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NORTH TO THE FUTURE

Ben Weissenbach

An Offline Adventure Through the Changing Wilds of Alaska

A 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 upa 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 writer from Los Angeles. He studied under John McPhee at Princeton University and was awarded a Gates Cambridge Scholarship to pursue a PhD in Polar Studies. His work has appeared in the L.A. Times, National Geographic, Scientific American, and Smithsonian, among other publications.
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Published 2025-07-15 by Grand Central

Comments

A highly entertaining and insightful debut.

New book charts offline adventure in Alaska Read more...

North to the Future is a kind of bildungsroman of perception -- a story of learning to see and hear and feel by venturing out in the wild. It is a beautiful and necessary book.

Enduring grizzly bears and packs of wolves, smoke-choked skies, and days of solitude in frigid endless nights, Weissenbach is pulled out of the two-dimensional world mediated by phone and computer screens into the awesome, terrifying, and beautiful existence changing rapidly and inexorably before his eyes. John McPhee has a worthy successor.

Far and away the best outdoor adventure book I've read in years. It takes a dire but somewhat distant topic, climate change, and brings it to within inches of your face, so you can hear the snuffle of grizzlies and the glassy crackling as the glaciers recede. In the process, it gently nudges us to relearn the raw art of being human: to walk softly, to see sharply, to beI>vitallypresent.

A rollicking adventure through the Alaskan wilds where the art of humility meets the necessity of paying attention.

Ben Weissenbach's absorbing North to the Future is packed with fascinating and eccentric adventurer/scientists, hair-raising wildlife encounters and haunting landscapesall in the tradition of his teacher, John McPhee. But Weissenbach offers a contrasting dimension unique to a writer of his era: how all this reality feels to a 20-something raised on the airless virtual world of the 4"x2" screen. The book thus carries a double warning: of a threatened external environment and an internal one, too.