ABOUT

Meet your guide

Beryl Artman, founder and lead guide of Alaska Kosher Expeditions.

Beryl Artman in an AKX cap in front of a glacier and snowy peaks

MY STORY

Why vicariously? Let's make it possible.

Every time I came home from a season and told my stories, I heard the same thing, from my rabbis, from family friends, from people I'd just met: "Isn't it hard to keep kosher up there? We'll just live vicariously through you." I always wanted to answer: why vicariously? Let's make it possible.

I'd been carrying the idea for seven years, since my mountain guiding apprenticeship in Haines. But starting a guiding company was unbelievably daunting. So I waited. I went from company to company, looking for the right one to partner with. I didn't need a partner. I needed a push off the ledge.

In the summer of 2025, I was working as a trekking and climbing guide on the Matanuska Glacier for the owner of one of Alaska's premier guiding companies. I pitched him on running kosher trips under his company's name, permits and insurance. He told me: "Start your own damn thing."

So I did. Until then, the only way to see Alaska kosher was from a cruise ship. I wanted families stepping into the landscape: kayaking to glaciers, trekking ridgelines, keeping Shabbat with mountains out the window. So I took the best of every company I'd worked for (Eizehu chacham? Halomed mikol adam. Who is wise? One who learns from everyone.) and built Alaska Kosher Expeditions. Our first season, summer 2026, was fully booked.

I'm giving people a sampler of Alaska. I hope they fly home saying what I said the first time: I want to come back.

HOW I GOT HERE

How a gap year turned into a life in the mountains

How did a nice Jewish boy from New Jersey end up in the mountains of Alaska? It starts with my parents, avid adventurers who gave me a love of the outdoors from day one. After high school in 2018, I took a gap year with AmeriCorps NCCC, then flew to Alaska to backpack on my own.

In Talkeetna, a family took me in for a few weeks and arranged a flight around Denali with a glacier landing. Standing at 7,000 feet on the Ruth Glacier, with Denali towering above, I promised myself I'd come back and climb it. I signed up for an intro to mountaineering course, fell down the rabbit hole of Alaska guiding, and three years later returned as an assistant guide on Denali.

Before all that, I went to Joseph Kushner Hebrew Academy and Rae Kushner Yeshiva High School, where I grew a deep respect for Jewish tradition, discipline and community. At Johns Hopkins I earned a degree in mechanical engineering and started a blacksmithing club.

Beryl at the anvil with the Johns Hopkins blacksmithing club

BEYOND THE USUAL ROUTES

Alaska is a living story

From my first week in Alaska, I made a commitment: if I was going to guide here, I would learn its history, its stories and its culture. That curiosity has taken me far beyond the usual tourist routes.

I've driven the Dalton Highway in midwinter, 500 miles of gravel road into the Arctic. With twenty minutes before the doors closed, I jumped on a small prop plane to Utqiaġvik, the northernmost town and point in all of the US. I wanted to stand on the sea ice and feel what it was like to be one of the explorers and sailors of old who got trapped in the Arctic for the winter. While there, I had the rare privilege of witnessing Iñupiat whaling, a tightly regulated subsistence tradition that has sustained Arctic communities for thousands of years.

That's the way I guide: Alaska isn't just scenery. It's a living story.

In our free time, our assistant guides and I keep exploring, learning and studying: the geology, the history and the stories behind the places we take you. Then we bring it onto the trail. Standing on a glacier, you'll hear how the ice carved the valley below you. Looking across a braided river, you'll see geologic time at work, still shaping the land today.

The science, the history and the stories run through every day of every trip, so you leave understanding Alaska, not just having seen it.