There’s a fine line between a plant causing a blood infection and a plant making a healthy snack, and Kellie Nightlinger knows the difference.
As she walked on a North Douglas beach in early June, she pointed out a large, leafy plant near the beach. This plant, called cow parsnip, sprouts small fibers on sunny days that can cause serious problems if they come in contact with human skin.
These fibers make a person’s skin photosensitive to light, Nightlinger explained, often resulting in sunburn or a rash that looks like a birthmark. For some people, it can lead to open sores which can in turn lead to skin or blood infections.
“But earlier in the spring when it first comes up, it’s edible,” Nightlinger said, “so I like to steam it or sautée it, maybe with coconut oil.”
Toeing the line between deadly and delicious is a daily occurrence for Nightlinger. Recently voted the world’s top female survival expert and the No. 12 overall survival expert in the world, Nightlinger spends a large portion of the year in Juneau and the Tongass National Forest. The website where she has that ranking, TheTopTens.com, is based on fan voting, where people can rank everything from their favorite rock album to their favorite cell service.
Nightlinger, who refers to herself as the “Wild Woman,” moved to Alaska in 2012 looking to learn more about the distinctive temperate rainforest ecosystem. She said it was a lifelong dream to move to Alaska, and has been living it for the past five years. She’s been off the grid since relocating, moving every few nights and making a new camp somewhere else.
She also spends time in Montana and makes trips back to Michigan, but Nightlinger’s become enamored with Alaska as a natural oasis in a world becoming increasingly less wild.
“As the world’s population grows, we need wild places like this,” Nightlinger said, “places where animals can live, where plankton thrives, where people can come from all over the world on cruise ships and other ways and they can actually breathe clean air for the first time in their live in some cases.”
Living vicariously
Nightlinger’s hometown of Midland, Michigan, is best known for being the home to Dow Chemical Company, the second-biggest chemical producer in the world. Nightlinger now calls Midland one of the most boring places she’s ever been, and said it’s in the only county in Michigan that doesn’t have a natural lake.
Bored with her current setting, Nightlinger turned to the pages of National Geographic and Jacques Cousteau publications to escape, living vicariously through the writers and subjects. She became fascinated with indigenous cultures and how they survived in the most brutal and challenging environments, and started to research survival techniques.
“That’s how it started,” Nightlinger said. “I’d read a lot of survival books and Boy Scout manuals and Army survival manuals while most kids were reading comic books and stuff.”
She was only 3 years old when she started working with her father in his garden and grew up running around the woods on her family’s property.
She grew up to be a State Trooper in Michigan and then became a Michigan Conservation Officer for 12 years. When she finally moved up to Alaska in 2012, she was looking to “reinvent” herself and delve deeply into the wildlife of the rainforest. She worked at Greens Creek Mine, but lived in the wild, preferring that life to living in a house or apartment.
Living off the land made her think back to her childhood of reading National Geographic. The image that always stood out to her from those magazines was the African women living seamlessly with their surroundings.
“I just remember seeing them in their raw state with very little clothing or sometimes no clothing except for maybe some beadwork,” Nightlinger said. “Little did I know, many years later, I was going to be naked in Africa.”
Building an audience
Just after she began committing herself to being a survivalist, Nightlinger received a call from representatives from the Discovery Channel, asking her to be on their newest show. The pitch was this: She and another survivalist would be dropped in a dangerous setting for three weeks with nothing, not even their clothes.
She was wary of the idea at first, as this show hadn’t yet aired. She trusted Discovery, though, and ended up committing to it. She left her job at Greens Creek and shipped off to Africa for a 21-day stay with survivalist E.J. Snyder. The trip included extreme heat, figuring out how to make shoes, making fire and even surviving an encounter with hyenas.
The show was the first one to be recorded and the second one that Discovery aired. Prior to seeing the series, her friends and family were a little skeptical, but the finished product impressed them.
“When it came time to tell them that I was actually gonna be naked on television it was kind of a weird thing,” Nightlinger said, “but once everyone saw it, they understood it wasn’t about sex. It was about survival in kind of a caveman-cavewoman way.”
Her appearance on the show helped launch her career as a survivalist, getting her into the mainstream.
Though she spends much of her time off the grid, she’s found time to maintain an active social media presence. Her YouTube channel has nearly 6,000 subscribers and she’s going on 5,000 videos. Many of the videos are less than a minute long, just glimpses of her life kayaking and hiking and learning about the rainforest.
She works with Gastineau Guiding, taking people on tours throughout Southeast Alaska and sharing her knowledge, particularly about edible plants. Nightlinger admits that she’s still learning, but always is willing to talk at length about how ecosystems work and how everything interacts with one another.
As she walked on the Rainforest Trail on North Douglas in early June, Nightlinger pointed out a yarrow plant next to poison water hemlock, which look similar and are often found together. Once again, one will cause harm while one can heal wounds, but everything serves a purpose, Nightlinger said, and that keeps her fascinated with the area she now calls home.
“When I look at this forest, it’s a resource for all living things and it’s a valuable commodity,” Nightlinger said. “We need nature in our life, but nature needs us. Everything here serves a symbiotic role.”
• Contact reporter Alex McCarthy at alex.mccarthy@juneauempire.com.
Survivalist Kellie Nightlinger crosses a river near Juneau, gun in hand. Nightlinger has been voted the top female survival expert in the world, and has chosen Alaska as her home for the past five years. (Photo courtesy of Kellie Nightlinger)
Survivalist Kellie Nightlinger lays out seaweed to dry during a walk in early June. Nightlinger has been voted the top female survival expert in the world, and has chosen Alaska as her home for the past five years. (Alex McCarthy | Juneau Empire)
Survivalist Kellie Nightlinger looks up at trees while walking on Juneau’s Rainforest Trail. Nightlinger has been voted the top female survival expert in the world, and has chosen Alaska as her home for the past five years. (Alex McCarthy | Juneau Empire)
