In the summer of 1983, Jon Waterman, Lexington High School class of 1974, took his first trip to the Noatak River in Alaska. While there, he encountered cold temperatures, grizzly bears and hundreds of caribou.
After decades of exploring the Arctic, Waterman returned to that river with his son, Alistair, in 2021. But, he was not met with the frozen paradise he remembered.
“I had a pretty good picture of it in my mind’s eye,” Waterman, 68, told LexObserver. “When you remember something so well and you go back, it’s easy to see the change.”
Instead of shielding themselves from frigid winds, like Waterman had done during past summer trips to the northern region, he and his son cooled off from summertime heat in the river.
“I could never have imagined doing something like that 35 years before,” he said.
They saw lush greenery instead of snow and ice, and witnessed an environment nearly desolate of the animals that once ruled it.
“I was stunned by it,” said Waterman. “I was astonished.”
Waterman recounts many of the over-1,000 nights he spent in the Arctic and global warming’s effects on the region in his new book, “Into the Thaw,” which will be published by Patagonia and available on Nov. 12. Ahead of its release, Waterman, who now lives in Carbondale, CO, will give a lecture on his book at Lexington’s Cary Memorial Hall on Oct. 17.
Waterman’s interest in exploring the Arctic stemmed from his childhood, when he enjoyed spending time outdoors during New England’s frigid winter months. While attending LHS, he frequently ice-climbed Mount Washington and visited New Hampshire as an Explorer Scout, where he dug snow caves and survived in igloos with his peers for days.
“I became very comfortable in the cold at a very young age,” he said. “I essentially had a lot of training right from the age of 15.”
After graduating from Lexington High, Waterman, then 19, took his mountaineering talents west where he attempted to climb Denali, North America’s highest summit. He said he’s since climbed the record-breaking peak “at least a half dozen times.”
Next, he set his sights on traversing the Northwest Passage — that is, from the Arctic’s Pacific tides to the Atlantic — which he completed in ten months, collectively, from 1997 to 1999. Waterman accredits that accomplishment to the skills he learned climbing New England’s peaks as a teen.
“When you’re out in sub-zero [temperatures] for weeks on end on a mountain and dealing with avalanches and crevasse, it’s all relative,” he said. “Going to the Arctic actually seemed a lot easier [than mountaineering in New England] in comparison.”
Throughout those adventures, Waterman journaled, photographed, videoed and tape-recorded his experiences and conversation with locals. He saw first-hand and learned, through those discussions, how the evolving climate affects natives.
Waterman first noticed those effects when he visited the Canadian Arctic in 1997. During that trip, a native told Waterman “he had never seen blue birds or robins in his village but he started seeing them in the 1990s.” Conversely, the native told Waterman that locals would dog sled through snow until mid-July in years prior.
And still, the Arctic continues to evolve due to warming temperatures. Sea ice — which absorbs waves and mitigates storms — has been melting along the Arctic’s coasts, causing increasingly intense weather to hit communities such as the coastal Alaskan village of Kivalina, according to Waterman. He said he’s also seen the consequences of rising tides in areas such as Noatak, where roads have been swept away from flooding.
Beyond disturbing Arctic natives, Waterman said those disruptions in the northern region will continue to cause unusual weather patterns and storms as far south as Georgia.
“The Arctic and the Antarctic are like the world’s air conditioner,” he told LexObserver. “The AC is broken right now…because the sea ice is melting and it’s warming up there.”
The US has seen many intense storms, such as Hurricane Helene last month which destroyed much of the nation’s southeast, sweeping away neighborhoods in intense flood currents and killing over 200 people.
Waterman created “Into the Thaw” out of his archived journal entries and reading scientific work on the climate crisis. He said it’s the easiest book he’s ever written.
“It was such an organic project for me, I knew exactly what I wanted to say,” he said. “And of course it evoked some nostalgia because [writing the book] brought me back.”
In addition to “In the Thaw,” Waterman has published over a dozen books, including “Atlas of the National Parks,” which was published by National Geographic and “Chasing Denali,” among others.
“The Arctic is a very important place but it is so little known,” Waterman told LexObserver. “Relatively few people live there so we don’t pay much attention to it but it has a big effect on us, it’s part of our world.”
If you’d like to attend Waterman’s lecture where you can buy a signed copy of “Into the Thaw” from Maxima Book Center, you can purchase a ticket on the lecture’s EventBrite page. Tickets are $10 for Lexington Historical Society members and $15 for non-members.
The book and the talk will no doubt be fascinating.
Meanwhile, NYer writer Elizabeth Colbert just wrote about a trip to Greenland, much of that in the context of the changes due to global warming. I suspect Jon Waterman’s book and talk are going to be more fun and more interesting, though, just from what I’ve read here.