Jonathan Waterman

Working as talent, team leader, videographer, and writer, he has conceived or contributed to a half dozen adventure films including productions by WGBH, the Outdoor Life Network, and ESPN.

In 2001 Waterman published Arctic Crossing to chronicle his 2,200-mile paddle, sail, dogsled and ski trek across the roof of North America in a linear narrative.

Waterman's father Peter, a pianist, had composed music to Service's verse and gave the book The Spell of the Yukon, to Jon as a gift for his first trip to Alaska in 1976.

His essays were juxtaposed with biographical sketches about Olaus and Mardy Murie, who lobbied to create the Arctic National Wildlife Range in 1960.

Waterman wrote the book primarily to raise awareness about the beauty of the refuge and to prevent oil drilling on its wildlife rich coastal plain.

[8] Waterman followed up with an editorial in the Washington Post to continue raising support for wilderness protection of the coastal plain to prevent oil drilling.

Waterman's career revolves around rugged, immersion journeys, traveling broad sweeps of landscape and seas and rivers to establish a sense of place so that he could defend an otherwise defenseless nature.

[11] As he told one interviewer in 2014: What’s wrong with the idea of passionately speaking out for the causes you believe in?” We tend to be much more passive today about standing up for our natural places.

He also acted as talent, videographer, and writer for two films, including Chasing Water by Pete McBride, who mostly traveled the river basin in airplanes and accompanied Waterman for two days in the headwaters and a week in the delta.

In his 12th book, Northern Exposures, he wrote about his photography in this anthology of previously published essays[15] “Even when they appeared as ghosted-out, black-and-white chapter openings or shared space with glossy color advertisements in magazines, I took consolation that my images were more than just research tools for injecting imagery into my prose.”[16] His fourth book about Denali, Chasing Denali, published in 2018, details the legendary yet disputed first ascent of the mountain in 2010 by four gold miners.

The first-person memoir documents extraordinary changes in the Arctic over the past four decades of Waterman's northern travels as rising temperatures have caused extensive thawing of the permafrost, diminishment of sea ice, and the impacts on wildlife and culture.

Jonathan "Jon" Waterman was born in Providence, Rhode Island, raised in Massachusetts, and has lived in Colorado since 1989 with many returns to his former home state of Alaska.