Dec 8, 2024
Most, if not all of us, have bucket lists. Places we want to
visit…but don’t always get the opportunity.
This is Kurt Repanshek, your host at the National Parks Traveler.
One of the destinations on my bucket list is Gates of Arctic
National Park and Preserve and the Noatak River that runs through
it. A week or two floating the river sounds pretty ideal to me.
While it’s debatable whether I’ll cross that off my bucket list
remains to be seen, today’s guest has floated the river more than
once and backpacked all over Gates of the Arctic. And Jon Waterman
returned from those trips with incredible stories of the places he
saw, the people he met, and the wildlife that came in range of his
eyes.
But over the course of several decades Jon also has witnessed the
impact of climate change to the region, and it hasn’t been good.
It’s the main thread of a story he lays out in his latest book,
Into the Thaw.