Life on Orcas Island with Edee Kulper

Rolf Eriksen has a unique relationship with The Tower on Top of Mount Constitution, which is also the name of his book. He first visited the monument as a baby and then worked to repair it through the decades as the owner and general manager of Happy Acres Company for over 53 years. Rolf has bicycled up to the tower weekly for the past 25 years in order to assess wear and tear, document graffiti, and soak in its ethereal atmosphere...

Consulting with theme parks, museums, zoos, and aquariums, and managing creative development with architects, graphic designers, writers, composers, painters, sculptors, fabricators, and contractors takes Brian Leonard all over the world, from Washington, D.C.'s National Geographic Museum of Exploration to the largest aquarium in the world in Abu Dhabi. Brian also has a few fun inventions he dreamed up – the Stiffy (a rod holder st...

Meet The German Magician: "I lost my mother when I was ten. The world stopped making sense. At seventeen, I was living alone, figuring it out. I picked up my first deck of cards - not for the art of magic, but to connect with people. Magic gave me something I didn’t expect: FAITH. For the next 18 years, I worked in Germany's automotive industry - Volkswagen, Porsche, stability and structure. But the magic inside me never left. The ...

Advice from a local Inuit man to "make sure you talk with the ancestors" has shaped Karl's mindset and survival, and he is preparing for his third season paddling the Canadian Arctic's Northwest Passage. Karl is the founder of Krüger Creative, a nonprofit dedicated to wilderness exploration, personal growth, and environmental awareness. Through Krüger Expeditions, he offers day sails and multi-day sail-to-ski or sail-to-surf journe...

Bruce Benton went from Peace Corps work in West Africa to the US Treasury Department’s Deputy-Director of the Office of Raw Materials and Oceans Policy to a career managing the World Bank’s efforts to defeat parasitic riverblindness in Africa. He has written a book of the same. Locally, Bruce continues to work hard to help the Island Rides program. A few years ago, he secured grant funding totaling $800,000 for electric vehicle inf...

Modern-day explorer, Karl Krüger, is preparing for his third leg of a three-summer solo journey through the Canadian Arctic's Northwest Passage. He covered 900 miles combined in 2022 and 2023 on his stand-up paddleboard, and in the summer of 2027 he plans to use a Holopuni outrigger canoe instead to retrace the coast he explored on his SUP, starting in Tuktoyaktuk, continuing past Kugluktuk - his furthest east point from previous s...

Georgette Wong's expertise is in impact investing and strategic consulting to strengthen local communities. She currently serves as Board Chair of the Nonprofit Finance Fund, the Investment & Audit Committee for The Russell Family Foundation, as well as the Investment Committee of the Orcas Island Community Foundation. She has been the CEO of Correlation Consulting for the past 10 years, focused on clients seeking to integrate ...

A deep dive into Liberty's turbulent early years and what formed her sense of freedom, adventure, and the desire to be who she chooses to be and surround herself with people she trusts. Liberty talks here about biking across Finland, solo horseback riding in Mongolia among horse thieves and threatening bandits, feeling akin to orca whales, writing a series of books for children about a society of mermaids and facing adversity throu...

Not only is Robin Lassen one of the warmest, most encouraging human beings you'll ever meet, she's also a tireless go-getter. While her fine art paintings hung in a local gallery and shop, she was zipping across the sky as a flight attendant for Alaska Airlines ~ a new hire at the age of 69. During summers, she trades the quiet life of Orcas Island where she practices challenging musical memorization on her piano for the on-call, a...

Local legend Jimmy Mudd is known for the “Train Wreck,” a local jam time for any musicians interested, which he hosted every week for decades. I wanted to give an Orcas Island student the opportunity to be an interviewer with me at the radio station, and the school recommended Senior Kairam Bailey, vocalist of a local band called Bonzi. I asked who his ideal guest would be to interview, and the answer was a resounding "Jimmy Mudd!"...

She goes by Liberty, and she lived out her list of hundreds of dreams by the age of 30. She has swum with orca whales in Norway, the only human to have been in a tank with 16-foot Florida alligators with nothing between them and her but a mermaid suit, she's a trained free diver, an equine therapist, a wing walker on small aircraft, a mountaineer, an author of several books, the only female captain in the San Juans, a naturalist, a...

Tenar is one of the few people you will catch a glimpse of out in the sea all year round, even in the cold, winter months. She circumnavigates Orcas Island in a day on her surfski, trains for competitions, and talks about being doggedly persistence over being blessed with a particular skill (though I believe she is an absolute phenom). She's a math lover and instructor, shares her stories of navigating autism, and attributes many o...