, and how Adolph let bankrupt farmers keep working his land through the Depression. The Federal Lands series turns to papers, among them Fred and Lidia Selkregg's, where Lydia's landslide maps and seismic planning are tied to the deadly slides Southeast Alaska is living with now.

Woman Who Went to Alaska, A by May Kellogg Sullivan (1871 - 1952) is the gold rush told by someone who was there, read as an audiobook: the Elk stopping in the dark to pull four nearly frozen men and five dogs from a leaking dory, a rescued miner laughing that somebody up there had something for them, Sullivan solving her frozen feet with reindeer-skin mukluks over her shoes, and men filing the papers to stake her a claim on the Kuskokwim.

Alaska as a setting

The fiction on this page is mostly old and mostly about gold and ice. Rex Beach, drawn to Alaska by the Klondike rush and five years of failed prospecting before he wrote, set Spoilers, The by Rex Beach (1877 - 1949) on a Nome where Helen Chester watches a crowded street become a close-range gunfight, finds three armed men stripping gold from the Midas sluices over a wounded watchman, and opens her door to Roy Glenister with a Winchester, warning that vigilantes are on their way to hang Judge Stillman. Blue Envelope, The by Roy J. Snell (1878 - 1959) is a girls' adventure in which Marion and Lucille wake to find their rowboat, motor launch and a strange boy gone, Obagak warns about sea ice cracking before Cape Prince of Wales, and the boy who once swam to them off the Washington coast reappears with reindeer sleds from a village on the north coast of Russia.

Hellhound Country is the contemporary one, a Segel Media audio drama in which Isabel and her daughter Kaya flee Fairbanks after a murder in their kitchen and a missing husband. Its clips have a former small-town sheriff admitting he hunted hellhounds, orichalcum weapons that can kill them, Billy waking aboard a cargo ship and Contreras handing Kaya a scorpion, with episodes titled for stops along the way: ISKUT, HELLS GATE, REVELSTOKE, BAINBRIDGE. HBO's The True Detective: Night Country Podcast covers the series set in fictional Ennis; Issa López says she made Danvers a cynic because she is one and that she is Navarro, and Jodie Foster reverse-engineered Danvers so that Kali Reis's Native character stayed the central voice. Molly of Denali, from GBH & PBS Kids, follows Molly Mabray, an Alaska Native girl at the Denali Trading Post in Qyah, working out from a crate chewed from the inside how the puppy Suki got there.

Where to start

• For the missing: the "Girdwood" clip from Alaska Unsolved, then the Nome season of Up and Vanished.
• For how the state works: Dylan Blankenship on Ag Matters Alaska, then Anna Brawley on Alaska Real Estate Podcast.
• For the coast and the weather: Raven Radio News on the ferry, Alaska Climate and Aviation Podcast on Katmai ash.
• For the past in its own voices: Woman Who Went to Alaska, A by May Kellogg Sullivan (1871 - 1952) and Wrangell History Unlocked.

The Alaska feed on this page plays clips from these shows.