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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Erin writing this blog post

I’m writing this blog post on a piece of waterproof paper, watching the surf crash, and waiting for the plane to bring us our first guest of this expedition. So thank you, David for transcribing my less-than-stellar handwriting when this message makes its way to you.

Over three weeks into our journey, I feel like we’ve completed a great migration, from ice-locked hills, across the barren expanse of rock and ice, to the forested shores and crashing surf of the Pacific. And we still have over a month remaining.

Ice-Locked World

When the plane roared off, leaving us on a brushy strip of gravel in the Samovar Hills, we weren’t sure we could even move all our stuff along with the 3 weeks of food. There was much about our setup that we wished we’d though through better, tested more… But none of that mattered anymore.

Fresh snow on the Samovar Hills creeps lower after each rain

A patch of land perhaps a dozen miles long and half a dozen wide, the Samovar Hills rise up in a sharp crenulated ridge of snowy peaks – hills only in comparison to the massive face of Mt. St. Elias and its surrounding range. And they’re surrounded by ice. Spilling out of the mountains, and engulfing hills and valleys alike in a great mass of ice, stretching out around 15 miles to the ocean beyond.

Everywhere we walked in the Samovars, the post-glacial world was taking over from the ice. Bathtub rings striped the brush hillsides where ice-edge lakes once rested. Hundreds of feet below, stranded icebergs littered a barren rocky shore, where the current lake drains and fills at the edge of Malaspina glacier. Occasionally, an old tree trunk appeared in the rocky moraines, buried and exhumed, reminding us that the current cycle of advance and melt is not the first one here. Glaciers advance and retreat with the climate but in geologic time, have rarely been stable.

What appear to be rock ridges protruding from the ice are actually a few inches of rock unsulating ice ridges.

An ice-locked chunk of land in the middle of a huge lobe of ice is a landscape that seems so exotic and strange. But 10,000 years ago, it might have been entirely ordinary. Visiting the Samovar Hills is like a trip back in time to the end of the last Ice Age, when enormous lobes of ice filled most of Alaska’s bays, valleys, and lakes. Following lumpy ridges of mud and grave, draped over mounds of melting ice, I see what our own home in Seldovia used to look like as the Kachemak Bay glacier melted away. Now spruce forests and blueberry bushes obscure the complicated shape of the land beneath and I wonder how soon it will be until this spot is a forest at the ocean edge.

Moving The Universe

The rickshaw on snow-covered Malaspina Glacier

Or at least the tent, and stove, and food, and clothes, and diapers, and batteries, and children.

Base camping with a baby and a toddler is awesome. Heading out for the day with a child on each parent’s back and a small bag of crucial supplies slung around my waste or on my chest… Stopping to take photos, to let Katmai pick berries and splash in the stream, and coming home to an already-set tent with dry firewood stacked inside, ready to cook a hot dinner… And we might have stayed there forever, in the first spot we stumbled into right across the valley from the landing strip. But there was more to explore.

11 base camps later, we’ve tried pretty much everything. Katmai being coaxed along at a snail’s pace with Lituya on my chest, a pack on each parent’s back, then Hig running ahead to ferry gear and eventually carrying Katmai on his shoulders. Hig pushing Katmai in the packraft-unicycle-rickshaw over textured ice while he slept through a snow squall in a pile of blankets, Lituya leaned out sideways from her wrap on my chest, and we each carried a heavy pack. Me picking my way between stranded icebergs with one fussing child on back and another on front while Hig carried everything else (when we didn’t have much food). Packs on back and both kids on front, babbling and chattering away while we tried to see around them on the tricky footing of sharp rocks and steep slopes. All in the packraft (the easiest way). Once Katmai even took a nap draped upside down across Hig’s shoulders.

Lituya playing with pilot bread in the rockshaw. Usually this was Katmai’s seat.

One constant is that it’s always difficult to figure out where to put the toddler. Another constant is that we are always slow, always awkward. Our 5 miles per day estimate may have been overgenerous after all. When the kids are overtired and screaming/whining, we question ourselves. When Lituya is happily eating sand, and Katmai is throwing rocks into deep blue ice holes and chattering away about finding the next moulin, we know this is the best thing we could be doing.

With one or two days food, moving camp wouldn’t be such a large project. But our food caches are big, coming in lumps of 3 weeks, 8 days, 3 weeks, and 11 days. So the logistics have evolved to include making short day trips to ferry chunks of food ahead of us, lightening our eventual load.

Crossing the Moonscape

We left the whistling marmots behind. The wolverines. Dolly Varden. Coyote tracks. Finally even the last of the alder bushes were behind us. The last ptarmigan droppings. The last moss. And then one last pile of bear scat, far out on a barren moraine. We had entered a different world.

Hanging out on the vast rolling ice plain of Malaspina Glacier

Highway-width stripes of ice alternated with lumpy ridges of rock, barely concealing the ice beneath. The grey and white stripes rose and fell in undulating waves. From the peaks of the moraine stripes, a vast plain of glacier stretched away on every side as the land receded behind us. Mt. ST. Elias towered in the distance. In this monochrome world, the only spots of color were the moulins, where water rushed and gurgled into deep holes of a vivid turquoise blue.

We watched Malaspina melt around us. Each morning, the glacier began quiet, frozen. As the day warmed, little popping, tinkling, hissing sounds began from the ice around our feet. Water began to flow, rushing and gurgling, tumbling into every moulin.

“But I want to look down into the moulin” Katmai protested, tugging against my tight grip on his arm.

Rock and white ice on Malaspina Glacier

“Only holding mom’s hand” I insisted, moving a few steps closer to the steep rounded edge of another Moulin.

At his own speed, Katmai moved slowly from attraction to attraction, looking into every moulin, climbing on every boulder, and spending inordinate amounts of time throwing rocks into deep blue pools, splashing in tiny ice streams, and breaking the skin ice on ponds. In short, being an ordinary toddler in an entirely unearthly place.

Our tent set up on a glowing blue floor of ice, we waited out one rainstorm, watching the ice melt a full inch in 24 hours. I tried to picture the scale of that, across the 40-mile wide glacier, across not just one day, but a year, or a decade…

To The Ocean

Hig and Katmai on the beach

After over a week on the ice, the thing we were most excited to see was a slump of alder bushes. We’d carried a few meager fires worth of wood across the ice, but the return of brush meant the return of our hot food, warm tent, and morning coffee.

Fountain Stream appeared as a coiling pool of whirlpools, ringed all around by boulders where it springs up from underneath the ice. Then it mellows, smoothing out into a wide brown swath between brushy shores covered in bear and moose tracks. Almost like an ordinary river, but for the fringing of ice, scattered bergs, and the hulk of Malaspina beyond.

Arriving at the crashing surf, it felt like we’d completed a great migration, returning to a place familiar from 4 years ago, but so dynamic that each time we walked it, it would be different.

Here, the edge of the glacier is hidden, underneath curving trees, or just behind a thin band of forest. From our camp, we heard both surf and sea lions.

Onward.

(If you leave a comment, David will send it to us as a text message, and we’ll try to reply from our sat phone when we get it. Feel free to ask Katmai questions as well)

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Alaska Peninsula – 2001

Northwest Arctic – 2010

In the beginning, we dived into lightweight backpacking with more guts than knowledge. We took off across the Alaska wilderness with a homemade fleece sleeping bag that was both too cold and too heavy, a too-small ‘space blanket’ tarp that leaked in spite of its weight, little Sevylor packrafts that popped at the slightest provocation… We were kind of lightweight, and kind of uncomfortable.

Alaska Peninsula – 2001

Unimak Island – 2008

In the decade since then, we’ve traded out everything in that original gear kit, creating a setup vastly more functional and comfortable, with hardly any change in weight. We carry sleeping pads. A real packraft. A pyramid shelter. A nice sleeping quilt. Lighter shoes. Better insulation. We swapped out our short-lived Gore-Tex for more durable but equally light and breathable Dermazax. And we’re still often sad when it wears out too quickly.

Our new gear combined with new skills and knowledge that let us push limits we couldn’t even imagine when we first started trekking.

And then there’s the camera(s)

We first took pictures on an old point-and-shoot with a few rolls of film. Then a disposable. Then a digital point and shoot. On each expedition we took a few more pictures. On each expedition, they got a little better.

Camera gear – 2007

We began to share these expeditions with others – first by typing up my journal entries along with a few pictures and maps on our old AKTrekking website. A few people visited. Then a few more. We kept walking, looking, photographing, writing, and learning.

Soon, what had started as a hobby overtook our lives and work, becoming our mission – becoming Ground Truth Trekking.

By the time we began our year-long journey to the Aleutians, the point-and-shoot had been replaced by a digital SLR with two lenses. Each time we hit a town, I carved out a few hours of time between frantic packing and planning and eating to type out a blog post on a borrowed computer, trying to share what we saw and learned.

Then we had kids. Wearing a toddler for a 300-mile journey in the Northwest Arctic our speed dropped from nearly 20 miles a day to just 10. Now with Lituya’s arrival bringing us up to 45 lbs of children, any notions of light, fast A to B travel disappeared, at least for awhile.

2010 – Erin stretched her coat around Katmai, her pregnant belly, and her front pouch.

Life on Ice is the adventure that sprung from these limitations. It’s a journey to explore in detail, with base-camping and toddler-paced walking, keeping everything just light enough that we can uproot and move the camp across the glacier – around 65 miles through the course of the journey. But a new style of expedition brings about a whole new crop of needs we’ve never had to think about before. Without the ability to reach new towns every week or so, we’d need to set up remote food caches. We’d need a solar charger to recharge camera batteries. I didn’t feel comfortable being out with small children without a form of communication, so we’d need some kind of satellite device in addition to the EPIRB. After the great reaction we’ve gotten to our first movie (due out on DVD soon! Really!), we figured a bit more video gear would be a good idea. Hig’s gotten into timelapse photography… And the technology just kept adding up, in a great pile of incompatible proprietary batteries, chargers, memory cards, and cables.

Reaching Out

If we’re bringing everything else, why not bring the internet? Heck, the 10 foot diameter tent with a woodstove in the middle is hardly different than a 24 foot diameter yurt with a woodstove in the middle. It’d be just like home! Except for the necessity to carry it around every week or two across remote wilderness terrain. It seemed we were planning the heaviest ultralight expedition ever, and the stress of figuring out all the technology was worrying me even more than finishing up the rain gear.

2011 – Camped out behind the yurt testing the Titanium Goat tent and stove

The goal was to share what we learned on Malaspina with the rest of you in real time. Which seemed like a good idea, until I found myself in a frantic flurry of Googling, holding a SPOT Connect and an iPad, failing to make them work at all, and learning that even if they did work Hig had mis-interpreted the advertising and they wouldn’t be capable of what we wanted in the first place. Today the iPad and SPOT went back in the mail – at least we can return them for a full refund.

I was tempted to do the same with the rest of the tangle of batteries and cords – to ditch all the gadgets and technological crutches in one fell swoop. But I do actually love to take pictures. And I want to be able to call the pilot if we need him. Piece by piece, the rational arguments for including each piece of technology end up winning out over the emotional appeal of a sweeping gesture.

Now we have a new plan. We’ll rent an Irridium 9555 sat phone. Through some laborious typing on the phone’s keypad we can send up to 1000 character messages to an email address, to David Coil, who will kindly paste them into Twitter/Facebook (once a day or so?), keeping us in the modern age after all, for better or worse. When our visitors show up (we’ll hopefully have 4), we will send them off with handwritten notes for this blog – old-school messages to transcribe for a digital world.

Many years of hiking journals on Rite-in-the-Rain paper

Old Tech

All this techno-planning is either a modern luxury, or a modern curse. But the tradition of expedition stories predates Facebook by a good number of centuries.

With two months worth of Rite-In-The-Rain paper, my expedition journal weighs over 12 ounces for this trip, with a couple mechanical pencils thrown in for good measure. As a writer, these pages are a comforting constant – perhaps the only thing we’ve carried, unchanged, for our entire decade worth of expeditions. I write by headlamp, while everyone else is asleep, often with cold cramped hands and an exhausted body. It’s an nonnegotiable ritual. Every night, no matter what the day brings, I fill a few pages. Great stacks of these journals pile up in a box on my shelf, pulled out for material for my books and other writing. The paper may be higher tech than it used to be, but in spirit, it’s not much different than the journals of explorers from centuries past. Whatever I can or can’t Tweet from the middle of the wilderness, I’ll bring these pages back with me.

By the Numbers

So for the record, here’s the technology we are planning to bring. Of course, this could still change…

For a less organized but more complete view of our planning, feel free to check out our Life on Ice Google Spreadsheet.

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