The ice in the Chukchi Sea in January 1923 was not a frozen highway stretching 90 miles to Siberia.

It was a shifting, dangerous, largely unpredictable surface whose hazards were navigable only by people with deep experience and sophisticated assessment skills.

Iñupiat hunters traveled on sea ice regularly, and their knowledge of sea ice behavior was extraordinarily detailed.

They could read the ice’s structure to assess its stability, understand how wind and current patterns would move the ice over time, identify the visual cues that distinguished safe ice from ice that would collapse underweight or split along invisible fault lines.

This knowledge — developed over thousands of years of sea ice travel — was what separated successful Arctic travel from death.