Whatever side you were on when the rift occurred, that's the side you stayed on. It was too wide to simply step over, too substantial a gap to drive across. We would have had to travel far south into Mexico to make a leap for it or go north through Canada to where the land ended and swim, though the waters were turbulent there as the Beaufort Sea spilled into the cravasse effectively creating a river that would someday be called The Calamity.