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A World on Fire

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                As I make my way through the Yukon headed towards my final destination of The Atacama Desert I watch the cloud of smoke in the distance grow larger and larger, its massive size is like something out of a post apocalyptic disaster movie. I think back on the two travelers I met last night while I debate whether or not to take the fork in the road that will take me away from the fire or closer to it. One man was my age 30 from China named Yu Yang and the other was a 42 year old German man named Roland Kock .                   Yu Yang was on the end stretch of his journey from Patagonia to Anchorage coming the opposite direction I was headed and Roland was a journalist who promoted travel in Germany. Although they were both seasoned travelers with plenty of adventures behind them their viewpoints on the worl...
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Alaskas Changing Landscape

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Just like my mother and Reba I’ve chosen to live my life as a nomad, although my travels take me far outside my ancestor’s traditional land. I’ve yet to find a way to balance work and travel so when I get weary of the road and run out of money I head back to Alaska. Before I leave I always make sure to stop by my mother’s old property and think about the fun times we had in the woods. As I leave Alaska this time I don’t know if I will ever come back. The many extreme changes I’ve seen in the last few years have me worried that the land will never be the same again. As a child I would look out of my window at the mountains above Anchorage, I studied the lines of light and shadow, the contrasts of rock and snow meeting the white clouds and blue sky. I tried so hard to capture this beauty with pencil and paper but all my efforts only produced simple lines and shading that required a lot of imagination. When I look at those mountains today I no longer see the snow that used to cap the...
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Reba’s Cabin

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Have you ever went hiking and stumbled across a forgotten cabin, and as your curiosity pushes you to explore you can’t help but wonder about the lives of the people who lived there? This is the story of one of those forgotten places.                 About 9 miles outside of a tiny little Alaskan border town called Tok, tucked away in the woods down a long dirt road off an even longer stretch of highway sits the cabin of Reba Dewilde, an amazing woman who cut her own path through the harsh Alaskan wilderness and one of the last of a generation of Native Americans raised in the old ways. What’s impressive about this particular cabin is the fact that it’s not the only one she built, she had built 3 cabins in her lifetime, all while raising her five sons and daughter as a single mother. Feeding six kids off of the land in and of its self is an impressive task, but to single handedly build 3 cabins while...
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The Library at the End of the World

                It’s been almost a decade since I’ve even touched this blog, so much has happened in that time and I’ve learned so much. I don’t even want to read what I used to post and even thought about deleting it but I can’t be too hard on myself, I was younger then. I should be proud of the fact that I set out to try and change the world and I should be proud that I continued to educate myself and fight  for what's right even if I didn’t keep writing.                 A lot can happen in a decade, I went back home after getting stuck in Sacramento, California. I had tried to get back on the road many times but one thing after another kept me in Sacramento. After 4 years in that city I was so torn between continuing the journey or returning home that I left the decision up to a coin flip, I went back to Alaska. Leaving Sacram...
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