Arctic

John Kauffmann's portrait of the Brooks Range — the most remote mountain chain in North America. Part natural history, part elegy for a wilderness that was, at the time of writing, still essentially untouched.

Barry Lopez spent five years traveling in the Arctic, and the book he wrote about it is one of the great works of American nonfiction. It's about ice and light and musk oxen and Inuit hunters, but it's also about the nature of imagination — how a landscape this extreme remakes the people who enter it.

Natalie Warren and Ann Raiho connected over a shared love of paddling as teenagers at a Minnesotan outdoor camp. Later, as college graduation approached, Raiho suggested an expedition inspired by the 1935 book Canoeing with the Cree, a classic outdoors tale of two men who paddled from Minneapolis to Hudson Bay, wending two thousand miles through muddy rivers, whitewater rapids, windy lakes, polar bear country, and dozens of riverfront towns and Indigenous communities. Aiming to be the first women to undertake the route, they set off in a seventeen-foot Langford Prospector dubbed Kawena Kinomaeta, meaning “no worries” in Cree, and eventually adopted a tough scruff of a dog named Myhan as their third boat companion. Hudson Bay Bound shares all the exuberance, self-doubt, relationship spats, exhaustion, and basic truths of their three-month voyage: “When in doubt, don’t think too much, and walk around the block in your hiking boots.” Isn’t it time you planned a big adventure with your best friend?

Huw Lewis-Jones on the visual culture of Arctic exploration — the paintings, photographs, maps, and illustrations that shaped how the world imagined the north. A history of seeing ice.

Buddy Levy's account of the 1881 Greely expedition to the Arctic — 25 men went north, 6 came back. Starvation, mutiny, cannibalism, and one of the most controversial rescue operations in American history.

Debbie Miller's portrait of the Arctic Refuge — its caribou, its wolves, its vast tundra silence. Miller lived near the refuge for years, and her book is both a natural history and an argument for leaving the last great American wilderness alone.

Kolbert curates the best polar writing — from the heroic age to the climate crisis. Nansen, Cherry-Garrard, Lopez, and contemporary scientists, all gathered at the poles.

Six journeys to Greenland across six years — dog sleds, hunters, ice, and the Inuit culture shaped by the most extreme environment on earth. Ehrlich writes about cold the way she writes about everything: with a poet's precision and a survivor's authority.