When Ben Weissenbach first landed in Anchorage in the summer of 2018, he considered himself pretty much invincible. Nothing could touch him; there was no situation he couldn’t charm, reason, or muscle his way out of. Looking back now, Weissenbach calls that feeling “pure hubris,” the kind of confidence that shows up in your swagger when you’re a 20-something kid from Los Angeles for whom everything just seems to go right. That was before Alaska got ahold of him—and turned his worldview upside-down.
This odyssey is the subject of Weissenbach’s new book: North to the Future: An Offline Journey Through the Changing Wilds of Alaska. It’s a spirited adventure tale complete with hair-raising bear encounters, weeks-long expeditions alongside grizzled ecologists, and late nights spent weighing the fate of the world around a guttering fire. But it’s also a profoundly thoughtful look at the way we all live our day-to-day lives—and what our tech-saturated world could leave us missing.
The Allure of Alaska
When Weissenbach first planned his trip to Alaska in 2018, he never intended to get a book deal out of it. Mostly, he was just looking for an excuse to travel.
Like many young people, Weissenbach had been drawn to the far north by the romance of classic adventure tales—stories by the likes of Jack London, John Krakauer, and John McPhee. And though he’d only ever spent a handful of days in a tent, he managed to convince his school, Princeton University, to send him to Alaska for a research project on climate change. It was a trip for which he was entirely unprepared.
“In a lot of ways I had grown up experiencing the world through a screen. I think that’s true of a lot of kids my age,” Weissenbach told Outside. “I was part of the first generation to go through adolescence with front-facing cameras and social media. What was going on online often felt as real—if not more real—than whatever social interactions we were having in person.” He grew up with the sense that the “real world” was always somewhere else, a glossy, glowing image just out of reach. Weissenbach hopped on that plane to Alaska in part hoping to find it.
Unplugging—Big Time
What he discovered was a land that’s at once as raw and wild as it’s ever been—and more impacted by human activity than any other corner of the planet. Despite its remoteness, Alaska faces some of the worst effects of climate change on earth. The experience opened Weissenbach’s eyes to both the harsh reality of a warming world and the inexorable joy that comes from unplugging, slowing down, and paying attention to the rhythms of the earth.
“I realized I had let technology invade my life so entirely that I didn’t know how to experience the world without it,” he says. During his first days off-grid, he felt out of place and disoriented. But as the weeks ticked by, he sank into a deeper presence—and discovered he was able to pay attention and see the world in ways he never imagined possible.
“It’s really hard to understand how different your mind can be when you’re off your phone and away from the internet for eleven weeks at a time,” Weissenbach says. “Most of us haven’t experienced that since we were toddlers. I was amazed at how different the texture of my mind was.”
The experience changed the way Weissenbach sees our planet, and the way he sees his own habits. Of course, none of that wisdom was easily won.
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