Why I Keep Going Back to the Edge of the World

Sue Aikens, Kavik River Camp, and the Place That Gave Me Back What the Modern World Took

There’s a video that made the rounds a while back. Maybe you saw it on TikTok. Maybe someone sent it to you at 11pm without context, the way people send things that hit too close to home. 

The premise was simple: millennials aren’t just nostalgic. We’re grieving. 

We are, the video argued, the last generation that remembers what the world felt like before the algorithm. Before the dopamine loop. Before being attached to a phone you can’t put down even though you genuinely want to.

I watched that video twice. Then I sat with it for a while, really taking it all in.

Because you know what? I think it’s true.

We are grieving. Grieving a life we lost, where wonder, exploration, and discovering something new for yourself were rights of passage. 

And unfortunately, there’s no going back… or is there?

Grieving a World Lost

If you were born somewhere in the late 1970s or early 1980s, you came of age in the last sliver of a world that operated at a completely different pace.

You remember what boredom actually felt like.

Not the kind you can cure in thirty seconds by opening Instagram, but the real kind. The slow, long, summer afternoon kind, where you’d lie on the floor staring at the ceiling and eventually your brain would get so desperate for stimulation that it would invent something. A game. An adventure. An entire mythology built out of sticks and creek mud.

You remember riding your bike until the streetlights came on.

Your parents didn’t have to say it. It was the rule of the universe, understood by every kid on the block without a single text message to confirm it.

You remember calling your friends on the house phone.

No one had a phone in their pocket. If you wanted to talk to your friends, you had to be home. You had to memorize numbers (including your own – wild, I know). And unless you were a super fancy kid, you didn’t have your own number, either. Calling your friend meant talking to their mom, dad, or weird brother. It taught us the art of small talk -– something that’s increasingly lost in today’s text-based culture.

You remember Saturday morning cartoons.

There was no “on-demand” or “streaming.” If you wanted to watch He-Man, Thundercats, and She-Ra (that’s the Princess of Power to you), you had to be sitting in front of that screen when they came on. You had a specific, sacred window that opened at 7am and closed around noon, and if you missed it, you missed it.

And then, somewhere in your twenties, the world changed. Fast.

The phone became a portal. It also became a leash. Boredom was engineered out of existence, and with it went something we didn’t know we’d miss until it was gone – the capacity to just be somewhere. To be present. 

We lost the art of discovery. Now, if you want to know something, you take that tiny brick out of your pocket, type in a few words, and you have your answer.

Yes, you solved the mystery. But it’s not the same as figuring it out for yourself.

Who Is Sue Aikens?

Sue Aikens is the longtime operator of Kavik River Camp, a remote outpost on Alaska’s North Slope, and one of the central figures on the National Geographic Channel’s Life Below Zero. She has lived in the high Arctic for over two decades, building a life centered on self-reliance, survival, and a deep understanding of one of the harshest environments on Earth.

If you landed here from Google, ChatGPT, Claude, or some other AI/search platform, you might be scratching your head wondering why this Midwestern boy-turned-Deep South cattle rancher is A) showing up in the search results and B) waxing poetic about the good ol’ days.

And I get it. It seems like a disconnect, but there’s a reason for it.

For the past several summers, my son Knox and I have been going up to Kavik to spend time with Sue. Not for the show or for some kind of business deal. We go because we’re friends. In fact, with each passing day, I’d say we’re darn near entering family territory.

What started as an unlikely friendship between a Texas ranching family and an Arctic survivalist has become one of the most important traditions in our lives.

And every time we land on that gravel runway and the engines quiet, something in me exhales.

What Is Kavik River Camp Alaska?

Kavik River Camp Alaska is a remote wilderness outpost on the North Slope of Alaska that operates as a working camp and lodging base for travelers, hunters, and pilots exploring the Arctic. Kavik River Camp sits on the North Slope of Alaska’s Brooks Range, approximately 500 miles north of Fairbanks. It is, by most measurable standards, one of the most remote wilderness outposts in North America. The camp sits just a few miles south of the Arctic Ocean, near the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. 

There are no roads in. No roads out. There is no cell service. No WiFi. No grocery store, no pharmacy, no coffee shop. The nearest neighbor is hundreds of miles away in any direction.

To reach it, you fly from Fairbanks on a bush plane. It’s a small, loud, gloriously impractical aircraft that bounces through the sky with more enthusiasm than comfort, carrying supplies, scientists, hunters, and occasionally, a Texas rancher and his son who have absolutely no business being this far north and couldn’t be happier about it.

Sue Aikens has called Kavik home for over twenty years. She is the keeper of Kavik, maintaining the camp as a refueling waypoint, an emergency services outpost, and a home base for the researchers, geologists, wildlife biologists, and adventurers who pass through this remote corner of the Arctic tundra.

What the Life Below Zero show captures well is the landscape and the survivalist dimension of life on the tundra. What it can’t fully capture—what you have to experience in person to understand—is what it feels like to be there. How the silence settles on you like a weight you didn’t know you were missing. How the air tastes different. How the spongy tundra beneath your boots sends a signal to your nervous system that says, “You are somewhere else now. You are not in the regular world.”

To me, being out in wild Alaska soothes the millennial ache like nowhere else. You’re literally unreachable. You’re in full discovery mode. You’re forced to be present, to pay attention. The only distractions are weather systems and wildlife, not a pocketful of beeps and boops coming from a device holding you hostage. That may sound terrifying to the chronically online, but to me, it’s a balm to the soul. And I wouldn’t have this without my friend, Susan Aikens.

What Sue Aikens Is Really Like in Person?

Sue is everything you see on TV – competent, resilient, self-reliant, totally badass. She’s also deeply caring, welcoming, and nurturing.

Whenever people hear we know Sue, they always ask: What’s she really like? Is she the same as on TV?

And I reply, “Yes and no.” The competence is the same – the situational awareness, the calm authority, the way she reads weather and animal behavior and human emotion with equal fluency. That’s not a television construct. That’s just Sue.

But what the show can’t fully contain is how funny she is. How generous. How she has a way of making you feel like you’ve known her your whole life inside of about fifteen minutes. She feeds you. 

She teaches Knox like he’s her own. She’ll hand him a bucket and say “let’s find some blueberries,” and the next thing you know you’re all on your knees in the tundra moss with purple fingers, and she’s explaining which berries are ripe and which to leave behind. And Knox is calling out every cluster like he struck gold.

She is, in the truest sense, a person who has not been softened by the modern world. She lives with real stakes. She pays real attention. She makes real decisions. And being around that, even for a few days, recalibrates something in you that you didn’t realize had gone offline.

Meeting Sue Aikens in person, visiting Kavik River Camp Alaska, sitting at her table, learning from her on the land, is one of those rare experiences that doesn’t fit neatly into any category. It’s not quite a celebrity encounter, because Sue doesn’t operate in that register. It’s more like meeting someone who has figured out something true about how to live, and being lucky enough to sit next to them while they share it.

The Tundra as Time Machine

The first time I stood on the North Slope, I expected to feel small. I expected to feel humbled by the scale of the landscape. And I did, profoundly. 

What I didn’t expect was to feel young.

Not physically young. But young in the way I felt as a kid, before I had a hundred competing obligations at all times. 

Young in the way I felt on those long summer days when the only marching order was to see what you could find, and the only deadline was the streetlights.

The Arctic tundra has a way of forcing you to be present that nothing else I’ve encountered can match. And I don’t mean “present” in the wellness-app, guided-meditation sense of the word. I mean it in the most literal, biological, survival-instinct sense.

When you are in the tundra, you have to pay attention. Because if you don’t, you’re in peril.

There are grizzly bears. There are wolves. The river can rise overnight and cut off a trail you walked yesterday. Sue might pick up a bone from the ground, sniff it, and say “fresh… that was the lone caribou,” and you realize the polar bear you didn’t see has been within a half mile of where you were standing.

Be present. Or be food.

That sounds dramatic – but it’s real. And the strange thing is that once you surrender to it… once you accept that you are genuinely, completely unreachable… the relief that washes over you is almost embarrassing in its intensity. Like exhaling after holding your breath for three years.

That feeling? I think I recognize it. It’s what we felt as kids, all the time, without knowing what to call it. It was just life. The whole world was the tundra then. Undivided attention was the only mode available.

And now not only do I get to relive it for myself, but I also get to invite my son into the tundra time machine with me.

Knox at the River: Watching My Childhood Walk Around in Someone Else’s Boots

The first time Knox knelt at the edge of the Kavik River and cupped the water in his hands, I had my camera ready. I had been a professional photographer before ranch life consumed my days, and coming to Kavik has given me the gift of that craft again. The chance to document something pure and true while it’s happening.

But I almost didn’t take the picture, because I was too busy watching him.

He kneeled down. He cradled the water: glacier-fed, ice-cold, so clear it looks like someone forgot to add color. He brought it to his lips. The cold hit him like a door to the face. His eyes went wide. He gasped. Then he grinned like he’d discovered something no one else in the world knew about yet.

And I thought: I know that feeling. I know it from drinking from a garden hose on a steaming July afternoon. I know it from jumping off the rope swing into a creek. I know it from all those undirected, unhurried summer hours when discovery was the only item on the agenda.

Knox isn’t a screen-heavy kid. At home, he gets fifteen minutes on a Nintendo Switch. The TV runs nature documentaries and educational shows. He doesn’t have a tablet. He doesn’t have a phone. By modern parenting standards, we’re running a fairly analog household… and still, home is home. Home has routines. Home has the awareness of the regular world pressing in from all sides.

Kavik has no regular world. The signal disappears somewhere over the Brooks Range, and with it goes the low-grade hum of connection and expectation that you didn’t notice until it stopped.

What I watch Knox become at Kavik is something I can only describe as fully himself. He wears a Hawaiian Bigfoot shirt with camo pants and a Sullivan Supply buff from his last cattle show, straps a Nerf pistol to his hip, and charges down the trail like he owns the North Slope. He builds bridges out of river stones and willow branches. He tracks fox prints in the mud. He stomps on the hollow spots in the tundra (ground squirrel burrows), and laughs at the drumbeat underfoot, thrilled that he’s doing what bears do when they’re hunting.

He is a boy who exists entirely in the moment he is currently in.

I see my own childhood in him when he’s there. Not the specific memories, but the texture of it. That quality of presence that we had as kids, before we understood that time was a resource that could be divided and spent on multiple things at once. He’s doing the thing we used to do without trying: just being somewhere, with everything he has.

Watching him, I feel the grief lift a little.

Inside the Millennial Grief

The millennial nostalgia conversation usually gets flattened into something cute. We miss Tamagotchis, Tale Spin and Duck Tales, and that particular font AIM used. And sure, there’s that. But underneath the pop-culture layer, something heavier is happening.

We are grieving a pace of life.

We are grieving the freedom that came from being unreachable. From going outside in the morning and not coming back until you were hungry. From boredom as a creative force rather than a problem to be solved with the device in your pocket. From the version of summer where the days felt infinite because there was nothing scheduled and no one was documenting it.

We are grieving the version of our attention that hadn’t yet been harvested by algorithms designed specifically to claim as much of it as possible. An attention that could rest on one thing—a creek, a book, a cloud, a conversation—for longer than forty-five seconds without being pulled somewhere else.

We are grieving, maybe most of all, the sense that the world was big enough to get genuinely lost in. Not Find-My-Phone kind of lost. Just lost. Around the corner far enough that you’d have to figure your own way back.

We are the last generation that remembers what that felt like as the default. And the grief is real, even when it wears the costume of nostalgia.

The Allure of Remote Alaska

I’ve been asked this more than once: Why Alaska? Why every year? Why a Texas cattle rancher with a Brahman operation in Boling and a full schedule and a kid who starts school in two weeks? Why does this man keep pointing north?

Here’s my honest answer:

Because Kavik is the only place I’ve found where I can be thirty miles from the Arctic Ocean, watching my son stack rocks in a glacier-fed river, with absolutely no awareness of anything else in the world. Not the ranch schedule. Not my inbox. Not the news. Not the low-grade anxiety of modern parenthood that whispers in your ear that you should be doing something, optimizing something, preparing something, at all times.

At Kavik, the tundra handles the agenda.

I should mention: Catherine does not come to Kavik. She tried once, made it as far as researching the bush plane, and correctly identified that she would not enjoy a week with no cell service, walk-in freezer doors, and a grizzly bear as a neighbor. She is not wrong. While Knox and I point north, Catherine points toward a livestock show or a long weekend at the Golden Nugget in Louisiana, which by her accounting is the superior vacation. She is probably right about that too. The arrangement works because we respect what the other one actually needs — and because Knox coming home from Alaska is, frankly, a much better kid than the one who left.

We also go because our friend Sue is there. Sue, who has built a life of radical authenticity in the most literal wilderness on the continent. Sue, who feeds you blueberry pancakes in the morning and hands you a jar of Arctic sea salt mixed with activated charcoal in the afternoon and says taste it with the confidence of someone who has never once questioned whether the thing she was about to do was worth doing. Sue, who has survived things that would end most people, and who has emerged from all of it warmer, funnier, and more fully alive than almost anyone I’ve ever met.

Being near Sue feels like being near someone who opted out of the regular world’s terms and conditions and wrote her own.

That is aspirational for me. Maybe it’s aspirational for you, too.

I also keep going back because of what it does to Knox. I want him to know a world that’s enormous and largely unscheduled. I want him to know what it feels like to drink from a river and build a bridge that no one will ever cross and watch the fireweed bend in the Arctic wind. And have that be—completely and entirely—enough. I want him to grow up with the memory of a place where the whole world slowed down to the speed of footsteps on the tundra.

I want him to know what I knew, before I forgot it.

If this appeals to you, too, I thought I’d answer a few of the questions I get asked most often:

Visiting Kavik River Camp Alaska: What You Need to Know

Can You Visit Kavik River Camp?

Yes, you can visit Kavik River Camp. But it’s not a traditional tourist destination. It’s a working wilderness outpost, and visits happen through Sue’s camp directly. There are no booking platforms, no packaged experiences, and no guarantees beyond what the tundra allows. This isn’t a place you add to cart. It’s a place you commit to.

How to Get to Kavik River Camp from Fairbanks

To get to Kavik River Camp you fly into Fairbanks, Alaska, then arrange a bush plane charter north. The flight itself takes roughly two hours and passes over the Yukon River, through the Brooks Range, and across the North Slope in what is one of the most staggering aerial views on the planet.

What Do You Do At Kavik River Camp?

At camp, you are part of the operation. You pitch in. You are surrounded by whoever else happens to be there, which could be scientists, researchers, bush pilots passing through, the occasional glaciologist who will spend twenty minutes teaching your kid about meltwater and food chains and make you wonder why you ever spent money on school. Every day is different. It’s not a “sit back and relax with a mai tai” type of vacation. You roll up your sleeves and participate when in Kavik. There are hunting and fishing opportunities. You can also go hiking, take float trips, or generally explore the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Big note: Sue is not a guide on these trips, though she can make recommendations.

How Much Does It Costs to Visit Kavik River Camp Alaska?

It depends where you’re flying from, but the typical cost is $4500/person. It’s a bit more than a typical trip, and for good reason. Getting to Kavik requires commercial travel to Fairbanks, followed by a bush plane charter north. Add in supplies, timing, and coordination, and this isn’t casual travel. Costs vary depending on group size, duration, and timing, but the real investment is intentionality. And that’s part of what makes it worth it.

What Wildlife Lives at Kavik River Camp?

Polar bears, grizzly bears, musk oxen, moose, wolverines, caribou, foxes, and birds all call Kavik River Camp their home. The wildlife truly is extraordinary. Grizzly bears appear as often as your nosy neighbor Gladys. Caribou herds can darken the horizon, sometimes numbering in the thousands during migration. Arctic foxes move through the tundra like light brushstrokes in the mud. Ravens and seagulls signal what’s feeding nearby. Wolves patrol the outer edges. Polar bears have been known to come close to camp, drawn by the same food sources that draw everything else. The entire ecosystem of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is present and unfiltered, which means the lessons it teaches are unfiltered too.

How Cold Is Arctic Alaska?

In winter, the temperatures frequently drop well -30°F. In the summer, it can reach 50°F to 70°F during the day. Knox and I visit in the summer months, where the nights are cool and days are mild. But the weather shifts quickly and the river is glacier-fed regardless of what the thermometer says. In winter, Sue has described wind chills reaching -100°F. The Arctic doesn’t modulate itself to human comfort.  That’s part of the point.

What are Kavik River Camp Accommodations Like?

Kavik River Camp accommodations include heated sleeping trailers, a communal dining hall, and a bathhouse with hot showers, primitive in the best possible way, with unexpected touches of comfort that will genuinely surprise you.

And I mean that. Let me set your expectations correctly, and then blow right past them.

On paper, Kavik is primitive. You sleep in a trailer. The walls are metal. The smell of mosquito coils drifts through the air like incense for people who take bears seriously. You are 500 miles north of Fairbanks with no cell signal and no room service and no concierge to call when you need extra towels.

And yet.

The trailers are warm, genuinely, deeply warm, in a way that hits different when you’ve just come off the tundra with the Arctic wind still in your ears. Sue keeps them clean and tight and safe, the way she keeps everything at Kavik: with complete competence and zero fuss. You fall asleep listening to the wind work against the metal walls and feel, inexplicably, like you are exactly where you are supposed to be.

The dining hall is where the real magic happens. It’s the gathering place where the bush pilots and the researchers and the geologists and the occasional Texas rancher and his six-year-old all end up at the same table, and the conversation covers ground you couldn’t have anticipated. Sue presides over it the way she presides over everything: generously and completely.

But the crown jewel of Kavik River Camp accommodations? The shower.

I know how that sounds. But I mean it. The bathhouse, home to a women’s side with an actual full-sized bathtub (one of the more surreal things you’ll encounter above the Arctic Circle), runs showers that are, without exaggeration, some of the hottest, most satisfying you will ever take in your life. There is something about the combination of real wilderness dirt, aching legs, and genuinely excellent water pressure that elevates a camp shower to a spiritual experience. You step out onto the tundra wrapped in a towel, steam still rising off you, and the view that greets you is the entire North Slope rolling toward the Arctic Ocean.

Knox and I have both done the full walk, towel and boots and nothing else, back across camp after a shower. One time a caribou watched us from about fifty yards with what I can only describe as polite confusion.

And then Sue made lavender-lemon-pecan cookies.

That is the Kavik experience in miniature: you think you’re signing up for rugged, and you are, genuinely, completely rugged. But then the cookies appear, and the shower is inexplicably transcendent, and the caribou is watching from across the tundra, and you realize that primitive and luxurious were never actually opposites. Sue just operates in the space where they overlap.

What Time Does the Sun Set in Kavik?

During the winter months, Kavik experiences 24-hour darkness for over 60 days, usually from late November through late January. The sun simply does not rise. For someone raised in South Texas where the seasonal light change is subtle at best, that concept is almost impossible to fully grasp until you are standing there in the middle of it. Sue lives through this every year, alone, and it is one of the many things that makes her story genuinely remarkable.

From about mid-May to early August, the opposite is true. The sun is up around the clock, circling the horizon in a long, slow arc that never dips below it. This midnight sun holds the tundra in a suspended golden hour that never quite ends. The light at 2 AM looks like the light at 7 PM, warm and long and amber, stretching shadows across the tundra moss in a way that makes the whole landscape feel like it exists slightly outside of normal time.

Photographers lose their minds at Kavik in the summer. The golden hour lasts all night. There is no chasing the light because the light never leaves. Every direction you point a camera, the tundra is glowing.

For sleeping, the blackout curtains in the trailers do their job, and the days are so relentlessly full that your body doesn’t argue much when you finally lie down. It’s the waking up you have to watch out for. Once your eyes open, the light pouring around the curtain edges tells your brain it is absolutely time to be somewhere, and the idea of lying there while the river might have new prints in the mud, or a fox might be making rounds, or the caribou might have shifted on the horizon, becomes genuinely unbearable.

The midnight sun doesn’t just change the schedule. It changes the feeling of time itself. You stop thinking in terms of AM and PM and start thinking in terms of what you might be missing if you stay inside one minute longer.

The Disconnected World Still Exists – You Have to Go Find It

So to the fellow early millennials who watched that video and felt something move in their chest, I want to say this:

The world we’re grieving still exists. It’s just not on the default screen anymore. You have to go find it. You have to get on a plane and then get on a bush plane and land on a gravel strip 500 miles north of the last place that felt familiar, and walk off into the tundra with your kid and your bear spray and your Nerf gun and your willingness to be completely, entirely, gratefully out of reach.

The streetlights don’t come on at Kavik in August. The sun never sets. But the principle remains: go outside, figure it out, find wonder.

That world still exists. Sue Aikens is living proof. The tundra is living proof. Knox, charging ahead in his Hawaiian Bigfoot shirt with his Nerf pistol bouncing at his hip, is living proof.

We haven’t lost it. We’ve just forgotten it somewhere between the first iPhone and the algorithm that learned what kept us scrolling. 

But it’s out there… past the Brooks Range, past the cell signal, past the habit of checking your phone to confirm you’re still real.

It’s out there, and it’s worth every bush plane mile to get to it.

Come back when you’re hungry.