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’d been walking gingerly for days, both of us, barely recovered from COVID. The narrow farm lanes boomed with trucks, and their concrete lanes slalomed north from the old Silk Road city of Xi’an, crossing endless hills and gullies. A land stubbled with brittle cornstalks. With scraps of snow in the leeward sides of furrows. Magpies screeched like rusty hinges in the windbreaks of Chinese scholar trees. In some fields the oldest, broken remnants of the Great Wall jutted like rotten molars. Above: a weak sun the color of wax. Everywhere lay a pale coating of macaroon dust: on the houses, on the cars, on your lunch of noodles, on your dreams. Blown loess, it was. We were crossing the famous yellow earth plateau.
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
Milestone 84: Encounter
No human beings were encountered on foot at this Milestone.
A video showing the landscape around this Milestone
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