We eventually made it over the mountains, and as we landed on a narrow shelf next to the Aichilik River our tiny plane sent herds of caribou running across the green slopes. Miller, like the rest of us, was forced to disconnect completely. He is nothing if not an urbane cat—raised in a Dupont Circle townhouse that served as a 1970s-era salon for the African-American intelligentsia in Washington, D.C., and now a longtime fixture of the Chelsea art and music scene. Even in the wilderness, he always looked fly: khaki canvas pants, a tightly cut Levi’s denim jacket, a newsboy cap turned at a rakish angle. Our first afternoon in the refuge, I watched him through my field glasses as he walked slowly, calmly toward a herd of caribou, hands held out before him, the gesture oddly Vulcan.

At first, this National Geographic Society “emerging explorer” seemed disoriented by being disconnected. We had only been in the wilderness for a few hours when Miller approached my tent and asked, rather sheepishly, if I had any “paper books” I could spare. Turned out his iPad battery was winding down. Eventually Miller settled into the simpler rhythms of that primeval landscape. On the morning of Day Four, he talked about how the change in environment had affected him. “We’re going into information overload, where there’s too much of everything all the time,” he said, sitting on the bank of the swift and shallow Aichilik, swatting at swarms of mosquitos. When he muses, which he does easily and often, Miller speaks in an erudite stream-of-consciousness that can, in the space of a minute, swirl together James Joyce and Paul Robeson, Jorge Luis Borges and John Cage. “It’s so powerful to be here, and to think about how I could write a composition, how I could make a new multimedia work, just from this openness, just from hitting the Reset Button on my creative process and getting away from New York and getting away from it all. This is a full and rich place, and I am sitting here absorbing a tremendous amount of information that nature made.”

Getting away from it all. That, in a nutshell, has been the great offer of the wilderness experience since, more than a century ago, John Muir celebrated wildlands as a cure-all for a “tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people.” The rewards can be as simple as relaxation or—if your tastes are more like DJ Spooky’s—a chance at sublime contemplation.

Yet the opportunity to fully disconnect might be at risk thanks to the steady expansion of advanced telecommunications.

Micah Baird

Earlier this summer Parks Canada announced it is bringing wifi to its visitor centers, and the United States National Park Service isn’t far behind. Google is extending its popular Street View program to the backcountry with Google Trekker and enlisting adventurers to help photo-map even the most remote places. More ambitiously, the information giant is laying plans to extend connectivity to the world’s farthest hinterlands. Google is expected to spend between $1 billion and $3 billion to deploy a fleet of some 180 mini satellites that will provide an Internet signal from the sky. The plan may also involve high-altitude balloons and solar-powered drones supplying high-speed, broadband service. The idea of universal connectivity is, in a way, exciting. Why not share a selfie from right above Machu Picchu? For climbers preparing to make a peak ascent, real time weather info is a serious safety bonus. Far more importantly, global connectivity could be a huge asset to the billions of people who still haven’t had the opportunity to tap into the promise of the Internet.