North to the Future
An Offline Adventure through the Changing Wilds of Alaska
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4.4 • 5 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
Winner of the 2025 National Outdoor Book Award (NOBA)
One of Smithsonian Magazine's Top Ten Books of 2025
Hailed as a “worthy successor” to John McPhee (Kirkus Reviews), Ben Weissenbach —a digital native with little prior wilderness experience—embarks on a series of scientific adventures across the wilds of Alaska with some of the state's most distinguished and audacious researchers.
At the age of twenty, college student Ben Weissenbach went north to Arctic Alaska armed with little more than inspiration from his literary heroes and a growing interest in climate change. What met him there was a world utterly unlike the 21st century Los Angeles in which he grew up—a land of ice, rock, and grizzlies seen by few outside a small contingent of scientists with big personalities.
There’s Roman Dial, the larger-than-life ecologist with whom Ben walks and rafts a thousand miles across Alaska’s Brooks Range. There’s Kenji Yoshikawa, the reindeer-herding permafrost expert who leaves Ben alone for eleven days to care for his off-grid homestead, where temperatures drop to -49 degrees Fahrenheit. And there’s Matt Nolan, the independent glaciologist who flies him to the largest glaciers in the American Arctic.
As these scientists teach Ben to read Alaska's warming landscape, he confronts the limits of digital life and the complexity of the world beyond his screens. He emerges from each adventure with a new perspective on our modern relationship to technology and a growing wonder for our fast-changing—ever-changing—natural world.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this spirited debut travelogue, Weissenbach, a journalist and L.A. native, recounts trekking around Alaska in 2019 as a 20-year-old college student looking to escape the hustle and bustle of modern life. While accompanying ecologist Roman Dial on a 360-mile expedition studying climate change's effects on the Brooks Mountain Range, Weissenbach learned to howl like a wolf to scare off curious packs and found that Alaska's forests are expanding as its permafrost thaws. He also recounts tagging along with Matt Nolan as the glaciologist flew over the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in a bush plane taking photographs that formed the basis of detailed 3D maps that could be used to detect illegal incursions from oil companies. Throughout, Weissenbach frets that humanity will "trade the world for images of it" and describes how spending 11 winter days alone in an off-grid cabin with virtually no sunlight and -40º nights helped teach him how to be present instead of escaping into his phone. Weissenbach spins the immersive travel writing into a soulful meditation on the value of getting back to nature, whether to better understand the changes it's undergoing or to better understand oneself. This will transport readers.
