By Chia-Chia Lin for the New York Times

To say that Alaska is what you make of it suggests unconstrained entitlement; it’s something the colonizers could have said. At the same time, it’s hard to ignore the fact that Alaska is one of the last places in this country where you can wander millions of acres of land, doing whatever and sleeping wherever you please. If someone might have objected to your actions elsewhere, here he would simply never know.

All that summer, I thought I had ventured to Alaska to try on a different way of life, one that tested my self-reliance and competence. I wondered if I’d failed. Now, years later, I believe I was simply searching for a place I’ll clumsily call an anti-home. I mean an antithesis to my own childhood home — for in the backcountry I’d found quiet and stillness and the edge of happiness — but I also mean a place at odds with all notions of home. A place with no safety net, no walls, no sense of enclosure or intimacy or kinship. A place of exposure. It was not so much that I wanted to prove something to others, but that I had a question for myself: Who was I, in a place like that?

With trail hiking, the questions are limited: Is that the path? Which fork should we take? But in the backcountry, the questions are so numerous, so overwhelming, as to achieve a nearly rhetorical pitch. Forward or backward or right or left or any of the degrees in between? Where did that mountain come from? Will we ever see another human being?

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Scientists at Colorado State University have taken a close look at Denali air as captured near the park entrance. A monitor there pulls air through a set of four filters, getting samples every third day. A park employee then mails the filters to the Lower 48.

Scientists studied the particles less than 2.5 micrometers in size trapped at the Denali station from 1988 to 2013. It takes dozens of specks that size to bridge the width of a human hair, but they combine to reduce visibility and are small enough to make it past our noses into our lungs. Due to its temperature inversions and 100,000 people staying warm in the subarctic, Fairbanks has a problem with a buildup of particle matter. Denali is squeaky clean by comparison, but Bian found a few invaders that drifted through the gates.

Bits of burned tundra and trees show up in the filters in summertime, especially years such as 2004, when wildfires burned an area in Alaska the size of Vermont. Sea salt from the northwest coast and other areas finds its way to the park in winter, when there are high winds, low temperatures and some open water.

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