Then the road stopped!
At the end of a very long Alaskan Highway is Fairbanks, and here I find the roads end. From that point everything I was familiar with was about to change. Firstly there was the 800 plus miles through the heart of the Alaskan wilds, before I could even face the greatest challenge, the Bering Strait. However, before either came the new and confounding challenge of logistics. Unable to fund the longer summer route, I was to rely on frozen rivers between native villages in the dead of Alaska’s winter to provide the best possible route combination, while at the same time demanding complicated, detailed logistical planning.

 

From specialized equipment to forward caching of supplies, Alaska was demanding, but even greater was the challenges for the Bering Strait and Russia. That first winter was a severe and rigorous teacher of many lessons. Arriving on the Alaskan coast too late for a crossing I now began to experience the lengthy delays associated with this environment. The following year, with everything in place, I teamed up with Dimitri Kieffer and finally stood at the end of the Americas looking at the mountains of Russia. In April 2006, against all the odds and all the damming evidence of experts, Dimitri and I entered the history books as the first recorded case of people reaching Russia from the US via the Straits on foot.  However, we walked into a political fire-storm and spent the next 58 days fighting deportation orders which could scupper a passage through Russia. Once the dust had settled, it would be another year before we could return to Russia and pick up the route again the following winter. After which Dimitri and I went our separate ways. But soon the tide began to turn on the Odyssey. Having lost our sponsors and strapped for cash, with the logistical costs mounting and no roads for almost the first 2,000miles, the trek across Russia will be a daunting one. Now, with new and heavy Russian visa requirements, the odyssey struggles with an unforeseen challenge greater than any physical or environmental challenge encountered thus far. Welcome to an odyssey in the 21st century.

 

 

The lead artwork depicts a night on the Norton Sound Bay West coast of Alaska 2nd of January 2006.  Pushing hard for the distant lights of the Inuit village of Koyuk, I find myself unknowingly on thin ice and its not long before I am in the ocean.