Fun, Adventure, and Everyday Alaska
by Angela Schmidt with UAF’s Alaska Film Archives. Sharing stories from KUAC’s television history as we celebrate National Library Week.
This National Library Week, we invite you to take a look back at everyday Alaskans and what they do for fun and adventure.
For decades, KUAC public television has captured these moments.
In the 1990s series Angling Alaska, viewers followed fishing adventures all across the state -- meeting the people who fish its waterways, and sharing in the excitement of the catch.
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In The Balloonatics, from 1982, we see a different kind of adventure -- hot air ballooning over Interior Alaska’s vast and surprising terrain.
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And in Cache Your Cash, produced in 1977, KUAC offered practical, and often creative, advice on how to make the most of a dollar in a place where everything can be just a little more challenging -- and a lot more rewarding.
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These programs remind us that Alaska isn’t just a place of hard work -- it’s also a place of curiosity, creativity, and fun.
Through a partnership between KUAC and the Alaska Film Archives at the University of Alaska Fairbanks Rasmuson Library, more than a thousand of these historical programs have been digitized and preserved. And they’re all available for viewing online.
This project is part of the American Archive of Public Broadcasting, a national effort supported by the Mellon Foundation, GBH in Boston, and the Library of Congress.
To start exploring, visit americanarchive.org and search for “KUAC Alaska.” Or visit KUAC.org for links.