Ben Weissenbach
North to the Future: An Offline Adventure through the Changing Wilds of Alaska
(Grand Central, July 2025)
Winner of the 2025 National Outdoor Book Award: Journeys
One of Anchorage Daily News’ Favorite Books of 2025
Read an interview with Ben Weissenbach including an excerpt from the book in Outside Magazine
Ned Rozell writes a review of North to the Future in Anchorage Daily News
An interview with author Ben Weissenbach in Christian Science Monitor
One of twelve books about the West Alta is excited to see published in July
Read the review in the Anchorage Daily News
Read a review in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Read the full Kirkus review
Noted by the Gates Cambridge Scholarship
Read the review in Library Journal
Read an excerpt from the book in Princeton Alumni Weekly
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.
Praise for North to the Future
“North to the Future is a kind of bildungsroman of perception — a story of learning to see and hear and feel by venturing out in the wild. It is a beautiful and necessary book.” – Elizabeth Kolbert, New York Times bestselling author of The Sixth Extinction
“Ben Weissenbach’s absorbing North to the Future is packed with fascinating and eccentric adventurer/scientists, hair-raising wildlife encounters and haunting landscapes—all in the tradition of his teacher, John McPhee. But Weissenbach offers a contrasting dimension unique to a writer of his era: how all this reality feels to a 20-something raised on the airless virtual world of the 4”x2” screen. The book thus carries a double warning: of a threatened external environment and an internal one, too.” – John Colapinto, New York Times bestselling author of This is the Voice
“Weissenbach spins the immersive travel writing into a soulful meditation on the value of getting back to nature….[North to the Future] will transport readers.”―Publishers Weekly
“A clear-eyed and occasionally memoiristic treatise on the importance of observation and immersion. For readers of a naturalistic or environmentalist bent, but also those who think themselves opposed to such perspectives.—Genevieve Williams, Library Journal
“Weissenbach is pulled out of the two-dimensional world mediated by phone and computer screens into the awesome, terrifying, and beautiful existence changing rapidly and inexorably before his eyes. John McPhee has a worthy successor.” ―Kirkus Reviews
“Apart from the adventuring… and the science, the delight in North to the Future is to be found in the portraits Weissenbach constructs….into artful and informative storytelling. John McPhee, to whom the book is dedicated, is surely proud of his former student.” ―Anchorage Daily News
“Far and away the best outdoor adventure book I’ve read in years. It takes a dire but somewhat distant topic, climate change, and brings it to within inches of your face, so you can hear the snuffle of grizzlies and the glassy crackling as the glaciers recede. In the process, it gently nudges us to relearn the raw art of being human: to walk softly, to see sharply, to be—vitally—present.” ―Robert Moor, New York Times best-selling author of On Trails: An Exploration
“A highly entertaining and insightful debut.” ―Cal Newport, New York Times bestselling author of Slow Productivity and Digital Minimalism
“A rollicking adventure through the Alaskan wilds where the art of humility meets the necessity of paying attention.” ―Caroline Van Hemert, award-winning author of The Sun is a Compass
“A compelling portrayal of wild places. . . with consistent narrative tension. . . [McPhee’s] student — who dedicated the book to McPhee — paid attention.” ―Ned Rozell, Anchorage Daily News
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.