RUBY — Beneath a bulbous waxing moon, we roll along on a ribbon of packed snow. The clear river ice beneath our tires is four feet thick. That ice we can’t see is the crystal memory of so many cold days of the winter of 2025-2026. The remaining spruce pile of our Tanana friends […]
“You guys are the result of thousands of years of selection,” Fran Kohl said. “You haven’t scratched the surface of what you can do with those bodies and brains.” Our biologist friend gave that much-needed pep talk as she shuttled me, Bruno Grunau and Forest Wagner to Eagle Summit, an alpine high point rising above […]
An international research team has retraced the astonishing lifetime journey of an Arctic woolly mammoth, which covered enough of the Alaska landscape during its 28 years to almost circle the Earth twice. Scientists gathered unprecedented details of its life through analysis of a 17,000-year-old fossil from the University of Alaska Museum of the North. By […]
A few days ago, Cora the dog and I walked across a footbridge spanning a natural moat flowing through northern tundra plants. There, we reached mile 0 of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline and the finish of a south-to-north walk across Alaska, most of it on the service road that parallels the pipeline. Though the orange-and-black mile […]