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.
We left the Uzbek-Kazakh border checkpoint and walked east.
We were swapping jokes to pass a hot afternoon. We joked our way right past the Walk’s next 100-mile mark. When I realized the mistake it was too late to return — we’d plodded on for six miles. A young railroad worker at the next village drove me back on a motorbike. His name was Sagun. He didn’t ask me one question about my presence in the desert. Nor about the journey. Nor about the strange choreography required to build a Milestone. It was as if he’d been hauling foreign pedestrians across the desolate Ustyurt Plateau his whole life. As if he’d run out of questions generally a long time ago.
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
Sagun Ezjanov
Railroad worker, age 25
Who are you?
I am a Muslim. I am a railway employee.
Where do you from?
My father came from Turkmenistan. My family came here in 1971.
Where are you going?
The railroad. I check the condition of the tracks.
Observations from social media from the Milestone location
People in this part of the world are celebrating Protecting Children Day on June 1 and Civil Servants Day on June 23. Someone posts about wasting water and implores others to protect the environment. Some are cheering for their champions at the Olympic Games in Rio. A number of 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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