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North to the Future

An Offline Adventure through the Changing Wilds of Alaska

Coming Soon

Contributors

By Ben Weissenbach

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$14.99

Price

$19.99 CAD

Ben Weissenbach—an L.A. native with little prior wilderness experience—treks through the Alaskan tundra with a series of eccentric environmental scientists, and returns with a new perspective on technology and a revitalized sense of wonder for the natural world.

At the age of twenty-one, college student Ben Weissenbach set out into the Alaskan wilderness armed with little more than inspiration from his literary heroes and a growing interest in climate change. What meets him there is a landscape both stark and awe-inspiring—a part of the world seen by few outside a small contingent of scientists with big personalities.

There’s Roman Dial, the larger-than-life field scientist who leads him on a five week journey into the Alaskan backcountry. There’s Kenji Yoshikawa, the isolated researcher who leaves Ben alone for eleven days to care for his remote cabin, where temperatures at night drop to -49 degrees Fahrenheit. And there’s Matt Nolan, the independent glaciologist who flies planes onto glaciers.

As Ben’s mental and physical resilience is tested, he discovers far more than his own limits; struck by the landscape’s staggering beauty and sheer indifference to humanity, Ben emerges from each experience with a new perspective on our modern relationships to technology—and a deep sense of wonder for our natural world.

 

  • "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."
     
    Elizabeth Kolbert, New York Times bestselling author of The Sixth Extinction
  • "Ben Weissenbach’s absorbing North to the Future is packed with fascinating and eccentric adventurer/scientists, hair-raising wildlife encounters and haunting landscapes—all 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." 
    John Colapinto, New York Times bestselling author of This is the Voice

On Sale
Jul 15, 2025
Page Count
320 pages
ISBN-13
9781538758359

Ben Weissenbach

About the Author

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. 

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