“Into the Thaw: Witnessing Wonder Amid the Arctic Climate Crisis”
By Jon Waterman; Patagonia Works, 2024; 305 pages; $35.
The Arctic is “greening,” author Jon Waterman points out early in his beautifully written and gorgeously photographed account of 39 years adventuring in the extreme norths of Alaska and Canada. The treeline and shrubs are moving northward with higher temperatures and longer summers. Coastlines are eroding and coastal communities flooding as protective sea ice disappears. Permafrost is thawing, causing lakes to empty and mountainsides to slump and slide. Unprecedented lightning storms ignite wildfires that sweep across drying tundra. The migration patterns of birds, mammals and fish are all changing.
Waterman wants readers to understand the Arctic — from the time it took shape 2.4 billion years ago through its historical past and into the rapid change of the present. As a former national park ranger and climber, a wilderness guide, a photographer and filmmaker, and the author of 16 previous books, he is uniquely qualified to witness both environmental change and the wild beauty and resilience of one of the remotest and most challenging places on Earth. His personal experiences and observations and his strict attention to scientific fact combine for a tremendously engaging and informative reader’s journey.
“Into the Thaw” begins with a prologue from along a creek in the Gates of the Arctic National Park, at the beginning of a 2022 journey that would take Waterman and a companion on a 500-mile route across the Brooks Range, down the Noatak River from its headwaters to the Chukchi Sea, and up the coast as far as Kivalina. Waterman had first traveled the Noatak River as a park ranger in 1983; 20 Arctic trips later, he returned to try to understand the climate crisis.
The early chapters, after the prologue and an Arctic “primer,” are based on Arctic journeys Waterman made in 1983, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2006 and 2021. On his first trip, as a ranger on loan from Denali National Park, he and another ranger paddled for 45 miles and seven days down the Noatak River, through the heart of the then-new Gates of the Arctic National Park. Waterman was stunned by the wilderness and animal life they observed. He was equally impressed by an archaeological site where ancient caribou people had carved finely crafted tools. His passion for learning everything he could about the Arctic was set.
In 1997, more than a dozen Arctic trips later, Waterman began to pursue his dream of crossing “the roof of North America along the Northwest Passage.” In the first phase, he solo paddled from the Mackenzie River Delta in Canada to the Beaufort Sea coast and then westward to Prudhoe Bay, more than 400 miles altogether. “After a week alone, without sight of another human, I had talked to every animal I encountered, but fortunately, no one talked back ... I bowed to the sunsets. And I became attuned to the Arctic world around me in an instinctual way. How the sun’s rays swept in long horizontal arcs through the dawns. The distant hum that emanated from the sea on quiet days.”
He also did meet people on that trip — beluga hunters on the Canadian side and later Kaktovik caribou hunters traveling home with boatloads of meat; all were fearful for his safety as a solo traveler without a firearm, all generous with food and information. When he finally reached the Endicott oil field, a uniformed guard who emerged from a heated truck was the opposite of friendly.
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The next year Waterman returned to the Mackenzie River Delta and turned east, to continue his traverse of the Northwest Passage. His plan to travel on the sea ice was thwarted by an early thaw, and he transferred to a sea kayak with a sail. That summer, after 25 days without seeing another human, he found himself transformed into inquisitive calmness, “a new loose-limbed and approachable posture.” Then, in 1999, he spent two months living in Inuit villages before continuing eastward. After encountering many barren ground grizzlies along the coast, he finally met a polar bear that ran into the water and swam after him as he unfurled his sail and sped away.
In 2006 Waterman explored mountains, rivers, the coastal plain and the coastline of the Arctic National Wildlife, both to honor the 50th anniversary of the scientific fieldwork that led to the refuge’s creation and to study climate change. He shared part of that adventure with a member of the original science team, George Schaller. Along the coast he witnessed severe erosion of the coastline, “slumped in muddy quagmires,” in sharp contrast to the intact, frozen bluffs he’d passed nine years earlier.
In 2021 Waterman returned to the Noatak with his 15-year-old son and family friends. They were plagued by mosquitoes they’d hoped to escape in August, and the caribou that had been so plentiful decades earlier were absent from the brush-filled valley. “The more I thought about it, the longer the list of changes grew.”
The final section of the book, filling nearly half its length, Waterman calls “The Final Journey, 2022.” Here he returns to the time first mentioned in his prologue — when he traveled on foot and by packraft for 500 miles through three national park units. This section is loaded not only with day-by-day descriptions of the journey, much of it in wildfire smoke, but fascinating aspects of natural and political/conservation history. From natural history segments, we learn that the large, hairy Arctic bumblebees shiver to warm up as they vibrate the pollen off fireweed, assisting with pollination, and that pingos formed by expanding ice lenses — providing elevation for plants, bird nest habitat, and caribou mosquito relief — are now collapsing into craters as the ice below them melts. He also records human history in the region and the hospitality of villagers met along the way. The theme of environmental change due to a warming climate continues.
Waterman’s informed, vulnerable, often humorous voice makes “Into the Thaw” a great pleasure to read. The large-format color photos and detailed maps make it equally satisfying to look at. Not every writer can pull off a joyous read while also telling a serious environmental story that speaks to the values of protected lands and encourages climate action. By loving and respecting the Arctic world through witnessing its many wonders, Waterman opens readers not just to sharing his appreciation but to the experience of wonder everywhere — and the need to safeguard a world that grants us so many gifts.