North to the Future An Offline Adventure through the Changing Wilds of Alaska

Ben Weissenbach—an digital native with little prior wilderness experience—embarks on a series of scientific adventures across the wilds of Alaska with some of the state's most distinguished and audacious researchers.

At the age of twenty, college student Ben Weissenbach went north to Arctic Alaska armed with little more than inspiration from his literary heroes and a growing interest in climate change. What met him there was a world utterly unlike the 21st century Los Angeles in which he grew up—a land of ice, rock, and grizzlies seen by few outside a small contingent of scientists with big personalities.

There’s Roman Dial, the larger-than-life ecologist with whom Ben walks and rafts a thousand miles across Alaska’s Brooks Range. There’s Kenji Yoshikawa, the reindeer-herding permafrost expert who leaves Ben alone for eleven days to care for his off-grid homestead, where temperatures drop to -49 degrees Fahrenheit. And there’s Matt Nolan, the independent glaciologist who flies him to the largest glaciers in the American Arctic.

As these scientists teach Ben to read Alaska's warming landscape, he confronts the limits of digital life and the complexity of the world beyond his screens. He emerges from each adventure with a new perspective on our modern relationship to technology and a growing wonder for our fast-changing—ever-changing—natural world.


 

Ben Weissenbach is a graduate of Princeton University, where he studied English and Environmental Studies and was mentored by John McPhee. After graduating in 2020, he received a Luce Scholarship to report on climate change in Asia. His work has appeared in the L.A. Times Sunday Edition, National Geographic, The Washington Post, Scientific American, and Smithsonian. He lives in Los Angeles.