THE HORIZONTAL EVEREST

If you like your landscapes cold, quiet, and austere, welcome to Ellesmere Island, photojournalist Kobalenko's spiritual (and part-time) home, where you needn't bother with thermometers or maps because you really don't want to know.

It’s up north: “Think of the little metal disk that sits on top of a globe,” writes the author. “Ellesmere is under that.” Kobalenko has logged more miles on the island's 76,000 square miles than any known human, with the exception of the Greenlander Nukapinguaq. He is drawn to its “physical beauty, its cold, its nontechnical terrain, its isolation . . . its unwalked expanses, its alien flavor, [which] all felt like a purer form of my own inner geography.” Keeping his observations and historical anecdotes as spare and flinty as the land, Kobalenko coaxes a very wild portrait of a place where you can sled along behind dogs under Northern Lights for weeks at a time, have a fine chance of coming eyeball-to-eyeball with a polar bear, or eat your whisky rather than drink it (just leave it out in the 70-below chill). The author delights in following in the footsteps of men and women who went before him. Admiral Peary spent time on the island, as did a host of lesser-lights in the Arctic exploration community, many of them (Hans Krüger, Alfred Björling, Otto Sverdrup) meeting dreadful ends on the spot. Kobalenko’s search for mementos takes him all over the island, from one extreme end—literally and figuratively—the other. In the process he witnesses rainbow-colored lenticular clouds, white wolves that don't fear humans, “the best-known rock on Ellesmere” (an example of his wispy, dry humor), and sites where ancient people lived, though “God knows how these early Stone Age cultures survived.”

Hard travel in a land both severe and—this is the neat trick—beckoning. (photographs, maps)