One spring day, Judy Brakel and her husband Greg kayaked along the coast of Baranof Island, coming ashore in late afternoon to camp on the beach.  After cooking dinner, they walked into the forest until they came to an open area of rounded granite terraces.  “Greg remarked how little the land had changed since the last ice age,” Judy said, recalling the slow-growing plants that spotted the rockscape.  They hiked up the granite slope until Judy stopped before an oblong mound of rocks. Lichens gripped the stones and tiny trees grew from between the cracks.  She suddenly realized, “I am seeing something that was made by people.”

Greg, a naturalist, agreed that the mound was not only manmade, but one of the oldest artifacts he had seen in Southeast Alaska.  The couple pondered its significance until, finally, it hit Judy.  “I bet you it’s a grave,” she said.  They turned to watch the rays of the setting sun shoot through the clouds to strike the tiny islands of Chatham Strait.  “Oh, this is a perfect place to put somebody,” Judy thought.  Today, she remembers the moment of that discovery with a feeling of privileged peace that can be experienced only by someone who has spent years exploring Southeast Alaska.  “It made me feel so rooted here, like I found this place because I belong here,” she says.
 
Judy’s roots in the Tongass have been a lifetime growing.  Born in Petersburg, she grew up traveling the coastline of Southeast Alaska’s islands and mainland by boat.  As a child, Judy spent so much time wandering the region’s rocky beaches and mist-laden fjords with her family that, she says, “I took the wild untouched version as my vision of the world.  I thought that’s the way the world was normally.” 

Because she learned how to fish, hunt, and harvest edible plants early on, Judy has long been confident in her ability to make a home of the rainforest.  When she was in her thirties, Judy’s first marriage ended in divorce, and she faced the challenge of raising three small children alone in Juneau.  Too short of cash to afford new winter clothes for her children, Judy gathered shellfish and local plants, fished, hunted mountain goats, and started a backyard garden to keep her family well-fed.  “We would combine outdoor adventures with practical things like getting clams or berries or ptarmigan,” she says. 

At her office job, Judy says, “I would always look out the window and wish I was outside even when it was raining.”  Eventually, she was able to juggle her responsibilities so she could work as a kayak guide in the summer.  “At that point, I told myself I was never going to spend another summer in an office,” she says, “and I never have.”

For twenty years now, Judy has led kayak trips exploring the bays, salt chucks, and hidden coves of northern Southeast. She has gravitated to the northern coast of Chichagof Island, where Sitka black-tailed deer browse the intertidal kelp in the winter, and whales, seals, eagles, and gulls feast on herring in the summer.  Near Point Adolphus, Judy has watched countless humpback whales breach and feed in the waters of Icy Strait.
   
As a guide, her favorite trips are the ones when clients begin to feel at home.  “I’ve been on trips where it rained every day, and the people relaxed into it.  They would paddle alongside whales, see a lot of wildlife, and when we got back, we would go to a building where they could get out of the rain, and they wouldn’t.”

Judy now lives in Gustavus with Greg in a house built of Tongass spruce and hemlock.  Each fall, Judy stores vegetables from their garden in their root cellar and cans quart upon quart of high-bush cranberry juice.  She dries mushrooms, makes kelp salsa, and picks nagoon berries.  She fishes for salmon and hunts on the small islands around Gustavus and across Icy Strait on north Chichagof, sometimes kayaking home with a deer.  She has never stopped exploring and celebrating her home.  “I feel like I’ve had a fortunate life because I’ve lived here,” she says. “It’s akin to the gratitude that’s central to most or maybe all religions.”