Shortly after setting out this morning I came to a road block and discovered that the highway had been shut down until 9:00 PM for bridge repair. This turned out to be a good thing as it got me out of the car and hiking in a place that I would have passed up otherwise. There was a lot of thick brush surrounding the road, but I stumbled on a pipeline access road that led through the brush and above treeline. I then spent five hours roaming the tundra and climbing to two small ridges that afforded awesome views. The plants on the tundra are all tiny and often completely alien from the sort of plant-life I’m used to — I found one little plant that was about an inch high and emitted a cloud of smoke when I touched it, while others looked more like something that would be found under the ocean. Even though I’m five miles from the Arctic Circle the weather was warm enough that a t-shirt was often sufficient, but the Brooks Range on the northern horizon is completely snow-covered, reminding me that today’s warm weather is probably just a fluke.
"My life amounts to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean. Yet what is any ocean, but a multitude of drops?" — David Mitchell