At One with the Natural World

Barry Lopez's adventures with the word & the wild

Nicholas O'Connell June 21, 2004 - 3:15am

They never saw it coming. Barry Lopez and three scientists were making bottom trawls in a twenty-foot boat several miles out from Pingok Island on the North Slope of Alaska, one of the most desolate and remote regions of the planet. Skirting the edges of the pack ice in the Beaufort Sea, they concentrated on their work and ignored a storm moving in from the southwest. Before they realized what was happening, the wind pushed a large ice...

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About the Author

Nicholas O’Connell, a freelance writer in Seattle, is the author of At the Field’s End: Interviews with Twenty-two Pacific Northwest Writers (University of Washington Press, 1998).