“Man always kills the thing he loves, and so we the pioneers have killed our wilderness. Some say we had to. Be that as it may, I am glad I shall never be young without wild country to be young in. Of what avail are forty freedoms without a blank spot on the map?”
-Aldo Leopold
Throughout history, there have always been those eager to see what lay behind the horizon and around the next bend. They were willing to cast off the comfort and safety of civilized life and venture into the unknown, knowing full well the deprivations they might endure. Each conquest and discovery, however, closed off future opportunities of the same kind. If the blank spots were gone, the question became whether adventure itself had vanished with them—or merely changed shape.
Early explorers sailed out toward the unknown in search of untold riches, secret elixirs of youth, and new lands. With each discovery, those blank spaces slowly disappeared. Expeditions like those of Lewis and Clark’s and John Wesley Powell’s opened up prairies, mountains, canyons, and desert for further inquiry by the American masses. The land slowly filled, while the wild was edged out. Perhaps no marker illustrates this better than the near extirpation of bison in the 1880s. In 1893, Frederick Jackson Turner famously declared the American frontier closed.
With the New World largely known, aspiring conquistadors took to the ends of the earth, hoping to be the first to reach one of the last remaining frontiers. Yet even as polar regions and remote corners were claimed, the hunger for adventure remained unsatiated. New lands eventually gave way to new heights as mountaineering took hold. In Alaska, a ragtag group of miners formed the Sourdough Expedition in late 1909, mushing 100 miles from Fairbanks to the base of Denali and ultimately summiting its north peak.
Along the way, the frontier of the adventure and explorer world steadily eroded as each area was mapped and its people, flora, and fauna cataloged. In the process, the ethos of adventure shifted. Those who ventured out went from creating the map to interpreting it. The primary goal of geographic conquest and discovery gave way to stylistic innovation. Artist and vagabond Everett Ruess offers an early example of this shift, roaming the Desert Southwest in the 1920s, not to chart new land, but to experience it as subject and medium. In 1947, Thor Heyerdahl provided another interpretation, sailing a balsa-wood raft 4,300 miles across the Pacific Ocean from Peru to prove that historic South Americans could have made the journey and settled Polynesia.
Differences in ethos and the rise of technology also reshaped how these trips were conducted. Communication changed drastically. Early expeditions had no way of reaching the outside world for months or even years, whereas modern journeys are nearly always connected through satellite messengers and GPS. Even the idea of success shifted. Early on, survival itself was paramount, with success often guaranteeing coverage across all available media. That remains true to some extent in our age of social media and algorithms, though internal metrics like purity, creativity and style have taken on greater importance.
Despite these changes, a number of unique trips have forged new pathways, offering new ways of seeing the map and revisiting routes of the past. In a fully mapped and digitized world, creativity and style take precedence, expressed across four broad themes:
- Purity- Trips undertaken with limited gear or outside support, often eschewing modern technology like GPS or resupply.
- Technological- Trips that pursue routes in novel ways made possible by new tools or methods.
- Historical- Journeys that retrace part or all of a historic route, blending historical accounts with the modern landscape.
- Political and Sociological- Trips that explore a specific issue or social question embedded in the route itself.
What follows are examples of each category:
Purity
In 1959, Dick Griffith, a legendary Alaskan adventurer and packraft pioneer, set off from the village of Kaktovik, on the Arctic Ocean coast. His goal was to travel nearly 500 miles overland, alone with three dogs, across the Brooks Range to the village of Anaktuvuk Pass. He carried minimal gear and largely lived off the land, hunting caribou for food. This light style of travel was far from the norm of the era. As the journey wore on, supplies dwindled and the caribou disappeared, forcing Griffith to eat one of his dogs to survive. Fifty days later, he walked into Anaktuvuk Pass. Unlike previous eras, the fact that the route was largely unknown did not matter, for Griffith, the journey, and the uncertainty that accompanied it, was the point in itself.
Other examples within this realm include:
– Alaskan smokejumper Buck Nelson, who lived off the land on Admiralty Island in Southeast Alaska for 70 days in 2014.
–Roman Dial’s self-supported, self-contained 625-mile, 26-day traverse of the Brooks Range, from Kivalina to the Haul Road (2006).
–Heather “Anish” Anderson’s self-supported, self-contained 24-day, 800-mile Arizona Trail hike (2024).
Technological
In 1996, Roman Dial, Carl Tobin, and Paul Adkins traversed the Alaska Range using mountain bikes and packrafts, covering nearly 800 miles through dense brush, across glaciers, and down swollen rivers. Their “Hellbiking” expedition predated the rise of modern bikepacking by decades. Building off lessons from fast-and-light races like the Alaska Mountain Wilderness Classic and combining them with emerging technology, they created a novel way to travel through the landscape. Rather than eliminating uncertainty, their use of technology redefined it, introducing new scenarios and challenges that heightened the experience.
Decades later, portions of this same terrain were interpreted from above. In 2016, Red Bull athletes Gavin McClurg and Dave Turner paraglided 435 miles unsupported across the Alaska Range from Lake Clark to Cantwell.
Historical
In 1989, author Douglas Preston set off from southern Arizona to retrace Coronado’s historic route, despite never having ridden a horse before. He ultimately traveled nearly 1,000 miles through the Mogollon Rim, mountains, canyons, and high desert of Arizona and New Mexico, later recounting his journey in Cities of Gold.
In 2011, author Rinker Buck and his brother retraced the Oregon Trail using a team of mules and a newly outfitted covered wagon, wooden wheels and all, traveling from Missouri to Oregon.
Political and Sociological
At the height of debate over the proposed Keystone XL pipeline, Ken Ilgunas decided to see the affected landscape for himself. He hiked 1,700 miles on a self-created route from just south of Alberta’s tar sands to the refineries on Texas’ Gulf Coast. The journey was notable in part because he trespassed for nearly all of it. Along the way, the trip became an exploration of politics, land ownership, and local culture. He’d later expand on the journey and these topics in his book “Trespassing Across America”.
A quieter but equally powerful example comes from Karsten Heuer and Leanne Allison’s project Being Caribou. During one of the many renewed pushes to drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, they chose to take to the land, following the Porcupine caribou herd for five months to see what was at stake. Beginning in the Yukon, they traveled alongside the herd to its calving grounds on Alaska’s Arctic Coastal Plain, before returning south to the mountains for winter. Over the course of their roughly 1,500-mile journey, they moved through terrain long familiar to humans, but viewed it through the lens of the caribou and with an eye toward how further development might reshape the interactions between local people, animals and the land.
*****
Seen through this lens, the frontier of adventure may never truly die. With imagination and a willingness to reinterpret the map, endless possibilities remain. A couple such ideas come to mind, starting with one historical route that still feels nearly untouchable.
Historical
Alaska’s harsh interior turned away many expeditions throughout the late nineteenth century. It wasn’t until 1885 that Army Lieutenant Henry Allen led the first successful expedition into the region. Ascending the frozen Copper River, Allen’s party encountered trouble from the outset: treacherous terrain, malnutrition, starvation, and extreme weather. Eventually, they left the Copper River, crossed the Wrangell Mountains, and descended into the Tanana River drainage. From there, they floated the Tanana to the Yukon and eventually to the ocean, but not before making a several hundred-mile side trip up and back down the Koyukuk River toward the Brooks Range near present day Bettles. Their 1,500-mile journey was unprecedented, earning them the moniker the “Lewis and Clark of Alaska”.
A modern version of this route would be easier in some ways. It is mapped, and infrastructure and settlements now exist along much of it. Yet that same knowledge lays bare the hazards Allen faced unknowingly. It is difficult to imagine anyone today willingly ascending 100 miles of the Copper River, even with ice. The sheer length and duration of the journey alone would likely derail most attempts to recreate it.
Technology
There are fewer truly new modes of travel today than in decades past. It’s difficult to identify a recent innovation equivalent to the packraft or mountain bike, tools that fundamentally changed how people move through wild landscapes. That said, some long-standing technologies remain unexplored. Paragliding is one such example. While vol-biv efforts exist, they have been limited in scope. The most ambitious example to date may be McClurg and Turner’s 2016 vol-biv crossing of part of the Alaska Range. There is potential to develop longer, more complex vol-biv routes in Alaska and beyond. Combined with packrafting, the possibilities expand dramatically.
The Living Map
In the past, explorers pushed to the edge of the known world, into places believed not to exist. Those blank spots on the map are long gone. In their absence, adventure has become closer to an art form, less about brute force conquest and more about interpretation. If the blank spots are gone, it does not mean the world has grown smaller. Instead, the burden of meaning has shifted to us. The map has become a canvas, offering endless opportunities to those bold and creative enough to see it differently.