OUT OF EDEN WALK

I guide the coolest trips in the world. For years, I’ve worked as a guide and boat handler aboard small expedition cruise ships that explore the Earth’s poles. Alaska to Antarctica, that’s my job.

Even now, as I write this, I’m sitting atop a snowmobile, parked on sea ice next to my seasonal ship home, an icebreaker called Le Commandant Charcot, a few miles from an emperor penguin colony in Antarctica. Just like the Alaskan summer, time in the Austral summer stands nearly still under a seemingly eternal sun above, but unlike the northern woods, not a shade of green is to be seen. It’s a grand, open landscape of mountains of ice and shimmering sky, a vista almost like the moon. Towering icebergs clot the horizon. I’m a bit tired from a long contemplative walk last night, alone surrounded by ice, the nearest tree likely a thousand miles away. Blue and white dominate in every direction in a scale as magical as a dream. And it’s this very agelessness, it occurs to me as I absorb the profound silences here, that appealed so much when I recently joined the Out of Eden Walk as a walking partner.

Last summer, I walked and paddled with Paul Salopek some 550 kilometers through Alaska. Our route varied from glaringly modern, urban Anchorage to a familiar highway leading toward my home near Denali, then onward through forests and rolling valleys, landscapes kissed and carved by glaciers, to finally raft down a wild river. Sometimes it takes a long journey to process another. Here’s what I’ve learned.

I’d been anticipating joining the Out of Eden Walk for a decade, since a happenstance meeting with Paul in a bar-eatery in Tbilisi, Georgia, in 2015, a couple of years after he’d set off from Ethiopia. Looking back, I was already hopping and working between extreme and diverse geographies, and it was the slowing down aspect of the walk that was most needed in my life. I’d been in a rush professionally and personally to see and do it all. I’ve called my beloved Alaska home for many years. And although I’d raced across every corner of the state doing various treks and trips by land and sea, I felt I’d hadn’t explored it meaningfully because my pace was simply too fast. In my rush to notch up one more “farther away” trip, to snowball all my experiences into something bigger, I was getting lost.

What better way to reconnect with and focus more deeply on home than to simply put one foot in front of the other?

On the Out of Eden Walk, I hadn’t even finished the early road section of the journey when the pavement burned holes through my sandals. Yet even so, it was just upon entering the Matanuska Valley that I noticed that years of stress and back pain that I’d carried at sea, an old complaint that sometimes woke me up at odd hours in the night, was gone. Walking was therapy, and not just for the body, but for regions of the mind that carry their own baggage—life’s heaviness I’d do well to leave behind.

In the midst of unusually sunny northern days that, even more thankfully, were mosquito-free, I can measure out my walking memories as much by our conversations as by the valleys we traversed.

I recall the day we tackled world literature and our writing heroes’ craft with words. I found myself tearing up about what wilderness meant to me after Paul asked about Jack London’s works, those famous Klondike stories that for me touched the core of my soul’s desire to protect wilderness from our ever-encroaching industrial world. There was the day we spoke of ghosts and lost loved ones, and once again, tears flowed by a crystal-clear lake after a long and punishing hill climb. Along the free-flowing Copper River, where the simplest pleasure of them all, and a skill that kept man going through the first ages of migration—making fire—was ours to share, we spoke of inner as well as outer journeys. I found myself coming back to the very heart of why I ended up guiding in the first place: to explore. Exploration in this case wasn’t about blank spots on a map or being the first to do something. Honestly, I was born a bit late in history for a lot of that conventional record-seeking.

Instead, it was all about daily discoveries, including ones lodged beyond the borders of science. Somewhere near a delicious bubbling waterfall that we drank from near Wrangell St. Elias National Park, I told Paul I smelled the legendary Sasquatch. This creature represented to me a vast unknown that I always tried to keep an open mind about. A spirit of wildness. I vowed not to reveal or photograph Sasquatch should I ever confirm its existence—because some discoveries can be a shared in a wonder story that we can smile about, yet keep to ourselves.

Paul was a good student in picking up new Alaskan outdoor skills. Obviously, he’s got me and about any other soul you could meet on Earth beat in sheer foot-mileage. He could get by most days with minimal snacks or water, which is the opposite of me. I’m tough. But I also chug milk like there’s no tomorrow and can’t resist ice-cream, two items at the top of my shopping list at Alaska’s roadside stops.

Still, it was our long and footloose chats about using our mental muscles that impressed me the most.

“If you want to tell good stories, you have to listen. And really listen, deeply.” Paul would say this to me so often it was almost a mantra. In my job as an outdoor guide, and looking back at a life where I have fancied myself an explorer of sorts in many far-off lands, I came to realize how I fell short of doing that: just learning. I’m skilled at educating and hopefully enlightening others on trips to the most remote horizons of the world, often as part of a much larger team of guides and ship’s crew. Yet, if I’m not listening, and asking questions more often, how could I ever know what’s truly being absorbed and shared? I’m likely missing the mark, be it an expedition cruise in frigid Antarctica or a good, old-fashioned road-camping trip in Alaska.

Genuine exploration by no means has to involve anywhere “exotic” or far-flung. In our case while walking across Alaska, the unfilled map was the forest at hand, or a road or trail, or a river and rocky beach. This was the biggest discovery of all. With my friend Paul, I was learning to self-guide my own path through home.