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.
Everyone was hot. Everyone was tired. Our feet hurt. We’d walked close to 20 miles that day. From Aktau, our starting point in Kazakhstan, it was more like 350 miles. We were trying to reach the empty highway rocketing to Beyneu.
What was Beyneu?
A speck on the map. A railroad town. The only civilization for thousands of square miles around. An iota of aging Soviet concrete and steel swallowed in the heat waves of Central Asia, an outpost lost in the steppes. Beyneu Beyneu Beyneu. We dreamed of the pleasures waiting there. It was our Xanadu.
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
Bazarbay Atitanov
Retired railroad worker, age 45
Who are you?
I own the hut at Akbolak springs. I raise horses.
Where do you come from?
Beyneu.
Where are you going?
Home. (He was driving a motorbike across the steppe.)
Observations from social media from the Milestone location
Most tweets are about a Korean music band that seems to be very popular in this region. The hashtag #LoveBTS is trending, and one fan keeps posting about them in Russian. Her posts also take pride in her nation, language, and the motherland. Many tweets show strings of characters that are part of a bot experiment described in a long thread on Hacker News (a popular platform for discussing technology), where people are trying to determine its origins.
A video showing the landscape around this Milestone
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