Hiking the Glenn Highway through Alaska. Published in Asphalt Pilgrims.
Paul Salopek
Every hundred miles Salopek pauses to record the landscape and a person he meets, assembling a global snapshot of humankind. Milestones reflect straight-line distances, but his walked distances are generally much longer. More on these waypoints here.
Every hundred miles Salopek pauses to record the landscape and a person he meets, assembling a global snapshot of humankind. Milestones reflect straight-line distances, but his walked distances are generally much longer. More on these waypoints here.
The valley had been a migration route since the Stone Age. There was a life-sized bull, perhaps 9,000 years old, carved into the pottery-colored rock of Wadi Hafir. There were thousands of inscriptions pecked by nomads, by urban Nabateans, by squint-eyed caravaneers traveling the incense roads, by absorbed Muslims trekking to Mecca.
Today the valley is a park. We had walked in from the south, from near the border of Saudi Arabia. The local Bedouins — Zuwaida, Zelabia, others — were settled now and lived off tourism. Most had given up their camels. Who could blame them. Foreigners built their schools, their tiny cinderblock houses. They paid for the second-hand pickup trucks and the dusty TV dishes anchored against fierce desert winds to the roofs of the houses. Some land features were named, spuriously, after Lawrence of Arabia. He had passed through, too, only yesterday, under “cliffs as red as the clouds in the west, like them in scale and in the level bar they raised against the sky.”
A wraparound soundscape at this Milestone
This Milestone’s location on a map
Photos of the ground under Paul’s feet and the sky above at this Milestone
A brief question and answer with the first person Paul meets at this Milestone
Deena Mohamed
Fourth-grade student, Age 10
Who are you?
My name is Deena Mohamed.
Where do you come from?
Here. I live in Wadi Rum village.
Where are you going?
I go that school. Over there. The yellow building. It’s the Wadi Rum school.
Observations from social media from the Milestone location
As we pass through urban Aqaba, the social media landscape diversifies with tweets situated in Jordan and Israel, written in Arabic, Hebrew, English and Spanish, and posted from Flickr, Path, Foursquare and Instagram, among other services. With 41 percent of Jordanians and 73 percent of Israelis online, the conversations are rich and varied and reflect different sectors of society. On both sides of the border, winter weather is a topic of conversation, and individuals post photos of the natural scenery all around.
A video showing the landscape around this Milestone
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