Kids in the woods: Katmai’s face shows evidence of trying to climb into the squirrel’s hole

In honor of Katmai’s third birthday, Lituya’s first (last month), and my third year as a wilderness parent.
(Read First Year in the Woods and Second Year in the Woods here).

“No, I don’t want to walk to the lake, I want to walk all the way to town!”
“I want to run on the road!”
“No, I need to walk very slowly!”
“I have to visit at the dump truck with the broken engine!”
“I can’t come because I’m working on putting all this snow in the sled!”
“Carry me!”
(from 10 minutes of a walk with Katmai)

As he turns 3 years old, I find that my role as a parent is shifting from porter to outdoors coach. For years, I’ve been struggling with the logistics of HOW to bring Katmai out into the woods with us. But my biggest task now is squirming my way into that toddler mind of his and making sure he LIKES IT.

Katmai walks over the shattered rock that covers this part of Malaspina Glacier, and Mt. St. Elias provides a backdrop.

Katmai is always a big fan of playing on the beach.

His Own Two Feet

Last September, we watched Les’s plane buzz its way back over the vast expanse of Malaspina Glacier, leaving about a hundred miles from the nearest human, with two little kids and a ridiculously large pile of stuff. As we lashed the 95 lbs of food, 60 lbs of gear and diapers, and 19lbs of non-mobile baby onto the two mobile adults, I realized we had suddenly entered a new phase of parenthood.

Katmai was two and a half. And to get to our campsite, he would be walking. In fact, he would be carrying his own pack, with a two pound bag of raisins in it.

“Look Katmai, there’s a stream up ahead! Maybe when we get there, you can throw a rock in!”
“Why don’t you hold my hand, Katmai, and we can just walk up to those trees over there!”
“Hey Katmai, if we make it to the new campsite, you can have some dried pineapple!”

Katmai explores the mossy roots of trees undermined by melting ice below.

That first day, we only had to make it a quarter mile across the valley. But over the course of our entire two month expedition, we traveled around 100 miles. For most of it, both kids were passengers. But at 2.5 years old, Katmai was both a more awkward passenger, and a more reluctant one. Over that two months, he probably walked around 20 miles on his own two feet. And every single one of those miles was an exercise in patience only marginally easier (and sometimes more difficult), than carrying him.

The Joys of Nature

I want our children to love the outdoors. That’s a big part of why we take them out in the first place, right? I want Katmai to throw rocks in the creek, to stare down into a deep icy hole in fascination at the water gurgling into its depths, to kick the seeding fireweed into clouds of fluff that cover his fleece suit in a layer of white, to lay on his belly picking nagoon berries, to imagine rocks into cars and logs into dinosaurs, to run in a stream, to stomp his tracks into the mud, to drink from a trickle of glacial water, to eat snow…

Picking blueberries

But sometimes, I wish he would do all those things just a little faster. Sure, kid, look at that stick for a minute. But then get up again, and walk at a reasonable hiking pace in the direction we’re going, and don’t stop again until we’ve gotten at least a little ways along. OK? Sadly, this is not how a 2 year-old’s brain works.

Every time we go out, I practice seeing the world through Katmai’s eyes. Is being 10 yards from home any reason not to spend 15 minutes digging “mouse holes”? Aren’t the details of a snow-buried devil’s club fascinating after all? I’m a wilderness lover. And I love the details of nature as well. But toddler zen does not come naturally to me. I like to move through the world, at least a little bit, watching hills and valleys move by beneath my feet, discovering places we’ve never been before. And if we followed toddler zen all the time all the time – if we ate snow from every inch of snowbank, or “fed” spruce twigs to every single driftwood “dinosaur” on the beach, we’d never get anywhere at all.

Little explorer playing in the brush

Testing out the palatability of local vegetation

The Art of Coaxing

The compromise is coaxing. From my own childhood, I remember my mother parceling out M&Ms and Skittles to my brother, and playing word games with me, coaxing us along the trails of Washington’s Cascade Mountains. Scanning blogs and forums, I’ve gleaned tips and tricks from the parents of older children, from “magic energy drinks” to hide-and-seek and scavenger hunts along the trail. We aren’t giving up wilderness travel any time soon. And we won’t be able to carry our children forever. It’s a delicate balancing act, trying to gently ease a willful almost-3-year old into big-kid expectations.

“Katmai, let’s go on an adventure!”
“I don’t want to! I want to go to town!”
“But adventures to new places are really fun! Only big boys can do them. And we can go on an adventure into the trees, and we can look for tracks in the snow, and we can have warm cocoa when we’re done.”
“Will there be toys there?”
“We can bring some toys.”
“I want to bring my horses and my train engines and my cars and my bunny and my backhoe and…”
“That’s too many to carry. How about just the horses?”

Katmai brings his plastic horses on an “adventure” behind the yurt

Winter Awkwardland

Katmai clutched his plastic horses as I wrangled him into pants, snow pants, shirt, fleece, two pairs of socks, neoprene booties, elbow-length mittens, and a beautiful whaling parka with a wolverine fur ruff. And that was just the first kid. I sent him out the door, turning to stuff Lituya into a fleece, booties, and her snowsuit, while she whined and tried to wriggle away. Then I realized I wasn’t dressed for the single digit temperatures myself, and hurried to grab snow pants, gaiters, gloves, hat, and mittens, while Lituya lay immobile on the floor with her arms and legs stuck straight out, fussing at the sudden restriction. I threw Lituya on my back in the woven wrap, arranging an over-large coat over both of us.

Visiting the unplowed world.

We were ready for “adventure.” Out the door of the yurt, we turned left. Not to the trail, but into the narrow band of woods that lies behind the yurt, and the gully beyond.

“What do you think we’ll find, Katmai?”
“Wood bugs!”
“What are wood bugs?”
“They have tails like this, and legs, and they walk and they eat snow and they eat trees, and they’re bugs because they go on land.”

Apparently, “wood bugs” were all the scattered branches and twigs sticking up through the snow. We made slow progress from wood bug to wood bug, Katmai marveling at how more of them appeared beneath his feet as he sunk into the deep drifts. We talked about their dietary habits, pointed out their body parts, and continued into the trees.

A heavy dump of wet snow brings the accumulation at the yurt up to 4 and a half feet.

Lituya slowly sung herself to sleep on my back as I stomped. On this January day, I was home alone with both kids. This was no intrepid glacier expedition, or major backpacking trip. Just an ordinary afternoon.

A wind came up, sending piles of fluffy snow sailing off the trees in a sudden shower of white. But in the gully, where we were, the wind was light enough that even the little ones didn’t complain.

I let Katmai choose the way, even when it led us through deep and brushier snow than the route I would have chosen. The snow was waist deep in places, and neither of us had snowshoes, so I got my own excercise by vigorously stomping down a trail good enough for Katmai to walk on. He scrambled under a log, climbed “steep mountains”, and carefully stomped his larger horse through all of it, talking about the tracks ‘Boozo the horse’ was making. We found caves for the horses to peer in, snow for them to walk in, and devils club flowers and dried out stalks of grass for them to eat.

The snow in our yard dwarfs adults and toddlers alike.

Even here, on a tiny piece of our own property, I discovered things. I found a tree toppled in one of the fall storms, lying across the gully on our summer trail to the nettle patch. I looked at the tracks of voles and rabbits, as Katmai insisted that they were all made by “wood bugs” I lifted Katmai up the steepest parts of the slope, then I stomped a trail back down as he slid behind me.

In brush and deep snow drifts, the quarter mile took us nearly 2 hours. Back on the road, Katmai took off running in the tracks left by the road grader, exclaiming excitedly at a passing snowmachine.

Erin and sleeping Lituya in the snow

The Passenger

I may be turning into an outdoors coach for Katmai, but my kid-carrying days are by no means over. Nearly every time I step outside, Lituya is riding on my back.

It’s hard to be a one-year-old in the winter. She’s old enough to have desires beyond watching the world from my back. But she’s too young to make any headway wearing a snowsuit on a slippery path through deep powder.

I love the snow. And at this point, carrying a 21 pound kid on my back is so ordinary I hardly notice it. But she’ll be happy to see spring.

Playing in the treasure trove of spruce cones stored by squirrels.

The Future

Looking at the other children I know, I try to imagine mine at 4 and 2 years old. Then I try to imagine those 4 and 2 year olds on a 600 mile 3-month-long journey around Cook Inlet. I can’t imagine it yet. Which is only par for the course for a big adventure – especially with over a year left to plan it. Being an adventurer means always planning new challenges you can’t really imagine until you get there. Having kids means the exact same thing. So we continue our quest, working to become experts in the unexpected.

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We watched this bizarre vessel get towed by on its way to Homer. Eventually it will be moved to upper Cook Inlet to drill oil and gas exploration wells.

Over half of Alaska’s electricity comes from Cook Inlet natural gas. It’s powering the computer I’m typing this on. And it’s running out. By 2017, we’re supposed to have only half of what we need, an annual shortfall of 50 billion cubic feet.

People are less worried about this now than they were just a few months ago, as new discoveries come online. But the fact remains that the easy gas is gone – what is left will be more expensive to extract, and some may not prove economic to extract at all.

Read more about the history and future of Natural Gas in Cook Inlet.

50 billion cubic feet sounds like an enormous gap. But that shortfall is only around 2% of what we’ve exported in the past 40 years. If all the gas had been kept in state, we could have filled that “production gap” for decades beyond the projected shortfall.

Why have we spent the past several decades exporting trillions of tons of natural gas, only to find ourselves suddenly scrambling for enough of the stuff to keep the lights on?

For any natural resource extraction project, there’s usually a debate. And the two sides often line up along the lines of “Now” or “Never.” The “Now” camp touts jobs and tax revenue, and the benefits of economic development. The “Never” camp points out pollution, and the negative impacts to ecosystems, communities, and other industries.

There’s rarely a “Later” camp.

The Beluga power plant: Alaska’s largest natural gas generation facility.

Why not? I’m not an economist, but this is something I’ve wondered about for years. If the public owns the gas and oil and metals under the land, leaving them in the ground is a form of savings account – with interest in the form of increasing resource prices. Extraction, on the other hand, really is spending the wealth – removing that resource for good.

From the oil/gas company perspective, I can understand why they probably aren’t worried about saving resources for later. They’ll do whatever brings the most profit – likely extracting the resource as quickly as possible, selling it for the highest price possible, then picking up and moving to a new spot.

From the state perspective, it’s not so simple. The state owns all the gas in Cook Inlet. Actually the public does. And the state has a constitutional mandate to use all public resources in the best interest of all Alaskans:
“The legislature shall provide for the utilization, development, and conservation of all natural resources belonging to the State, including land and waters, for the maximum benefit of its people.”

So we exported gas as quickly as possible while failing to secure an alternative source of heat and power for state residents. If new gas plays don’t work out very soon, we’ll need to turn around and start importing LNG to the same facility that exported for 40 years. Was that really the best we could do?

The long-anticipated arrival of a jackup rig into Cook Inlet.

The Case for Leaving Wealth in the Ground

Alaska is a resource extraction state. How does an economy dependent on natural resources avoid a seemingly-inevitable boom and bust?

Boom and bust is how it generally works, here and in the rest of the world. Resources are discovered and quickly depleted. Then it’s either on to the next jackpot, or on to an economic decline.

Wouldn’t it be nice if there were some gas, oil, and metals for our kids and for future generations of Alaskans to use? All these resources will only be more valuable the longer we wait to extract them. If you’re manufacturing a product, it makes sense to step up production as demand and prices rise. But if you’re selling a finite pool of a non-renewable resource, you might get more money for your product if you parcel it out – leaving some to sell when prices rise even further.

Drill rig at the Pebble Mine prospect in March 2008.

Chances are, the techniques used to extract all our resources will only become more efficient, effective, and environmentally friendly with time. Some of the painful tradeoffs between ecosystem damage and industrial development might simply disappear in the future.

It’s not just oil and gas. Say we don’t build a Pebble Mine now. In another 100 years, maybe we’ll have mining techniques that eliminate the (impossible) necessity to safely store toxic wastes forever. Metals may be even more valuable then. Maybe we’ll have a tax structure that gives the state more value for its minerals. Wouldn’t that be better for Alaskans?

Unfortunately, such projects are approved or denied based on a flurry of paperwork and regulatory check boxes, politics, and lawsuits. Such decisions are not based on whether they represent the best use of our land and resources in the long term.

Facilities and waste rock piles at Red Dog Mine

Planning for Empty

In Cook Inlet, what would have happened if we had parceled out gas leases to spread out development for our own use rather than exporting? Maybe we’d have a lot more left now to burn in our power plants and homes. But maybe it wouldn’t have worked.

Slow and steady seems like an attractive idea. But it’s possible that without the LNG exports, the oil companies wouldn’t have found Cook Inlet gas profitable to develop at all – that the export potential is what led to development of gas for in-state use. I don’t know how likely that is. Either way, a slow and steady approach would have missed all the economic activity that came from the exports.

Still, if you’re going to depend on the extraction of a non-renewable resource, you ought to have a plan for what happens when that resource runs dry. 40 years ago, Alaska could have started investing the money from lease sales and taxes in renewable energy projects for the Railbelt, rendering the eventual depletion of gas a much smaller problem. But we didn’t. Now, funding for those projects will be much more of a struggle and time is also a problem as the gas runs out.

Packrafter and drill rig in Cook Inlet

And the gas in Cook Inlet is dwarfed by a much bigger problem: Alaska’s entire economy and government is dependent on North Slope oil. We’ve done OK at saving some of the money in anticipation of that oil eventually being gone. But have we done enough to develop an economy beyond the raw extraction of resources?

From oil to metal to fish, Alaska has a lot of natural resources, including some in decline, and some yet untapped. Can we learn from our own (and the rest of the world’s) mistakes, and treat the rest of them like the irreplaceable savings account that they are?

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Today I’m trading guest posts with Roz Savage, an amazing adventurer from the UK. Read my post “Why Alaska?” over at Roz’s website.

Taking up my oars for the cause

It’s funny, the things you find yourself doing when you fall in love.

In my case, it wasn’t a man that I fell for (and no, not a woman either) – it was Planet Earth. Having spent much of my adult life doing a job I didn’t like to buy stuff I didn’t need, I had  a belated environmental epiphany at the age of 36 and realised two important things:

- that all the stuff in the world wouldn’t make me happy if I wasn’t happy being myself

- that I, along with most of the developed world, was on an unsustainable path of consumption that was unlikely to end well for humankind.

These life-changing insights coincided with another important development: in search of an answer to the question “What will make me happy?” I wrote two versions of my own obituary – the one I wanted, and the one I was heading for if I carried on as I was. It may seem obvious to you, but it came as something of a surprise to me when I discovered that I did not want to spend the rest of my life working in an office cubicle. In the face of potential worldwide catastrophe, the “security” offered by a steady job no longer seemed quite so reassuring.

From here it was a large but swift leap of logic to deciding that I would take up my oars for the cause and row across oceans to bring awareness to environmental issues. It seemed like a good idea at the time and has indeed proved to be so. Yet I have spent much of the last 7 years, during which I have spent over 500 days at sea and rowed over 15,000 miles, trying to figure out just what the connection is between voyaging slowly across vast expanses of water and saving the world.

Luckily, I have had plenty of alone time to think about it, and this is what I have concluded:

1. The world is not as big as we think it is

Having rowed across the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans, I can tell you that although the world is big, it is not as big as we might think. We might believe that compared with the size of the Earth, 7 billion humans is not enough to have a real impact, but it is. When you’ve seen trash floating around in the ocean, thousands of miles from land, you realise that we have touched every corner of our planet.

Rowing the Atlantic

2. Nature makes no special allowances for humans

There is nothing like twenty foot waves to remind you where human beings stand in the overall scheme of things. We might think that we have nature under control, but she is so very much more powerful than we are. Whether we “deserve” to survive as a species is not a moral judgement, it is a natural one. We are as subject to the laws of nature as anything else, and on a finite planet we can’t continue get away from the pollution we are creating.

3. Every action counts

This is the good news bit. Although there have been a few major catastrophes that grab the headlines – Chernobyl, the Exxon Valdez, the Gulf oil spill – most of our problems have been created by 7 billion humans making short-sighted decisions day after day. If we make positive choices as consumers, such as using less plastic, walking more and driving less, reducing, reusing, repurposing, repairing, and if all else fails, recycling, then we can still turn this situation around. We need our leaders to come up with smarter policies too, but in the meantime there is a lot we can do, starting in our own homes, starting today.

The Pacific

You might think that anything you do is too small to make a difference – just a drop in the ocean, so to speak – but every action counts. As an analogy, one of my oar strokes doesn’t get me very far, but 5 million of them has taken me the best part of all the way around the world. I’ve learned through hard experience that if I look at the challenge as a whole, it becomes too overwhelming to imagine and I lose all motivation. But if I keep on just sticking my oars in the water, taking one oarstroke at a time, eventually I get there. Those tiny oar strokes add up.

So there we have it. It might not sound like much of an insight to show for 15,000 miles of rowing, but I have found it a powerful lesson, and I now offer it to you in the hope that you will find it helpful – no matter what your life challenges may be.

Roz Savage

Stay in touch

If you are interested in following my next adventure, this summer I will be kayaking and cycling around Britain, doing beach cleanups along the way. After years of talking about environmental issues, it is high time I rolled up my sleeves and got my hands dirty. I will be doing my best to spread awareness, but at the very least I will leave a trail of cleaner beaches in my wake – at least until the next tide of trash comes in. You will be able to follow along at my website, or on Twitter, or on Facebook.

I hope to visit Alaska in 2013, to join Ground Truth Trekking for part of their next adventure. A part of the world I haven’t seen before, and two incredible people I haven’t met before. I can’t wait. You won’t find me back in that office cubicle again any time soon.

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After a storm, the signs of rapid coastal erosion are especially obvious. Here, spruce roots trail uselessly down to the beach, where the dirt has been washed away beneath them. Coastal Erosion Slideshow

Near the edge of the ice, a curtain of spruce roots trailed down a steep sand bluff.  Their ends tangled with the greenish-brown piles of kelp at the top of the beach – forest abruptly meeting ocean.  Fishing buoys and a dead skate, tossed up by the tide, littered the mossy forest floor at the ocean’s edge.  Freshly broken trees, bright green and smelling strongly of spruce pitch, had toppled down onto the gravel beach below. I walked the edge of Malaspina Glacier on the Gulf of Alaska coast, watching global warming and the resulting erosion remake the world in front of my eyes.

It was the second time in a week I’d stood on this shore, and in that short time a storm had reshaped it completely.  Stream mouths were re-routed.  Great piles of logs had washed away, accumulating on new stretches of shore. We hunted for antique glass balls exhumed by storm waves and strewn in drift lines with green twigs and uprooted tube-worms.  In a few places, the ocean had scraped away the sand altogether, revealing soft mud that offered little resistance to the crashing waves.

The base of this dead tree is washed by waves, on a shrinking beach on Alaska’s Lost Coast, near the rapidly-melting edge of Malaspina Glacier. Here, global warming is leading to rapid coastal erosion.

A huge part of the globe’s population and infrastructure is found on coastlines.  Global warming is quickly becoming a driving factor in the reshaping of these shores – through a combination of sea level rise and beach dynamics.  In the fall of 2011, I spent two months on Alaska’s wild Lost Coast, experiencing the impacts of global warming at the edge one of North America’s largest glaciers, and exploring the implications for the rest of the world. 

During the storm, sea foam pelted our  tent as we rolled boulders into place, anchoring the thin nylon walls.  The intensity of the gale kicked up our adrenaline, and whipped the surf up into what seemed like monstrous curls.  But with winds of perhaps 50 miles per hour, it wasn’t a 100-year storm, or a 10-year storm.  It might not even be a 1-year storm.  This happens all the time.  Every year, or every few years, the waves come crashing into the trees.  Here, on the melting edge of Malaspina Glacier, the beaches are washing away.

Once this was the Sitkagi Bluffs, but now the ice is melting and lakes and lagoons replace the towering ice.

In the middle of the wilderness, erosion harms little beyond the spruce trees.  But around the world, shorelines are home to great metropolises and ports that move all the world’s goods.  All are subject to the complicated dynamics that drive the formation and destruction of beaches, and vulnerable to changes in those forces. In most cases, global warming leads to increased erosion and endangers coastal communities.

Read More

We journeyed to Malaspina Glacier to explore the impacts of global warming first hand, bit the link between warming and coastal erosion turned out to be far more dramatic and interesting than I anticipated. So often, global warming-caused sea level rise is portrayed something like the filling of a bathtub. But coasts are far more dynamic, and vulnerable, than that image suggests. So how does it actually work? Read the rest of my essay here, see the coastal erosion slideshow, or see an example of melting and erosion at Malaspina as seen in photos and maps from the 1890s to today.

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Katmai walks over the shattered rock that covers this part of Malaspina Glacier, and Mt. St. Elias provides a backdrop.

Today I’ve got a guest post on wilderness travel with kids at the “Adventure Tykes” blog:

“Plan what you can. Be adaptable for everything you can’t. Cultivate flexibility, stubbornness, caution, and guts. Embrace the inconvenience – no adventure will be as easy as jumping in a car and driving from heated building to heated building. Don’t worry that others aren’t doing it. Embrace the slower pace of life. It may not be comfortable at every moment. There will be whining. But adventure is addictive. In the end, everyone will thrive, and you won’t be able to imagine living your life differently.”

Read more…

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It’s traditional, round about now (or a bit earlier if I wasn’t procrastinating) to reflect back on the previous year – accomplishments, trials, major events, pretty pictures…

The first day of 2011 brought us a brand new member of Ground Truth Trekking. The last few months of the year brought us an amazing expedition to Malaspina Glacier. Smaller adventures and projects filled the spaces in between. So here is our year in pictures.

January: Born New Year’s Day, Lituya’s arrival was the first event of our 2011 (and by far the most significant one).

February: Nursing while snowshoeing – adapting our newly larger family to our standard outdoor lifestyle

March: When snow covers the alder, the hills and mountains around Seldovia open up to snowshoeing. While we were putzing around in Seldovia, Bjorn and Kim were embarking on the winter half of their expedition to Donlin Mine

April: Visiting Sitka for a book event, we arrived at the height of the herring spawn, where roe-covered seaweed turned every beach golden with tasty eggs.

May: Beginning our planning for the Life on Ice expedition, Katmai mixes brownie dough – for a special treat in the wilderness.

June: By the end of June, the garden was going strong. Friends helped harvest radishes for radish salad and radish green pesto.

July: The trail behind the yurt winds its way up to the “bumps” – where meadows of alpine tundra give a view of Seldovia below, and the mountains beyond.

August: In the beginning of August, salmonberries and blueberries show up in force, filling both freezers and pies.

September: Dropped off in the Samovar Hills, we explore an ice-locked landscape at the edge of Malaspina Glacier. The stand of hundred-year-old trees on this ridge in the Samovar Hills seems out of place, but older trees appearing from beneath glacial till tell of another time when forest grew more widely here.

October: After walking across 15 miles of ice, we follow the glacier’s edge on the Lost Coast’s long sandy beaches. The famously universal glue of the barnacle held fast on this smooth wood.

November: The changing season, with storms bringing sleet that often froze soon after, left us ready to head home.

December: Holiday party season is also power-outage season, leaving this yurt party lit by candles and headlamps. Settling back in at home, we turn our attention to new projects.

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sequel coming

I rarely introduce myself as a writer. I was the high-school student who hated English class. The college student who never took a single writing course. But as the years go by, being a writer has grown to encompass more of my time, and more of my identity.

Sound-canceling headphones are playing music in my ears, as I attempt to ignore Hig and the kids in the background for a few hours of work. In one window on my cluttered laptop, I’m diligently plodding through 200 pages of hand-written notes from Malaspina Glacier, transcribing them into digital form (so far, I’ve gotten to page 82). In another window I’m working on an article on global warming and coastal erosion, trading comments back and forth with Hig on the complicated science of beach dynamics. In another window, this blog. And in the last window, the first chapter of my next book.

An official contract from Mountaineers Books is sitting in my email inbox, waiting to be signed. I have until the end of the summer to write it. They have until Fall 2013 to turn it into a physical book.

The most common (and heavy) way we traveled

I won’t tell you the title, because I hate titles and will almost certainly leave that chore until the last possible minute. Also, the publisher likes to help pick them.

So what am I writing?

Follow me as our young family treks through the remote corners of Alaska, exploring the intersection of wilderness and industry in America’s wildest state. With two small children in tow, we set out to explore our vast wild home: walking the coast of the Arctic Ocean, living for months on the crumbling edge of Alaska’s largest glacier, visiting remote mines and remote villages, and building a life in a yurt at the edge of the wilderness…

This text came from the book proposal I wrote – basically a long sales pitch to convince the publisher that what I aim to write is something people might actually want to read.

Learning to garden

Hig: “Somehow, we always manage to do things that others think are crazy – verging on impossible.”
It’s an odd position to be in, trying to explain why what we spend our time doing is worth reading about. But I believe in it enough to keep trying. I guess through some combination of Hig’s optimism, my stubbornness, and our overlapping vision, we’ve devoted our lives to doing things worth reading about: Ground Truthing, immersing ourselves in whatever seems interesting or important, and learning by diving head-first into the wilderness and the communities that surround it. Somehow we always end up with an experience that is an adventure – we push our limits and find ourselves surprised, enlightened, and always looking for more.

And looking around at my bookshelf, I’m comforted by the fact that I’m not really alone in this odd pursuit – we all gain from the well-told experiences of others.

I’ll say more on the book as it progresses beyond a proposal and an outline. But if you’re interested, I’ll certainly announce the final version on our email list (infrequent emails)

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Lituya was generally much more interested in exciting new twigs and rocks than the expansive vistas that surrounded us.

In the past week and a half that I’ve been home, I’ve baked pies for Thanskgiving, enjoyed the crunch of last summer’s cabbages, spent money, eaten out of my own bowl, been overwhelmed by emails, used our washing machine, reconnected with friends and family, and reveled in the magic of light switches.

It’s good to be home.

Where I can hurry to start a fire in the wood stove to push back the morning chill. Where I can juggle two kids in a small living space. Where a day’s errands might involve walking a few miles in the cold pulling a sled full of kids and stuff. Or coaxing Katmai along a snowy trail as I try not to be impatient. Where I can step out my door to an amazing view of wild places, looking for the tracks of all the little animals that came past in the night.

Sometimes, it seems like my “real life” and “expedition life” are not so different after all.

Erin threads her way through stranded icebergs littered by Oily Lake.

But however primitive our everyday home, and however beautiful the next-door wilderness, it’s not the same. A real journey is a profound experience in a way that’s difficult to describe. Even at toddler speed. Even after we’ve done so many of them.

I can’t distill those 2 months into one blog post (expect more to come), but here’s a taste of what we learned along the way.

Ice-Locked:

A dozen yards ahead, a black furry shape paused at the foot of the slope. Its sleek fur and broad flat tail shone in a brief patch of sun, the first break in the rain we’d had for several days. Katmai and I stopped, watching the wolverine for nearly a minute before he noticed us.

15 miles of ice separates the Samovar Hills from the forests and rivers of the Gulf of Alaska coast. 5 miles of ice separates them from similar sets of hills. But in this ice-locked world, we saw bears and wolverines. We heard the whistling of marmots from their holes in piles of rock. We saw a lone canine track on a high slope, and watched finger-length Dolly Varden swim in the valley’s network of streams. I tried to picture a marmot hopping crevasses, a fish swimming underneath ice… All of these animals must have crossed a sweep of open glacier. But when?

History Repeats:

The stand of hundred-year-old trees on this ridge in the Samovar Hills seems out of place, but older trees appearing from beneath glacial till tell of another time when forest grew more widely heare.

Maybe the marmots hop crevasses. Maybe when they showed up, there were no crevasses to hop. Everywhere we went, we trod on new ground – muddy slopes where the ice has melted away, young thickets of alder and willow springing up at the edge of the mud. Malaspina Glacier is shrinking rapidly, melting along with most of the world’s glaciers in this period of rapid human-driven climate change.

But at the glacier’s edges, we found a few large stumps of spruce trees. Old, grey, and larger than any living trees around, looking out of place in the mud and rubble and young plants. Sometime in the distant past, the glacier was even smaller than it is today. Sometime in the not-so-distant future, the forests will grow here again.

Beasts of Burden:

We tried putting nearly everything in the packraft-rickshaw. We tried putting it all in Hig’s pack, leaving me to carry both kids. We tried letting Katmai walk on his own, coaxing him along with puddles, interesting pieces of driftwood, and the promise of dried pineapples. We tried pushing him over highway of white ice in the rickshaw. We tried stuffing all of us in the family-sized packraft. The first few times we moved camp, we tried every possible arrangement we could think of to move the four of us and all our gear.

Katmai walks over the shattered rock that covers this part of Malaspina Glacier, and Mt. St. Elias provides a backdrop.

By the end of the trip, we’d moved camp 28 times, covering about a hundred miles in the course of that two months (not counting all our various day hikes). I wish I could say we discovered a magic solution. We sent a few excess pieces of gear back with visiting guests. Hig spent a few days caching and retrieving heavy bags of food, rather than attempting to move with all of it. But mostly, we resigned ourselves to the awkwardness, and embraced the snail-like pace.

The Gift of Being Slow:

In 2007, we walked the same piece of coast we traveled this fall, covering in a few days what we just explored for over a month. The kids forced us to be slow. Slow enough to watch how the super-cooled ice springs changed over the course of a day. Slow enough to explore icy crevasses opening up in a mossy forest floor. Slow enough to wait for a high tide storm to sweep waves into Sitkagi Lagoon, sending trees tumbling out into the maw of the surf. Slow enough to creep around all the hidden lakes a few miles back from the shore, where trees and rocks tumble over cliffs of ice, and the world is rapidly changing shape. Slow enough to see a dozen feet of erosion in a chunk of coast we walked several times. Slow enough to follow the seals up into to Malaspina Lake with the tide, and to discover an ice cave where a river disappeared off the map. Slow enough to follow the tracks of the wildlife following our own tracks.

Before the kids, we never would have imagined planning a trip like this. Now, I can’t imagine missing everything we saw.

Our Titanum Goat tent on the ice of Malaspina Glacier

Fire Saves Our A**:

Part of the load we lugged through those 28 camps was a 10 foot circular tent, floorless but double-walled, with a small cylindrical titanium stove, and around 7.5 feet of titanium stovepipe. At 6 pounds, it was a huge jump up from the 1 pound pyramid we’ve been carrying for years. And that extra 5 pounds was what made this trip possible.

On cold dark mornings, we barely had to leave the bed to start the fire, having the tent comfortably warm and water on the stove before the kids even woke up. On stormy days, when blowing sleet battered the tent, we could sit inside and cook pancakes while the kids played happily, all kept dry by the double walls. We could dry laundry and wet gear on a line hung from the pole holding up the tent.

Lituya lounges in the warm tent

Over the months of increasing cold and dark, we burned that stove for over 300 hours. Without it, we would have needed to carry at least 5 more pounds of clothing between us, and would have been much less comfortable for it.

“I Am Not A Climbing Surface!”:

This was Katmai’s most repeated quote of the trip – applied to his sister, seemingly every other minute as they jockeyed for space in the limited confines of the tent. My version was usually: “Don’t climb on me right now Katmai, I’m doing an important job.” (feeding the fire, packing our stuff, really anything at all).

Two months without stepping indoors was by far the longest we’d gone. At first, Hig laughed at me when I said the thing I missed most was a chair. Then he understood. In some ways, our yurt is still a small and crowded space. But I can sit somewhere out of child climbing range.

Katmai is always a big fan of playing on the beach.

Bubble Fish, Running Mud, and Dinosaurs:

As we stepped off the ice after crossing the expanse of Malaspina Glacier, I was awestruck by the springs at Fountain Stream, where thick grey supercooled water boils up from nothing – great cauldrons immediately springing into a full-fledged glacial river. Katmai remembers our campsite on the silty mud flats, where he spun our bicycle wheel to make little holes in the sand for his pretend ants to live in. The vastness of the ice, the power of the storms, the transformations of the rapidly shifting landscape – all of those were lost on the kids.

So what did they get from the journey? A toddler’s world is small. Finding berries in a patch of tundra. Making “bubble fish” by splashing in a tiny stream. Climbing every boulder, and turning smaller rocks into boats. Dropping rocks into deep blue holes in the glacier’s ice. Looking into moulins. Marveling at a seagull following the packraft. Making tracks in the sand. “Paddling” the raft. Feeding driftwood “dinosaurs”. Wading through sea foam. Chasing snowballs. Examining a dead sea lion. Learning all the animals and plants seemingly effortlessly. Imitating every camp chore.

A baby’s world is even smaller. Eating fistfuls of sand. Mouthing smooth rocks. Crawling on smooth mud. Investigating camp gear. Watching the world from a perch on mama’s back.

And we wonder why our lens is always so dirty…

Spending 24 hours a day with their parents, without the distractions of computers and phones and errands and work to suck our attention away. Seeing things that almost no adult has ever seen. And being happy and compliant about as often as small children are in any situation.

Wildlife:

At Malaspina Lake, the snow was perfect for tracking. Lines of our tracks went back and forth along the snowy beach for the past several days – some light marks on top of a hard frozen crust, others sunk deep into the slush on a warmer day. And each morning, we watched closely as we left camp, looking for tracks not left by human feet.

Bear tracks in the snow near our camp at Malaspina Lake

Nearly every day we found them. First the bears, making us nervous with tracks that passed uncomfortably close to our camp, and leaving us puzzled as to their motivations. By the middle of an unseasonably cold November, it seemed like all the bears ought to be heading to sleep. And even if they weren’t, we expected them a couple miles away on the coast, feasting on the untouched carcass of a dead sea lion. Not up here at the icy edge of Malaspina Lake, wandering across a snow covered delta, eating only lupine roots.

As we traced our tracks further, we found the footprints of more bears, a small canine, and a wolverine. All checking out our tracks, as we later checked out theirs. On all our older faster trips, the animals must have watched us just as much, as we hurried forward, never seeing their signs.

Every Trip Is Exactly Long Enough

The last time we set the stove up, Hig banked sand around the edges where the cylinder had started to burn through. We didn’t think that piece would have survived another packing. The ice and snow were closing in – ice closing off the packraft travel options, as snow closed off the walking options. Our gear was set up for fall, and we shivered as the early winter closed in. A few hours after landing in Yakutat on a cold sunny morning, a storm moved in, dumping a heavy load of snow.

Six inches of snow covered the beach, and Katmai was fascinated.

I don’t know if it’s coincidence, or many years of training our own expectations. On an expedition, I almost never wish for it to end early. And at the end of an expedition, I almost never wish it could stretch longer.

P.S. – You can now buy our movie! (from the 4,000 mile walk from Seattle to the Aleutians – on sale through December)

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(Journal date 10-30-11)

It was a small and gentle stream, flowing out between mossy green boulders on a sunny afternoon, almost shallow enough to wade. Then it was a place of driving rain that stung our faces, driving sea foam that plastered the tents, gusts that lifted boulders from the tent stakes, thunder, lightning, and the deafening clatter of hail.

Angry coast

After the storm, high tide sent surges of water over our hastily abandoned camp. And the mouth of the lagoon had transformed–from a small and gentle stream to a roiling swatch of roiling white several hundred yards wide. Water poured out of the lagoon between giant breaks of surf that sent ocean waves crashing back in.  A raft of logs was caught in the tug of war, battered and broken on the rocks until they were finally tossed all the way into the sea, streaming east down the coast with the waves. Salt spray filled the air, and waves splashed the rocks all the way to the top of the beach, where we stood to watch in the forest above. Evening brought a low tide, a flash of sun, and a retreat of the angry ocean. We walked between freshly-broken logs and clear blue icebergs, by the mouth of a small-again stream.

Open beaches

Malaspina is North America’s largest tidewater glacier. Four years ago, when we were first here, it squeaked by on a technicality.  A few pieces of kelp, a stripe of sea foam at high tide, coming in through a narrow channel. Now it is unquestionable. The lagoon rises and falls with every tide, and tastes brackish even at the far end. Barnacles grow at the saltier depths. And the surf crashes in and out, sending icy blue chunks of Malaspina scattered along the coast. Sitkagi Lagoon is a place that doesn’t even exist on the USGS maps. A place that is still out of date on most recent satellite photos, and far longer then when we were here 4 years ago. Forest topped ice bluffs calve into the lagoon, and the mouse bite out of the massive Malaspina glacier grows larger and larger.

Visitors

The children have slowed our pace and redefined our traveling style. Enough that people can communicate with us, airplanes can meet us, and instead of driving forward at a 15-20 miles per day pace, we’re the ones slowing folks down.

Michael, Carl, and the family

For the past week, we’ve been a party of 7. The four of us, plus Carl, a photographer and guide from Anchorage (who’s been with us for a couple weeks), Michael, a weather forecaster from Anchorage, and Sam, our programmer from Wisconsin. Sometimes, more people add more complications, driving us to camp in a terribly exposed spot none of us would have chosen on our own. But they lend helping hands holding a tent up in the storm, and adult conversation around our stove in the evening. They’re all headed out today after high tide, bringing this blog post with them. We were alone for nearly a month before Carl arrived. It will be odd to be alone again.

P.S. Thanks for all the questions. We’re happy to keep answering them. Sorry if any get lost in Sat Phone quirkiness.

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(Journal date 10-21-11)

Retracing

Supercooled water from hundreds of feet below sea level

In the pre-dawn cold, ice filled all the little streams around our camp.  Terraces of ice, spilling down every channel like low-angle stair steps, freezing from the bottom up.  The start of the streams was only a few hundred yards away, where super-cooled silty water boiled out of a patch of leafless brush.  As the day warmed, the ice-chilled passages started to melt, draining to leave long fingers of ice crystals behind.  By afternoon, it was only a small silty stream again, the deep glacial source only visible at the springs itself.  Everyday, the pattern repeated itself, as water came up from beneath our silt flats, from beneath hundreds of feet of ice.

In 2007, we were lucky to have noticed them at all.  We had a stormy night’s camp near the beach at which Hig burned not only wood but large pieces of beach trash.  And in the cold dark morning after, we wandered inland in the hopes of avoiding an icy stream wade, stumbling across the cold springs, spending perhaps 20 minutes there before morning on.

Surf’s up

This time, we had 3 days.  Revisiting our old storm camp on a sunny afternoon, we noticed all the logs and boulders for Katmai to climb, and photographed the sunlit spray on rolling waves.  But only after changing a couple more diapers and washing some toddler-soiled clothing in the surf.  At the cold springs, we chose our camp for the crawling and running potential of the silt flats, as well as for us to watch the springs change.

When I’m picking my way over boulders with a heavy pack on my back and a pretty heavy kid on my front, base-camp-backpacking-kid-toting travel seems brutal.  But even we adults see so much more.  We’ll be exploring this section of coast for over a month – where last time we cruised by in just a few days, the ticking of the food clock driving us toward Yakataga.  This time, we see not only the beach, but the forest behind it.  The silty rivers.  Hidden lakes with drowned forests lining their shores, ringed with steep cliffs of ice.  Ice tunnels, moulins, and the ragged lumpy edges of moraines…

Watching a sunset

The exploration is wonderful.  And the exploration leaves us aimless, all the time and all the options making each day’s plan (and each week’s plan), more difficult.

Rain

And sometimes, the day’s plan is simply “huddle”.

Rain pounded on the roof, blowing against the nylon walls in great shuddering gusts.  From the bed, we listened, grateful for the double-wall of our tent, grateful for the warm fire inside, and somewhat less grateful for the water streaming across our mossy floor.

Glacial mud is surprisingly impermeable.  And after several camps on mud that turned into liquefying indoor pools once we started walking around on them, we ought to have learned.  But we all woke up to a floor that was entirely water, with only the packraft holdings us above the wet.  Even an eighth of a mile, it was as an epic morning move.

Easy walking in the forest

For us, the large tent with a stove in the middle  is a luxury.  For the kids it’s their security blanket.  As dusk falls on a traveling day, Katmai’s whining becomes more frequent, more desperate “I want to go to our new campsite!  Where is it?!  Where is the tent?!”  And my answer that we’re looking for a spot, that we don’t know where yet fails to make up for the fact that home is GONE.  But under the thin sheet of green nylon, on his sleeping pad, the world is good again.  Playing resumes.  Even Lituya’s evening fussing calms.

Wandering

As I write these last few sentences, the plane that will take this back to civilization is zooming our way.  We’ve been back and forth to the beach, back and forth to the ragged edge of the glacier, back and forth between calm weather and storms.  We’ll be a party of 7 for the next week, and we’ll see what the world brings.

Katmai running in the foam

Beyond the coordination with guests and airplanes, the options open wide.  So wide, we’ve been stumped about where we should go, going back and forth on our options in the evening discussions stretching back over the past week.  Head east on the ice to Malaspina Lake?  On the beach?  Half and half, with a long float on the river?  East all the way to Yakutat?  Or stop somewhere around here and never go east at all?

(If you leave a comment, David will send it as a text message, and we’ll try to reply from our sat phone when we get it)

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