Camped with seven adults and five children on the south-central coast of Alaska, I was doing a little writing experiment. I had been following possible Paleolithic routes, taking off with adventurers across glaciers and mountains to get a sense of living and traveling in the same landscapes people faced tens of thousands of years ago. […]
LWON is celebrating the holidays by re-running some of our favorite posts. This post originally appeared in slightly different form in July 2014. Sarah dipped her fingers in a red mineral paint and lifted them to her face. She put streaks above her cheekbones and up her chin, her design standing out against a backdrop […]
Earlier this month, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change came out with an even firmer stance on current environmental affairs, including reams of new data from more scientists saying, basically, news is not good. The New York Times called it “the starkest warning yet.” Little new was revealed in the report, rather it deepened the […]
Seeing a mammoth is not the same as looking over a zoo wall at a modern elephant, or even standing next to a live, gray, wrinkled wall of flesh with scant, coarse hairs. Watching the flexible, prehensile reach of an elephant’s trunk and the slow cross-wise chewing of hay, I’ve found it hard to see […]
As we know by now, science is not the last word on anything. It is one story among many, and it alone doesn’t satisfy every inquiry. Over the last few years I’ve been visiting landscapes associated with the Bering land bridge in western Alaska. Most archaeologists believe this is where the first people crossed from […]
The most often asked for bedtime tale from my children is a “Squirrel Story.” I’ve written a book about animal encounters in the wild, but this is a whole different matter. As the kids scoot beneath their covers, I tell them about a horde of blood-thirsty, mad-eyed squirrels who’ve built an enormous warren beneath our […]
Sarah dipped her fingers in mineral paint and lifted them to her face. Standing on the bold, white surface of the Harding Icefield in south-central Alaska, she painted brown-red stride-marks across wind-dried skin. We were several days into a trek by skis, ropes, sleds and backpacks, and were as far out as we’d get. She […]
A bear broke into my wife’s old teardrop trailer in the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in southern Colorado. It must have been yearling by the bite marks in bean cans, and the smallness of its hips where it busted out the door-window and dragged itself inside. The bear didn’t find much, leaving […]