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 passed the Milestone without realizing it. I dumped my pack and jogged two kilometers back, tripping along an old railroad track rusting to oblivion amid sweltering green slopes and brown rain-swollen rivers.
No one was around. As was proper. The place was a graveyard.
In 1951, South Korean and American forces had battled the North Koreans in these hills. The Americans had bombed enemy positions in the villages, and many civilians were killed. A few survivors, women and children mostly, took shelter in caves and those were napalmed too, by mistake.
The caves are still there. They gape like eye sockets from the hillsides, and in their dusty floors are embedded stone tools: the knapped spear points of the early humans I’m following, the first Homo sapiens who stumbled out of Africa tens of thousands of years ago. What can one say of such cracked places? We always forget. It hardly matters. Aleppo, Bucha, Cholula, Gurganj, Nanking—and Danyang, Danyang, Danyang. We keep finding our way back to you.
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 100: Encounter
No human being was encountered at this Milestone.
A video showing the landscape around this Milestone
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