That’s how I’m served my first shot of the stuff one wintry March night after landing in Anchorage. A couple dozen locals are partying inside a ranch house strung with holiday lights near the frontier bars downtown. Jet-lagged and hungry, snow caked up my jeans, I have been whisked into the kitchenette, where the effervescent hostess, wearing a green beaded necklace, pours me a jigger. “It’s better with this,” she says, tossing in the salmon with a tiny splash.
The hostess and some others here are from the Alaska Distillery, based in nearby Wasilla. The small company has made a name for itself in the booming flavored-vodka sector—now 20 percent of the overall market—with a range of innovative blends, including the smoked-salmon vodka, introduced in 2010, and the first commercially available vodka distilled with hemp seeds, dubbed Purgatory and released in February 2012. (It contains no THC, the active ingredient in marijuana.) These concoctions, as well as a half-dozen fruit-infused vodkas, have the unique distinction of being made partly with meltwater from icebergs harvested in Prince William Sound. (...)
Because glacier harvesting is done in insignificant quantities, there’s little regulation of it around the world. There are no federal guidelines in the United States. In Alaska, the only state that requires permits, there has been only one permit holder for most of the past 15 years—Scott Lindquist, head distiller of Alaska Distillery. A salt-and-pepper-haired 51-year-old, he takes to the water several times each year during the September-to-May tourism off-season to collect some 10,000 to 20,000 pounds of icebergs from Prince William Sound. He hauls in blocks weighing 300 to 8,000 pounds so he can tap their ancient water, which he insists is the best in the world. “It’s the quality of something so special and so old,” he says.
The challenges and risks inherent to Lindquist’s work are heightened by the fact that he suffers from optic atrophy, a degenerative eye condition that blurs his vision so much that he is considered legally blind. Though he’s not able to drive a car or navigate a boat, the beauty of the pristine glaciers lures him onto the water.
“I’m blind,” he says, “but I have vision.” (...)
The first surge of interest in Alaskan glacier ice began in the late 1980s. Japan’s economy was the envy of the world, and entrepreneurial bar owners there, looking for another way into the wallets of flush businessmen, started pitching a unique up-sell that tapped into the country’s fascination with the American wild: authentic Alaskan glacier ice cubes. Cocktails went for $50.
When fishermen in Alaska eagerly took to harvesting icebergs, the state’s Department of Natural Resources scrambled to come up with guidelines, which still stand today. No ice can be taken inside a national park. If a seal has hauled itself out on a berg, you can’t collect within a mile of it. Anyone taking more than 40,000 pounds of ice from a single source needs a permit, which now costs $500. Permit applicants at the time estimated that the market for glacier ice in Japan alone would amount to 16 million pounds per year, with another four million sold in California.Lindquist got in a few years after the initial rush. Raised in a suburb of Portland, Oregon, he struggled with his eye condition, repeating several grades and missing plays as a high school tackle. When he was 19, he moved to Cordova, Alaska, to take a job on a commercial seafood-processing boat, a notoriously brutal gig. But he ended up on a beautifully refurbished wooden vessel and fell in love with life on the water. “Once I put my foot on that boat, I knew I was never coming back,” he says. Because of his poor sight, being a fisherman was not an option, but after a year in Alaska he trained to be a herring-roe diver. (The mask magnified his vision.) He’d spend just three months a year diving—the roe was selling for $1,500 a ton—and the rest of his time hanging out in Hawaii. Eventually, he married and settled in Cordova, raising two kids.
Like many Alaskans, Lindquist saw icebergs as a convenient resource, ideal for packing coolers for fish or beer. But he started hearing about guys who were earning money selling the stuff to make fancy ice cubes and wondered if there might be an opportunity there. Before we went out on the boat, he recalled a day in the mid-'80s when he was on Prince William Sound with some friends, contemplating his future. At one point, he looked down into the dark blue waves and saw a sparkling shard of whitish-blue glacier. “I took a piece in my hand,” he tells me, “and I said, ‘OK, this is going to be the next thing in my life, this piece of ice.’”
Several years after that, Lindquist would daydream about making that change. Then, suddenly, he was forced to. On March 24, 1989, Lindquist and his crew were getting ready to set off from the dock when a fisherman told him there’d been an oil spill on Bligh Reef, right in the heart of the herring grounds. Lindquist was assigned to the first reconnaissance boat to investigate the damage from the Exxon Valdez. His stomach dropped the moment he arrived at the site. “It looked like rubber waves: big and thick, no sea or foam, just unbelievable black goo, seabirds covered and sea otters dying,” he remembers. “Then it settled in just what the heck actually happened here.”
The herring were wiped out along with Lindquist’s livelihood, and, soon after, his marriage. “It was a major deal,” he says. “And I never recovered.”
by David Kushner, Outside | Read more:
Photo: Michael Hanson
