PORT VALDEZ(May 4th)–We have launched on the pipeline hike version 2.0, 20 years after the first time. I’m now sitting on the muscled root of a Sitka spruce by the pleasant rush of a creek. A bald eagle shrieks from the top of a tree nearby while a diesel ship engine thrums from the Valdez […]
Twenty years ago, I was 34 when I walked away from a chain-link fence near Port Valdez and headed east. Those were the first steps on a summer-long trip across Alaska. In a few days, I will begin to retrace those steps. This summer, I will try to again walk from Valdez to Prudhoe Bay […]
On a sunny afternoon in Nome, Jeff Oatley stepped off his fat bike. That day, for the first time since before the Super Bowl, he had nowhere to ride tomorrow. On March 7, Oatley, with his wife Heather Best (who rode a few hundred miles of choice trail with him), finished a winter bicycle ride […]
TOOLIK FIELD STATION — After 800-plus miles by snowmachine and three weeks of working in the same clothes, it’s time to pack our duffel bags, stuff them into a barrel and set them on fire. Just kidding about the burn barrel, but three lake studiers and I returned last night to the slushy snow of […]