The Ultima Thule

Journeys in America’s Northernmost Lands: a web anthology of the Alaskan Arctic

Arctic Heroes

December 13th, 2010

Arctic Heroes

| December 13, 2010

Reprinted with permission from Dan Ritzman, Arctic Wild guide and Alaska Program Director for the Sierra Club. Over the past month we have lost two of the great champions for Alaska’s wild places – Stewart Udall and Dr Ed Wayburn Stewart Udall (January 31, 1920 – March 20, 2010) Stewart Udall grew up in the [...]

Unexpected Gifts in the Utukok

| September 18, 2010

Cedric spends eight weeks in the Utokok Uplands looking for the Western Arctic Caribou Herd. But it is them who found him and so he had an experience he will never forget.

Utukok River

| April 9, 2010

What are the elements off a perfect day? Here, in this place, this day played out in a perfect way…I woke up to hot sunlight streaming through he tent…The heat was a heavy weight pressing me down, the effort to move, to leave the tent required all the energy I could muster. I stepped out [...]

Leaving the land of light

| August 17, 2009

After the haze from faraway forest fires had cleared, we would often sit speechless watching the low light from the midnight Arctic sun paint the gentle hills and mountains around us. The light is perhaps one of the biggest gifts of the Arctic, one of the spectacles of this part of the world less noted [...]

Kills, ruins, pups and the circle of life

| August 15, 2009

We rewarded ourselves after two long days of tundra and river travel with a rest day, getting out for a shorter hike and reading. Peter and I traded Pielou’s A Naturalist’s Guide to the Arctic and Barry Lopez’ Arctic Dreams back and forth. We also both finished Pollan’s book, In Defense of Food. Then we [...]

Heading downstream… and back upstream

| August 12, 2009

(Post #3 from the Western Arctic trip. More posts coming over the next few days.) It was time to get on the river. Wolves woke us again that morning with their howls, and we were reluctant to leave our wide embrace of gentle mountains and treeless tundra, where our eyes so easily roamed the slopes [...]

Join us on journeys through America’s northernmost lands!

| April 22, 2009

In medieval times, the Ultima Thule was used as a moniker for those lands outside of the known world. Despite the heated debates on development, many of Alaska’s lands remain essentially unknown, even to the residents of the state itself. In the summer of 2009, Peter and Shannon Huffman Polson will embark on journeys through [...]