He served as an elected member of the Anchorage Municipal Assembly (1986-1993) and as Deputy Commissioner of the Alaska Department of Natural Resources (1983-1987). He was president and a member of the Board of Directors of the Cook Inlet Historical Society from 1993-2015 and was the chair of the Anchorage Centennial Advisory Commission from 2013-2015. He has also written, co-edited or contributed to several books on Captain James Cook, Captain George Vancouver and the history of Alaska, including Arctic Ambitions: Captain Cook and the Northwest Passage (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2015) and Captain Cook’s Final Voyage: the Untold Story from the Journals of James Burney and Henry Roberts (Pullman, WA: Washington State University Press, 2017).