Men's Journal

Parajumpers’s Kodiak Parka was inspired by Anchorage’s 210th Rescue Squadron.
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Imagine a cross between an emergency room surgeon, Ed Viesturs, and a Green Beret. Imagine this person descending by parachute, or rappelling from a helicopter to save the hide of a mountaineer stuck on Denali, or a commercial fisherman at the mercy of the roiling Bering Sea. That person would probably be a parajumper, one of a small number of highly skilled elite military rescuers.

This jacket was designed with a handful of those people, Alaska Air Guard’s 210^th Rescue Squadron, in mind. They do their life-saving in the 49^th state’s unforgiving elements.

To read more about the jacket, visit Parajumpers’s web site. To read more about the parajumpers who inspired this coat’s design, check out this book: The Rescue Season: The Heroic Story of Parajumpers on the Edge of the World ($889; parajumpers.it).

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This article originally appeared in the February 2010 issue of Men’s Journal.

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