Ben Weissenbach
North to the Future: An Offline Adventure through the Changing Wilds of Alaska
(Grand Central, July 2025)
Ben Weissenbach—an L.A. native with little prior wilderness experience—treks through the Alaskan tundra with a series of eccentric environmental scientists, and returns with a new perspective on technology and a revitalized sense of wonder for the natural world.
At the age of twenty-one, college student Ben Weissenbach set out into the Alaskan wilderness armed with little more than inspiration from his literary heroes and a growing interest in climate change. What meets him there is a landscape both stark and awe-inspiring—a part of the world seen by few outside a small contingent of scientists with big personalities.
There’s Roman Dial, the larger-than-life field scientist who leads him on a five week journey into the Alaskan backcountry. There’s Kenji Yoshikawa, the isolated researcher who leaves Ben alone for eleven days to care for his remote cabin, where temperatures at night drop to -49 degrees Fahrenheit. And there’s Matt Nolan, the independent glaciologist who flies planes onto glaciers.
As Ben’s mental and physical resilience is tested, he discovers far more than his own limits; struck by the landscape’s staggering beauty and sheer indifference to humanity, Ben emerges from each experience with a new perspective on our modern relationships to technology—and a deep sense of wonder for our natural world.
Ben Weissenbach is a graduate of Princeton University, where he studied English and Environmental Studies and was mentored by John McPhee. After graduating in 2020, he received a Luce Scholarship to report on climate change in Asia. His work has appeared in the L.A. Times Sunday Edition, National Geographic, The Washington Post, Scientific American, and Smithsonian. He lives in Los Angeles.