A Long Trek Home drives the western US

Posted by Erin on 15 Mar 2010 | Tagged as: book, events

Leaving the land of blowing snow, we have entered the realm of flowers, leaves, and visible ground. It’s spring in Seattle, and we’re here kicking off another book tour! We had an event on Bainbridge Island yesterday, and we’ll soon be picking up a rental car and heading South – next stop Olympia, WA


View A Long Trek Home – Spring 2010 book tour in a larger map

Ironically enough, for a book in which we spent an entire year without taking any form of motorized transport, we’ll be doing this tour in a great big driving loop around the western US (walking seemed a little slow for our purposes this time). We’ll be hitting cities in Washington, northern California, Utah, Colorado, and Montana (see map above). Do you live in one of these places? Do you know someone who lives in one of these places? I assure you that we have an awesome slideshow, and any help getting the word out is greatly appreciated!

You can click on the pips on the map, or see the schedule on the Book page – where you can get specific dates and times, and download posters to stick up in your town. (And if you’re not in one of these places, you can order signed books there as well, or get unsigned ones from Amazon). You can also get event details on A Long Trek Home’s Facebook Page.

I’m already nervous about whether it was a crazy idea to take a 13 month old on a month-long road trip. Please help spread the word and help us make this worth it!

Here’s a teaser in the form of a brief excerpt from the beginning of winter, in one of the journey’s more difficult sections. It seems more appropriate to Seldovia’s blowing snow than Seattle’s calm sun, but here you go…

“Wind wears on you. At times, it felt as though the world would never stop
howling—its shrieks penetrating every last corner of my thoughts. By the
third storm in a week, all I wanted was to turn off my ears—to curl up and
hide. Rain blew, sheeting across the pools of ice that lay in the low spots
between each dune. Even when we were standing still, the wind blew us
forward. We slid and spun, unable to stop without falling down or waiting
to hit a spot of sand.

We called it Desolate Bar. Wind howled, rain spattered, and nothing
but a small patch of dunes rose above the flat sand and the water of the
Copper River Delta. Five miles away, we could see a dim outline of trees
on a distant shore. In between, there were only channels, tide flats, and
ocean—flat and grey to the edge of the earth. Aside from the beach grass,
we were the only living species on our island of sand and ice—miniscule
specks in an enormous landscape. It felt as though we were standing in the
middle of the ocean. The storm raged around us, churning the delta into
a frothing chop we couldn’t hope to paddle. We couldn’t go anywhere. It
was a forsaken world.”

And here’s the blurb from the back of the book, A Long Trek Home: 4,000 Miles by Boot, Raft, and Ski:

From the Puget Sound to the Bering Sea

Four thousand miles along the edge of the Pacific

A world reduced to just two small packs and the next 100 yards…

In June 2007, Erin McKittrick and her husband, Hig, left Seattle for the Aleutian Islands, traveling solely by human power through some of the most rugged terrain in the world. This book tells the story of their unprecedented trek along the northwest coast and their encounters with pelting rains, ferocious winds, blizzards, and bears, as well as with the tiny communities that dot this wild region.

An epic wilderness adventure, their journey is also one of learning and discovery. Erin and Hig set out with a desire to better understand the interplay between human communities, ecosystems, and natural resources along their route. They pass through clear cuts, mining areas, and streams with declining wilds salmon populations. By taking each mile step by step, they intimately explore the coastal regions of Washington, British Columbia, and Alaska. By hiking, cross-country skiing, and packrafting, they see the wilderness in its larger context and gain a unique, on-the-ground perspective.

Whether discussing politics with off-the-grid back-to-the-landers, spooking a grizzly from the underbursh, repairing gear with dental floss, or catching a still-warm pizza falling from the sky, Erin and Hig experience a rich and varied coast, a world facing destructive change, but with hope for a sustainable future.


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Seldovia Blizzard

Posted by Erin on 12 Mar 2010 | Tagged as: home, southcentral alaska

Where once was a van…

A couple weeks ago, rain brought a slushy thaw to the land. It froze again quickly, but the snow cover was starting to look thin. Almost as if spring might be near. Almost.

First, there was snow. A foot of it, wet and perfect for snow forts. It made me wish Katmai was old enough to play in it.

Then there was powder snow, almost a foot again on top. We went winter camping with some friends from town. We slogged through deep drifts into blowing snow, as Katmai screeched his dismay at the wind from within his many layers. I wondered what we were getting ourselves into. But the rest of the weekend was calm – sunny even.

Hiking up Barabara valley

Dog in the snow

Bumming electricity in the storm

Snowy paradise

And then there was snow. Sleeping in the yurt again, I listened through the night as great piles of snow slid off the roof and thudded onto the ground below. In the morning, it was a blizzard.

Sideways snow battered the yurt, plastered the door, erased snowshoe tracks in a handful of minutes. The stronger gusts sent a ripple all the way around our fabric walls. We kept the woodstove roaring against the near zero temperatures and howling winds. Before long, the power went out, kindly preventing us from doing much work.

It kept snowing. Dede’s van was entirely buried at the foot of the driveway. Beneath six foot snow drifts, the trail was nowhere to be seen. The wind found its way into the yurt, sucking the heat away as soon as the fire died in the night. In the morning, long ice crystals criss-crossed our water bucket, and slush thickened berry jam.

Katmai’s dislike of blowing snow on his face pinned us indoors, aside from brief excursions to shovel a path to the outhouse or well, split wood, or film the storm. But after the first day without power, Hig bundled Katmai under his coat and we ventured to the neighbors’ for a brief interlude on our laptops.

The storm has receded. The power has returned. The van has been excavated. But still, it is snowing.

I wrote that last paragraph as I headed to bed last night, convinced the blizzard was done. But the nighttime sounds of rattling walls and the screech of sliding snow said otherwise. According to the National Weather Service, today was mostly cloudy with light winds. According my window, this morning, it was blowing and snowing. Dede’s van was buried all over again.

Apparently, we have been sitting in the bullseye of snow. While our blizzard continued, just across the bay Homer has bright blue skies. The whole town of Seldovia is getting antsy. Spring break starts tomorrow, and everyone is worried about being able to leave town. We haven’t had mail in a week, and hardly anyone has gotten across (though luckily the power crews made it yesterday). We’re leaving tomorrow too, if we can, headed out on book tour to lands where I hear there is bare ground. Even flowers!

It cleared up this afternoon, and with the blowing snow no longer pinning us indoors, I wandered around the newly drifted landscape of our front yard. Snapping pictures, thinking how the whole world looks perfect for snowshoe explorations… I’m going to miss the snow!

Snow in the spruce

Avalanching under the yurt

Pulling in wood

Outhouse drifts

Calm evening


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Big Earthquakes

Posted by Hig on 03 Mar 2010 | Tagged as: events, geologic hazards, maps, video

I got my PhD studying tsunamis and working with other scientists who study tsunamis. One thing that almost every scientist studying tsunamis has in common is that they’ve never actually seen one.

For several of my former colleagues, this changed when the tsunami from Chile spread throughout the Pacific. Andy recorded 7 distinct waves using a ruler he’d just purchased at Home Depot in Santa Cruz harbor. Jody (my former advisor) and Tanya watched ice shift in tsunami waves in the frozen harbor of Petropavlovsk, Kamchatka (Russia). Jody has been studying tsunamis since the 80s. In an email she told us all, “I am SURE I eyewitnessed a tsunami, for the first time in my life!”

Tanya watching the tsunami in frozen Avacha Bay.

Tsunami scientist Tanya Pinegina watches gentle tsunami waves in the ice in Avacha Bay, Petropavlovsk, Russia.

Photo by Jody Bourgeois

All I can say is that I may have seen a tsunami, albeit a really small one. On a beach here in Seldovia I watched the dropping tide. Did it drop a little faster during the last 5 minutes? Has it slowed now? The tide gauge in town definitely saw something… a wave several inches tall with a period of 10 minutes or so (link here, many gauges on this page, including a more easily seen example of a tsunami recorded by a tide gauge in King Cove a few hundred miles southwest of Seldovia).

I also set up my camera. I took a timelapse video, accelerating reality by 300x. I’ve watched this video many times now, and I think I can see slight variations in how fast the tide drops down the beach near the center of the image. Then again, maybe not… you can judge for yourself. (The boat in the distance probably isn’t being moved by the tsunami, as the period of its motion is only 1-2 minutes, as opposed to about 10 minutes.)

Chile tsunami timelapse in Seldovia, Alaska from Bretwood Higman on Vimeo.

The Santa Cruz harbor had a much more obvious tsunami, and there’s a small amount of video of the devastating tsunami in Chile.

What are the chances? Global occurrence of large earthquakes

The earthquake in Chile was a really big one. It’s amongst the largest ever measured, with the energy of a billion tons of TNT, enough to change the rotation of the earth. Decades pass without a single earthquake this large anywhere on the planet.

Does it seem like there are a lot of big earthquakes lately? Two recent deadly events, one in Haiti and one in Chile, have gotten a number people wondering if that is more than a coincidence.

In the case of Haiti and Chile, it almost certainly is just a coincidence. The earthquake in Haiti was a giant in terms of human tragedy, but as far as seismic energy, it was quite small in comparison to many earthquakes that have happened around the world lately. The USGS catalog records 16 earthquakes as large, or larger than the one in Haiti in the last year. The Haiti earthquake was large enough to increase the danger of other earthquakes on the same fault, but not large enough to influence tectonics a quarter of the way around the world in Chile.

However, the largest earthquakes – those over magnitude 8 – do seem to cluster in time. The three largest earthquakes in the 20th century, all magnitude 9 or more, occurred in 1952, 1960, and 1964. (Some catalogs list the 1957 Andreanof Islands earthquake as a 9.1, making four over 9 in that time range, but the USGS rates this one an 8.6.) After 1965, there were only two magnitude 8.3 earthquakes, and none higher until after the turn of the millennium. The statisticians have taken a look (Bufe and Perkins, 2005), and they don’t think that’s random. I plotted the data below, and you can judge for yourself.

Graph of the largest earthquakes in the instrumental record.

We’ve been measuring earthquakes since 1900, and the recurrence of the largest ones doesn’t seem random. There’s a clump of large earthquakes in the ’50s and ’60s, and then a lull through the turn of the Millenia. Things have been more active again in the past decade.

Click the graphic for a larger version, as well as data and vector graphic file.

And the past decade has been a big one for earthquakes. There have been five earthquakes above 8.3, including the 2004 magnitude 9.1 earthquake in the northeastern Indian Ocean. Each increase of 0.2 in magnitude corresponds to a doubling in energy released, so the 2004 magnitude 9.1 released as much energy as 16 magnitude 8.3 earthquakes.

What does this mean? We only have a short instrumental record (since 1900) and there’s a lot of variability, so it’s impossible to know whether we have another magnitude 9 just around the corner. But it seems likely that the period of tectonic quiescence starting in 1965 and ending with the gradual increase in seismicity in the late 90s is gone. It’s no time to dally on the science, both old-fashioned paleoseismic studies, and maybe some new methods that can help warn of impending earthquakes. And it’s no time to skimp on education and good infrastructure that can save lives during an earthquake. Likely the biggest difference that led to far fewer people killed in Chile than in Haiti was better building standards.

Why do the biggest earthquakes come in clusters?

At this point we don’t really know.

For an earthquake on a fault to happen, there have to be two things in place: The fault has to be under stress so it can provide energy for an earthquake, and some point has to fail, triggering the fault to move and that energy to be released. Stress increases over time and eventual failure is inevitable, but exactly when it happens is dependent on that trigger, which can be very subtle. The point where failure begins is the hypocenter (directly beneath the epicenter on the surface of the earth) and the entire portion of the fault that moves is the rupture area.

One way to think of it is to imagine the fault as a large building. Perhaps it is an apartment building in Istanbul, and as new floors are illegally added the stress on the structure increases. This unstable structure has a lot of energy in it, all in the form of cement and other materials suspended high in the air by weak architecture. But when it finally collapses, that collapse starts somewhere. Perhaps a pillar designed for two stories and holding five collapses because someone uses it to tie up their dog. Now the nearby pillars and walls must suddenly bear more of the weight, and they collapse as well. The failure spreads from the original “epicenter” pillar, and consumes the entire building, analogous to the earthquake’s rupture area.

So was it the dog that caused the building to collapse, or the extra stories? I’d say the cause was the additional stress, while the trigger was the dog. Earthquakes are the same way… caused by gradually building stress, but triggered when some point gives way.

Bufe and Perkins, 2005, discuss how an earthquake in one area of the world might lead to another far away and years later. Their first possible explanation focuses on triggering, while the others suggest that stress might increase on distantly separated faults at the same time:

  • Perhaps the vibrations from a distant earthquake increase the pressure of water trapped in pores in rock, and that pressure leads to a gradual weakening of the rock, initiating an earthquake.
  • Maybe a slow pressure wave moves through the lower crust after a large earthquake, and this wave causes stress to increase on other faults that then fail.
  • Perhaps large “silent” earthquakes, rarely detected because the deformation they cause is so slow, drive the system by running along plate boundaries and triggering their more violent kin.
  • It could be that the changes in where and how much ice is in glaciers changes the stress on faults and leads to times of quiescence or greater activity.
  • Or my favorite: Maybe the largest earthquakes change the stress on tectonic plates. As this stress moves around the planet it triggers more large quakes, until the crust has settled into a lower state of stress.



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First Year in the Woods

Posted by Erin on 14 Feb 2010 | Tagged as: home, trip reports

In honor of Katmai’s first birthday today…


by Unimak Island, I was already pregnant

Speculations

We knew how to plan routes through a complicated landscape of cliffs, water, and brush. We knew how to packraft in a gale, set up shelter in a blizzard, and start a fire in the pouring rain. We knew how to pare our backpacking gear down to a fine-tuned minimalism. But we knew nothing about babies.

Wilderness expeditions were a thread of our lives we couldn’t imagine giving up. Yet we couldn’t imagine having an infant along either. Most of our early speculations revolved around babysitting grandmothers – wondering when the baby would be old enough to leave for an hour or two, a day or two, a week or two… We wondered whether it was possible to bring a baby bushwhacking at all.

In the year since Katmai’s birth, we’ve never been hiking without him. He’s more portable than we imagined.


diaper change in the snow

Winter

Katmai was squalling, his high shrill voice ringing from where he was curled in the wrap on Hig’s chest. The cry sent my new mom brain into a frenzied flurry of activity. I pulled a thermarest from my small day pack, plopped down unceremoniously with snowshoes still dangling from my feet, snatched the fussing newborn from Hig’s arms, and threw a down quilt over the pair of us. He started nursing immediately, eyes still closed, neither knowing or caring that his dark warm cave was on a snowy hillside. The awkward diaper change by unpracticed parents in 20 degree weather went a little less smoothly. But within a minute or so of us starting to walk again, all indignities and discomforts were forgotten. We continued for another couple of hours, repeating the nursing break once more – slowly building a new rhythm to our lives.

….

“See the snow? I know you’ve never seen anything else, but someday things will be green here.” At three weeks old, the world outdoors was probably not much more than a monochrome blur of white ground and black branches. It was probably also not much more important – the world beyond mom irrelevant to the tiny infant’s brain. My words trailed off as Katmai fell asleep, and I listened for the small sounds of baby breaths and snores from the wrap on my chest, over the din of snowshoes crunching on an icy trail. He’d never saw the top of the hill – the half hour it took to get there was longer than he could stay awake.


in the shade of the forest at Cape Yakataga

Spring

I covered Katmai’s ears with my hands as the 5-seater plane buzzed over the giant Bering Glacier, on its way to the lonely outpost of Cape Yakataga. As we neared the coast, Hig and I talked excitedly about the places we remembered from our year-long trek, excited to be setting off on this latest expedition.

We’d switched out our stretchy cotton baby carrier for a homemade version made of ripstop nylon. We had three backpacks for the three of us – only Hig and I carried all of them – a large one on each of our backs, and a small front pack for whichever parent wasn’t carrying the child. After many years of ruthlessly cutting down our pack weight, the bags seemed oddly bulky for just three days away from base camp – expanded by a collection of baby diapers, baby sleeping bag, baby clothes and a baby life vest. A much larger volume than the three and a half month old baby we carried it for.

On the scale of our adventures, it wasn’t much. Eight days in the field, two small backpacking trips, some easy packrafting, a few thick bushwhacks, a bit of scrambling, bugs, sun, and logging roads… It wasn’t something we thought we’d be doing this year at all. But the invitation to Yakataga arrived unexpectedly in the spring, tempting us with a trip that seemed both interesting, and surprisingly possible. Katmai was portable.


Katmai – 4 months, tree – 500 years

The rhythm evolved. Tuck baby into wrap, face into mommy or daddy’s chest. Walk a few minutes until baby falls asleep. Continue until baby screams.

Pluck him out, nurse him, and pop him back into the wrap, face out this time. Protect baby’s eyes from the bushes as he gets a close-up tour of river bank alders, logging road ditches, and forests. Try to keep mosquitoes off the baby’s face. Continue until baby screams.

Pluck him out, nurse him, and pop him back into the wrap, face in. Repeat.

With each venture away from our base camp, the packs grew smaller, as we realized that babies, like adults, need less gear than you might at first think. With Katmai, we floated down a braided glacial river in the packrafts, and crossed several more. We ducked and climbed and swatted our way through overgrown deadfall on the edge of a clear cut, and a smorgasboard of milder bushwhacks. We scrambled steep slopes of crumbly rock near the edge of a glacier – dad carefully picking his footsteps while the baby happily gurgled and kicked.

Hig and I were acting as field assistants for Cascadia Wild, documenting the potential for restoration in the massive Yakataga clearcut. Hig measured stream widths, while I nursed Katmai. I scribbled notes on streamside vegetation, while Hig showed Katmai the varying textures of alder and willow leaves. We appreciated the dramatic face of the melting Yakataga Glacier, the broad valley of the Duktoth River, and the misty Lost Coast. Katmai appreciated gnawing on cottonwood twigs, grabbing at dandelion poofs, and watching the bushes rush by.


investigating the beach in Tutka Bay

Summer

Luckily for Kamai, his father is a master bushwhacker. With Katmai protruding from his chest like a strange second head, Hig ducked beneath the alder boughs, turning his body to delicately brush by the devils club. He pulled salmonberry canes out of the way of Katmai’s face. One small scratch on the nose was all Katmai had to show for his afternoon in 4th of July Creek valley. I wished my arms and legs could say the same. In the long light of summer, even a day hike can get overly ambitious.

The rhythm of baby fussing was sped up by the heat, and we rested beneath the shade of spruce tree islands in the brush, entertaining Katmai with twigs. My packraft spun in circles on the glassy water as I paused to nurse the baby under the light of the full moon – huge and red from the haze of distant forest fires. At 2AM, we paddled home.

…


scree glissade with Dad

Last winter’s meager snowfall was followed by volcanic ash, then a warm sunny spring, melting the mountains back to bare ice and rock. Even amongst high peaks, the usual snow slopes were boulders and scree, bare rock fields with barely a hint of vegetation. Some of the dime-sized patches of moss might not have seen sun in years. Some of the rock might never have seen sun at all.

For a four-day expedition in the moutains above Tutka Bay, we counted. About 17 pounds for a diapered and dressed 6 month old. 1 pound for the wrap to carry him in. Another 4 pounds of extra clothes, diapers, and sleeping gear for Katmai. Altogether, it was 22 pounds of additional weight to add to the 65 pounds or so we were already wearing or carrying between the two of us.

We walked on ice. We walked past newborn lakes. We skated down slopes of sharp scree, past cliffs scratched by vanished ice and decorated with mountain goats. We threaded our way down steep and narrow routes with cliffs all around. Katmai watched and slept and giggled from his perch on our chests.

Katmai trusted us. He trusted us to keep the bushes out of his face. He trusted us not to drop him on the boulders or ice. He trusted us to keep him warm and fed and dry. Katmai spent his days snuggling his parents, watching the world go by, and occasionally being set down to play in it. Each place we stopped, he found new bushes to chew on, new rocks to investigate, and new games to play.


peering though the grass

Fall

Katmai peered through the grass as his younger companions busied themselves with nursing and diaper changes. The air on the alpine ridge was crisp and cold, with a biting breeze. We ducked down in a pocket out of the wind, sitting on the bright red and yellow carpet of autumn tundra. Three babies, three moms, a dad, and a friend, out for a few hours hike on the trail above our yurt.

In the flurry of activity that was my book tour, I missed our backyard wanderings. I hiked through crowded airports with Katmai on my back, explaining to the TSA agent that the wrap was simply a long piece of cloth – posing no terrorist threat. We hiked the streets of Portland and Seattle, baby carrying oddities in a land of strollers. On a darkened stage, Hig gently bounced Katmai in the wrap on his chest, as we told stories from our year-long journey. Katmai smiled at the crowd and watched the pictures flash by – adventures from before he was born. Katmai fussed, sending his dad scurrying off to soothe him to sleep before returning to the presentation.

Katmai came with us on stage because he came with us everywhere – a smiling crawling appendage to our lives.


reveling in the snow

Winter again

Snow has opened up our backyard again. Nearly every day, Katmai and I wander the hills behind the yurt, sometimes on snowshoes sinking into loose powder, other times in shoes slipping on an icy crust. At nearly 20 pounds, Katmai rides on my back now, his head poking through a hole sliced in my raincoat. Asleep, his head rests on my back, fleece hat slowly accumulating snow.

Awake, he babbles happily over my shoulder, watching the dog run and roll in the snow with an excited “da!” that I can almost believe is a word…. We take fewer breaks now. And when we stop for lunch, Katmai still nurses, but he can also share my bread and cheese.

“He’s so patient!” I exclaimed to Hig near the end of a 7 hour hike, looking over my shoulder at Katmai’s smiling face.

“Actually, he’s not patient at all,” Hig corrected me. “He’s just happy.”


distant mists

Baby steps to the future

Before Katmai was born, we didn’t know how portable a baby would turn out to be – or how easily this little person would slot into our lives. And as we plan more ambitious outdoor exploits for Katmai’s second year, I wonder what all of this means to him. I wonder what impact it has on a baby to spend so much time looking at trees and snow, rocks and berry bushes, tundra and rabbit tracks… A young mind is constantly learning, soaking up the foundations of understanding wherever it might be. But all he can tell us is a happy babble, a contented snooze, and the occasional wail of hunger or cold.

Maybe he’ll grow to love the outdoors. Or maybe not. He’s too young to tell us, and too young to decide. And maybe wondering about the impact on Katmai is the wrong question altogether. Katmai has joined a family of adventurers, therefore he comes on adventures, adapting to the circumstances of his birth like every baby everywhere. The three of us are happy, and Katmai has never known another way.

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Mercury Merganser

Posted by david on 27 Jan 2010 | Tagged as: Coal, environment, introduction, sustainability


Misty morning in the California Hills (by David Coil)

Hello again, welcome to another guest post by David… it’s been quite awhile since my last post. For new readers, I’m a behind-the-scenes researcher for Ground Truth Trekking. I don’t go on any of the cool trips but I help write and research many of our articles such as those on coal. I’ve been living in Belgium for the last few years and have recently moved to Davis in Northern California.

While I really enjoyed living in Europe, I always missed nature… in particular large open wild spaces like those that can still be found in the Western US. I love to be able to hike without seeing much indication of people. I also like the fact that lands are often accessible to the public in the US: I can go hiking in National Parks, Wilderness Areas, BLM land etc. Europeans are always amazed when I described the concept of BLM land, truly public places where one could just go and hunt, fish, hike, camp, or whatever.


Rainbow Trout (by David Coil)

Scouting

When I first arrived here in Davis I began to happily scout the area for hiking, packrafting, fishing, and hunting possibilities. And I was excited with what I saw; Northern California is chock-full of outdoor opportunities. I’ve caught some nice fish, paddled some fun rivers, and taken a lot of pictures. The landscape here is very different than Colorado where I grew up, or Washington where I spent many years.

In addition to hiking, I also wanted to go bird hunting. Now I should mention that my version of bird hunting isn’t really typical. I have no boat, dog, camouflage, whistles, or really much of anything. I just like to hike around a likely looking area with a shotgun… which basically means I’m just hiking with an extra weight in my arms. But occasionally I get lucky.


The duck in question (by David Coil)

The hunt

A few weeks ago I spent the day scouting out a wildlife area in the hills for hunting prospects. A beautiful area, thousands of acres of BLM and State of California land, I didn’t see a soul or much sign of humans anywhere and I saw plenty of ducks, quails and rabbits. So not long thereafter I went hunting there and had a wonderful time. I wandered the hills for hours without seeing any signs of humans other than the occasional bit of windblown trash. I also shot a duck near a river and brought it home and ate it with my family.

Rude awakening

Curious to read more about this species of duck, and the area where I had been, I turned to the internet: “The common merganser is a non-migratory fish-eating duck with a serrated bill.” Cool. Then I discovered that the upstream lake which feeds the river I’d been following is an EPA superfund site due to mercury contamination! Apparently there were a large number of mercury mines in the area a long time ago, and they suspect over 100 metric tons of mercury was dumped into the lake. The fish consumption advisories for the entire watershed basically suggest that if you’re a non-reproducing male you might consider eating some very occasionally and if you’re a woman or child forget about it. I even found one study where some researchers calculated that the fish are so contaminated that the common mergansers in the area were liable to suffer reproductive harm from the bioaccumulation of mercury. I found this information to be simultaneously worrisome and extremely frustrating.


Lingering mists (by David Coil)

Having done research on the topic of mercury contamination, I’m well aware of the fact that eating a fish-eating duck downstream of a mercury mine is probably a really bad idea. Mercury bioaccumulates in the food chain, meaning that predators collect more and more mercury as they eat contaminated prey. But it never occurred to me to research the proximity of Superfund sites to my next hunting prospect.


Cache Creek (by David Coil)

Then and now

To me this is a personal example of the consequences of ongoing environmental degradation. The mercury contaminating my duck was dumped into the environment a long time ago, at a time when we didn’t know as much about the toxic impacts it would have. But looking ahead, we have similar problems waiting to happen or already happening. Toxic piles of mine tailings could eventually escape their engineered barriers, for example at a mine like Red Dog, or Pebble Mine if it is eventually built. Fish and birds in currently pristine rivers could also become unsafe to eat. In these cases we know the consequences of our actions… and still as a society we value short-term economic gain over long-term consequences.


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Alaska Coal Country (2010 expedition plans)

Posted by Erin on 06 Jan 2010 | Tagged as: trip preparation

Before I talk about our upcoming expedition… For those of you who haven’t seen it, we were in the New York Times last week. In the past few years, we’ve been in the media a number of times – so in a way, I’m kind of used to it. However, every other time, it’s been for something we’ve done (our year-long journey, the book I wrote…). This time, we’re news just for being ourselves – just for living our lives in a way that seems pretty normal to us, and many of the folks around here – but pretty unusual in the American mainstream. Anyway, back to expedition plans. :)

Alaska Coal Country

We became interested in the issue of coal in Alaska around two years ago, skiing through the site of the proposed Chuitna Coal Mine on the west side of Cook Inlet, as part of our Journey on the Wild Coast. Since then we’ve done our homework on the issue. What we need now is to see Alaska coal country up close.

Why?

In the US, when we think of coal, many people think of Appalachia, or Wyoming. But perhaps we should think of Alaska. Over 4 trillion tons of coal may lie beneath Alaska’s wilderness – perhaps 10% of the worlds total. Most of this can be found beneath the tundra in the northwest corner of the state – under the foothills of the Brooks Range, and on the coast of the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas.

Coal was first discovered here hundreds of years ago, and small-scale mines supplied coal to power small towns, and the ships plying arctic waters. But the only mines here are small-scale remnants, shuttered long ago when the world on moved to liquid oil. The only modern exploration effort closed down shop in 2009. It would seem that the coal here is merely a piece of geologic trivia – unexplored, undeveloped, and hidden in the far reaches of the inaccessible arctic.




But oil and natural gas are becoming scarcer and more expensive, while the energy demands of an increasingly plugged in world population only grow larger. Coal supplies half of the US’s energy, and around a quarter of the world’s. Some people see Alaska’s coal as a cheap source of energy – powering the future. Shipping routes from northwestern Alaska are well placed to take advantage of shrinking arctic ice, delivering coal across the Pacific to power-hungry markets in Asia.

There is no free lunch — no way to generate energy without impacts. But coal is higher impact than almost any alterative — more polluting than oil or natural gas, with a larger footprint than hydro or wind farms… And there is little prospect of cleaning it up enough to match our other energy technologies. Mining coal destroys swaths of wild land and pollutes watersheds. Burning coal produces more of the pollutants that cause acid rain, more of the mercury that accumulates in the food chain, and more of the carbon dioxide that creates global warming and leads to ocean acidification. Global warming is already having dramatic impacts in Alaska’s arctic, from dwindling sea ice, to coastal erosion, to disrupted ecosystems.

That’s the big picture. In my opinion, an increased reliance on coal is one of the darker paths we might walk down. Now we’re looking for depth. Just what is Alaska coal country? Who lives there, and what do they think? How much coal is 4 trillion tons? We know no better way than to go there and see for ourselves.

Where?

Across tundra home to caribou, grizzly bears and wolves, over sedimentary hills with protruding layers of coal, and down meandering rivers cut through banks of permafrost… The couple hundred miles of our journey will take us across one small portion of northwestern Alaska’s vast coal fields. Exactly which portion, we’re not quite sure yet.

Where we go is determined by the intersection of the interesting, the important, and the possible. The arctic’s coal lies beneath a patchwork of land designations, with the federal government, the state, and native corporations all owning pieces. One attractive option is to travel between the native villages of Point Hope and Point Lay — dependent on the permission of the Arctic Slope Regional Corporation. If anyone reading this has connections here to help us get this permission, let us know! Another possibility would take us through the National Petroleum Reserve A, home to the majority of the coal deposits. And whichever way we go, logistics are bound to be more complicated than we’re accustomed to.

How?

With just Hig and I, the journey would probably take around two weeks. But it’s no longer just Hig and I. With Katmai, we plan to spend a month on the expedition — modifying our usual style and speed to safely and enjoyably travel through the wilderness with a toddler. Our rough plan is to go in August — hopefully beyond the worst of the mosquito season, but not too far into the fall snowstorms. Some pieces of gear (water filter, satellite phone) that we’ve dispensed with for ourselves, we’ll bring for the baby. And though we’ve always embraced the logistical purity of walking from town to town, with a toddler to carry, we plan to rely on airplane food drops so that we don’t need to carry more than a week’s worth of food at a time. How we’ll manage to keep it simple enough to carry everything? We’re still figuring that out. Part of the challenge is that being first time parents, we have no idea what an 18 month old is actually like.

Stay tuned for more plan specifics in the coming months, as we look for funding, land permissions, and Hig works on his bizarre scheme for a baby+gear carrier.

The larger vision:

We want to connect the dots – between vast quantities of coal beneath Alaska’s wilderness, the exploding economies of Asia that would eagerly burn Alaska’s coal, and dramatic impacts of climate change. In addition to our Arctic trip, we’re planning shorter missions to the other chunks of Alaska coal country — at the Chuitna prospect, CIRI’s Underground Coal Gasification prospect, and Usibelli. All together, the Alaska coal country journeys will be the first stage of a 3-part series that will take us to Asia, and back to the Lost Coast, occurring over the next few years.


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Ground Truth Trekking

Posted by Erin on 30 Dec 2009 | Tagged as: environment, home, introduction

We live outside. Snowshoes breaking trail into drifts of fluffy new snow, wet flakes swirling down to accumulate on the several layers of hats we’ve put on Katmai — who is sleeping on my back like a little snowcone. Breaking the ice on our well to dip out a jar of water. Scrambling past the toe of a glacier, days from the nearest town…

We live inside. Streaming music over the internet, sitting at our laptop-offices a few feet apart, Katmai nursing to sleep on my lap. Rain running down the rippled plastic windows of the yurt while the fire roars in the stove, and we assemble pages on Alaska coal…

Our life is half remote, and half connected – half low-tech and half very high-tech. I thought I’d take a moment to write about our vision for the future of Ground Truth Trekking. In the next post, I’ll outline our next big expedition.



Ground Truth Trekking’s beginning

Officially, we founded Ground Truth Trekking in 2007, just before our year-long expedition. In reality it began slowly, several years earlier, as a natural outgrowth of our journeys.

In the summer of 2005, after a tromp around Blockade Glacier, Hig had to get back to grad school. I had already quit (after receiving my masters). So I took off toward an obscure piece of tundra west of the village of Nondalton — the site of the proposed Pebble Mine.

I didn’t know that much about the Pebble issue at the time. Not many folks did. And the bit I’d read only served to highlight how little I knew about something so large.

Expeditions are a natural way to learn. On my journey, I could measure the size of the Pebble proposal not in acres or miles, but in how many days it took me to walk through the place. I could walk past the drill rigs, and cower from the roar of the helicopters flitting between them. I could eat the berries and watch the caribou. I could meet the people in Nondalton. I could see the place as real.

I came back, and built a simple website on the Pebble Mine to share what I’d learned, filled with pictures I’d taken along the way. That “ground truth” formed the backbone of the site. But in order to make something meaningful, I needed the facts behind it. I spent uncounted hours on the internet, researching the issue, reading the mining company’s background documents, going to their meetings.

I wasn’t sure what I expected to come out of the project. I certainly didn’t have money to support it, or anyone but me working on it. But I was surprised at the response – from people requesting photos, emailing their questions and comments, linking to the site… For awhile, my website was the top hit for a ‘Pebble Mine’ google search, beating out both the mining company and the major opposition website. Since then, my own importance has dropped, but I’ve been happy to see the Pebble issue receiving a lot more attention — and am glad to have been a part of that.

Present, and future

So that’s the idea. Ground Truth Trekking is based on the belief that expeditions to see what’s on the ground help us learn about important issues. We combine that “ground truth” with “researched truth,” using our scientific backgrounds along with our adventures to come up with something we hope will further the conversation about these issues in an entertaining and informative way. Of course, we can’t hope to be experts on everything, so we focus most of our efforts on natural resource issues in Alaska.

We give presentations, write occasional articles, and of course I wrote a book. But a lot of what we do ends up on this website. Our vision is to make this into a place for virtual exploration, where people can learn about the issues, see photos, read stories, see maps, etc… So reading the story of an expedition, you might see a sidebar about an issue important in that region, and click to read a detailed informational article. From a photo, you could click to a slideshow with detailed captions and map locations, then download the photo for your own use. Reading an article about the history of coal in Alaska, you could click to a map that let you browse Alaska’s coal deposits and historic coal mines, then see photos and read stories about our expeditions to these places. Some of this you can even do now.

But our reality is that we’re just a few people, with limited resources, and limited time. So the vision is slowly clicking along towards reality, with new content and features appearing as we make them. So far, we’ve spent a lot of effort on our Journey on the Wild Coast (though we have so much content there, that only a limited amount is on the web right now). And more recently we’ve been exploring the issue of coal in Alaska. Right now there’s not a lot of adventure in that section, but stay tuned! We’re planning our next major expedition to the Northwest Arctic (Alaska Coal Country) this summer. More on that in the next post.

Ground Truth Trekking is an official 501c3 nonprofit, which means we’ve been able to get a few small grants to support our work (it also means your donations are tax-deductible :) ). In addition to supporting our expeditions, that has helped us to bring David Coil on board to help with researching and writing coal articles, and is helping us with getting programming support for the website. We’re also looking into branching out to include other “ground truth” expeditions done by other adventurers. More on that soon too.


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Yurt sweet yurt

Posted by Erin on 11 Dec 2009 | Tagged as: book, home

ballard library talk
Interesting neighbors… (pic from Joseph Reeves)

I’m typing by the roaring woodstove and looking out our rippled windows at the volcanoes, while the baby’s busy rolling our canned goods across the floor and getting into every enticing object he couldn’t reach when we left on book tour 6 weeks ago. 1 boat ride, 7 car drives, 4 train trips, and 9 plane rides later, I’m happy to be home.


ballard library talk
Katmai exploring the kitchen

Absent for the fall, we arrived to a sudden winter. Everything is covered with a couple feet of snow, and I’ve been taking advantage of it by going snowshoeing with our crowd of Seldovia friends. Up on the ridge, we caught the low-angle sun that barely touches town in December, we set up a winter camping spot in a nearby valley…. After 3 separate Thanksgivings worth of pie, I need the exercise!

ballard library talk
warmth

Although I’m not sorry to be done with the traveling logistics, I enjoyed the book tour. And it went really well! Mountaineers is already sold out of the first printing and expecting the second printing to arrive in a few weeks. I ordered their last copies though, so I still have some to sell if anyone’s still short of Christmas presents. In fact, it went so well that we’ll be doing it again in spring – visiting California, Colorado, Montana, as well as a few other Alaska and Washington spots we didn’t get to the first time. Hopefully Katmai will be as flexible and cheery of a traveler as he was the first time.

ballard library talk
between all the Thanksgivings there were 8 pies

The fog has rolled in… As soon as it clears up and the planes can fly, we’re headed to pick up a New York Times reporter at the airport. More on that later.

ballard library talk
Working on the road (pic from Joseph Reeves)


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On Book Tour – making our way South

Posted by Erin on 07 Nov 2009 | Tagged as: book

ballard library talk

We’ve been gone from home more than 3 weeks, currently camping out in my mom’s house in rainy Seattle. It’s been a whirlwind of book tour events. We’ve given our presentation 11 times already, so for those of you who haven’t seen it yet, we’ll have it down pat by the time you do. Katmai has been doing great at the presentations too. Here in Seattle, we’ve had helpful grandmas at nearly every talk, but when we don’t, Hig usually wears Katmai – joining in for as much of the presentation as the baby allows. A couple times I’ve even found myself nursing him while answering questions after the talk!

For those of you who missed our 4 Seattle events, there’s still one more on November 18!

I’ve been really happy to see the great response I’ve gotten to the book so far! We’ve had enthusiastic crowds overfilling nearly all of our talks so far, and the people who’ve gotten back to me say they’ve really enjoyed reading the book. Perhaps that’s a biased sample though… If you read the book and would like to let people know what you think, it’d be really helpful to have more reviews on Amazon. :)

Tomorrow we’re heading down to Portland for a week, then Eugene, Seattle again, Minneapolis, Juneau, and then we’ll finally be back home. Since this trip is going so well, we might well head out on another book tour later this winter to hit California, Colorado, and some more of the western states…


For anyone who’s interested, you can hear our radio interview on KUOW’s Weekday,
buy the book, or see the Book Tour schedule.

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Burning coal while it’s still underground?

Posted by Erin on 13 Oct 2009 | Tagged as: Coal, environment, southcentral alaska

As Hig and I have been scrambling to get ready to leave on our Book Tour
this week, CIRI came out with the news that they’re planning an underground coal gasification
project on the west side of Cook Inlet (near the proposed Chuitna coal mine).

Which provided the kick in the pants to get our Underground Coal Gasification
article put together. So if you’ve been wondering what the heck underground coal gasification is, and what its benefits and drawbacks are, you’re not alone.

Underground coal gasification

Here you go (first paragraph of the article pasted below, click for more):

Underground Coal Gasification
(UCG) involves igniting coal in the ground, then collecting and using the gases that result from its partial combustion. Although the idea dates back over a century, very few UCG plants have ever been built. Underground gasification could potentially allow the use of coal that is currently uneconomical to mine. Underground gasification eliminates the need for strip mining
and might make carbon capture and sequestration
more practical. However, UCG produces more CO2 per unit energy, and thecoal combustion wastes
that are left behind can leach pollutants into nearby groundwater, and have caused major contamination in UCG pilot projects….Read more…

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