What I instead ended up doing was spending a lot of time in the laboratory slicing up tiny pieces of chickadee beaks and looking at them under the microscope and trying to make sense of this really challenging problem that in the end didn’t have all of the easy answers that I was hoping for. I had started this research project that kept chickadees with beak deformities thinking that I was going to find more of a connection between the natural world and wildlife health and environmental health and ultimately myself. I had just finished up my PhD feeling really, really disconnected from the natural world. We spoke to Van Hemert about why she undertook such an epic journey, what she learned from the trip and what it was like to complete it. The six-month journey saw Van Hemert, a biologist who developed a love of the outdoors growing up in Alaska, and Farrell, a custom home builder, row, ski and, in one particularly harrowing scene, swim their way across a route with “No roads, no trails, and no mentors,” as she writes in her new book about the trip, The Sun Is A Compass: A 4,000-Mile Journey Into the Alaska Wilds.
In 2012, Caroline Van Hemert and her husband, Pat Farrell, set out on a 4,000-mile journey from Bellingham, Wash., to Kotzebue, Alaska.
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