“Waak in da wada!” (walk in the water)

Sunflower star (Pycnopodia helianthoides):

Even the tides have a season. In spring, the tides switch with the tilt of the earth, bringing the lowest lows not in the middle of the night, but at a much more manageable 10AM. Punchy slushy snow still covers the high country in April and May. Plants are only beginning to unfurl. The world at the yurt is an interfingering of brown and white, mud and slush, the dry stalks of last years grass and the hopeful dirt of a too-early garden, melted and snowed on and melted again.

Hermit crab

But the beach? Fuzzy purple sunflower stars, rose-colored anemones, bright orange sponges, and shimmering green algae… Chitons in leathery-black or mossy grey, or sporting gaudy pink stripes. The red tufts of tubeworms protruding cautiously from their curled white lairs. Nearly translucent anemones visible only in the bright white stripes that grace their delicate tentacles. Red-clawed hermit crabs tucking themselves within the hairy shells discarded by whelks. Sucker fish in hues of granite and siltsone, tails curled around their body in a perfect mimic of a pebble. Pink worms twisting themselves in knots in our white plastic bucket, beside tussling limpets and crabs.

This tiny crustacean is held by surface tension to the top of the water

Sitka Periwinkles (Littorina sitkana):

Low tide is intricate, bizarre, with a new discovery under every rock, and a new assemblage of creatures on every stretch of beach. My 10th grade marine science class imprinted at least two things firmly in my brain: the scientific name of the green sea urchin (Strongylocentrotus drobachiensis), and an enduring love of tidepooling. My kids are merely an excuse.

5/6/12, -5.0 feet, 9:12 AM

At Outside Beach, I flitted between seaweed-covered boulders, seeing nothing but Christmas anemones, barnacles, and bidarkis (black katy chitons). But there are always Christmas anemones, and unlike most of the other Seldovians at the beach that morning, I wasn’t out collecting for a meal of bidarkis. I hurried over the slippery seaweed, looking for something different, wondering why the sandbar wasn’t out despite the -5.5 predicted tide.

Christmas anemone (Urticina crassicornis) drooping

Shells upon shells

Katmai was thrilled with the Christmas anemones, pointing them out in his high-pitched ear-splitting squeal, insisting I examine each discovery. I picked a ribbon of purple-brown seaweed (young dulse) from the rock and passed it to Lituya over my shoulder, then leaned down to feel the tacky surface of the anemone’s pink tentacles as they retreated away from my touch. Some were just mottled lumps of red and green, with tentacles neatly away into their cylindrical bodies. Others hung from the rocks wide open, improbably stretched, pendulous and colorful blobs melting down towards a missing ocean. And there were actually five kinds of anemones. High tidepools full of delicate rose anemones, the squat yellow cousin of the Christmas anemone, the nearly-transparent one with zebra-like stripes, and one stray soul in bright green… And a sea star missing three legs, and a purple urchin hiding in a crevice by the radiant fans of tube worms, and delicate hermit crabs with striped white and grey legs inhabiting opalescent snail shells. And then they were gone.

A few of the sand dollars were lodged upright in the sand, as if they’d failed to take their cues from gravity this day.

Katmai and Dad looking for tidepool critters at Naskowak Point

A few months each year, a few days each month, a few hours each day… The excitement of the tidepool world is whipped up by the briefness of the moment, by the water lapping at the ankles of my rubber boots, pulling back up to obscure the world nearly as fast as we could discover it.

A rising tide carried us – kids and life vests and camping gear and a pair of bright colored packrafts – into a muddy lagoon of periwinkle snails and washed-up algae, to explore a wind-twisted forest rising on cliffs above the ocean.

5/7/12, -6.0 feet, 10:00 AM

As the dancing shadows of sunlit spruce branches hit the edge of the grey tent, it was impossible to be annoyed at Lituya’s crack-of-dawn awakening. Eating oatmeal by the campfire, I watched the ocean slowly pulling back to reveal the rocks of the Naskowak Reef. This tide was even lower.

Ribbon kelp

As the tide shrinks away, this fish burrows into the sand to wait it out.

The sun hit a boulder as I listened to the hiss and pop of a hundred barnacles, rotating their beaks in their castle-like shells. The macro lens on our camera magnified the cells of the green algae, the translucent bodies of shrimp-like plankton, the tube feet of sea stars… The red arms of blood stars peeked out through the gaps in thick curtains of ribbon kelp. Worms and isopods and squiggling fish lurked beneath cobbles carpeted in a blanket of young dulse. With May’s long sunlight, the rocks were lush with algae of all kinds, slipping under our boots, shading a menagerie of creatures beneath their damp fronds.

The kids alternated between enchantment and frustration with the typical ping-pong rapiditity of the very young. The sunflower star is awesome! But the seaweed is too slippery! And I’m so incredibly excited to see the little fish you caught in the bucket! But I wanted to walk with daddy and now I’m going to scream and cry for 20 minutes about a decision we can’t undo!

Green algae

Clam worm. The kids call these “fang worms” for the fang-like protrusions that stick out from their head.

We moved to the simpler terrain of the sand flat, where half-buried sand dollars littered the surface, impossible not to step on. A bright orange and purple sunflower star waved its many arms in the inch or two of water that remained it it’s small depression, while another one sat motionless and sad-looking on dry sand. We walked through the eelgrass, nearly kicking up fish, while the tide flowed in around us.

5/8/12, -5.3 feet, 10:50 AM

With Katmai at preschool and Hig waylaid by more productive work, Lituya was my only companion. She squawked from the wrap on my back as I bent over, nose nearly to the sand, eyes and camera lens trained on tiny crabs and fish that appeared from beneath the cobbles on the beach. In her growing catalogue of words, I picked out an excited refrain of “rock”, “water”, and “ocean”. Visiting students from other towns crowded the beach beside us, squealing at their finds, a fleet of rubber boots leaving tracks on the spit of sand and eelgrass at Inside Beach.

Wosnesenskii’s Isopod

I set her wiggly form down, watching her run over the sand with a toddler’s bowlegged gait, beelining for the water. I turned over a few more rocks.

The water began to rise. It was all over – until next month.

Ice road paralleling Iditarod trail and Skwentna river.

Why is there an ice road on the Skwenta River, miles from the nearest town? Why are there bulldozers in the woods near our village?

These are both real questions that we’ve received in the last year… both with the same answer. Mining exploration.

Alaska is currently experiencing a “second gold rush” as high metals prices drive an unprecedented amount of mineral exploration in the state. It seems like almost everyone has heard of the Pebble Prospect. But not many people know that Pebble is only the largest and most famous of dozens of such prospects. In fact, within Alaska, 34 projects spent more than $1 million on exploration each in 2010, with 81 projects having spend more than $100,000. That’s a lot of helicopters, drill rigs, bulldozers, etc. And since most of this exploration takes place far from roads or population centers most people are unaware of it.

Hence the questions above.

The map

So we set out to create a “super map” of Alaskan mineral exploration. We wanted this map to be comprehensive, interactive, dynamic, and up to date. It turned out to be more work than we thought, both to research/locate the 84 projects now in our database as well as to modify/develop the appropriate software.

But it’s finally done and ready for public consumption. Check out the map here. The map is free and open source. We’re hoping to disseminate this map to everyone who might have an interest in viewing either the scale of mineral exploration in the state, or people who just want to know what’s going on in their region. So tell your friends, tell your enemies. Help us spread the word.

It’s also worth noting that this map is “value-neutral”. It’s just a map, we’re not saying whether any of these prospects are a good idea or a bad idea.

Features

The map has a number of features that we hope will make it useful:

You can sign up to receive e-mail (or RSS) updates for any area that you select on the map. That means when we update the projects in that area, you’ll receive a notice about the changes.

Each prospect contains information on metals sought, size, companies involved, notes on recent exploration, etc. Where appropriate, prospects are linked to longer GTT articles and/or photos of the prospect.

Because this map is generated from a database that we maintain, changes are instantaneous and are propagated through all versions of the map. We’ve received funding to maintain this map for at least the next three years and so expect it to always be up-to-date.

The map can be embedded into any other website, simply by pasting in the HTML found at the bottom of the map. See the result above.

It rained all night, or at least all the night that I was listening. For the last two days we’d been circling around a low mountain of shattered grey rock, our hopes perking up with each lull in the pattering, looking for enough of a break in the weather to climb for a view. I wasn’t very hopeful anymore. But when we finally dragged ourselves outside of the tent, the sky looked high, dry, and grey.

Our grey and yellow tent nearly disappeared below us, blending into the fall-colored willow bushes and slopes of rock below. I imagined camoflauged soldiers, dressed in pink and yellow in this gaudy world. As we climbed, the Noatak River appeared as a shining distant stripe. From the top, we could see what we’d been looking for: Red Dog Mine.

The mine pit itself was hidden behind a piece of the ridge, but through the shifting grey base of the cloud we sat in, we could see the brightly-painted tailings buildings and the long stripe of the airport.

I pointed it out to Katmai who was watching from over my shoulder. “Look. There’s Red Dog Mine again.”

“Red Dog Mine nice?” he piped back at me.

“I don’t know,” I told him. “That’s not an easy question.”

Read more: Essay: Running with Red Dog and our Article: Red Dog Mine

“Whatever you do, don’t put wood ash on the garden. Then it’ll definitely snow.”

I should have listened to my friend’s warning. On the morning of April 6, a light dusting of snowflakes drifted down to the ground, landing on top of the 56.5 inches of snow already sitting on the ground, and covering the wood ash I had put on top of the garden the day before in the hopes it would melt faster.

Picket fences are uncommon in Seldovia, perhaps this is why.

A few days later, Anchorage busted its all time snowfall record with 134.5 inches for the winter.

The news from the lower 48 this winter was all about the lack of winter. Friends in Minnesota saw summer in March. The entire eastern half of the U.S. pretty much skipped winter altogether. This winter was the 4th warmest on record in the U.S. (excluding Alaska and Hawaii), and the warmest March ever recorded.

Are we going somewhere fun?

Here in Seldovia, people chuckled at that news, while walking up to the top of their roofs, snow shovels in hand. Or cursed the news while running their plow trucks in a losing battle against drifted-in parking lots. Or they didn’t hear the news at all, busy skiing through an endless supply of powder up in the mountains, or zooming their snowmachines along the trail through our yard.

Katmai emerges from a cave dug into the 5 feet of snow in the yard.

Seldovia doesn’t keep snowfall records. But we’ve been recording snow depth through the winter on a measuring pole in our yard, which usually shows numbers around twice the depth in Anchorage. And we’re nowhere near the snowiest. Other places in the state, such as Valdez, Cordova, Yakutat, and Haines, always have snowfall stats that make Seldovia and Anchorage seem positively desert-like by comparison.

Graph of snow depth in our yard. Click for details.

With snow, it seems that every winter is an entirely different beast. In my childhood in Seattle, I don’t remember that being true. All winters were grey, rainy, and if we were lucky, had maybe one or two small snowstorms that might cancel a day of school.

With a sleeping baby on her back, Erin shovels out the bike and trailer from under a 6 foot snow drift.

I’ve only been in Seldovia for 4 winters. There was the winter of the eruption – where the little snow that fell was covered by an ash fall in April, and melted away seemingly instantly. There was so little snow that the berry bushes froze, and took several years to recover the blueberry harvest. Then there was the winter of the March blizzards, burying my mother-in-law’s van to the roof where it sat at the bottom of the driveway. Twice. Then there was the winter of the broken trees, where an enormous November dump of wet snow weighted down the tree tops so much that dozens snapped in half, and the alders were bent down so far that some of them hadn’t popped up fully the next June.

2011-2012 was the winter of the infinite and endless snow. Cold, and relentless, with fluffy snowfall after fluffy snowfall, piling on top of eachother with not much of a melt in between. This year had the coldest January ever recorded in Alaska, with temperatures here hovering in the single digits for pretty much the entire month. No one’s firewood lasted the season. The alders never laid down, and were simply buried standing up.

Katmai tries out his balance bike in single digit temperatures.

Why?

The lower 48 was warm mostly because the jet stream was farther north than usual this year, leaving much of the country in the warmer air south of the jet stream (particularly the eastern half of the country). Apparently, much of the blame lies with a pair of weather phenomena known as the Arctic Oscillation and the North Atlantic Oscillation. The Arctic Oscillation spent most of the winter in the “positive” phase, which drives winter storms to the north. The North Atlantic Oscillation does a similar thing, and was positive throughout the winter.

So we got everyone’s snow this year, as well as an unusually cold midwinter (particularly in January). Supposedly spring here will be cool and dry. I’m hoping they’re wrong (at least on the cool part), since I would like to see the garden before July. Given how ridiculously off some of the winter predictions were, I’m not too worried.

Snow drifted over the chainsaw where it’s hung on a tree behind the yurt

Even 4 and a half feet of snow (reached in early February) doesn’t phase Katmai’s plastic backhoe.

Weather is complicated. Next year, the pattern may switch entirely, and bury the lower 48 in all of Alaska’s snow. But climate trends are clear. Increasing global temperatures increases the chances of extreme events in any location, particularly on the warm end of the scale. Looking beyond regional weather patterns, February 2012 (the latest month with available data), was the 324th consecutive month where global temperatures beat the 20th century average. That means there hasn’t been a colder-than-average month on a worldwide scale since I was 5 years old (February 1985).

For now, anyone with a shovel is more than welcome to all the snow in my yard. Over 4 feet still available!

Summer 2010: Clutching ill-fitting yellow hard hats, we followed a small clump of tourists through the hallways and offices of Usibelli Coal Mine, accumulating a pile of cheerily-worded pamphlets. In between pictures of giant earth movers and aerial shots of the mine, was a simple graph, sweeping downward from left to right. Our tour guide paused here, proudly pointing out the correlation that seemed obvious:

States that use more coal power have cheaper electricity.

Most of the tourists glanced at it briefly, then wandered on. We lingered. I noted a few obvious outliers – the hydropower-dependent states of the Pacific Northwest had cheaper power than pretty much anywhere else. Beyond that, there wasn’t much information. What year was this data from? What other factors might be involved?

Owl on a coal seam near Usibelli Coal Mine

In the mountains near Healy, these wires are part of the grid that extends from the Kenai Peninsula to Fairbanks

The Big Idea

At Ground Truth Trekking, we might be best known for our crazy expeditions to far-flung corners of Alaska. But all of us were trained as scientists. And we’ve been researching Alaska coal issues for a few years now.

So several months later, when we came across a study calculating the “externality” costs of coal power, Hig had what seemed like an obvious idea. Externalities are real economic costs that aren’t captured in the consumer price of a good – costs paid by taxpayers and the public in the form of health care costs, pollution cleanup, etc…

We could add those externalities (about 18 cents per kilowatt hour) to the consumer energy prices from the original graph we saw at Usibelli mine, and get better picture of the real costs of coal power.

Enter the Data Geeks

It wasn’t that simple. First, we needed our resident computer geeks to create a fancy interactive graphic that let us look at energy sources, power prices, and externality costs for every state in every year. Next, since every power source has externality costs, we needed to dig into the literature to try and estimate those costs for everything from hydropower to nuclear. Finally, since existing power prices are often grandfathered in from old already-paid-off power plants, we needed to look at the data on how much power would cost from a newly-constructed plant.

The Chuitna Coal Mine prospect sits on a complex ecosystem of forests, meadows, and wetlands – “overburden” above the coal.

We dug through obscure government reports, emailed back and forth with arguments, questions, and statistics, and finally created not just a graph, but an entire report.

Why?

Because what we found in poking around in the data was not what we expected to find. We expected that adding externality costs would show that coal power was not as cheap as it appeared. That’s true.

What we also found, was that even without externalities, coal power wasn’t really cheap at all. States that increased their use of coal over the past decade didn’t see their power costs drop. And if you were to build a new power plant today, a coal plant would not be the cheapest choice.

There is no electricity “free lunch”. Not in cost, and not in environmental impact. But the least we can do is make our power choices based on real information, rather than outdated perceptions.

in the tundra at the Pebble site – 2005

Walking into Pebble Mine

August, 2005: I lay my camera carefully in the tundra, then ran back and flopped on my belly, smiling in a frame of reindeer moss and berries. A helicopter roared past, dangling something from a cable beneath it. It had been three days since I talked to another human, but I was surrounded by the sound of their machines: the constant thwack of rotors, the rumbling of drill rigs, and the roar of small planes.

I tucked the camera into the dry bag that hung around my neck, and headed out into the swampy flat that marked a proposed tailings lake, snapping photos between the squalls of rain. For dozens of square miles around me, the rolling wet tundra had been engulfed by an idea bigger than anything this part of the state had ever seen: the Pebble Mine proposal

I wasn’t really a photographer. The digital SLR camera was brand-new to me only a few months earlier. I took pages of detailed notes in a waterproof journal, but I wasn’t yet a writer. I wasn’t an activist. At the time, I wasn’t even an Alaskan. I was just an ex-grad student – a newly-minted Master of Molecular and Cellular Biology looking for a new path in life.

Caribou near the Pebble site – 2005

The New York Times introduced me to Pebble Mine, in a 2005 article that shocked me mostly with what I didn’t know. A giant mine proposal, at the headwaters of a giant salmon fishery – how had I missed such a big issue?

Type “Pebble Mine” into Google today and you’ll be inundated with protest pages and mine company pages, a Wikipedia article, magazine spreads, and news pieces from across the world. There are photos of the prospect, maps galore, photos of people standing with anti-mine banners, photos of drill rigs and photos of salmon… There are movies to watch, a National Geographic piece to read, and a dozen different organizations to join.

In 2005, there was none of that. Pebble Mine’s backers were planning to move to permitting in less than two years. But it seemed like no one had even heard of their plan. Information was difficult to come by. Talking to a director of a prominent conservation group focused on Alaska, I had a hard time convincing him that Pebble actually existed. People cared, but they were few, scattered, and no one was paying them much attention. I couldn’t even find a picture of the place.

So I thought I’d better go take a few.

Three days earlier, I’d walked here alone from Nondalton Village, not sure what I might find. As I walked into the rolling flats of the proposed tailings lake, the wind and rain picked up, whipping the tiny plants into photographic blurs, and spattering water across my lens. The plants hugged the ground in a close-knit mat, surviving by being low and crowded. I followed caribou trails around the brushy tangles, circling Frying Pan Lake, and hiking into the hills on either side of the valley.

Cranberries and reindeer moss – 2005

I’d just spent the whole day hiking in what could become a giant tailings lake. How could everything around me – literally everything I could see, and everything I walked through all day, disappear into a toxic muck pond?

Becoming an Expert

At the end of 2005, typing “Pebble Mine” into Google would bring you straight to me. I had exactly zero funding, and only crude web skills. Yet somehow, my on-the-ground expedition, photographs, research and writing had turned my page into the dominant source of Pebble Mine info on the web. Requests started flooding in. I heard from people who wanted to use my photos, for everything from posters to magazines to college projects. From people who had questions, who wanted to know what they could do, who wanted to know more…

Who was I to be in this position? I tried to live up to it, painstakingly compiling facts and news articles, attending Northern Dynasty’s meetings in Seattle, and reading long papers about mining issues.

Where Threatened Waters Flow

Last of the snow melting from the banks of the upper Koktuli River – 2006

June, 2006: I walked out of Nondalton Village, this time with Hig and my friend Tom in tow. The tundra was painted with the pastel yellows and pinks of tiny wildflowers and tinged with the dull, muted tones of ground that has only recently emerged from the snow.

Even from this closest village, the Pebble valley was still a day and a half’s walk away. As we approached the first of the exploration drill rigs, a trio of caribou trotted past gracefully. A helicopter roared across the dark grey sky, tilting and bouncing in the punishing wind. Trash littered the ground near the trampled and muddy pits of old drill rig sites. I crouched in the grass with my telephoto lens, shooting drill rigs and hoses, and the sludge of rock slurry spilling out over the tundra.

Our mission on this journey was to follow the water. As salmon swim, and as toxins might flow, we spent a month traveling almost 500 miles under our own power, hiking and packrafting the length of both watersheds that connect the Pebble site to Bristol Bay.

My natural shyness had been countered by my bolder companions. As we passed through villages, we began to talk to the locals – about the area, about our trip, about the mine. Each person we spoke to seemed keen to tell us that their entire village was against the mine. They were concerned about the fish, and skeptical of the mining company’s promises.

Here in the Bristol Bay watersheds, everyone knew about Pebble. Everyone had strong opinions. But the rest of the state and the country was just starting to hear of it.

Drill rig at the Pebble Prospect – 2008.

Familiar Ground

March, 2008: A wind swept our skis down the frozen surface of Sixmile Lake. As we approached Nondalton Village a cluster of low, colorful buildings emerged from the bare birch and shaggy spruce on its shores. The small forms of people appeared on the edge of the ice, approaching to greet us.

“Come in! There’s moose stew and all kinds of food.”

By now, we were returning to familiar ground. We dumped our snowy backpacks in a corner of the Nondalton community center, underneath a poster of my photographs from 2005, and lined up for styrofoam bowls of moose stew.

Anti-mine symbols graced buttons and baseball caps around the room—a neat red slash through the words “Pebble Mine.” “No Pebble Mine” posters covered the walls, the professional work of an Anchorage environmental group intermingled with the colorful hand-drawn efforts of local children. Nunamta Aulukestai, a multi-village organization ?rmly against the mining proposal, had invited a panel of scientists and a state official to talk about the potential impacts of a mine.

Somewhere in the past few years, things had changed. Not just here in the villages, but across the state. More and more, Pebble was even popping up in national and international media. Pebble Mine wasn’t the issue no one had heard of anymore. It was the issue everyone had an opinion on. It was the issue that dominated commercials and ballot initiatives, and seemed better known than any other resource issue in the state.

Forever

Elders outlining subsistence resources near the Pebble site – 2008

Tom Crafford (state DNR large mine coordinator), stood up in front of the small crowd in the Nondalton community center, explaining the setup at Red Dog Mine, where a water-treatment plant sits at the outlet of the tailings storage lake, perpetually deacidifying and detoxifying the water before it is released, making it safe for downstream life. When the mine closes, the treatment plant will still be there, treating the water in perpetuity. Other maintenance will need to be performed perpetually as well, keeping the toxic tailings stored in a dammed-off lake, forever sequestered away from water and air. This is what the future of Pebble Mine might look like

Hig broke in with a question: “What exactly do you mean by ‘in perpetuity?’”

“Forever,” Crafford responded.

“Actually forever?”

“Yes.”

“When the United States no longer exists, when glaciers roll over the landscape in another ten thousand years, some guy is going to be out there with a bulldozer maintaining the dams around the tailings storage lake? To a geologist, forever doesn’t even make sense!”

Forever is impossible. Whether it happened in one year, ten years, a hundred years, or a thousand, those tailings would eventually pollute the downstream watersheds. Failure was a given. We were just taking bets on when it might happen, and how rapid a failure it might be.

What’s Next?

A thunderstorm approaches the Pebble site – 2006

In some ways, we’ve moved away from Pebble Mine in the last few years, broadening our focus to encompass issues that haven’t yet reached everyone’s attention. Against the backdrop of air-supported National Geographic photo trips and constant television ads, my home-grown efforts seemed paltry. The world may not need my photos of Pebble any longer. But there are questions that no one else is asking.

I haven’t been back to Pebble since 2008. But Hig’s visited the area every summer, digging trenches, doing high-resolution GPS surveys, searching for evidence of faults and earthquakes. Even in the 30,000 page baseline data document Pebble Mine recently released, there is only a paltry 3 pages covering seismic risk. And in those 3 pages, there’s not much worth looking at. For other industrial projects in seismically active areas, companies pay for detailed surveys that identify faults and quantify risk. Here, Hig has spent yeas doing the only original science on seismic hazard risk in the Pebble Mine region.

In the last seven years, I’ve watched awareness and outreach on the Pebble Mine issue blossom far beyond what I could have possibly imagined. But that question Hig asked in Nondalton still hangs unanswered. It’s an issue that comes up in large mine projects across the state and the world. As far as I know, there is no solution to the problem of permanent tailings storage other than what we were told by the PR rep for Red Dog mine.

What will we do about forever?

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

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

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

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

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

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

His Own Two Feet

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

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

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

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

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

The Joys of Nature

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

Picking blueberries

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

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

Little explorer playing in the brush

Testing out the palatability of local vegetation

The Art of Coaxing

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

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

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

Winter Awkwardland

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

Visiting the unplowed world.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The snow in our yard dwarfs adults and toddlers alike.

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

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

Erin and sleeping Lituya in the snow

The Passenger

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

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

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

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

The Future

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There’s rarely a “Later” camp.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Case for Leaving Wealth in the Ground

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

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

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

Drill rig at the Pebble Mine prospect in March 2008.

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

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

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

Facilities and waste rock piles at Red Dog Mine

Planning for Empty

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

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

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

Packrafter and drill rig in Cook Inlet

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

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

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.

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.