As politicians in Washington tangle over whether to preserve the bounty of America's natural resources or exploit them, most people in Alaska say bring on the drills. For most of the year, it brings to mind the surface of the moon, this snow-covered treeless plain that rolls into the frozen Arctic Ocean so seamlessly it's impossible to tell where tundra ends and ocean begins.
Snowdrifts take the shape of waves, frozen in action.
In the nearby Inupiat Eskimo village of Kaktovik, houses are built on metal stilts to keep them steady above the permafrost. Food is either hunted or flown in, and polar bears wander by for leftovers. Here on the edge of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge on Alaska's North Slope, the temperature 30 below zero on this sunny day on the cusp of spring, people seem content to operate in a separate orbit from the rest of the country. But now, this remote and isolated spot, closer to the North Pole than Washington, D.C., finds itself in the midst of a national debate. On one side, oil companies clamor to tap the billions of barrels of oil said to lie beneath the refuge.