Natalia Del Campo sees the Blue Pool, shimmering like a winter oasis. It sparkles below a snowy trail and rocky gray cliffs, the iridescent turquoise water rippling under the rushing downpour of Tamolitch Falls.

It’s a clear March day in McKenzie Bridge, Oregon, a riverside valley in the Willamette National Forest, about an hour east of Eugene. In 2020, a devastating fire tore through this area, setting 173,392 acres ablaze. Even now, six months later, the road leading here smells like ash; on the way in, you pass the blackened remnants of Douglas firs and toppled power-line poles. The contrast makes the Blue Pool seem even more spectacular.

Del Campo, a petite 33-year-old Mexican American with short dark hair, feels like she’s rising from the ashes, too. She had a crushing year—losing her job as a bar manager to COVID-19, spiraling into depression, struggling with complex PTSD stemming from a sexual assault that happened when she was a teenager, attempting suicide, and undergoing intensive psychiatric treatment.

She came to the valley to clear her head, and it seems to be working well. She can feel the spirit of the earth, a deep bond with the natural features of this environment, including the old, porous lava flow through which the McKenzie River seeps upward to form the Blue Pool. If she stares at a tree long enough, it appears illuminated, lights circling it from all sides, making it more vivid than vivid, more real than real. She sees her ancestors down through the ages, living with nature in the shadows of history. She tells me later that these moments feel like “an interconnectedness 
 knowing that you’re a part of something bigger than yourself, something very beautiful and old.”

As Del Campo approaches the pool, she feels her feet taking root in the slushy path, the trees growing around her, the water rising and falling like waves of light cascading inside her chest.

“It wasn’t like I was a spectator,” she says. “Or like I was in the forest looking at all this stuff. It was like, I am the forest.”

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On May 4, 2020, with the pandemic turning his life upside down, 13-year-old Sebastian Morris needed a break. Bright and amiable, with long brown hair and wraparound shades, Sebastian lived in Santa Rosa Beach and enjoyed the usual Florida-boy fare—swimming, snorkeling, and hanging with his buddies, who nicknamed themselves the Tribe.

That morning, as Sebastian watched the rippling waves coming in at —more than 1,200 acres of shorefront and dunes just east of the town of Panama City Beach—he couldn’t wait to go diving with his dad, Bobby, a blond-haired 46-year-old who was loading up a rented pontoon boat.

Bobby had parlayed his passion for diving into a career as a commercial diver and remote-operated-vehicle pilot. The work is adventurous and challenging—he’d done everything from searching for a sunken helicopter to cleaning up after the British Petroleum oil spill. It’s also dangerous. One time while Bobby was torch-cutting an underwater structure damaged during Hurricane Katrina, he briefly got knocked unconscious by an explosion.

But what really captured Sebastian’s imagination were the treasures his father occasionally found on the job, including a 300-year-old ship he discovered in 2019, deep in the Black Sea near Turkey. “I was like, man, I kind of want to do that,” Sebastian says.

“All he’s ever wanted to be is a treasure hunter,” Bobby confirms. As they set out into the Gulf of Mexico, Sebastian imagined all the amazing things they might find.

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The world’s most mysterious cave is difficult to reach.

To get to Cueva de los Tayos—Cave of the Oilbirds—drive east out of Ecuador’s capital city of Quito for eight hours along narrow, potholed roads that twist through cloudforest above the Amazon Basin. Pull over outside the small town of Mendez, and walk a path to the bank of the muddy Santiago River, where you’ll see locals hauling 150-pound bushels of bananas on their shoulders. Lower yourself into a long wooden canoe and glide past cascading waterfalls to the start of a dirt trail. Hike five hours in the humidity, over Puntilla de Coangos mountain, then up to the summit of Bocana de Coangos. The trail ends at a clearing with three thatch huts, home to a dozen Shuar, the ancient tribe that guards the cave.

The Shuar are the Indigenous people of the region, legendary warriors known for shamanism and for shrinking the heads of their enemies. Tayos beckons from deep inside territory that is managed and protected by the tribe, and visitors must take great care when navigating the local politics and customs. Theo Toulkaridis, a geology professor and researcher at the University of the Armed Forces in Ecuador, who is a leading expert on Tayos, learned this the hard way in 2014. After a few days exploring the cave, he climbed out to find 20 angry Shuar waiting for him. Toulkaridis had hired local guides, but other Shuar were upset that they had not been hired as well. “My guide hugged me close and whispered, ‘Don’t resist,’” Toulkaridis recalls. Then a Shuar woman whipped him with a belt.

Tayos is named for the brown-feathered, hook-billed nocturnal birds that dwell inside the cave alongside thousands of bats. The birds act a lot like bats, spending their days in darkness and heading out at night to forage for fruit. They’re called oilbirds ­because of their fatty chicks, which the Shuar capture and reduce to oil. The cave is also rumored to contain artifacts of a lost civilization. A 1972 bestselling book by Swiss author Erich von DĂ€niken, called , claimed that Tayos held carved passageways and a “metal library” of tablets written in an unknown language. Von DĂ€niken has long believed that aliens once inhabited the earth, and the tablets fit his theory that extraterrestrials helped ancient people evolve. The notion has been criticized as pseudoscientific and racist, attributing the achievements of now marginalized earthlings to ­interlopers from space. Yet it spawned a cottage industry of books, conventions, and TV shows, ­including the History Channel’s Ancient Aliens, which premiered in 2010 and is one of the network’s most popular programs.

A couple of years after The Gold of the Gods was published, the late Scottish explorer Stan Hall assembled a team of 100 scientists, cavers, British and Ecuadorean military personnel, and, remarkably, astronaut Neil Armstrong, who served as a figurehead, and led them into Tayos to unravel the mystery. What they found astonished them. Deep inside, in spots where it would have been impossible to lug machinery, there were stone passageways that appeared to have been cut at right angles and then polished. They also discovered a burial site dating back to 1500 B.C.

“The cadaver, as if surprised by the sudden intrusion after so many lonely centuries, crumbled to dust when touched,” Hall writes in , his book about the expedition. Though the team didn’t find the metal library, Armstrong put the adventure “up there with the moon landing.”

Beyond that, only a small number of intrepid hikers, wide-eyed UFO believers, and from Brigham Young University—who believed that the metal tablets might be linked to the Mormon faith—have made it inside. The cave has also attracted interest from geologists and archaeologists, who have mapped portions using 3D technology to better understand its scope. (Roughly four miles of the cave have been mapped so far, but an estimated three miles remain.) Toulkaridis calls it “a natural laboratory which is fundamentally untouched.”

To enter Tayos, you need more than the permission of the Shuar. You also need a blessing from the cave itself. I learn this late one starry night in August of 2019, in Kuankus, the tiny Shuar settlement, which is located about one mile uphill from Tayos. Getting here has been a brutal ten-hour slog in sweltering heat. The trek included crossing a rickety rope bridge high above the rapids and trudging in mud through thick jungle loaded with giant black bullet ants, so named because being bit by one feels like being shot. The plan is to stay in Kuankus for the night, then enter the cave with our Shuar guides the next morning.

I’m here with a small team led by Eileen Hall, Stan Hall’s 34-year-old half-Scottish, half-Ecuadoran daughter, who continued her father’s quest to understand the true history and power of the cave after he died of prostate cancer in 2008. Eileen, who lives in London, is artistic and spiritual, a former architect who now conducts what she calls energy-healing work with private clients. Along with another architect, Tamsin Cunningham, she is also a cofounder of , a company that explores the cave through writing, music, and meditation. Today, with her long brown hair in a ponytail, she’s dressed in a black Ecuadorean shirt, long gray hiking pants, and blue rubber boots caked in mud. This is her fourth expedition to the cave. When I ask her what I should expect, she tells me that Tayos is “a psychedelic experience.”

After sipping from a wooden bowl of chicha, a chalky, alcoholic drink made from fermented yuca (prepared by women who chew it and then spit into the bowl), we gather with the Shuar around a campfire. A shaman—a stout, middle-aged woman with long, dark hair—leads us through the permission ceremony. We hold hands while in Spanish she thanks the stars, the moon, the earth. She removes a smoldering log from the fire, waving its smoke behind each of us in a blessing. Finally, we take turns asking for permission from Arutam, the all-powerful force in the Shuar religion, to enter Tayos. After a few moments of silence, the shaman tells us that the spirit has allowed us inside what she calls “the womb of the earth.”

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Maksim Popov needed a gun. 

It was late fall 2018, and the single, unemployed 29-year-old was descending into darkness. He was living in Volgograd, the large industrial city in southwestern Russia where he’d grown up, and as he later explained, he’d become desperate, even hopeless. It’s not clear what caused his downturn or if he’d sought help, but at some point he decided he wanted to shoot himself. To get a firearm legally in Russia , which is presumably why Popov found himself online, reading about a remote outpost in the Arctic that’s popular with Russian tourists and is also one of the easiest places on the planet to rent a gun: Longyearbyen. 

The tiny town of some 2,200 residents is among the northernmost settlements in the world, situated about 800 miles from the North Pole on the island of Spitsbergen, in the isolated Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard. Nestled at the end of a mountainous valley where it meets the shore of a small fjord, Longyearbyen was for centuries an icy base for whalers and trappers. Beginning in the early 1900s, it became a lonely coal-mining community populated by Norwegians and Russians, closed to visitors because of the limited infrastructure.

But after the Svalbard airport opened just outside town in 1975, Longyearbyen emerged as a tourist destination, and today some travelers come each year by plane and cruise ship. , with their numbers jumping 500 percent since 2016. Many venture into the frozen wilderness on snowmobiles or dogsled tours. Others visit the most famous structure in the Arctic: . Built inside a mountain, the so-called Doomsday Vault opened in 2008 and stores nearly a million samples of plant seeds, so that crops might be restored following a global catastrophe. 

Then there are the polar bears: at least 2,000 of them live in the region, and the local tourism board likes to claim that they outnumber the residents. A number of outfitters run expedition cruises to observe the animals safely from the water. On the edges of Longyearbyen, warning signs dot the snowy plains: (“All Over Svalbard”), they proclaim below an illustration of a polar bear silhouette. People are required to carry a rifle for protection when leaving town, and tourists frequently walk the streets with guns slung over their shoulders, though they are supposed to be unloaded in town. The grocery store, city hall, bank, and other establishments post no-rifles signs outside and provide lockers in their foyers for storing weapons. If a visitor is at least 18 years old, renting a rifle for protection from bears and the ability to remain sober long enough to visit either of the sporting-goods stores in town that supply firearms. 

For Popov, it seemed like the perfect place to end his life.

There's a classic Norwegian children’s story called “Folk og rovere i Kardemomme By,” which translates as “When the Robbers Came to Cardamom Town.” It’s about an idyllic village where the locals live in peace until thieves arrive and cause a bit of trouble, then are arrested and change their ways. (Ultimately, they become heroes when they put out a fire.) Many Longyearbyen residents have felt as though they lived in Cardamom themselves. With its bright, candy-colored homes and buildings laid out neatly against a mountainous backdrop, the town has the look and feel of a Dr. Seuss drawing. As Trond Hellstad, the chipper manager of the local branch of SpareBank 1, the only bank in Longyearbyen, told me one bright day in March, “It’s a fairy-tale town.”

Longyearbyenians share an unusual, adventurous lifestyle. With few roads for cars, they get around on snowmobiles and skis. During the interminable winter, when the sun doesn’t rise for four months, the northern lights frequently paint the starry sky. When daylight returns in the spring, residents celebrate with the weeklong Solfestuka, or Sun Festival, dancing to live music, swilling local beers, and joining the face-painted kids’ chorus to sing “Here Comes the Sun” on the steps of an old burned-out hospital on the outskirts of town. Summer brings endless hours of light for hiking, biking, boating, and fishing. Reindeer and arctic fox roam the island’s interior, while whales, walruses, and seals frolic in the fjord.

Hellstad is a clean-cut, middle-aged dad who favors khakis and pressed button-down shirts. Originally from Nyksund, in northern Norway, he’s among the majority of residents who dropped out of conventional life to chase a far-out existence in Svalbard. There is in the archipelago, but the islands have a surprisingly diverse demographic, with more than 50 nationalities represented, though Norwegians dominate and English is the most commonly shared language. There’s a feeling in Longyearbyen that everyone is running either from or to something. Many who come last only a while, with the average stint running about seven years.

Hellstad fell in love with the natural beauty of Svalbard during a family vacation, and in 2010 he eagerly pursued an opportunity to transfer from a SpareBank 1 in the Vesteralen Islands, off the coast of northern Norway, to manage the branch in Longyearbyen, where he relaxed into the ease of extremely small-town life. He spent his days meeting with locals and tourists in his corner office, a taxidermied arctic fox perched on his wall with a ptarmigan in its jowls. “You can leave your door open here and the key in the car. Everybody knows each other,” he tells me in his lilting Norwegian accent. “There’s almost no crime at all.”

Besides the occasional pub fight or drunken snowmobiler, the most common transgression, according to Longyearbyen police chief inspector Frede Lamo, is stolen boots. Over coffee at a restaurant called Gruvelageret, Lamo explains this oddity. The walls are crowded with old black-and-white photos of miners. Around us, diners dig into dishes of whale carpaccio and reindeer in lingonberry sauce.

Lamo has shaggy blond hair, a graying beard, and tattoos snaking down his arms. Around town, he says, it’s customary to remove your shoes when entering a building. The tradition goes back to the mining heyday of the 1950s, when, according to local legend, a barracks maid named Olga insisted that workers leave their grimy footwear outside. Today most establishments are BYOFS—bring your own fuzzy slippers—which you slide on like Mr. Rogers after politely removing your boots and leaving them in a cubbyhole, where they’re vulnerable to the occasional theft.

Lamo moved to Longyearbyen from Oslo in 2012, after tiring of the traffic and chaos of urban life. A part-time wildlife photographer and guide, he also wanted to live closer to nature. “As soon as you leave town,” he says, “you can be by yourself as long as you want without seeing a single human being.” 

Still, as he learned, you can’t completely escape civilization anymore. After relocating, Lamo spent several months working as a field inspector, a job that had him acting as a kind of environmental-protection cop. He was stationed in an old hunting cabin on the rugged northwest coast of Spitsbergen, tasked with looking out for interactions between cruise ships and wildlife. While there, he witnessed a mysterious and alarming dynamic: human skulls emerging from the rocky ground. Soon he saw other bones—ribs, femurs, hips—along with splintered shards of wood. Because of climate change, the permafrost supporting a whaling graveyard from the 1600s was melting, causing the dead to be expelled. 

The remains that could be gathered were sent to the Svalbard museum, but the macabre dilemma continued in Longyearbyen, where melting permafrost pushed bodies from a town cemetery to the surface. Besides the spook factor, this presented a public-health concern, since corpses can retain deadly pathogens. For this reason, burying the dead has been illegal here since 1950. Locals like to joke that it’s illegal to die in Svalbard. When I meet the town’s scruffy mayor, Arild Olsen, one morning in his office, I ask what the punishment is for violating this law. “Death,” he deadpans.

After some 18 hours of travel, Popov landed at the Svalbard Airport on December 17, 2018. It was the middle of what locals call the dark season, the stretch between late October and mid-February when the sun never rises above the horizon. After stepping off the plane, he would see his first polar bear within minutes: stuffed, it stands on all fours in the center of a baggage-claim carousel. Most travelers who arrive by plane catch a bus for the short ride to town. From his seat, Popov would have seen a faint outline of the mountains lining the valley and probably snowmobilers zipping by with the lights on and rifles in tow, just in case. 

Once in town, he checked into a hotel and spent a couple of days exploring the town, with its one snow-covered road of restaurants and shops. Some locals made their way down the strip on dogsleds, panting huskies pulling them to Fruene, a popular café, where they warmed themselves with coffee and ate egg salad sandwiches and lingonberry scones. At night they filled the handful of restaurants and bars to swap stories over beers. Anyone dropping into this scene would be struck by the eclectic mix of characters from many different countries. Longyearbyen has the feel of a postapocalyptic frontier town at the frozen top of the planet. 

But Popov hadn’t come here to explore or to socialize. Eventually, he got down to the business of securing a gun. Across the parking lot from the town grocery—whose offerings include polar bear mugs, polar bear mittens, polar bear booties, and polar bear refrigerator magnets—was a store called Longyear78 Outdoors and Expeditions. For 190 kroner per day ($20), Popov could rent a rifle capable of taking down a charging polar bear.

Before he’d left Volgograd, Popov had filled out an application for a rifle-rental permit, using a Svalbard government website. He’d been approved, and now, inside Longyear78, he handed over his ID and listened as the clerk gave him a detailed explanation of how to operate the weapon. After that, he was free to walk out the door with it slung over his shoulder, like everyone else in town.

Once Popov held the gun in his hand, the reality of his plan hit him. He had come thousands of miles to kill himself. He had a rifle. The time had come, but he was losing his nerve. So he put it off. 

That night, back in his hotel room, he mulled over his options. There was no sun, and he was far from home, in a very strange place. He was sure he didn’t want to go back to Russia, but he didn’t want to die, either. As he would later claim, a new solution dawned on him: he would do something that would allow him to get help, right here in Norway. He eyed his rifle, already loaded, and thought about the lone bank in town. Then he sat down at the laptop he’d brought, typed the phrase “Eto ogrableniye” into a Russian translator, and hit enter. Almost instantly, the English wording appeared: “This is a robbery.”

A couple of years before Popov came to Longyearbyen, Mark Sabbatini was getting ready for bed in his apartment in town when he heard what sounded like a gunshot. Scruffy and thin, with silver-framed glasses and an unruly salt-and-pepper beard, Sabbatini is the one-man publisher-writer-­editor of , the northernmost alternative weekly in the world. Sabbatini grew up in Colorado and says he came to Longyearbyen because he wanted to cover the news at the end of the earth. “It’s isolated in pretty much every possible sense,” he tells me one afternoon at Fruene, “other than the fact that we’ve got a great internet connection.”

The sound he heard in his apartment was his mirror cracking. As soon as he saw the broken glass, he knew that melting ice was destabilizing the ground under buildings. Over the coming days, his floor buckled, windows wouldn’t shut, cracks began scarring the apartment’s edifice. According to commissioned by the Norwegian Environment Agency and released last winter, Svalbard is among the fastest-warming places on earth, with annual temperatures rising more than seven degrees between 1971 and 2017. Most structures in Longyearbyen are mounted on permafrost, which is a far easier and cheaper solution than digging potentially hundreds of feet down to anchor the foundation in bedrock. As a result, melting has put many buildings at risk. “Everything that is not bolted to the solid ground is moving,” Mayor Olsen says. “Houses, roads, critical infrastructure—everything.” 

Higher temperatures have also brought more rain and floods. In , unusually heavy downpours caused water to leak into the entryway tunnel of the Global Seed Vault, spurring a brief media panic. (As it turned out, the seeds were never at risk.) Rain can also destabilize the snowpack in the mountains bordering town. In December 2015, , a nearby peak, buried 11 homes. Lamo and others rushed to the scene with shovels and dug out their neighbors, though a 42-year-old man and 2-year-old girl died. , in 2017, destroyed two apartment buildings and forced the evacuation of 75 residents. The city subsequently spent $15 million erecting snow fences to protect the most vulnerable structures. Meanwhile, some 140 homes have had to be permanently evacuated due to the danger.

The Norwegian Environment Agency report predicts more of the same, with annual temperatures predicted to rise as much as 18 degrees by 2100 and rainfall increasing by up to 65 percent. Besides transforming how humans live in Svalbard, the changes will have devastating effects on wildlife. One afternoon during my visit in March, Kim Holmen, the international director of the , takes me out for a snowmobile tour to show me changes in the local habitat. A native of Sweden, he has a long gray beard and wears dark sunglasses and a pink knit hat given to him by a former student. He also carries a rifle over his shoulder, in case we encounter any bears.

We stop at the edge of the fjord, which is devoid of ice. “At this time of year, we would have been on a snowmobile belting across to the other side, but now it’s just open water,” he says. In the seas surrounding Svalbard, historically important species like polar cod and ringed seals are moving north as the waters warm, while mackerel and blue whales are making their way in. 

After proceeding for half an hour across soft, silent snow into a vast white valley, we see two reindeer. We watch as they struggle to find food. Rainfall has caused a layer of ice to form between the snow and the underlying grass, so the reindeer must punch through the ice to get at the vegetation. “It’s just single leaves that they might find,” Holman says. “It’s hard work.” 

Changing climate has made life harder all around. Sabbatini had to move out of his teetering apartment. As a journalist, he’s covered the many ways that Svalbard is transforming, and he fielded media calls when the Global Seed Vault leak became an international news story. He never expected another event to steal the spotlight. 

On December 21 at just before 9 A.M., Hellstad trudged happily over the crunchy snow to the one-story building, hanging with icicles, that houses the Longyearbyen post office and SpareBank 1. He greeted his two-person staff, then sat at the desk in his corner office to enjoy the steam rising from his coffee.

At 10:40 A.M., teller Kristine Myrbostad, an outdoorsy young mother, was standing behind the counter in the lobby when a large, dark-haired man came in carrying a rifle. There were no other customers in the bank, and Popov aimed the rifle at her, speaking the English phrases he’d learned online. “This is not a joke,” he said in his thick Russian accent. “This is a robbery. I need hundred thousand.”

Terrified, Myrbostad walked with Popov to Hellstad’s office. At first, Hellstad didn’t realize what was going on. He assumed Popov had simply missed the sign telling visitors not to bring guns into the building. “You need to leave the bank,” Hellstad said. “You’re not allowed to have a weapon in here.”

Popov, bundled in layers of wool and down, eyed him solemnly, sweat dripping down his forehead. The Russian aimed his rifle at Hellstad, who felt the shock of fear. Popov repeated his earlier warning: “This is not a joke. This is a robbery. I need hundred thousand.”

Hellstad tried to get Popov to understand his circumstances: he was in the middle of nowhere, in frozen darkness, in an outpost with one small airport. A single phone call could close the entire town, so there was no chance of getting away. “This is not a good idea for you,” Hellstad said. 

Popov repeated the other English words he’d practiced. “I need money,” he said. “You have to give me money.”

Hellstad called out to his other employee, Svenn Are Johansen, who was working in the back of the bank, and told him to do what Popov said. Johansen nervously grabbed a stack of multicolored kroner, worth about $8,000, and put it on a table in the lobby. Popov stuffed the pockets of his winter coat, then walked out into the pitch-black day. This was not a fairy tale. A robber had come to Longyearbyen for real. 

When officer Frede Lamo was first told about the robbery at SpareBank 1, which was down the hill from the police department, he figured it was a mistake. “It’s not something we’re used to here at all,” he says. After learning that it had really happened, he mentally sped through the protocol of what he should do. The officers would need weapons and a plan for surrounding the bank. It’s a small town­—where will people be at this time? Lamo recalls thinking. What if they run into this man? A call was made to the nearby grade school to keep the children indoors.

Roughly 15 minutes after Popov had first entered the bank, Lamo and four other officers pulled up in police cars. They didn’t see a robber. Of course, the criminal couldn’t have gone far. Even if he had a vehicle, the road through Longyearbyen doesn’t afford much of an escape. A few miles in one direction and it ends at the airport; a few miles in the other and it stops at a tree. As Lamo looked around in the midday darkness, he figured there was only one thing to do if you’re running from the law in the northernmost town in the world: jump on a snowmobile and ride into the wild.

Except Popov wanted to be caught. After leaving SpareBank, he was eager to get rid of his gun. He didn’t want the gun. He wanted help. He walked across the parking lot and back to Longyear78, rifle in hand, where the clerk reprimanded him for carrying a loaded weapon around town before taking it back.

Panicked, Popov needed to hear a familiar voice. He called his mother in Volgograd and told her he’d just committed a robbery. “She advised me to run, but I told my mom that I was on a desert island,” Popov would say months later at his criminal trial, according to a reporter. Instead he walked back to the bank. He would claim in court that he intended to return the cash.

Lamo and the other cops had just arrived when Popov approached the building. He didn’t have a gun, just the kroner stuffed in his coat pockets. From behind the bank’s locked doors, Hellstad watched as Lamo and the others ordered the Russian to the ground and cuffed him.

On May 8, 2019, a district court in mainland Norway convicted Popov on counts of gross threats, coercive force, and illegal use of arms. He was ordered to pay 20,000 kroner, about $2,300, each to Hellstad and the two other employees of SpareBank 1, and sentenced to one year and two months in a prison in Tromsö. When Popov is released, he will be expelled from Norway. 

“He was quite remorseful,” says Hellstad, who watched the sentencing on a livestream. “He didn’t want to hurt anybody. I’m happy this case is behind us.”

But the aftershocks remain. “I never thought I’d see the day when this happened here,” Sabbatini says. “I mean, what was he thinking?” Coinciding with the robbery, Sabbatini says, there’s been a broader uptick in crime. One acquaintance had fuel canisters swiped from his yard; another had an engagement ring lifted from a locker. Sabbatini no longer leaves his laptop unattended at Fruene. “People have started locking their cars and their homes,” he laments. 

Toward the end of my visit, I snowmobile with Holmen to the top of Longyearbreen glacier, a sweeping slope of ice cutting through the valley outside town. The wind whips up a whiteout as we climb the snow-covered surface, but when we reach the top it clears, affording us a stunning view of the multicolored homes far below and the churning fjord in the distance. Holmen tells me that the glacier, which is thousands of years old, is melting at roughly one foot per year. Looking down at Longyearbyen, it’s impossible not to imagine a very different life here in the near future. It may still be a beacon for people seeking to get away from it all, but it’s going to change. It already has. 

For Hellstad and others, the robbery feels like a menacing omen—a sign that this version of the fairy tale might not have a happy ending. “It’s like the big cruel world is coming to town,” he says. “Like the story of Cardamom, this place where nobody is doing any harm—but that is now kind of broken.”

The post The Bizarre Bank Robbery That Shook an Arctic Town appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

Joining game in progress.

You materialize at a sprawling ranch near a snowcapped mountain covered with freshly powdered pines. Three horses graze nearby behind a purplish wooden fence.

To open the gate, click the lock.

A jet-black mare wearing a striped blanket approaches, its hooves sinking into the slush and white puffs blooming from her nostrils.

Click horse.

Name: Lucky
Age: 20 years
Likes: Carrots
Dislikes: Apples

Checking your inventory, you select a carrot. Lucky nibbles it from your hand, increasing her health. Congratulations! You have earned a Good Deed. As Lucky nuzzles your parka, you see two buildings.

Check overhead map.

The smaller building is marked Stable, the larger one Main Ranch House.

You follow deep sets of bootprints to a two-story log cabin. Several pairs of hiking shoes drip on the porch alongside two rocking chairs. A sign on the door says THE RANCH. You walk inside to find five other gamers. One is a slight, bearded figure in a dark blue hoodie, jeans, and white socks.

Click gamer.

Nickname: CTL
Age: 22
Favorite game: Pokémon Showdown
Quit games: Two weeks ago

You approach with a nod. As you shake his hand, it turns from pixels into flesh.

The game I’m describing isn’t real, but it’s an accurate depiction of things that are happening at a real place. The bearded figure you just met is named Brian, and he’s undergoing therapy at , the country’s first residential treatment center for video-game addicts. Along with several other young adult residents, he’s been progressing through three stages of treatment, which ReStart offers for a hefty fee: more than $50,000 total. There’s a waiting list for admission. There is also another branch that helps those addicted to a different kind of game – online casino games – which currently is rolling out in a pilot program in Italy with the help of . We hope that it will become more available to the general public as they work to accommodate the increase in demand.

Stage one has two parts. In the first, ReStart participants spend about a month detoxing (or “de-teching”) at Rise-Up Ranch, a five-acre working spread in the hills outside Carnation, Washington, about 25 miles east of Seattle. When they’re not doing talk sessions, they’re outdoors—hiking, gardening, and tending to the ranch’s animals.

During part two of the detox, patients move to Heaven’s Field, in Fall City, where they settle into what ReStart calls “an intensive life-sharing community” of recovering gamers. After that comes Open World, a halfway house located at a treatment center in Bellevue, a stone’s throw from Microsoft. At this stage, patients share an apartment and participate in group counseling sessions. They also mentally prepare to go back into the workplace, live independently, and begin a radical new chapter of their lives. Because for many, the goal of all this isn’t just to moderate their gaming. It’s complete abstinence.

As long as there have been video games, critics have bemoaned their social and psychological consequences. Over the years, researchers have churned out studies showing that violent games can lead younger players to be more hostile and less empathetic. Not everybody buys this, and there’s research that says there is no connection.

Inarguably, too much gaming can lead to health problems. Last March, the Endocrine Society—an international organization of endocrinologists—released a , involving a group of 33,900 teenagers, which found that heavy screen time and snacking could increase risk of heart disease and diabetes. In another , scientists from the New York Institute of Technology found that gamers who played between three and ten hours per day reported a range of ailments, including eye fatigue and neck, back, wrist, and hand pain—yet only 2 percent were getting medical attention. The researchers also found that 40 of the people studied “did not participate in any form of physical activity,” though presumably the gamers at least walked to the bathroom and the fridge.

The concept that seriously overdoing video games counts as addiction is new, and it comes at a big moment in the evolution of the industry. If you haven’t worked a joystick since the days of Ms. Pac-Man, entering a modern gaming environment would be about as shocking as getting an iPhone in the 1880s. Today’s games are cinematic artworks. They enable players from around the world to share digital adventures that are so immersive, so full of surprise and delight and realistic living things, that they can fulfill the core human need to explore. So-called open-world games, which encourage players to travel through unrestricted landscapes as they live out cinematic narratives, have been around in less robust form for decades. Now, thanks to faster internet speeds and extraordinary graphics, thriving online communities have transformed franchises such as Fortnite, Minecraft, and League of Legends into multibillion-dollar businesses and, more profoundly, an entire way of life.

Last October, , the Manhattan-based juggernaut behind the long-running Grand Theft Auto series, released its latest blockbuster for PlayStation and Xbox, Red Dead Redemption 2, a prequel to its 2010 action-adventure fantasy set in a fictionalized American West. The new game, which took more than seven years and hundreds of millions to produce, casts players as a gang of outlaws who ride and rob and shoot their way across the frontier. The lush landscapes of flowing rivers and snowy mountaintops, inspired by painters like Rembrandt and Bierstadt, cover many square miles of territory. This imaginary world teems with wildlife: bison roaming the plains, geese flying overhead, sockeye salmon jumping upstream. Completing the various missions that propel you through the story often feels secondary to simply exploring.

The scope of Red Dead Redemption 2 rivals the biggest Hollywood films: 300,000 animations, half a million lines of dialogue, 1,200 actors (700 with speaking parts), 2,200 days of motion-capture scene work, and a 2,000-page script. As Rockstar Games cofounder Dan Houser New York magazine last year, the result is an experience “in which the world unfolds around you, dependent on what you do.” Red Dead Redemption 2 was released on October 26, 2018, and brought in during its first weekend, beating the strongest film opening of 2018, Avengers: Infinity War, by almost $100 million. Seventeen million copies shipped in just two weeks.

For developers, the goal of this new generation of open-world games is stimulating a player’s sense of adventure in ways that emulate the real thing. Jean-Sebastien Decant, creative director for the latest Far Cry installment, New Dawn—which puts players in a carefully rendered postapocalyptic Montana—says, “The key is to provide as much agency and as many surprises as possible.” Worlds are designed to make players expect the unexpected—say, a hermit living in a wilderness cave—just as one might stumble upon a bear in Yellowstone. Maura Reagan, a former ReStart therapist, suggests that the simulations satisfy something primal in her clients, similar to what they might feel if they were climbing Mount Everest or descending the Amazon: a sense of purpose, accomplishment, and empowerment. “These guys are getting the hero’s journey,” she says, “but digitally.”

New science indicates that digital adventure may be just as thrilling as the real thing. An emerging body of research suggests that these virtual worlds can stimulate the same brain activity and physiological response as offline exploration. But taking epic journeys without leaving your basement can come at a price. In the most extreme cases—for people like Brian and the other patients at ReStart—the gaming world became so alluring that they left the real one behind.

“This is Microsoft country,” Cosette Rae, the cofounder of ReStart and also its CEO, tells me as we plod down a snowy path to a large gray-sided lodge with sweeping views of the Cascades. We’re visiting Serenity Mountain, a ReStart rehab facility, similar to the ranch, that’s devoted exclusively to teenagers. Serenity sits on 32 rolling acres of winding trails and towering trees. There’s an indoor pool, three koi ponds, and a barn that’s been converted into a gym and art room. A sign on the front door reads Live the Good Life; another says No Smoking or Vaping. A few scruffy gamers in puffy jackets and hoodies hurl snowballs with one of the psychologists, a middle-aged guy in worn boots and a plaid shirt.

The proximity to Bellevue—home to Microsoft, Nintendo, and other giants in technology and gaming—is intentional. “If you’re going to treat heroin addicts, you’re not going to find them in the workforce,” Rae tells me. “You’re going to find them out on the streets.” And if you’re going to treat people with “technology problems,” as she puts it, there’s no better place than here. “One of the things that we believe creates health and wholeness in people is a connection with the outdoors and nature,” Rae says.

Rae and cofounder Hilarie Cash got the inspiration for ReStart from watching tech-addiction struggles firsthand. After spending the nineties as a contract developer and IT worker for Seattle tech companies, Rae became a clinical social worker. One case involved a 15-year-old boy who was skipping school to play World of Warcraft, the hugely popular online role-playing game, 17 hours a day. Cash had seen people with similar problems, and she had a personal stake, too—a young son who was developing a taste for gaming. “I was looking at the future,” she says, “and I was thinking, I want to understand this so I can protect him, so he doesn’t become one of these clients.”

Video-game addiction is not yet listed as an official mental-health condition in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the compendium of recognized forms of mental illness published by the American Psychiatric Association. That may eventually change—last June, the World Health Organization included “” in its International Classification of Diseases, a web-based diagnostic tool that helps doctors identify and treat afflictions. But there’s still plenty of resistance from health experts. In 2017, two dozen scholars around the world cowrote a for the Journal of Behavioral Addictions arguing against the use of the diagnosis, saying that there isn’t enough evidence to support it yet.

At ReStart, the issue seems settled: staff and clients talk about gaming like they would any other addiction. Rae tells me about a 13-year-old boy who was “using” World of Warcraft a dozen hours a day. Stories about game addicts run the gamut—lost jobs, dashed hopes, broken marriages. Rae mentions a man who fell asleep at the wheel and crashed his car after a gaming marathon at a convention. Another man developed deep vein thrombosis in part from sitting in his game chair too long. He eventually lost a leg to amputation.

In a small, quiet library at Serenity I meet Nate, an 18-year-old in a hoodie and jeans who’s been here several months. He spent his early years in Colorado, where he says he was “outside all the time,” roaming the woods with his buddies, looking for fun and adventure. Starting at age 13, Nate began filling the same exploratory need with World of Warcraft. Playing as a character named Bothar the Paladin, he fell in with a group of gamers who would venture together into the supernatural lands of Warcraft.

Before long, gaming had completely replaced the outdoors. Instead of goofing around in the woods, he searched for hidden jewels in Warcraft. “It’s similar in the sense that you don’t know what’s going to happen,” he explains, shifting in his chair. “I guess that’s like how, in the wilderness, you go and find something and you’re like, man, that’s just so beautiful.”

By Nate’s junior year in high school, he was skipping nutritious meals for junk food or eating nothing at all. His 3.5 GPA plummeted into the twos, and he finally stopped going to school.

All this came to a halt one night around 3 A.M. Nate was in his bedroom watching a Japanese anime series called My Hero Academia when he got “gooned”—slang for being bagged by handlers from a wilderness-therapy program. As his father explained to him that his problem with gaming had gone too far, Nate nervously eyed the three men who were there to escort him away.

“There’s no talking around it,” Nate recalls. “They were just like really big guys, very muscular, and there’s three of them.” After undergoing three months of treatment in a woodsy locale outside Bend, Oregon, he was taken to Serenity to start the rehab process.

There’s plenty of natural beauty to be had at Serenity. Cash takes me out for a hike on one of the trails nearby. It’s lovely and peaceful, the quiet stillness made more so by a thick blanket of snow. As we move through the trees, Cash talks about the psychological and physical benefits of being outdoors: lower stress, elevated mood, increased focus. When I ask her if she can imagine a day when virtual worlds become as compelling as this, she gasps and says, “The real world cannot be substituted by a virtual one.”

But, actually, it can.

While it seems strange to think that the virtual outdoors could substitute for the real thing, science is beginning to suggest that it often does. Recent have shown that the same parts of your brain that get stimulated during a hike can get fired up by screen time in a digital wilderness. Colin Ellard, a neuroscientist at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, has studied the phenomenon, and he says that “when we engage in game play, certainly with immersive virtual environments, we’re probably reproducing a lot of the same patterns of activity in the brain that are produced by real environments.”

To understand this, consider the science on why being outside is good for your brain in the first place. Using fMRI scans, studies have shown that when we’re outside taking in a majestic view, we stimulate the parahippocampal gyrus, a region of the brain that’s a central component of the limbic system. The euphoric feeling you get in the outdoors likely comes from opiate receptors inside the parahippocampal gyrus that flood you with physiological goodness that’s similar to what you get from a slice of pizza or a romantic relationship.

There’s an evolutionary reason for this: the more stimulated we are by our environment, the more inclined we are to explore it. In a 2006 for American Scientist, neuroscientists Irving Biederman and Edward A. Vessel wrote that the brain has “information-acquisition mechanisms that reward us for learning about the environment” and that “such mechanisms would have an evolutionary advantage.”

Ellard and his colleagues wondered whether a simulated outdoor environment might also elicit rewards. To test this, they put participants through a stressful ten-minute simulation, asking them to write about a recent challenging experience while the sounds of jackhammers and honking cars played in their headphones. They then donned virtual-reality headsets and explored a photorealistic forest, with shrubs, trees, flowers, and streams. For added immersion, the scientists misted the testing area with Forest Breeze air freshener. (Nothing like the whiff of chemical pine to get you feeling outdoorsy.) They found that the stress reduction delivered by the virtual outdoors was similar to being outside. Though there’s debate about whether this response happens mainly because of the novelty of being in virtual reality, Ellard thinks the effects are real.

To get a taste of what VR feels like, I strap on an Oculus headset to play a rock-climbing called The Climb, which can make you feel weak in the knees. I’m looking out on a sun-dappled rock wall overlooking a vast and gorgeous simulation inspired by Halong Bay in Vietnam. I gaze at distant gray limestone pillars jutting up from turquoise blue waters. Wispy white clouds drift overhead; waves lap sandy beaches. Using touch controllers, I move my hands along the rock wall, squeezing the trigger to grip and release.

When I make the mistake of looking down at hundreds of feet of air below me, my brain tells my body to freak out, and it responds accordingly—sweat flows from my palms, my stomach flops.

Earlier this year, neurobiologists at the University of California at Irvine a group of gamers who played Minecraft, the popular open-world multiplayer title. Though the game isn’t photorealistic, it’s immersive and compelling, and it allows players to explore and build their own domains—jungles, deserts, forests, and so on—using Lego-like blocks. The participants in the study played approximately 45 minutes a day for two weeks. The researchers concluded that the game improved their hippocampal functions, specifically memory performance. “Video games can act as a form of environmental enrichment in humans,” they said in a paper that appeared in Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience.

Gregory D. Clemenson, one of the authors, cautions that this does not mean video games are as nourishing to the mind as a walk in the park, but they may do more good than people think. “There’s evidence that when we explore virtual worlds, we are using the same processes as when we explore a real one,” he says.

At the Ranch, gamers care for three goats—Tatiana, Rose, and Dammit the Fainting Goat—among other animals. Tending to critters is one method for helping them reengage with the world. In case the gamers need how-to advice, animal-care binders line the shelves inside the main building.

Brian, the 22-year-old who used to go by the handle CTL, sits cross-legged in a cushy reclining chair, relaxing after a daily group session. Like most people here, he’s wearing a hoodie that hides his face inside a soft, shadowy cave. He was addicted to the fighting games PokĂ©mon Showdown and Super Smash Bros., which he played so much that he dropped out of school. He’s been here only two weeks, and he’s still adjusting.

“I’d be flat-out lying if I said I didn’t miss gaming,” he tells me, staring into space. “I think almost everyone here would be.”

At ReStart, one goal is to get people moving. The rehab begins with about a month of de-teching. This means, among other things, abstaining from screens for the sake of getting back in touch with themselves and the environment. “We’re focused very much on their health,” Cash says. “Eating well, exercising, and catching up on sleep. Because they’re all sleep-deprived.”

De-teching doesn’t cause the same symptoms of withdrawal suffered by alcoholics and drug addicts, but there are distinct challenges. Rae says that when clients detach from their dependence on reward cycles, their bodies go into some kind of crisis. Newcomers at ReStart can find themselves fighting depression, anxiety, and stress. Brian says that after years of barely eating and sleeping, just being back on a schedule has been mind-altering. “You have to get used to going to bed at the same time and waking up at the same time,” he says. Nate describes a kind of lucid dreaming he’s experienced during his de-teching, in which he’s able to visualize himself in the game world, despite the fact that he’s in a bunk bed deep in the woods.

After the initial phase, patients settle into a regular regimen of chores, counseling, and physical fitness. Residents tend to tomatoes, kale, and other vegetables in a greenhouse. One of the therapists is a wilderness first responder who takes the patients out on trails where they can learn about wildlife and ecology.

Maura Reagan used to run weekly movement-therapy classes at ReStart, focusing on rebuilding residents’ mind-body connection and facilitating the flow between their inner and outer worlds.

“Being able to show that their physical growth is parallel to their emotional growth really comes to life tangibly when we take them into the mountains,” she says. “They can actually see that they’re engaging in their bodies again.”

While some gamers are required to put down their controllers to get back outside, there’s a flip side to all this: augmented-reality games, in which a new generation of smartphone gamers are treating the real world like a playground. Players use their camera as a viewfinder, and it overlays computer graphics and information on the settings around you.

The first AR blockbuster arrived in 2016 in the form of Pokémon Go, which places tiny animated creatures into natural settings that players explore in a sort of scavenger hunt. The novelty of seeing a red-horned, flame-tailed Charmeleon scurry across your backyard spawned a global phenomenon, as phone-wielding humans with outstretched arms chased imaginary Pokémon into trees, oceans, and oncoming traffic. The game, owned by a San Francisco company called , cracked the top five in app-store revenue in 46 countries, bringing in more than $2 billion since its release.

Such experiences are all part of the plan for John Hanke, 52, Niantic’s game-­developing founder. An earlier company he owned, Keyhole, was devoted to scanning the globe; he sold it to Google as the basis for Google Earth. With Niantic, the goal was more personal: he wanted to get his kids outside. “I like to wander around to weird and interesting places,” he says. “With young kids, I’m dragging my family along. The agenda was to make it more fun and more likely that I could get my kids to agree.”

With his other popular title, Ingress, the idea is to appeal to older gamers, getting them to lean more heavily into the exploratory nature of the experience.

On a crisp Sunday afternoon in March, I head to Valley Forge National Historical Park in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, to meet with a dozen avid Ingress players. As with Pokémon Go, you play it on your phone.

The conceit is the usual sci-fi fare: two factions—the alien-friendly Enlightened and the humans fighting against them, called the Resistance—are vying for control of landmarks around the world. To play, you have to visit the designated points of interest—say, the Temple of the Emerald Buddha in Bangkok, or a snowshoe trail in Fairbanks, Alaska. Once there, you “capture” a portal for your faction by triangulating it with the help of other phone-wielding teammates.

For avid players, Ingress is the best of both worlds, virtual and real. Michael “Qwerkus” Gerchufsky, a 50-year-old medical editor from Phoenixville, Pennsylvania, describes the appeal as we hike around the towering National Memorial Arch: “I was like, wait, there’s a video game that gets me outdoors?”

For nonplayers, the game can seem pretty geeky—a bunch of adults running around old cabins and forts, clicking their phones and yelping about the portals they successfully wrangle for their teams. But hey, a bunch of adults whacking little balls with wooden sticks probably looked pretty odd when golf first came around.

Ingress players stress both the sociability and active lifestyle of the game. Elizabeth Brunt, a software engineer, tells me how she broke her ankle in a fall and had to do rehab. “I needed to get out of the house,” she says. “With this I could play a video game but also get outside. It’s a good reason to keep moving.” Mike “Baron” Eisenstein, a science writer, says he regularly plays when he travels—for fun and as a way of meeting people. “I tried to play on Kilimanjaro,” he says, “but I had crappy cell service.”

Mary “MysticalGnu” O’Rourke, a manager for Choice Entertainment Technologies in Boulder, Colorado, is also obsessed. “It ­really appeals to people who are adventurous,” she says. “It’s like the old days of glory, gold, God. You have to establish new territories. This is taking that aspect and encouraging people to reexplore the world in the context of a game.” She devotes much of her spare time to exploring the country through Ingress. Connecticut, Florida, New Mexico, Nevada, mountains, parks, beaches, hiking, flying, driving. To access more remote areas in Colorado, she bought an ATV and a satellite phone. She recently took a jeep up Horseshoe Mountain to lay claim to a portal, continuing on foot when the trail narrowed too much for her vehicle.

Niantic’s AR world expanded this year with a Harry Potter game. One of Hanke’s design imperatives is to use more audio, so that players can gather clues and communicate as much as possible without having to stare at a screen. They also work hard to pace the game for daily life, designing microadventures that can be completed in five to ten minutes. Hanke sees more nongaming manifestations in the future, too. “Augmented reality is bleeding out from games into physical fitness,” he says.

In other words, AR points to a future in which we can have the best of both worlds. We can experience the outdoors in a new way, with a new lens, exploring places with people who might not be inclined to go outside and meeting new friends along the way. As the technology becomes more seamless, it will fade, like everything else, into the background of our lives. The true sign of this integration will be when we stop talking about this stuff at all. It’ll just be a part of the experience, another tool for the road, like a compass.

It’s midafternoon at the Bellevue Technology Center, a collection of bland office buildings in the heart of Microsoft country. This is the kind of place where ­coders and designers are creating the next great software and hardware that will capture our eyeballs.

One suite of offices here is the unlikely home to an outpatient service for people in one of the final phases of ReStart. Opened at this locale in October 2018, this is Open World, named for the genre of exploratory games that bedazzled so many patients in the first place. The participants have completed eight to twelve weeks of therapy in the mountain retreats of Washington and are in the home stretch of recovery. They share an apartment nearby while attending frequent counseling sessions focused on how they’ll balance their lives, including their technology use, in the years to come.

“To be ready for the transition program,” Cash tells me, “they really have to have a good life-balance plan and be in a recovery mindset.”

Near the kitchen, I meet a 21-year-old named Chris. As he sits on a stool picking at the last of a sandwich, he tells me about the vicious circle he experienced as a kid growing up in Texas.

“My dad was very neglectful. He didn’t spend much time with me,” he says. “But the time that we did spend together was playing video games. So that kind of increased my desire to play, especially when trying to escape anything I didn’t want to deal with.”

After several months in ReStart, Chris says he’s finding his way in the world again, and he’s taken up disc golf and nature walks. “I love spending time in nature,” he says. “It’s one of my favorite things to do these days.”There’s a tendency to think that being outdoors is inherently better than time spent in a virtual space. The truth, however, is increasingly complex. We have become cyborgs, toggling between the world around us and the world on our screens. With new technologies like AR, those worlds will continue to blur until, at some point, they overlap. It won’t be so easy to differentiate, as we do now, lamenting that we’re spending too much time staring at our phones when we should be staring at the sky. And it will be our increased immersion in virtual worlds that may heighten something more crucial: our need for the outdoors. In this sense, the gamers in ReStart are like visitors from the future, people who have returned from the other side of the pixelated glass, blinking back from their reverie to soak in the life around them.

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Before Noel Santillan , he was just another guy from New Jersey looking for adventure. It was last February, and the then 28-year-old Sam’s Club marketing manager was heading from Iceland’s KeflavĂ­k International Airport to the capital city of ReykjavĂ­k with the modern traveler’s two essentials: a dream and, most important, a GPS unit. What could go wrong? The dream had been with him since April 14, 2010, when he watched TV news coverage of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano eruption. Dark haired, clean-cut, with a youthful face and thick eyebrows, he had never traveled beyond the United States and his native Mexico. But something about the fiery gray clouds of tephra and ash captured his imagination. I want to see this through my own eyes, he thought as he sat on his couch watching the ash spread.

It took a brutal week in October 2015 to ­finally get him to go for it—Tuesday a taxi hit his Mazda; Wednesday a tree nearly fell on the car; Thursday, when he went to his girlfriend for comfort, she dumped him. “I was heartbroken and just wanted to get away,” he recalls feeling at the time. Scrolling through his Facebook news feed, he came across a friend’s photo of Iceland’s famous Blue ­Lagoon spa. “So Iceland comes back into my head,” he says.

Four months later, on a frigid, pitch-black winter morning, he was driving away from Keflavík airport in a rented Nissan Versa hatchback toward a hotel in Reykjavík, excited that his one-week journey was beginning but groggy from the five-hour red-eye flight. As a pink sun rose over the ocean and illuminated the snow-covered lava rocks along the shore, Santillan dutifully followed the commands of the GPS that came with the car, a calm female voice directing him to an address on Laugarvegur Road—a left here, a right there.

But after stopping on a desolate gravel road next to a sign for a gas station, Santillan got the feeling that the voice might be steering him wrong. He’d already been driving for nearly an hour, yet the ETA on the GPS put his arrival time at around 5:20 P.M., eight hours later. He reentered his destination and got the same result. Though he sensed that something was off, he made a conscious choice to trust the machine. He had come here for an adventure, after all, and maybe it knew where he was really supposed to go.

The farther he drove, the fewer cars he saw. The roads became icier. Sleeplessness fogged his brain, and his empty stomach churned. The only stations he could find on the radio were airing strange talk shows in Icelandic. He hadn’t set up his phone for international use, so that was no help. At around 2 P.M., as his tires skidded along a narrow mountain road that skirted a steep cliff, he knew that the device had failed him.

He was lost.

Getting lost is a fading phenomenon of a distant past—like pay phones or being unable to call up the lyrics of the Welcome Back, Kotter theme song in a heartbeat (“
your dreams were your ticket out”). Today, more than 50 years since the Navy built the first suborbital navigation system, our cars, phones, and watches can track our every move using signals from the 70-plus satellites circling the earth twice a day.

Most people would agree that this is a good thing. It’s comforting to know where you are, to see yourself distilled into a steady blue icon gliding smoothly along a screen. With a finger tap or a short request to Siri or Google Now—which, like other smartphone tools, rely heavily on data from cell towers and Wi-Fi hot spots as well as satellites—a wonderful little trail appears on your device, beckoning you to follow. Tap the icon of a house and you’re ­guided home from wherever you are. By knowing the most direct route—even one that ­changes on the fly with traffic conditions—we save time and fuel and avoid hours of frustration. The mass adoption of GPS technology among wilderness users has, it seems, helped make backcountry travel safer. According to the National Park Service, search-and-rescue missions have been dropping, from 3,216 in 2004 to 2,568 in 2014.

The convenience comes at a price, how­ever. There’s the creepy Orwellian fact of Them always knowing where We are (or We always knowing where They are). More concerning are the navigation-fail horror stories that have become legend. Last March, a 64-year-old man is believed to have followed his GPS off a demolished bridge in East Chicago, Indiana, killing his wife. After Nicaraguan troops mistakenly crossed the Costa Rican border in 2010, to stake their nation’s flag on rebel turf they thought was in their country, they blamed the snafu on Google Maps. Enough people have been led astray by their GPS in Death Valley that the area’s former wilderness coordinator called the phenomenon “death by GPS.” The source of the problem there, as in most places, is that apps don’t always have accurate data on closed or hazardous roads. What looks like a bright and shiny path on your phone can in fact be a highway to hell.

Then there’s the bigger question that’s raised when we hear about people like Santillan who, in their total dependence on technology to find their way, venture ­absurdly off course. What, we wonder, is our now habitual use of navigation tools doing to our minds? An emerging body of research suggests some unsettling possi­bilities. By allowing devices to take total control of navigation while we ignore the real-world cues that humans have always used to ­deduce their place in the world, we are letting our natural wayfinding abilities languish. ­Compulsive use of mapping technology may even put us at greater risk for memory loss and Alzheimer’s disease. By turning on a GPS every time we head somewhere new, we’re also cutting something fundamental out of the experience of traveling: the adventures and surprises that come with finding—and losing—our way.

By the time Santillan white-knuckled down the mountain in northern Iceland, he figured that despite the insistence of his GPS, he wasn’t anywhere near his hotel. There was no one else on the road, but at that point there wasn’t much else to do but follow the line on the screen to its mysterious end. “I knew I was going to get somewhere,” he says. “I didn’t know where else to go.”

The directions ended at a small blue house in a tiny town. He parked his car out front and slipped his hotel-reservation printout into his jacket as he headed toward the door. A pretty blue-eyed blond woman answered after the second ring. She smiled as he stammered about his hotel and handed her his reservation.

No, she told him in accented English with a laugh, this wasn’t his ­hotel, and he wasn’t in ReykjavĂ­k. That city was 380 kilo­meters south. He was in Siglufjördhur, a fishing village of 1,300 people on the northern coast. The ­woman, who’s name happened to be Sirry, pronounced just like the Apple bot, offered to phone the hotel for him. She quickly figured out what had happened: the address on Expedia (and his reservation printout) was wrong. The hotel was on Laugavegur Road, but Expedia had accidentally spelled it with an extra “r”—Laugarvegur.

Santillan checked into a local hotel to get a good night’s sleep, with the plan of driving to Reykjavík the next day. When he told his story to the woman at the front desk, she chuckled. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t laugh at this,” she said, “but it’s funny.”

“It’s funny to me also,” Santillan replied.

And when she told him that her name was also Sirry, Santillan felt like he was part of some grand cosmic joke. The next morning, when he went to check out, the joke became even grander. “Some reporters want to talk with you,” said Sirry.

The first Sirry had posted his absurd ­story on her Facebook page the previous day, San­tillan soon learned, and it had quickly been shared around. Something about the tale struck a nerve. Here was a sympathetic character who personified a defining ­aspect of the modern human condition—and hil­ariously so. A Facebook friend of Sirry’s who’s the editor of an Icelandic travel site wrote a blog post on the “extraordinary and funny incident.” Soon the misadventure ­attracted the interest of TV and radio journalists.

They weren’t the only ones who wanted to talk with him. “Everybody in the town knew about me,” he says. Some of the locals of Siglu­fjördhur came to the hotel to welcome him and take pictures. One offered him a tour of their local pride and joy, the Icelandic Herring Era Museum, a small red building devoted to the town’s biggest industry that plays films on the salting process and has an exhibit of a brakki, a dorm for the so-called herring girls who worked the docks. The chef at Santillan’s hotel prepared the local beef stew for him, on the house.

Enjoying all the hospitality, Santillan decided to spend an extra night. The following day he went on TV, explaining to a reporter that he’d always found GPS to be so reliable in the past. By the time he made it to Reykjavík that evening, he had become a full-blown sensation in the national media, which dubbed him the Lost Tourist. DV, an Icelandic tabloid, marveled that despite all the warning signs, the American had “decided to trust the [GPS].” Santillan sat down for a radio interview on a popular show. “World famous here man!” one Icelandic fan posted on Santillan’s Facebook page soon after. “Like your style. Enjoy our beautyful country.” Before long, his experience made international news, with reports in the Daily Mail, on the BBC, and in , which headlined its story “GPS Mix-Up Brings Wrong Turn, and Celebrity, to an American in Iceland.”

The manager of the hotel in Reykjavík had seen reports on Santillan’s odyssey and, to make up for the traveler’s hard time, offered him a free stay and a meal at the fish restaurant next door. Out in the streets, which were full of revelers celebrating the annual Winter Lights Festival, Icelanders corralled the Lost Tourist for selfies and plied him with shots of the local poison, Brennivin, an unsweetened schnapps. As a band played a rock song outside, Santillan kept hearing people shouting his name. Some guys dragged him up a stairway to a strip club, where one of the dancers also knew his name. The whole thing seemed surreal. “I just felt like, This isn’t happening to me,” he says.

Still, he was going to ride it out as long as he could. After the marketing manager of the country’s most famous getaway, the Blue Lagoon geothermal spa, wrote him ­offering a free visit, Santillan headed out the next day. The address came preloaded in his rental car’s GPS, since it was the one place everyone wanted to go.

As Santillan drove out under the winter sky, he marveled at how far he had come. Not long ago, he’d been just another working stiff on his couch in New Jersey. Now he was a rock star. He pictured himself resting in the cobalt blue waters, breathing in the steam. But half an hour later, when his GPS told him he had arrived, he got a sinking feeling. Looking out the window, he saw no signs of a geothermal spa, just a small lone building in what seemed like the middle of nowhere. The Lost Tourist was lost again.

Scientists have long sought to understand how we navigate our physical environment. A key early moment came in the 1940s, when psychologist Edward C. Tolman was studying how rats learned their way around a maze. He concluded that they were building representations of the layout in their nervous systems, “which function like cognitive maps.”

Some 30 years later, neuroscientist John O’Keefe located cognitive maps in mammalian brains when he identified “place cells” in the hippocampus region which became active when lab rats were in specific locations. In 2005, Norwegian neuroscientists Edvard and May-Britt Moser expanded on O’Keefe’s findings, discovering that the brain also contains what they called grid cells, which, in coordination with the place cells, enable sophisticated navigation. The trio was awarded the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for uncovering what the committee called our inner GPS. Their work has profound implications—not only for our understanding of how we orient ourselves but for how our increasing reliance on technology might be undercutting the system we carry around in our heads.

Individuals who frequently navigate complex environments the old-fashioned way, by identifying landmarks, literally grow their brains. University College London neuroscientist Eleanor Maguire has used magnetic resonance imaging to study the brains of London taxi drivers, finding that their hippocampi increased in volume and developed more neuron-dense gray matter as they memorized the layout of the city. Navigate purely by GPS and you’re unlikely to receive any such benefits. In 2007, Veronique ­Bohbot, a neuroscientist at McGill ­University and the Douglas Mental Health University Institute, completed a study comparing the brains of spatial navigators, who develop an understanding of the relationships between landmarks, with stimulus-response navigators, who go into a kind of autopilot mode and follow habitual routes or mechan­ical directions, like those coming from a GPS. Only the spatial navigators showed significant activity in their hippocampi ­during a navigation exercise that allowed for different orientation strategies. They also had more gray matter in their hippocampi than the stimulus-response navigators, who don’t build cognitive maps. “If we follow our GPS blindly,” she says, “it could have a very detrimental effect on cognition.”

There’s no direct link between habitual use of navigational technology and memory loss, but the implications are certainly there. Bohbot cites studies showing that a smaller and weaker hippocampus makes you more vulnerable to brain diseases like Alzheimer’s, since it’s one of the first regions to be ­affected. “It may be the case that if you don’t use the hippocampus, it shrinks and you’re at greater risk,” she says.

Other researchers suggest similarly foreboding possibilities. Julia Frankenstein, a psychologist at the Center for Cognitive Science at the University of Freiburg, has found that people are capable of orienting themselves within a city based on memories of traditional maps, which help us develop a larger perspective of an area. When you navigate by GPS, focusing only on a route without a broader spatial context, you never gain that perspective. “It is likely that the more we rely on technology, the less we build up our cognitive maps,” she says.

New research is adding to our understanding of exactly how we create those maps. Maguire recently worked with programmers to create Fog World, a shadowy virtual-­reality environment studded with alien landmarks. By scanning test subjects’ brains as they made their way around the scape, she could observe the spatial-­learning process in action. In a series of tests last summer, she found that the retro­splenial cortex, located in the middle of the brain, played a key role in logging landmarks that were useful for navigation. Once enough landmarks were logged, the hippocampus would engage. These two sections of the brain, it appears, work together to form a cognitive map. Maguire’s data also suggests that some of us just have a stronger sense of direction than others. “What we found was that poor navigators had a harder time learning the landmarks,” she says. “They never did as well as the good navigators.”

Maguire is planning experiments to see if it’s possible to intervene with the learning process to improve navigation. As for what we can do to retain our skills, she and other researchers offer the same strong suggestion: as often as you can, turn off the GPS.

One of the most passionate and informed champions of that advice is Harvard professor John Huth. A highly respected experimental physicist who was part of the team that discovered the Higgs boson (the so-called God particle, because it endows other particles with mass), he became obsessed with our disappearing ability to find our way in the world after a tragic event near his home on Cape Cod.

On a Sunday in October 2003, two young kayakers set off onto Nantucket Sound from the southern coast of the Cape. Mary Jagoda, a 20-year-old from Huntington, New York, and her 19-year-old friend Sarah Aronoff, from Bethesda, Maryland, paddled into the choppy, 60-degree waters without a compass, map, or GPS. A dense fog soon rolled in. When they were reported missing an hour or so later, a frantic search ensued. The following day, their kayaks were spotted tied together but empty. Coast Guard cutters, helicopters, and local police canvassed the area through the night to no avail. Jagoda was recovered on Tuesday, having died from drowning. Aronoff was never found.

Huth was kayaking just a half-mile from the women when they went missing. He, too, had become disoriented in the fog, but he’d been sure to take note of the wind and wave direction before leaving the shore, a habit he’d picked up after a scary experience several months earlier in Maine. He paddled back to shore blindly but with a strong sense of where he was headed.

The deaths of the women left him with a serious case of survivor’s guilt. His response was to embark on what he now calls a year of self-imposed penance by learning everything he could about navigation. He used flash cards to memorize constellations, studied the routes of 1600 B.C. Pacific Islanders and medieval Arab traders, and learned to orient himself using shadows. Eventually, he says, “I realized I was looking at the world very differently than I had beforehand.”

He dug in deeper, compelled by a sense of duty to fight back against automation bias, the human tendency to trust machines more than ourselves. In 2009, he began teaching a new undergraduate class at Harvard on primitive navigation techniques. The course led to his 2013 book, , which makes a powerful case for learning how to get where you need to go simply by paying attention to the environment around you.

Last summer, I visited Huth on Cape Cod to get a primer on what he teaches his Harvard students. One morning, he suggested we try a method for tracking distance used by the Roman legionnaires. Huth, an ath­letic, bearded 58-year-old, was wearing ­cargo shorts and a white T-shirt as we walked ­silently along a rocky beach near his home, counting paces, with every 1,000 paces equaling mille passus, the Latin phrase at the root of the word “mile.” We passed lobster red tourists, stopping every so ­often so he could compare our paces, which he penciled into a small notebook for later calculation. After a little while, he led us up a series of sand dunes.

“It was right here,” he said, pointing to an overgrown patch of beach grass where, he explained, there used to be a handmade wooden sign with a picture of one of the kayakers. There had been one phrase on it, he recalled: “No one is lost to God.”

Over Huth’s years of research on traditional navigation, one of the places that turned out to be an especially rich source of techniques was Iceland, an isolated island frequently shrouded in fog and surrounded by tempestuous seas. Europeans discovered it by accident, just like they had North America. As Huth recounted to me, a Norse sailor named Naddodd arrived there after drifting off course on his way to the Faeroe Islands. Others found means of reaching it purposefully. When the Norse colonized the country in the ninth century, they found it populated by Irish monks who had arrived, Huth speculated, by following the paths of migrating ducks. (Subsequent Norse explorers employed ravens.) As the Norse learned, Iceland’s weather was so unruly that summer offered the only reliable winds to get there. Sailing 50-foot wooden boats with tar-soaked moss sealing the hulls, they would hug the coast of Norway as they traversed between known landmarks.

Huth was particularly fascinated by how “for the Norse,” as he writes in his book, “time reckoning and direction were inter­twined.” They divided days into eight pieces that reflected the eight divisions of the horizon—north, northeast, east, southeast, south, southwest, west, and northwest—and created clocks by reading the sun’s relative position to markers, like a farmhouse or large rock. “The time of day,” he writes, “is then associated with a place.”

Huth hopes that modern humans will rediscover that deep sense of place. In the meantime, he rails against our choice to “outsource so many of our cognitive functions to auto­mation.” There are, he told me, “tons of examples of people substituting ­automation for actual reasoning.” None better, of course, than Noel Santillan.

As it happens, Huth could have found himself in his own lost-tourist predicament a couple of summers ago, when he took a vaca­tion to Iceland with his wife and daughter. As usual, he relied on a map instead of a GPS to get around. But as he drove into Reykjavík from the airport, he got mixed up on the city’s winding roads. At that point, he did what the Norse did centuries before: he sought out markers that he had already identified and coordinated them with the cognitive map he’d created in his head—the water shouldn’t be over here, it should be over there.

“I just stopped, looked around, and tried to identify landmarks,” he told me as we completed another mille passus. Fairly soon he was back on the right path.

This, he said, is what Santillan should have done. “If I’ve gotten to the point where the roads start looking impassible, I would say, ‘OK, this is fucked.’ Then I’d basi­cally try to retrace my steps.”

Santillan had no idea how he’d become lost again. For whatever reason, the GPS had led him not to the Blue Lagoon but to some convention center off an empty road. All he wanted to do was submerge himself in those wondrous warm waters, but instead he was trudging through the snow to see if anyone inside could help him find his way.

As he stepped into the building, a funny thing happened. He was recognized—again. The people inside were workers from the Blue Lagoon who had assembled there for a meeting, and they had seen the news reports about him. The fact that Santillan was lost again made him all the more credible. ­After ­patiently posing for a bunch of pictures, he succumbed to an old-fashioned way of getting to where he was going: following the directions given to him by another human being.

And so, with the GPS turned off, he drove on—a right here, a left there—looking for landmarks along the way. His hippocampus, acti­vated by the incoming data, stitched together the beginnings of a cognitive map. Before long he was soaking in a steamy bath, white volcanic mud smeared on his face—though not enough to mask his identity from some fawning spa employees. By then he’d ­already vowed to return to Iceland. ­Maybe, he thought, I’ll even live here at some point. Until he returns, he has something to remember his misadventure: an Icelandic GPS. The rental agency presented it to him when he returned his Nissan. Santillan tried hooking it up to his car when he got back to New Jersey, but alas, the foreign model didn’t work. So now it sits in a box in his bedroom, a reminder of his time as the Lost Tourist, a nickname he considers a badge of honor. “I like it,” he says, “because that’s how you find interesting things. If you don’t lose yourself, you’re never going to find yourself.”

David Kushner () is the author of , a memoir about the murder of his brother.

The post Is Your GPS Scrambling Your Brain? appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

Smoked-salmon vodka is best served the Alaskan way. Take a houseful of drunken St. Patrick’s Day revelers. Add a woman in a black dress dancing in a bearskin and a couple of ruddy guys back from a paragliding trip. Then drop a sliver of ruby red fish in your glass.

Captain Mike Bender at the helm of the Qayaq Chief.

Lindquist wrangling a captured berg.

Melting the batch back at the Alaska Distillery.

The end product.

That’s how I’m served my first shot of the stuff one wintry March night after landing in Anchorage. A couple dozen locals are partying inside a ranch house strung with holiday lights near the frontier bars downtown. Jet-lagged and hungry, snow caked up my jeans, I have been whisked into the kitchenette, where the effervescent hostess, wearing a green beaded necklace, pours me a jigger. “It’s better with this,” she says, tossing in the salmon with a tiny splash.

The hostess and some others here are from the , based in nearby Wasilla. The small company has made a name for itself in the booming flavored-vodka sector—now 20 percent of the overall market—with a range of innovative blends, including the smoked-salmon vodka, introduced in 2010, and the first commercially available vodka distilled with hemp seeds, dubbed Purgatory and released in February 2012. (It contains no THC, the active ingredient in marijuana.) These concoctions, as well as a half-dozen fruit-infused vodkas, have the unique distinction of being made partly with meltwater from icebergs harvested in Prince William Sound.

When it comes to the quality of liquor, “water is very important,” says Jeff Cioletti, editor in chief of , the industry’s trade magazine. “People with sharper palettes can discern it.” It’s also the ingredient most likely to be hyped in marketing materials. Think of Scotch made with Highlands spring water, or the legendary limestone aquifers that keep Kentucky bourbon pure. Even Coors boasts “Rocky Mountain spring water” as its source. The pitch is always about purity and authenticity. Here, glacier water is hard to beat, which is why glacier branding is so ubiquitous in the beverage industry. One of the largest vendors of water and ice machines in the U.S. is , a $100 million company that uses no actual glaciers. (Its headquarters are in Southern California.) , based in New Jersey, fills plastic bottles for office watercoolers from underground springs in Appalachia.

Look around, though, and you can find a number of products sourced from authentic Ice Age relics. There’s 10 Thousand BC, meltwater that’s collected from a granite basin at the foot of British Columbia’s coastal Hat Mountain Glacier and has been stocked in the VIP suites of Las Vegas hotels for $10 a bottle. Serac “genuine Glacial Milk,” a cloudy white beverage from Nevada aquaceuticals brand , is harvested from Mount Rainier’s Carbon Glacier during a brief summer window, when minerals below the shifting ice mix with the melt. According to Glacia Nova, the stuff is “linked to extraordinary long life, health and virility among indigenous peoples throughout the world.” In trendy clubs from New York to Tokyo to Santiago, cocktails are mixed with glacier ice cubes and sold to patrons for $50 a glass. Last February, who carved out almost six tons from a glacier in a national park in Patagonia. The man had loaded his haul into a refrigerated truck and was driving to Santiago to sell it by the pound to upscale bars and restaurants.

Because glacier harvesting is done in insignificant quantities, there’s little regulation of it around the world. There are no federal guidelines in the United States. In Alaska, the only state that requires permits, there has been only one permit holder for most of the past 15 years—Scott Lindquist, head distiller of Alaska Distillery. A salt-and-pepper-haired 51-year-old, he takes to the water several times each year during the September-to-May tourism off-season to collect some 10,000 to 20,000 pounds of icebergs from Prince William Sound. He hauls in blocks weighing 300 to 8,000 pounds so he can tap their ancient water, which he insists is the best in the world. “It’s the quality of something so special and so old,” he says.

The challenges and risks inherent to Lindquist’s work are heightened by the fact that he suffers from optic atrophy, a degenerative eye condition that blurs his vision so much that he is considered legally blind. Though he’s not able to drive a car or navigate a boat, the beauty of the pristine glaciers lures him onto the water.

“I’m blind,” he says, “but I have vision.”

TWO DAYS AFTER THE house party, Lindquist and I are knee-deep in snow on the docks of Whittier, a tiny fishing town about 60 miles southeast of Anchorage. Dressed in jeans, a thick pine-colored wool sweater, and a blue baseball cap, Lindquist squints into the haze over the choppy waves. “Yes! It’s snowing!” he says enthusiastically. “I wanted something dramatic.”

In the summer, Whittier teems with tourists who pay big bucks for day cruises to ogle the Blackstone Glacier. But 2012’s record snowfall has left this a deserted wonderland, burying the hot-dog stands and bait shops and making my drive from Anchorage a 90-minute ice slide in a whiteout.

We climb aboard the Qayaq Chief, a 40-foot fishing boat that Lindquist has chartered for the day, joining the captain and two crew members, along with Toby Foster, the 39-year-old owner of Alaska Distillery, and a couple of other distillery employees. By the time we approach the Blackstone Glacier an hour later, the deck is powdered in white. Half a mile from the jagged 200-foot-tall wall of blue-hued ice, the captain throttles back, and we slowly make our way through a narrow bay that’s a soup of glacial detritus, from the size of buses to the size of beanbags.

Despite Lindquist’s poor eyesight, he can still make out the larger chunks floating in the water around us. And like any seasoned hunter, he’s picky about his prey. We pass by some errant bergs that are no good, he tells me, because they’ve been exposed to the sun too long, becoming so porous that the oldest and tastiest inner crystals evaporate away. Lindquist prefers clean, round pieces that roll in the water from their own weight, shedding debris from their edges as they go. When he captures one, he’ll take it back to the distillery and cut the rind off with a chainsaw, getting down to the inner core, roughly two feet in diameter—pure, dense ice preserved for eons.

We angle toward an ottoman-size iceberg, and Lindquist leans over the bow, giddy. “That one would be great for Vegas!” he exclaims, referring to an upcoming liquor-industry trade show in Sin City where he wants to display a hunk of glacier. He pokes at the berg with a six-foot pike pole. “That’s a nice piece of ice,” he tells me, as water splashes his scruffy face. “It has color. I don’t see any debris. I can see striation. There’s some opaque and very compressed ice, so you got a lot of good crystals in that.”

Lindquist snaps into action. After years of false starts, he arrived at a proven method for landing icebergs. First he douses a pair of inch-and-a-quarter-long ice-climbing screws with hydrogen peroxide, disinfecting them as he runs his orange rubber gloves over them. The plan is to get close enough to the berg so he can hand-twist the screws into it and thread a rope through the eyelets. The rest of us will then help him tug-of-war the beast onto the deck.

Quickly, Lindquist grabs his most important tool: his son Hank’s old hockey stick, which he uses partly for good luck and partly because it works well for hooking ice. “Ease it back,” he shouts at the captain, who idles the boat. Lindquist lies on his belly at the bow, extending his torso over the water, and starts pulling on the berg. The wind has just picked up, and Lindquist’s target is bobbing around like a giant candy apple dusted with powdered sugar. The boat rises and falls on the waves, the water slapping Lindquist. When he finally pulls the berg within arm’s reach, one of the crew scurries up and tries to steady the ice with the pike pole as Lindquist attempts to twist in the ice screws. But with each motion, the berg bobs away stubbornly. After more than an hour of failed attempts, Lindquist says it’s time to move to calmer waters. “I like hanging out in front of a glacier,” he tells me, wiping the water from his face, “but sometimes you gotta go where the getting is good.”

THE FIRST SURGE OF interest in Alaskan glacier ice began in the late 1980s. Japan’s economy was the envy of the world, and entrepreneurial bar owners there, looking for another way into the wallets of flush businessmen, started pitching a unique up-sell that tapped into the country’s fascination with the American wild: authentic Alaskan glacier ice cubes. Cocktails went for $50.

When fishermen in Alaska eagerly took to harvesting icebergs, the state’s Department of Natural Resources scrambled to come up with guidelines, which still stand today. No ice can be taken inside a national park. If a seal has hauled itself out on a berg, you can’t collect within a mile of it. Anyone taking more than 40,000 pounds of ice from a single source needs a permit, which now costs $500. Permit applicants at the time estimated that the market for glacier ice in Japan alone would amount to 16 million pounds per year, with another four million sold in California.

Lindquist got in a few years after the initial rush. Raised in a suburb of Portland, Oregon, he struggled with his eye condition, repeating several grades and missing plays as a high school tackle. When he was 19, he moved to Cordova, Alaska, to take a job on a commercial seafood-processing boat, a notoriously brutal gig. But he ended up on a beautifully refurbished wooden vessel and fell in love with life on the water. “Once I put my foot on that boat, I knew I was never coming back,” he says. Because of his poor sight, being a fisherman was not an option, but after a year in Alaska he trained to be a herring-roe diver. (The mask magnified his vision.) He’d spend just three months a year diving—the roe was selling for $1,500 a ton—and the rest of his time hanging out in Hawaii. Eventually, he married and settled in Cordova, raising two kids.

Like many Alaskans, Lindquist saw icebergs as a convenient resource, ideal for packing coolers for fish or beer. But he started hearing about guys who were earning money selling the stuff to make fancy ice cubes and wondered if there might be an opportunity there. Before we went out on the boat, he recalled a day in the mid-'80s when he was on Prince William Sound with some friends, contemplating his future. At one point, he looked down into the dark blue waves and saw a sparkling shard of whitish-blue glacier. “I took a piece in my hand,” he tells me, “and I said, ‘OK, this is going to be the next thing in my life, this piece of ice.’”

Several years after that, Lindquist would daydream about making that change. Then, suddenly, he was forced to. On March 24, 1989, Lindquist and his crew were getting ready to set off from the dock when a fisherman told him there’d been an oil spill on Bligh Reef, right in the heart of the herring grounds. Lindquist was assigned to the first reconnaissance boat to investigate the damage from the Exxon Valdez. His stomach dropped the moment he arrived at the site. “It looked like rubber waves: big and thick, no sea or foam, just unbelievable black goo, seabirds covered and sea otters dying,” he remembers. “Then it settled in just what the heck actually happened here.”

The herring were wiped out along with Lindquist’s livelihood, and, soon after, his marriage. “It was a major deal,” he says. “And I never recovered.”

AFTER GIVING UP ON the berg by Blackstone, we motor about a half-hour away to a quieter inlet. Spying a large block, Lindquist once again reaches for his hockey stick.

When I ask him how he arrived at his methods, Lindquist tells me with a laugh that there’s “no textbook on this.” As he’s learned through trial and error, traditional mariner tools just don’t work very well. Lifting the massive ice chunks out of the water is especially challenging. Chains get pinned under a slab once it’s on the deck. Fishing nets are prone to breaking. He started using the ice screws at the suggestion of a climber friend.

Lindquist snares the block with his stick, twists in his screws, and quickly feeds the rope through the eyelets. It takes five of us to haul it on deck, where it slides to a halt accompanied by a round of cheers. For the next couple of hours, Lindquist is on fire, hockey-sticking, ice-screwing, and heave-ho’ing berg after berg on board. By the end we’re exhausted, having hauled in roughly 1,200 frozen pounds of Prince William Sound’s finest.

The difficulty of all this is one reason Lindquist has been the only remaining holder of an Alaska ice-harvesting permit, down from the 12 that have been issued over the years. Another is that initial estimates had wildly overestimated the demand for glacier ice. șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Alaska, ice harvesting has always been a tiny business supported by boutique operations. Since 1995, the , based in Newfoundland, has been pulling growlers from the North Atlantic; in recent years, the label has added iceberg-fueled gin, rum, and water to its offerings. There has been a cluster of activity in Greenland of late: made ice beer until the brand went bankrupt in 2008, and outfits in Nuuk and Ilulissat brew with glacial meltwater. , a Canadian company, harvests ice from a glacier in Greenland and mixes it directly with corn alcohol to produce Siku Ice vodka (tagline: “Siku Is Ice”).

Some of the companies making real money from glacier products are a bit more removed from the ice than they let on. One day in Anchorage, I hitch a ride with Gil Serrano, director of marketing and cofounder of , as well as the self-described “grandfather of glacial water.” A real estate entrepreneur, Serrano launched his company in 1992 and now produces some 60,000 bottles a week, ranging from eight-ounce plastic miniatures that sell for a dollar or two in grocery stores to illuminated glass carafes that garner $10 a pop at nightclubs. After he walks me through his massive bottling plant in Anchorage, we climb into his extra-large red SUV and drive the unplowed roads an hour north to his source—a seven-mile-wide lake nestled in a valley carved by the 25,000-year-old Eklutna Glacier. Serrano doesn’t get the water straight from the ice, which would be technically difficult and prohibitively expensive. Instead, he cut a deal to buy raw, untreated water from a nearby municipal water plant. “It’s first-use virgin water from a living glacier,” he explains.

Lindquist, however, won’t settle for less than the glaciers themselves. “It’s a joke,” he tells me on the boat. “It’s not hard to go turn a valve and fill up a tank. There’s no excitement in that. Where’s the sexy?”

Lindquist developed his appreciation for sexy through years of hocking glacial ice. He secured his first collecting permit in 1991 and began harvesting small amounts to supply vendors servicing the ice-cube market. He also took some business classes at the University of Alaska Anchorage and started doing sales for a bottled-water company that provided filtered municipal water to homes and businesses. In 1998, he landed his first commercial ice contract, shipping to a catering company in Munich. A few years later, he filled a couple of orders for the State of Alaska, one for 2,500 pounds of ice sent to South Korea for a trade summit. He started shipping to Japanese clients in 2003, heeding to their preference for “white ice,” the opaque stuff that cracks and pops in your glass when its ancient gases are released.

In the spring of 2010, the owner of a high-end liquor store in Anchorage who’d been buying ice from Lindquist introduced him to Toby Foster. A medevac pilot who’d gone into the booze business after breaking his back in a crash, Foster had opened the Alaska Distillery, the first commercial distillery in the state, in 2008. That year he introduced a vodka called Permafrost, which earned a “superlative” rating from Chicago’s , besting some 500 other brands, including Ketel One and Grey Goose. When Lindquist pitched him on using iceberg melt in his spirits, Foster didn’t hesitate. He liked both the novelty and the purity of bottling a bit of the state’s wild beauty. “Using glacier ice just seemed natural,” he says.

The two reintroduced Permafrost with glacier water—then, several months later, brought out the smoked-salmon vodka. (The latter required an intensive taste-formulation period. Says Lindquist: “The first batches were awful.”) Lindquist, who’d picked up moonshine crafting from locals in Cordova in the '80s, had to learn legal distilling on the job. His quirky tastes have produced a series of surprising vodkas in the past couple of years: rhubarb, birch syrup, Alaskan fireweed. The hemp-seed blend, Purgatory, won the gold medal in the spirits category in the , which recognizes product innovation. Meanwhile, Alaska Distillery revenues have jumped from a meager $4,500 in 2008 to well over $1 million last year. The company sells single bottles for the top-shelf price of $30 and distributes to liquor stores and bars in several states and Canada, in addition to online sales.

The fact that Lindquist has had so much success with such a broad range of flavors suggests that drinkers are as attracted to the very idea of sipping glaciers as they are to any particular taste they might impart. “It’s the notion that it’s kind of untouched by human hands,” says Beverage World editor Cioletti. “You can’t get water purer than that.”

BACK AT THE DOCK in Whittier, the guys use a forklift to move the ice into the bed of a pickup truck. The next morning, I meet Lindquist and Foster at Alaska Distillery’s headquarters to melt the harvest. The 7,000-square-foot space sits inside a converted airplane hangar at the end of a country road. In 2011, Lindquist moved into an apartment within walking distance. A couple of giant moose are milling around in the snow outside, and I’m warned not to get too close or I’ll risk being trampled. Inside, where the temperature is kept between 60 and 70 degrees, it looks at first like any other small distillery—crates of bottles, rolls of labels, plastic tubs of malted grain and barley.

But then I notice the giant chunks of ice situated around the room. Rather than heating glacier ice, Lindquist prefers to let it melt naturally, a process that takes from two to five days. In the middle of the warehouse, a translucent slab hangs by a chain from the ceiling, like the gizzard of a monster yeti. It drips into a 350-gallon stainless-steel drum, making a beautiful plunky metal droplet echo, which Lindquist urges me to listen to up close. “This is one of my favorite noises,” he says as he leans his ear over the barrel. “I believe the way this drips, you can get the rhythm of a song.”

He hangs smaller chunks from chains, while larger pieces are set right on top of the barrel. Once they’re fully melted, Lindquist goes into mad-scientist mode, blending roughly one part glacier water to two parts local spring water. The mix saves Alaska Distillery money, but Lindquist insists he does it to achieve a superior flavor. “You cannot get a smooth taste with 100 percent pure glacier water,” he says. “The combination makes a more full-bodied water.”

“The guy is an artist,” Foster tells me with a laugh. “When we first started working together, he’d piss me off to no end, because he’d spend all day making a batch of water. My theory on Scott is that, because he’s blind, all his other senses—including his sense of taste—are heightened.”

The water is then added to the 190-proof alcohol, which is made from wheat and potatoes grown in the nearby Matanuska-Susitna Valley. The salmon and berry flavors are infused from reductions, and some of the edgier product concepts haven’t worked out. “We were going to try a nicotine vodka,” Lindquist says with a grimace, “and there’s just no way.”

Over in the corner, Lindquist shows me a few rows of giant mason jars filled with freshly distilled corn whiskey, the result of a partnership with Regina Sutton Chennault, daughter of a famed, late Appalachian bootlegger named Popcorn Sutton, to try and produce an edition of her dad’s original moonshine using glacier melt. “My family always had to find a very clean water,” Chennault told me when she greeted us at the distillery. “Glacier water tastes better, and there’s no contamination.” (The project ultimately fell through.)

But sometimes, I discover, glaciers can be dangerous, even when they’re in custody. Lindquist is showing me his flavor-infusion lab when suddenly I hear a crash behind me, followed by a yelp. I turn to find șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű photographer Michael Hanson sprawled on the floor, blood gushing from his brow. He had been crouching down and photographing a berg perched on a stack of wooden pallets when it slid off—right into his face. Fortunately, Chennault works as a trauma surgeon by day. She quickly stops the bleeding, then rushes him off to get patched up, leaving him with perhaps the strangest scar story of all time. (Hanson returned later that afternoon, dizzy and black-eyed, to finish shooting.)

Maybe this is just what happens when you go around harvesting glaciers in Alaska. Or maybe there’s some kind of magical elixir lurking inside the ancient ice, some timeless essence that draws beauty and blood. That’s what I wonder as I belly up to the offending berg for a taste test. Lindquist pours me a shot of glacier water in a small glass beaker, then grabs an ice pick. As I hold the beaker against the block, he swiftly chips away at it, raining down sparkly shards into my drink.

As I raise my glass, I’m caught up in the drama of it all. I’ve traveled thousands of miles and witnessed the face-crushing might of the glaciers firsthand. So what do I taste when the slivers of frozen history slide down my throat?

I taste water. Honestly, I can’t tell the difference between this and the stuff in my fridge at home.

But then again, I realize, that’s not the point. What I’m really tasting is power—the awesomeness of water that was frozen 10,000 years ago and melted just for my pleasure. And that tastes great.

is the author of four books, including .

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AFTER DECADES OF PUTTING MONKEYS in space, landing men on the moon, and taking high school science projects into orbit, rocket scientists have finally turned their attention to something practical: spectator sports. This fall, after five years of prototype test flights, the first Mark-1 X-Racer rocket plane will take to the skies as the fire-breathing workhorse of the new Rocket Racing League, which promises to deliver something between NASCAR and the pod-racing scenes in Star Wars: Episode I (see details below). The ultimate goal, says league cofounder Peter Diamandis, is a competition that will grow from a domestic six-event season in 2007 to a broader tour, with a season-long points competition and races taking place all over the world. Before that happens, though, scientists will have to perfect a way to simultaneously look up and drink beer.

1. The RACECOURSE
will be a winding five-mile loop that will look something like a three-dimensional Formula-1 circuit. While most of the racing will take place at around 1,000 feet off the ground, the pilots will have to make low-altitude plunges to about 500 feet at certain points during each lap, including spectator-friendly passes near the grandstands.

2.
The pilots will make four to six PIT STOPS during each 90-minute race. Eight-person crews will pump a mix of liquid oxygen and kerosene and change the lithium batteries that power the electronics. This is one area where X-Racers will be markedly slower than their automotive counterparts, as each stop will take about eight minutes, compared with 14 seconds in NASCAR.

3.
To create the X-RACERS, engineers converted an aircraft called the Velocity SE, an experimental plane with superb gliding capabilities—racers will glide for long stretches between rocket burns—and a frame that can handle the 12 G-forces as the planes accelerate. Though the rockets will be capable of going five times faster, speeds will be kept safely around 300 miles per hour.

4.
Five CAMERAS will be mounted on each plane, offering multiple views of the action, including one camera that will be trained on the pilot. Advanced instrumentation, drawn from technology used in fighter jets and NASA spacecraft, will include heads-up displays that show the pilots three-dimensional representations of the racecourse.

5.
An array of multimedia devices will keep the SPECTATORS involved in the action. The audience will be surrounded by six 50-foot screens, with geometric rings superimposed over live video to highlight the flight path. Handheld units will display the planes’ locations on the course, real-time standings, and a selection of video feeds from the cameras on the X-Racers.

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