The Japanese tourist had decided to take a solo beach-camping vacation at the northernmost point in the United States: Point Barrow, Alaska, 1,200 miles from the North Pole. There were problems, though. The thick sea ice had hidden where the beach stopped and the water started, so his tent was planted on top of the Beaufort Sea. And there was a hairier problem wandering about: polar bears.
Cheryl Rosa, now deputy director of the U.S. Arctic Research Commission, was also in the area for the first time, working on her dissertation about the health of Arctic bowhead whales, which the Native Iñupiaq people have hunted for thousands of years. It was 2000, and she had moved to Alaska to pursue a combined Ph.D. and wildlife residency at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.
Read my profile of Rosa and her work in the Arctic in the winter issue of the Magazine of Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine at Tufts University.