The Road North

Fall in the Arctic is a rumor. A week, maybe less, and most years the color never makes it that far north at all. I was leaving Fairbanks, about to pick up the Dalton Highway and run for the Arctic Ocean, when the road lifted into this and I had to pull over.
Everything you came for is stacked into one frame here. The aspens turned all at once. The spruce held their dark green behind them. And the road just kept climbing and dropping toward the mountains, the way it does for hundreds of miles before the trees give out and the tundra takes over.
I shot it long, so the hills fold into each other and the road feels shorter and steeper than it really is. That compression is the point. It is what the drive feels like from behind the wheel, not what it measures on a map.
For anyone who has pointed a car north just to see how far the color goes. Printed and finished to gallery standard, made to pull a room toward the horizon. A piece of the road to keep, long after the season has turned.