It takes a bit of crazy to do something that is, well, crazy

"'There are few lonely places in this world,' wrote scientist and traveler Henry Elliott in 1886, 'and the wastes of the great Alaskan interior are the loneliest of them all.' Enclosed by mountains on three sides, the interior of Alaska was a land which few people knew well.

In the decades after the Civil War, a few explorers, adventurers and prospectors made their way into this subcontinent, which covers half a million square miles on top of North America. Lieut. Frederick Schwatka came down the Yukon River on a log raft in 1883 and passed the mouth of a huge river known as the Tanana, the 'River of the Mountains.' The confluence lay almost at the geographical center of Alaska. Judging from the size of its mouth and the stories the Indians told, Schwatka thought the Tanana might be the longest unexplored river in the world." (Cole, Terrence. Crooked Past The History of a Frontier Mining Camp: Fairbanks, Alaska. Fairbanks: UA Press, 1991. pp. vii.)

An aerial shot of the Tanana river I took while flying into Fairbanks.

Lieut. Schwatka and his group built rafts themselves and floated the entire length of the Yukon all the way to the Bering Sea without knowing anything about the terrain. The group that came after his was lead by Lieut. Henry Tureman Allen and their mission was to explore the Tanana. They went up the Copper River, hiked through a pass in the mountains and then floated down the Tanana to the Yukon. It took them 3 months and they nearly starved to death. When they arrived at a trading post on the Yukon, traders greeted them in disbelief; to their knowledge no one had ever crossed the Alaska Range to the Yukon and they thought the feat impossible. Of course, Athabaskans had been living in this area for quite some time. I can only imagine what it would have been like to be literally the first person to set foot in the interior of Alaska.

I've been a tourist, a traveler, I've lived in places foreign to me, I've been adventurous, eaten "strange" things, gone places I'd never been before, but when I read or hear stories about people who charted territories that had never, to their knowledge, been explored before I am reminded that there's a whole nether category of people out there. People who are so driven by curiosity and the desire to expand, not only their, but also humanity's knowledge that they abandon their fears, or at least compartmentalize them well enough to realize their dreams. These people are everywhere, in all fields of study or "walks of life" and I wonder what it takes to become one.