Book review: Twenty years later, Ned Rozell takes another pipeline walk

“Summer of Gravel and Steel: a thru-hike of Alaska, 20 years after the first”

By Ned Rozell; self-published, 2024; 346 pages; $25 paperback, $15 Kindle.

Fairbanksan Ned Rozell is perhaps best known for the science and natural articles he writes for the University of Alaska’s Geophysical Institute (which are distributed to Alaska newspapers) and his earlier book “Walking My Dog, Jane.” He now refers to that earlier book as a “prequel” to his new one. Both recount walking 800 miles along the Alaska Pipeline corridor, from Valdez to Deadhorse, during the summer months, first in 1997 and then again in 2017. Each time he was accompanied by a canine companion — first Jane and then Cora.

The charm of the new book rides on several factors. First, who doesn’t love the armchair adventure of a long-distance thru-hike? Think of Bill Bryson’s “Walk in the Woods” about the Appalachian Trail and Cheryl Strayed’s memoir “Wild,” about her time on the Pacific Crest Trail. Second, there’s the repeat factor; Rozell is able to chronicle changes in both Alaska and America after two decades. And third, Rozell is an agreeable companion as he examines the country he travels through, friendships and family, past adventures, and his own evolution as he journeys through his fifth decade of life.

Rozell is no Bryson or Strayed, as he’s much more than competent in the woods than either and suffers no hilarious (for the reader) misadventures. Another difference is the contrast of routes; his is not as “natural” or scenic as the famous trails, since it follows the graveled service roads next to the pipeline, some sections of which are buried and some of which are raised aboveground, to protect permafrost. (The raised pipeline made a handy place to hoist his food bags, beyond the reach of animals.) His route also lacks the challenges of hiking elsewhere in Alaska, where one has to wayfind through wilderness and contend with tussocks, alder thickets, and scree slopes.

As far as Rozell knows, he’s the only person who’s ever walked the whole 800 miles of the pipeline route, from sea to sea — now twice. Neither time was he trying to set any records; the first time he took 120 days, the second 90-plus; that’s less than nine miles a day on average. (Just this September, an ultrarunner from Virginia set a new record for completing the 2191-mile Appalachian Trail in 40 days and 18 hours; that’s nearly 55 miles per day.) Rozell’s goal involved taking time to, quite literally, smell the flowers (and the spruce, cottonwood, salmon carcasses, wet moss, wet dog, and methane leaking from thawing earth.) And, as opposed to crowded, competitive trails elsewhere, the author notes that, “Eight-hundred miles and I had seen no one walking who was not coming to see me.”

Friends and family members joined Rozell for some sections of his walk. He’d hoped that his 10-year-old daughter would join him for the summer, but she was, true to her age, more interested in spending the sunlit months with friends and cousins. Her periodic presence, and that of her mother and others, gave Rozell opportunities to digress into thoughts about his boyhood in New York State, parenthood, his past as an endurance racer, and the adventurous lives of several friends.

Compared to the emotional excesses of Bryson or Strayed or their big-pictures meditations on American life and self-discovery, Rozell serves as an undramatic narrator — well-organized, pragmatic, calm, someone you’d be happy to join on a nature walk. What he best brings to his story is his knowledge as a long-time Alaskan science writer and his attention to the world around him.

Among the science that Rozell includes are the technology involved with pipeline construction, the nature of permafrost, bird migration (“I was in the midst of a flesh-and-blood-and-feather flood, flowing northward”), details of many of the birds he saw and heard, Alaska demographics, hydrology, fire in the boreal forest, mosquitoes, the lives of lynx, and the values of the Arctic Refuge. Although he (surprisingly) never sees a single bear until he’s very close to the Deadhorse end, he does weave in a few bear stories from other times and places.

In his chapter, “Into the Anthropocene,” Rozell describes coming upon a sinkhole in the Dalton Highway formed by melting permafrost. On that same day, he coincidentally meets two permafrost scientists he already knew, one of whom refers to the “retrogressive thaw slump” they were inspecting. Rozell devotes a few pages to describing permafrost thaw, climate change as its cause, and the effect on the pipeline, roads, and other infrastructure. “While checking out the slump, I couldn’t help but to think of the irony: Ground thawing for the first time in thousands of years now threatened the stability of the pipeline, a tube that has transported so much of that climate-changing liquid during the past half century.”

Most poignant in “Summer of Gravel and Steel” are passages when Rozell reconnects with people he first met along the route and wrote about in the earlier book. Near Copper Center he visits with an old friend now unable to get off his four-wheeler. At a café near the Yukon River bridge, he reunites with the owner and learns of the sad endings of her partner and one of their boys. In Wiseman (a side trip of several miles including a packraft river crossing), a miner who, on the author’s first trip, showed Rozell his active mining claims, cooks up mooseburgers for him.

Poignant, too, is the sense he conveys of a “lonesome land” — homesteads and cabins now abandoned by earlier residents. With less oil flowing through the pipeline, even pipeline workers are scarce; at a pump station where Rozell was previously greeted by a small crowd including a cook who handed him fried chicken and mashed potatoes, he finds only the roar of engines and a vacant guard shack. “Summer of Gravel and Steel,” in the end, presents not just a story of one man’s midlife foot travel but a sort of time travel through the change that’s facing Alaska — and suggests something of what the future may bring.