newsminer.com

•I just received a note this morning that Toru Yamaguchi is not done walking, as he wants to spend some time in Nuiqsut, a village about 50 miles west of Deadhorse. He hopes to get to Barrow eventually.

He posed for a photo and gave a thumbs up sign.

According to two reports from Deadhorse Friday afternoon, the 37-year-old Japanese adventurer has made it to the edge of the oil field, pulling his homemade cart/trailer.

"He's here," said an employee of the North Slope Borough police.

When I saw him in Fox in late November and he confirmed the news that he was walking to Prudhoe Bay, I was afraid that we'd soon be writing his obituary.

He wasn't dressed in expensive winter gear and he was pulling a heavy cart in the dark. But he's proven to be a mighty tough character.

In December, there was a lot of publicity about Yamaguchi after he was reported missing. It turned out he had been given a ride into Fairbanks just before Christmas and that he planned to keep heading north.

He resumed his walk to the North Slope in January and picked up his cart. He slept inside the cart.

A News-Miner reader first reported seeing Yamaguchi on the Top of the World Highway in September.

The only detailed published account I have found about him was in the San Antonio Express-News in Texas more than two years ago.

“It’s my dream, it’s just a dream, I like to walk,” he told a reporter in 2006.

Yamaguchi began walking north from the southern tip of South America.

His equipment has changed somewhat in the past few years. In 2006, he was pushing a two-wheel dolly “stacked to his chin with necessities,” the paper said. He had a tent, cooler, clothing and spare provisions.

In Alaska, he pulled a cart and a boxed trailer. He sleeps in the trailer and camps along the road. On the big hills, one truck driver told me, the hiker made several trips up and down, ferrying loads in a backpack.

When the Texas reporter interviewed Yamaguchi, he spoke mainly in Spanish about his two-year trip through South America and sketched his route on paper. He had previously walked the length of Japan.

“I don’t want help. Only I want to walk every day,” he said.

“I like ‘Forrest Gump.’ Do you know? Forrest Gump is very pure,” he said.

“I only want to arrive to Alaska,” he said in San Antonio in November 2006.

The newspaper talked to Yamaguchi’s mother in Japan who said, “He has very big dream, the dream is walking, walking only, to Alaska.”