Out of Eden Walk

01/09/2026

🥾 Every hundred miles, Paul Salopek pauses to record the landscape and a person he meets, assembling a global snapshot of humankind.

In Beluga Point, Alaska, United States, on day 4,560 and at mile 10,900 of the Walk, Paul met Grey Doersch, 31, a landscaper and entrepreneur from Chugiak, Alaska, and his son.

Paul Salopek: Who are you?

Grey Doersch: I’m Grey, like the color. I’m from here. We’re of this earth.

Paul: Where do you come from?

Grey: Chugiak. It’s just north of Anchorage. I work outside. I’m moving my body all the time. I literally walk for a living. It’s just me and the Lord. I’m here on a break with my family. I’m a firm believer that you put your family before anything. But even before that, the Lord.

Paul: Where are you going?

Grey: That’s a tough question. It’s not in my control. It’s up to the Lord.

🔗 Explore Milestone 164: Launching Point and learn more about Milestone waypoints here: https://outofedenwalk.nationalgeographic.org/milestone-164-launching-point

Out of Eden Walk is a 38,000 kilometer walk across the world in the footsteps of our ancestors.

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01/05/2026

"Landfall. My first Milestone logged on land in the Americas: a subarctic launching point for my stroll south to Tierra del Fuego.

With the ancient migration routes through Siberia blocked these days by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, I’d detoured to North America from Yokohama, Japan, by container ship, disembarking at the obscure port of Prince Rupert, Canada. I hitched a ride from there on a $2-million pleasure boat to Ketchikan, Alaska. And from there, I hopped a commercial flight to Anchorage. Walking abroad for more than a dozen continuous years, with my melatonin levels yo-yoing through accordioned time zones, and my head spinning from unaccustomed speed, I barely made it through the airport. I’d forgotten airports. Bewildered, I left my laptop not once, but twice, at the security checkpoints. And once more on the plane. (OK, and one additional time at an airport bar.)

I asked my good friend Jeanne, an archaeologist living in Anchorage, to suggest a suitable prehistoric migration site near the city, a symbolic place to serve as a starting line from which to begin walking. Beluga Point she said. People had camped there 4,200 years ago. They left behind shards of slate ground into spear points and knives." — Paul Salopek

Explore Milestone 164: Launching Point: https://outofedenwalk.nationalgeographic.org/milestone-164-launching-point

📍 Beluga Point, Alaska, United States. Day 4,560. Mile 10,900.

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01/02/2026

🥾 “This is kind of a walk of a lifetime, a journey of a lifetime, in which there are walks of a lifetime inside of it.

And one of them was the Lost Coast, the outer coast of Alaska. And where’s that? It’s that long stretch of exposed coastline and that little kind of finger of Alaska that stretches out of the main chunk of it. I think it was about 300 miles of empty wild beaches, of spruce forests coming down to wild surf, of glaciers spilling into inlets, of seeing grizzly bears, seeing moose on the beaches.

I never imagined these wild animals being on beaches, and there they were. And it’s also kind of soberingly, on a more serious note, beyond the kind of natural wonder and the joy of knowing that there are these landscapes still left on the planet, is, it’s incredibly dynamic due to the climate change crisis.

These glaciers are melting. It’s changing the course of rivers. It’s affecting the ecology of salmon that migrate up the rivers. As one of the experts that I talked to said: ‘This is the geography, Paul, of the future, right here.’
It’s kind of the laboratory of what’s going to happen in different ways around the world.”

— Paul Salopek speaking with Stephanie Sy on PBS NewsHour

🔗 Watch or read along with the conversation between Paul Salopek and Stephanie Sy here: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/national-geographic-explorer-paul-salopek-on-his-trek-around-the-globe-on-foot

Stephanie Sy shares: “Paul Salopek is more than halfway done with his journey dubbed the Out of Eden Walk. His path began in the Great Rift Valley of Ethiopia in 2013, winding through the Middle East and Asia before crossing the Pacific Ocean for Alaska.

Salopek’s dispatches for National Geographic (National Geographic Society) along the way bring readers with him stride for stride on this unprecedented trek.”

✍️ Read Paul’s dispatches from the trail at www.outofedenwalk.org and sign up for Out of Eden Walk’s newsletter at www.outofedenwalknonprofit.org

👣 Out of Eden Walk is a 38,000 kilometer walk across the world in the footsteps of our ancestors.

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12/29/2025

✍️🥾 We're in the final hours of crowdfunding for the Out of Eden Walk nonprofit organization!

✨ Our Board is matching donations at a 1:1 ratio, doubling the impact of every dollar donated.

Support this 38,000 kilometer walk across the world in the footsteps of our ancestors.

Help us reach $90,000 today!

✨ Visit this link to learn more and give today: www.outofedenwalknonprofit.org/campaign

This year’s crowdfunding campaign ends today, December 29th.

Thank you all for your support! We’re truly grateful to have you along on the journey. 🙏

Pictured: Paul Salopek in China

12/28/2025

✍️🥾 Crowdfunding for the Out of Eden Walk nonprofit organization continues for two more days, through December 29th! Thank you all for your generosity and your donations. 🙏

✨ Our Board is continuing to match all donations at a 1:1 ratio, doubling each dollar donated. If you haven’t yet, please consider joining the journey today to make twice the impact.

🔗 To give and learn about the impact of your donations, please tap the link in our bio or visit www.outofedenwalknonprofit.org/campaign ✨

As Paul and walking partners make their way across the Americas, we are deeply grateful for our community.

As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, Out of Eden Walk relies on public support to ensure the journey moves forward with purpose, intention, and care, and your support helps meet the increased demands of this next phase of the journey.

✍️ Every dollar raised goes toward fulfilling our mission to connect people across borders through the power of storytelling.

Thank you for joining the journey and for supporting our slow journalism. 🙏

📷 Pictured: Photos from the Out of Eden Walk, a 38,000 kilometer walk across the world in the footsteps of our ancestors.

12/23/2025

"What I remind readers is that when the earliest human beings were walking out of Africa, it was not a depopulated landscape. The continents were inhabited, but just not by us. And it was this amazing time, Carolyn, when, if you and I were walking out of Africa, [we wouldn’t] know who we’d bump into over the next hill. It probably wasn’t us. It probably wasn’t Homo sapiens. It could have been a Neanderthal. It could have been something called a Denisovan. And these are cousins who are, you know, they may look a bit like us and even a lot like us, but they’re not the same species. It was a crowded planet at the time." — Paul Salopek on The World 🎙️🎧 Listen to the full conversation with host Carolyn Beeler or read along at the link below!

National Geographic Explorer Paul Salopek is retracing the path of human migration. More specifically, the scientific community's best guess for the likely path of early human migration. While walking through China, he visited the Academy of Sciences and met with paleoanthropologists there, who shar...

12/22/2025

THANK YOU. Your generosity has helped us reach our goal of $75,000 during our annual crowdfunding campaign!

✨ There’s still time: The campaign is live through December 29. Matching funds are still available and every gift made now will have double the impact.

As Paul continues walking across the Americas, we are deeply grateful for our community. Once again, you have helped us reach our campaign goal of $75,000.

As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, Out of Eden Walk relies on public support to ensure the journey moves forward with purpose, intention, and care.

✨ Our Board is continuing to match all donations during this last week at a 1:1 ratio. If you haven’t yet, please consider joining the journey to make twice the impact today.

During our 2024 campaign, our community successfully raised over $121,000. Help us surpass this goal!

Every dollar raised goes toward fulfilling our mission to connect people across borders.

As the Walk enters the Americas and a defining new chapter, your support helps meet the increased demands of this next phase of the journey.

🔗 To donate and learn about the impact of your donations, please visit: www.outofedenwalknonprofit.org/campaign

Out of Eden Walk is a 38,000 kilometer walk across the world in the footsteps of our ancestors.

Thank you for walking with us. 🙏

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12/20/2025

✍️ “The beach was once a bridge. This was long ago. It is an old story.

Thirty-six thousand years before human memory, the Earth’s water froze into attics of ice. It was a period of glaciation. The seas shrank. And a vast ramp of rock emerged from the receding surf, cementing Eurasia to the Americas. Grasslands sprouted atop the new land—Beringia. Imagine a cool Serengeti. Proto-horses drummed over it. So did gigantic horned bison. Panthera spalaea, cave lions larger than grizzlies, stalked myopic rhinos. Hairy elephants lumbered across. Some of these creatures perished along a maze of game trails. Their mineralized bones jut today from the Alaskan permafrost. This is where Tyler Weyiouanna finds them. He turns them into jewelry.

‘We find mammoth tusks eroding from the beach,’ said Weyiouanna, an Iñupiaq artist in the coastal village of Shishmaref, whose small grid of mud streets and boxy homes face the steel-colored waves of the Bering Strait, beyond which, barely a hundred miles away, Russia hunkers invisibly. ‘They look like pieces of brown logs or sticks.’

Shyly, Weyiouanna held up a ring he’d carved from a fossil tusk. He placed the small, bewitching disk in my palm. Warm to the touch. Polished like glass. The petrified bone as milky as campfire smoke in moonlight. The last time a human being saw a living mammoth was perhaps 10,000 years ago, shortly after the global climate warmed once again, swelling the oceans, and re-drowning the steppes between Siberia and Alaska. Was Weyiouanna’s ring, I wondered, whittled from some shaggy colossus speared by the very people I had been following for a dozen years? Did I just walk 27,000 kilometers to cup this nomad echo in my hand?

Sitting at Weyiouanna’s dinner table, I suddenly felt the whisk-whisk-whisk of Lyme grasses against hide leggings. I could hear the hunters’ remote cries lopped off by razored winds. And then the final trumpet of a toppled behemoth. It made a faint rattling among the chipped coffee cups, before passing away and beyond.”

— Paul Salopek, “First Beach”

🔗 Read Paul’s new dispatch from the trail here: https://outofedenwalk.nationalgeographic.org/first-beach

👣 Also: Crowdfunding for the Out of Eden Walk nonprofit organization continues! Independent journalism requires public support. Please consider donating to our annual crowdfunder today.

✨ Our Board of Directors is generously matching every donation at a 1:1 ratio up to $45,000, so donations are doubled for twice the impact.

🔗 At the link, read about why we fundraise, learn more about the trail ahead, and keep us moving forward with a donation: www.outofedenwalknonprofit.org/campaign

Thank you to everyone who has donated so far! We're grateful to have you along for the journey. 🙏

📷 Pictured: First steps on a new continent. Paul Salopek visited the isolated Inupiat village of Shishmaref, Alaska, located on the Bering Strait, before setting out on foot from Anchorage towards Tierra del Fuego.

Photo by Paul Salopek

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12/19/2025

🥾 In 2013, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Paul Salopek set out from the Rift Valley of Ethiopia—one of cradles of humankind—to retrace, on foot, the dawn voyage of the earliest Homo sapiens who first walked out of Africa during the Stone Age.

For 13 years, Paul has paced off 17,000 miles of those ancestral trails, calipering Arabian deserts, empty Central Asian steppes, icy Himalayan peaks, Burmese war zones, and the vastness of mainland China.

Out of Eden Walk is a continuous storytelling journey: Paul has never left his walking trail to return to the United States.

Hence, Paul’s recent landfall in Alaska, after crossing the Pacific Ocean from Japan on a container ship, marks a threshold in this voyage of slow journalism: The beginning of the final phase of a 24,000-mile odyssey in the wake of our roving ancestors.

In 2026, Paul will need your help in documenting a changing Americas on his ramble south to reach our species’ original “land’s end” in Tierra del Fuego.

For the first time on the Walk, a maritime or amphibious segment is planned down the Inside Passage of Alaska, to reflect the latest archeological evidence of early seagoing human dispersals into the continent.

The Walk is not just a feat of physical endurance. Its core mission is more meaningful: To chronicle the insights of people met en route, from Djiboutian camel shepherds to Kazakh geophysicists, from Chinese poets to Inupiat artisans, building a nuanced record of human life in the early 21st century and touching on pressing dilemmas of our day—war, mass migration, spiritual isolation, sustainability, cultural adaptation, and more—as seen from boot level, with a creative output that so far approaches a million words and tens of thousands of images.

Independent journalism requires public support.

🌱 Out of Eden Walk is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. Please consider joining our annual crowdfunder today.

✨ Great news: Our Board of Directors is generously matching every donation at a 1:1 ratio up to $45,000, so donations are doubled for twice the impact.

🔗 To learn more and to donate, please visit www.outofedenwalknonprofit.org/campaign

Thank you all for your support! 🙏

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12/16/2025

✍️ “I have been walking continuously out of Africa since 2013, making for Tierra del Fuego. I’m retracing the epic wanderings of our Stone Age ancestors, the early Homo sapiens who first paced off the worlds’ horizons. Mr. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine blocked my way into Siberia. Which is why, when Weyiouanna’s spry, 83-year-old grandfather, Clifford, a retired caribou herder, rummaged about his cramped house in Shishmaref to show me a family heirloom, an animal-skin belt stitched for his grandmother by Inupiat relatives in Chukotka, I stared down at the worn blue, white, and red beadwork with longing. With regret.

‘I don’t remember when we got it,’ said Clifford, who was born inside a tent on the buggy summer tundra day of June 6, 1942. He puckered his wrinkled face in concentration. ‘Maybe the 30s? Or the 40s? People still crossed the strait freely by boat back then.’

I too had washed up, another relic out of time, onto the icy grey beaches of Shishmaref from Asia.

My conveyance wasn’t a plank skiff or a Pleistocene land bridge, however, but a bunk aboard a container ship crossing the Pacific from Japan. At Anchorage, I had booked a commercial flight to Nome. And from there I squeezed into a bush plane. I’m still not certain why.

I wanted, I suppose, to plant a symbolic boot print at the freezing doorsill of the new continent. The Bering Strait represented, to me, more than just a geographical fulcrum point—a divide that tipped me finally into the Americas phase in my life afoot.”

— Paul Salopek, “First Beach”

🔗 Read “First Beach,” Paul’s new dispatch from the trail: https://outofedenwalk.nationalgeographic.org/first-beach

✨ Also: Crowdfunding for the Out of Eden Walk nonprofit organization continues.

✨Our Board of Directors is generously matching every donation at a 1:1 ratio up to $45,000, so donations are doubled for twice the impact.

✨ To support our slow journalism, tap the link in bio or visit www.outofedenwalknonprofit.org/campaign

✨Thank you for your support! 🥾

Pictured: Iñupiaq elder Clifford Weyiouanna and beads passed down to his family from ancestors in Siberia.

📷 Photos by Paul Salopek

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12/14/2025

✍️ “I too had washed up, another relic out of time, onto the icy grey beaches of Shishmaref from Asia.

My conveyance wasn’t a plank skiff or a Pleistocene land bridge, however, but a bunk aboard a container ship crossing the Pacific from Japan. At Anchorage, I had booked a commercial flight to Nome. And from there I squeezed into a bush plane. I’m still not certain why.

I wanted, I suppose, to plant a symbolic boot print at the freezing doorsill of the new continent. The Bering Strait represented, to me, more than just a geographical fulcrum point—a divide that tipped me finally into the Americas phase in my life afoot. It marked a deeper border of time, a portal back into the landscape of memory. Into a dim idea of home. I had been away rambling for more than a dozen years. And wind-stripped Shishmaref, as it turned out, proved a perfect stepping-stone for reentry. The Indigenous community straddled my long journey’s twinned obsessions: rootedness and restlessness. Inhabited for at least 400 years, the village of modern hunter-gatherers was in its last days. Shishmaref was falling into the Chukchi Sea.

‘It’s what every journalist who comes here writes about,’ said Darlene Olanna, a retired government worker in the village.”

— Paul Salopek, “First Beach”

🔗 Read “First Beach,” Paul’s new dispatch from the trail here: https://outofedenwalk.nationalgeographic.org/first-beach

✨ Also: Crowdfunding for the Out of Eden Walk nonprofit organization continues. Our Board of Directors is matching every donation at a 1:1 ratio up to $45,000, so donations are doubled for twice the impact.

✨ To give, please visit this link: www.outofedenwalknonprofit.org/campaign

✨ Your donations are crucial for keeping the Walk moving forward. Thank you to this community for your support!

Pictured: The chilly beach at the Inupiat village of Shishmaref, Alaska, is eroding away due to climate change, threatening the survival of the Indigenous community.

📷 Photo by Paul Salopek

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12/11/2025

✍️ “In the past, on relatively short water crossings along my continental walking routes, I simply continued to dutifully record Milestones aboard various cargo vessels, even though these segments of the journey were motorized. I logged six Milestones crossing the Red Sea, for example, on a boat hauling thousands of goats and camels between Djibouti and Saudi Arabia. While crossing the Caspian Sea on a rusting ferry crammed with hard-partying Turkish truck drivers, I chronicled two.

But now, I’ve faced the novel and daunting prospect of documenting Milestones on my passage across a vast body of saltwater—nearly 10,000 kilometers of the Pacific Ocean—on a container ship bound from Japan to Canada. (My walk’s ultimate destination is the tip of South America.) This immense watery interregnum between continents adds up to a whopping 54 Milestones. The ship I hitched a ride on, the gigantic Maersk San Vicente, would make this oceanic traverse in a lightning (by walking standards) 11 days. I did the math.”

— Paul Salopek

🌊 The dispatch “Milestones at Sea” describes how we recorded our journey's 100-mile waypoints across the Pacific.

Read the story in full here: https://outofedenwalk.nationalgeographic.org/milestones-at-sea/

✨ Also: Crowdfunding for the Out of Eden Walk nonprofit organization continues! Our Board of Directors is matching every donation at a 1:1 ratio up to $45,000, so donations are doubled.

✨ To give with twice the impact, please visit www.outofedenwalknonprofit.org/campaign

✨ Your donations are crucial for keeping the Walk moving forward. Thank you for your support!

Pictured: A string of 54 Milestones spans nearly 10,000 kilometers of the Maersk San Vicente's passage from Yokohama to Prince Rupert.

Map by Martin Gamache

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