World War III

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Silent. Awesome. Majestic. Everlastingly beautiful. Untouched by history. That was the description a Russian Orthodox missionary noted in his personal journal in 1794 as his impression of this section of rock and snow of what later came to be called the Brooks Range inside the Arctic Circle of Alaska’s northernmost province. They are the first-known words written about the North Slope.

What he might have written, if he’d had the chance, was that it was also unforgiving.

The missionary’s frozen body — his journal and Bible clutched together in one hand — was discovered in 1974 by a pipeline worker who’d chipped off a piece of the Russian’s knee with a pickax before he realized he wasn’t just hacking at subzero ground.

In the 160 years that the missionary rested undisturbed and surrounded by silent beauty little had changed. The Brooks Range remains for the most part unexplored and unsettled. It has been defaced infrequently by pockets of civilization, inhabited by foolish or brave souls whose very survival depends upon winning a constant battle against nature and the delivery of supplies from other souls even more foolish or brave.

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