**Press play on images for rolling slideshows**
220ish miles from Anaktuvuk Pass to the Arctic Ocean beyond Nuiqsut in July 2018. Highlights included fossils, coal seams, exposed permafrost, oil development, native Alaskans, mosquitoes, and sailing, all in a vast landscape that defies comprehension.
Below are many fine pictures of this journey with some captions (and a couple videos). At bottom is a snippet of an essay in progress.
This journey is part of my aspiration to cross Alaska from Anchorage to the Arctic Ocean.
More wild places.
Below are many fine pictures of this journey with some captions (and a couple videos). At bottom is a snippet of an essay in progress.
This journey is part of my aspiration to cross Alaska from Anchorage to the Arctic Ocean.
More wild places.
Beyond Forever
1/11/2019
If there were an end of things, it must be here.
How long had I been searching?
The world dropped away leaving only distilled light as we floated across a silvery, depthless sky. We had moved beyond form into what could have been a Bodhisattva’s dream. The river and ocean were glass reflecting weird skies sparely streaked with bright clouds. We had at last reached the Arctic Ocean, in warm sunshine, total stillness, profound calm. Earth here was only a tattered edge—a barely discernible shoreline—a vast, muddy tidal flat of intricately patterned pools and shimmering rivulets—more sky than land. A thin, white streak, textured with slight shades of gray—almost imperceptible sea ice—bridged sky and ocean along the distant horizon.
It took twelve days and 230 miles of paddling across the great plains of Alaska’s North Slope for the world to culminate—or disintegrate—into this moment, after a slow, continuous transition beginning from the stark, commanding form of glacier-carved mountains surrounding broad, treeless valleys. About halfway, the Colville River Bluffs emerged into view—high, perfectly pyramidal cliffs coated in green vegetation, as if an impossible northern empire of forgotten Mayans had applied their greatest handiwork in stitching together temple after temple. Each pyramid was matched by an inverted absence, producing some behemoth’s fanged grimace.
We skirted past hundreds—thousands—of these zippered teeth, watching intently for any sign of emerging fossils, admiring the black, slightly iridescent, horizontal coal seams angling across. As we proceeded north through this frigid, open plain, the cliffs slowly diminished—pyramids transformed into cones—sentinels of coal and exposed ice in stiff attentiveness guarding the tundra beyond—their eroding faces continually rumbling and splashing into the river below.
Like these cliffs, nothing here is quite solid—permanently frozen ground a half-mile deep in places holds pockets of standing water in its embrace, often surrounded by soggy, uneven vegetation. Thick layers of low fog creep inland from the northern ocean, sometimes meeting high, moist clouds from the Bering Sea ripping across the Continental Divide along the Brooks Range. The result is an indecipherable sky of multi-layered complexity—an explosive dance of mist and rainbows. The low, slow sun fights its way through the clouds, pouring its light onto mountains and tundra in the orange and pink hues of dawn and twilight—empty signs of a day that doesn’t end for months. The cold, crystalline air sometimes spontaneously forges a perfect ring around the sun—soft and multihued—perhaps three times its diameter.
On the Arctic coast, light betrays solidity, intensified at the time of our visit by a flat featurelessness, surreal reflectivity, and absolute calm. On our way towards the ocean, we had passed a few fishing cabins, and we were glad to see a final cabin just beside the coast offering a good place to hide from polar bears if we were to see one. I even made a comment to this effect. We arrived at the coast however only to find that what had moments earlier appeared to both of us to be the size and shape of a cabin, was only a small log lying on the mud.
An animal appeared in the distance. It looked like a caribou from afar, but ran at us fast and erratically, shapeshifting slightly as in a fun house mirror, varying in width and limb quantity, losing its certain identity, even tempting fears of polar bear. We unhooked the trigger guard from our bear spray, readied a flare, and waited. It only fully materialized into a young caribou when it trotted very closely past us.
The tide inched in—incoming ripples broke apart the perfect liquid reflections. Paddling upstream, fuzzy white dots emerged against a distant bluff, skating smoothly back and forth—a distant flock of birds, perhaps, on an unseen lake, impossibly out of view beyond the adjacent river banks, the image somehow bent and carried over the obstructing land between us.
The lone caribou ran into the distance, upstream, transforming into an abstract, levitating, amorphous brown blob, probably just as disoriented by the light as we were; I can only imagine what we looked like to him. A river island about two miles away rose up, seeming to float above the horizon in an intimidatingly steep river, but dropped back down, disappearing after a few hundred feet of paddling.
I looked back towards the ocean, and there, unmistakably, was a cabin.
Hidden views presented themselves in the light of the Arctic coast. By bending the far into view, expanding the small into immense proportions, these mirages are a bit like memories. I wonder what drives me to seek out these places, in trying to find the end of things, the great beyond…
Maybe I’m still after the thrill I found when, at the age of perhaps 10, I walked alone to the playground in an entirely different neighborhood. The slide was so big and yellow; the people all strange. Apparently, I was gone long enough to worry my parents: I had barely crossed back into my neighborhood when I saw our car with my mother’s thick black hair in the passenger window. I remember the aching feeling in my chest—fear that they knew how far I’d gone. But they didn’t. After we’d moved to a new state, I walked a few miles across hot, brushy suburbs, visiting some surprised friends along the way. During my freshman year of college, I rode my bike for hours into every hidden nook, into every forbidden neighborhood—discovering littered, marshy refuges and hidden memorials to injustice; I would stare out of my dorm window, allowing moss-draped oaks to transform into Baobab trees, transporting me into some vast African plain in the process.
I truly ventured out in 2004 when I took a massive road trip across the west, beginning in southern Georgia. Afterwards I reflected: “Overall, I drove approximately 14,000 miles. I went to 22 states (13 of which I had never been to before) and 3 countries…I saw the desert, the rainforest, 2000 or so miles of coast, 2000 or so miles of mountains along the Continental Divide, glaciers, volcanic areas, cactus, redwoods, a wide variety of people, and some of the most interesting cities in the states.” My tiny pickup didn’t survive the trek.
I have thus long been in search of beyond.
But beyond what? And why?
The unreal?
Myself?
The culminating scene of The Truman Show, one of my favorite films, has Truman, played by Jim Carrey, battling storms and traumatic memories of loss, as he sails across the ocean into the unknown. The God-Producer of the show-within-a-film, Cristof, settles the weather, allowing Truman’s journey to continue, before his sailboat eventually crashes into a wall, painted blue with lofting clouds—the far edge of the largest studio ever constructed, and the only home Truman has ever known. Cristof tells Truman, “Listen to me, Truman! There's no more truth out there than there is in the world I created for you. The same lies, the same deceit; but in my world, you have nothing to fear.” After a long pause, Truman takes a bow and exits.
How many exits have I already made? How many more must I make?
When will I crash into the smooth, painted wall of reality?
If there really is nothing more to be found at the earth’s bitter end, then why have I come?
Can the beyond move into and expand me?
How far can I go? How much can I fit?
Can I contain the world?
The universe?
Since reaching the Arctic Ocean and staring at that thin white strip of ice resting on the horizon, I have felt an aching need to know the ice beyond. I wished then that I had brought an ocean kayak, so I could have paddled out to the ice, and then kept going—circling the Earth over the North Pole, paddling off it altogether, stopping in to visit Mars on my way past the expanding edge of our tiny universe, and on beyond forever…
1/11/2019
If there were an end of things, it must be here.
How long had I been searching?
The world dropped away leaving only distilled light as we floated across a silvery, depthless sky. We had moved beyond form into what could have been a Bodhisattva’s dream. The river and ocean were glass reflecting weird skies sparely streaked with bright clouds. We had at last reached the Arctic Ocean, in warm sunshine, total stillness, profound calm. Earth here was only a tattered edge—a barely discernible shoreline—a vast, muddy tidal flat of intricately patterned pools and shimmering rivulets—more sky than land. A thin, white streak, textured with slight shades of gray—almost imperceptible sea ice—bridged sky and ocean along the distant horizon.
It took twelve days and 230 miles of paddling across the great plains of Alaska’s North Slope for the world to culminate—or disintegrate—into this moment, after a slow, continuous transition beginning from the stark, commanding form of glacier-carved mountains surrounding broad, treeless valleys. About halfway, the Colville River Bluffs emerged into view—high, perfectly pyramidal cliffs coated in green vegetation, as if an impossible northern empire of forgotten Mayans had applied their greatest handiwork in stitching together temple after temple. Each pyramid was matched by an inverted absence, producing some behemoth’s fanged grimace.
We skirted past hundreds—thousands—of these zippered teeth, watching intently for any sign of emerging fossils, admiring the black, slightly iridescent, horizontal coal seams angling across. As we proceeded north through this frigid, open plain, the cliffs slowly diminished—pyramids transformed into cones—sentinels of coal and exposed ice in stiff attentiveness guarding the tundra beyond—their eroding faces continually rumbling and splashing into the river below.
Like these cliffs, nothing here is quite solid—permanently frozen ground a half-mile deep in places holds pockets of standing water in its embrace, often surrounded by soggy, uneven vegetation. Thick layers of low fog creep inland from the northern ocean, sometimes meeting high, moist clouds from the Bering Sea ripping across the Continental Divide along the Brooks Range. The result is an indecipherable sky of multi-layered complexity—an explosive dance of mist and rainbows. The low, slow sun fights its way through the clouds, pouring its light onto mountains and tundra in the orange and pink hues of dawn and twilight—empty signs of a day that doesn’t end for months. The cold, crystalline air sometimes spontaneously forges a perfect ring around the sun—soft and multihued—perhaps three times its diameter.
On the Arctic coast, light betrays solidity, intensified at the time of our visit by a flat featurelessness, surreal reflectivity, and absolute calm. On our way towards the ocean, we had passed a few fishing cabins, and we were glad to see a final cabin just beside the coast offering a good place to hide from polar bears if we were to see one. I even made a comment to this effect. We arrived at the coast however only to find that what had moments earlier appeared to both of us to be the size and shape of a cabin, was only a small log lying on the mud.
An animal appeared in the distance. It looked like a caribou from afar, but ran at us fast and erratically, shapeshifting slightly as in a fun house mirror, varying in width and limb quantity, losing its certain identity, even tempting fears of polar bear. We unhooked the trigger guard from our bear spray, readied a flare, and waited. It only fully materialized into a young caribou when it trotted very closely past us.
The tide inched in—incoming ripples broke apart the perfect liquid reflections. Paddling upstream, fuzzy white dots emerged against a distant bluff, skating smoothly back and forth—a distant flock of birds, perhaps, on an unseen lake, impossibly out of view beyond the adjacent river banks, the image somehow bent and carried over the obstructing land between us.
The lone caribou ran into the distance, upstream, transforming into an abstract, levitating, amorphous brown blob, probably just as disoriented by the light as we were; I can only imagine what we looked like to him. A river island about two miles away rose up, seeming to float above the horizon in an intimidatingly steep river, but dropped back down, disappearing after a few hundred feet of paddling.
I looked back towards the ocean, and there, unmistakably, was a cabin.
Hidden views presented themselves in the light of the Arctic coast. By bending the far into view, expanding the small into immense proportions, these mirages are a bit like memories. I wonder what drives me to seek out these places, in trying to find the end of things, the great beyond…
Maybe I’m still after the thrill I found when, at the age of perhaps 10, I walked alone to the playground in an entirely different neighborhood. The slide was so big and yellow; the people all strange. Apparently, I was gone long enough to worry my parents: I had barely crossed back into my neighborhood when I saw our car with my mother’s thick black hair in the passenger window. I remember the aching feeling in my chest—fear that they knew how far I’d gone. But they didn’t. After we’d moved to a new state, I walked a few miles across hot, brushy suburbs, visiting some surprised friends along the way. During my freshman year of college, I rode my bike for hours into every hidden nook, into every forbidden neighborhood—discovering littered, marshy refuges and hidden memorials to injustice; I would stare out of my dorm window, allowing moss-draped oaks to transform into Baobab trees, transporting me into some vast African plain in the process.
I truly ventured out in 2004 when I took a massive road trip across the west, beginning in southern Georgia. Afterwards I reflected: “Overall, I drove approximately 14,000 miles. I went to 22 states (13 of which I had never been to before) and 3 countries…I saw the desert, the rainforest, 2000 or so miles of coast, 2000 or so miles of mountains along the Continental Divide, glaciers, volcanic areas, cactus, redwoods, a wide variety of people, and some of the most interesting cities in the states.” My tiny pickup didn’t survive the trek.
I have thus long been in search of beyond.
But beyond what? And why?
The unreal?
Myself?
The culminating scene of The Truman Show, one of my favorite films, has Truman, played by Jim Carrey, battling storms and traumatic memories of loss, as he sails across the ocean into the unknown. The God-Producer of the show-within-a-film, Cristof, settles the weather, allowing Truman’s journey to continue, before his sailboat eventually crashes into a wall, painted blue with lofting clouds—the far edge of the largest studio ever constructed, and the only home Truman has ever known. Cristof tells Truman, “Listen to me, Truman! There's no more truth out there than there is in the world I created for you. The same lies, the same deceit; but in my world, you have nothing to fear.” After a long pause, Truman takes a bow and exits.
How many exits have I already made? How many more must I make?
When will I crash into the smooth, painted wall of reality?
If there really is nothing more to be found at the earth’s bitter end, then why have I come?
Can the beyond move into and expand me?
How far can I go? How much can I fit?
Can I contain the world?
The universe?
Since reaching the Arctic Ocean and staring at that thin white strip of ice resting on the horizon, I have felt an aching need to know the ice beyond. I wished then that I had brought an ocean kayak, so I could have paddled out to the ice, and then kept going—circling the Earth over the North Pole, paddling off it altogether, stopping in to visit Mars on my way past the expanding edge of our tiny universe, and on beyond forever…
