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Can You Step in the Same River Twice? In Montana, I Learned the Answer.

jversteegh — Fri, 29 Nov 2024 12:00:30 +0000

You’re about to read one of the����ϳԹ��, a series highlighting the best stories we’ve ever published, along with author interviews, where-are-they-now updates, and other exclusive bonus materials. Read Lisa Chase’s interview with David Quammen about this feature here.

I have been reading Heraclitus this week, so naturally my brain is full of river water. Heraclitus, you’ll recall, was the philosopher of the sixth century B.C. who gets credit for having said: “You cannot step twice into the same river.” Heraclitus was a loner, according to the sketchy accounts of him, and rather a crank. He lived in the town of Ephesus, near the coast of Asia Minor opposite mainland Greece, not far from a great river that in those days was called the Meander.

He never founded a philosophic school, like Plato and Pythagoras did. He didn’t want followers. He simply wrote his one book and deposited the scroll in a certain sacred building, the temple of Artemis, where the general public couldn’t get ahold of it. The book itself was eventually lost, and all that survives of it today are about a hundred fragments, which have come down secondhand in the works of other ancient writers. So his ideas are known only by hearsay. He seems to have said a lot of interesting things, some of them cryptic, some of them downright ornery, but this river comment is the one for which Heraclitus is widely remembered. The full translation is: “You cannot step twice into the same river, for other waters are continually flowing on.” To most people it comes across as a nice resonant metaphor, a bit of philosophic poetry. To me it is that and more.

Once, for a stretch of years, I lived in a very small town on the bank of a famous Montana river. It was famous mainly for its trout, this river, and for its clear water and abundance of chemical nutrients, and for the seasonal blizzards of emerging insects that made it one of the most rewarding pieces of habitat in North America, arguably in the world, if you happened to be a trout or fly-fisherman. I happened to be a fly-fisherman.

One species of insect in particular—one “hatch,” to use the slightly misleading term that fishermen apply to these impressive entomological events, when a few billion members of some mayfly or stone fly or caddis fly species all emerge simultaneously into adulthood and take flight over a river—gave this river an unmatched renown. The species was Pteronarcys californica, a monstrous but benign stone fly that grew more than two inches long and carried a pinkish-orange underbelly for which it had gotten the common name salmonfly. These insects, during their three years of development as aquatic larvae, could survive only in a river that was cold, pure, fast-flowing, rich in dissolved oxygen, and covered across its flat bottom with boulders the size of bowling balls, among which the larvae would live and graze. The famous river offered all those conditions extravagantly, and so P. californica flourished there like it did nowhere else. Trout flourished in turn.

When the clouds of P. californica took flight, and mated in air, and then began dropping back onto the water, the fish fed upon them voraciously, recklessly. Wary old brown trout the size of a person’s thigh, granddaddy animals that would never otherwise condescend to feed by daylight upon floating insects, came up off the bottom for this banquet. Each gulp of P. californica was a nutritional windfall. The trout filled their bellies and their mouths and still continued gorging. Consequently, the so-called salmonfly so-called hatch on this river, occurring annually during two weeks in June, triggered by small changes in water temperature, became a wild and garish national festival in the fly-fishing year. Stockbrokers in New York, corporate lawyers in San Francisco, federal judges and star-quality surgeons and foundation presidents—the sort of folk who own antique bamboo fly rods and field jackets of Irish tweed—planned their vacations around this event. They packed their gear and then waited for the telephone signal from a guide in a shop on Main Street of the little town where I lived.

The signal would say: It’s started. Or, in more detail: Yeah, the hatch is on. Passed through town yesterday. Bugs everywhere. By now the head end of it must be halfway to Varney Bridge. Get here as soon as you can. They got here. Cab drivers and schoolteachers came too. People who couldn’t afford to hire a guide and be chauffeured comfortably in a Mackenzie boat, or who didn’t want to, arrived with dinghies and johnboats lashed to the roofs of old yellow buses. And if the weather held, and you got yourself to the right stretch of river at the right time, it could indeed be very damn good fishing.

But that wasn’t why I lived in the town. Truth be known, when P. californica filled the sky and a flotilla of boats filled the river, I usually headed in the opposite direction. I didn’t care for the crowds. It was almost as bad as the Fourth of July rodeo, when the town suddenly became clogged with college kids from a nearby city, and Main Street was ankle deep in beer cans on the morning of the fifth, and I would find people I didn’t know sleeping it off in my front yard, under the scraggly elm. The salmonfly hatch was like that, only with stockbrokers and flying hooks. Besides, there were other places and other ways to catch fish. I would take my rod and my waders and disappear to a small spring creek that ran through a stock ranch on the bottomland east of the river.

It was private property. There was no room for guided boats on this little creek, and there was no room for tweed. Instead of tweed there were sheep—usually about thirty head, bleating in halfhearted annoyance but shuffling out of my way as I hiked from the barn out to the water. There was an old swayback horse named Buck, a buckskin; also a younger one, a hot white-stockinged mare that had once been a queen of the barrel-racing circuit and hadn’t forgotten her previous station in life. There was a graveyard of rusty car bodies, a string of them, DeSotos and Fords from the Truman years, dumped into the spring creek along one bend to hold the bank in place and save the sheep pasture from turning into an island. Locally this sort of thing is referred to as the “Detroit riprap” mode of soil conservation; after a while, the derelict cars come to seem a harmonious part of the scenery. There was also an old two-story ranch house of stucco with yellow trim. Inside lived a man and a woman, married then.

Now we have come to the reason I did live in that town. Actually there wasn’t one reason but three: the spring creek, the man, and the woman. At the time, for a stretch of years, those were three of the closest friends I’d ever had.

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Meet the Extreme Travelers Trying to Visit Every Country in the World

jversteegh — Mon, 25 Nov 2024 11:00:52 +0000

It’s a pleasantly warm afternoon in Azerbaijan, a former soviet republic sandwiched between Russia and Iran, and the tank crewmen of the Qubadli regional Border Detachment are hosting a party. For hours they’ve been working to raise a wedding-style tent and set a dozen tables with cartons of fruit nectar, bowls of nuts, and plates of pale pink meats. The Azerbaijanis have been fighting off and on for more than 30 years with Armenia, another ex-Soviet state a grenade toss to the west, but tonight the war can wait.

Around 5 P.M., 14 shiny Nissan Pathfinders, Toyota Land Cruisers, and Mitsubishi Pajeros come racing into the encampment behind a military-police escort vehicle—a boxy Russian-built Lada—with lights flashing and engine whining. The SUVs file into a gravel parking area that was scratched out of the scrubland. Dozens of the detachment’s T-72 tanks and infantry fighting vehicles sit silently nearby like insects ready to sting.

The dust settles and about 30 civilians from more than 20 countries step from the cars, stretch their legs, and look around in wonder. Some are doctors. Some are vagabonds. All of them are here to see one of the world’s most contentious enclaves.

The detachment base sits on the fringes of Nagorno-Karabakh, a 2,700-square-mile patch of the Lesser Caucasus Mountains nestled inside Azerbaijan but historically home to a lot of ethnic Armenians, too. The two have been at each other’s throats for generations over this region, with thousands of lives lost. In the past four years, Azerbaijan has reclaimed the besieged area, and more than 100,000 Armenians fled back to Armenia. While the conflict appears to be over for now, there are remnants of the war everywhere: step off the road and a land mine might do you in.

(Illustration: Erin McKnight)

A muscular, jovial colonel with thin, graying hair and slate-colored eyes comes forward in his battle dress. The tank crews stand at attention in navy blue boiler suits. His name is Murad, but that’s all he can say. A patch on his chest reads O (I) RH+, which is his blood type.

“Welcome! Welcome!” the colonel says to the guests. “We’re so honored you are here.”

The leader of the visiting guests, Charles Veley, a 58-year-old from Marin County, California, steps forward from a white Mitsubishi that I’ve been riding in, too. “Thank you for having us,” Veley replies. “I hear you have a surprise.”

“Yes, yes,” the colonel says. “I hope you enjoy.”

What’s no surprise is that Veley, who has a boyish grin and a neutral, even way of speaking, is here. That’s because he is, according to a system he created, America’s most traveled person, a wanderer who has visited more of the planet than almost any known human in history. Fewer than ten people have seen more of the globe than he has.

To quantify that, there are lists. The most straightforward one comes from the United Nations, which affirms that there are 195 countries in existence, including places like Palestine and the Holy See. Federal Express says that it delivers to more than 220 countries and territories. The list that Veley compiled, and that thousands of other extreme travelers recognize, tops out at more than 1,500 distinct places that are currently possible for one to visit. It includes countries, regions, enclaves, atolls, both poles, and at least one small, sheer-cliffed islet in the middle of the ocean. Russia isn’t just “Russia,” but 86 discrete stops. The United Kingdom has 30 stops, including islands like Herm and Sark. To see the United States, you must travel to 79 places that stretch from the Florida Keys to the Pribilof Islands in the Bering Sea.

“Charles isn’t an adventure seeker but a knowledge seeker,” his friend Kolja Spöri, the German founder of the Extreme Traveler International Congress, a yearly gathering of the world’s most obsessive travelers that’s been held in such places as Baghdad, Equatorial Guinea, and Siberia, told me. “He’s the spiritual father of all country collectors,” he added in a blog post.

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Our Coast to Coast Walk Across Northern England Was an Exercise in Hope and Joy

jversteegh — Tue, 19 Nov 2024 11:05:51 +0000

On the morning of Monday, May 6, the air on the Cumbrian Coast was 58 degrees Fahrenheit and very damp. ��The tide was neither in nor out, and the surface of the Irish Sea looked like a restless version of the paved parking lot where my wife and I stood. Before descending to the beach, I loosened my shoelaces, jogged a few experimental steps, and tightened the laces again. Emma was stretching her quads and fiddling with the nozzle of her water bladder. We had giddy prerace feelings, though this was not a race, or even a run, and we’d come to England because we wanted to slow down.

Above the beach, a muddy path crept up a green sheep pasture to the top of St. Bees Head, a 300-foot sandstone sea cliff teeming with birds and mist. We knew from maps and books and online research that the Coast to Coast Walk, which we were there to do, traversed the mesa-like head for four and a half miles before veering eastward for another 188.

“How are they feeling?” Emma asked, nodding grimly in the direction of my feet.

“I’m hoping they’re just nervous,” I replied.

A fishing boat was humming alone in the sea fret. Beach pebbles clacked with fright, delight, or some other rocky emotion as they were tumbled by the waves. Because it’s a Coast to Coast tradition, we spent a few minutes on the shore picking among these oblate stones until one felt right—mine a mostly solid matte black, Emma’s black with green veins. Then we slid the rocks into our packs, dipped our feet in the sea, and clicked our Garmin watches on.

“I’ll race ya,” Emma said.

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I’ll Pass on Thanksgiving. Give Me a Camping Trip Instead.

tzemke — Sun, 17 Nov 2024 15:00:11 +0000

A couple years ago, my husband, Dan, and I were trying to figure out what to do for Thanksgiving. Go to my mom’s house, an hour away, for dinner? Fly back east to visit his family for a few days? Invite friends over for a Friendsgiving feast? Every option sounded stressful. “What if we just ditched all that and went camping somewhere warm instead?” I offered.

The idea of enjoying the holiday outside, instead of spending it indoors cooking and making small talk with distant relatives, sounded appealing. So that’s exactly what we did.

It’s not that I hate turkey and mashed potatoes. Or that I don’t like my extended family. But camping with my kids is the best quality family time we have. And, as we quickly learned, the long Thanksgiving weekend is an ideal time to enjoy incredible U.S. campgrounds without throngs of people. That’s why we’ve given up the notion of a traditional Thanksgiving—and all the emotional and literal baggage that goes along with it—and spend the holiday camping instead.

The author’s first Thanksgiving dinner, spent camping with her husband, two children—both left—and a new friend (Photo: Megan Michelson)

That first year, we drove our camper van from our home in Tahoe City, California, down to the sleepy central coast and , 15 miles west of San Luis Obispo. At 8,000 acres, Montaña de Oro is one of California’s largest state parks, with over and mountain biking as well as a picturesque beach that’s walking distance from the campground and seven miles of shoreline. In the summer months, the park’s 47 campsites book up quickly, but in November, it’s relatively easy to score a site.

On Thanksgiving day, we spent the morning surfing mellow waves at Cayucos Beach and the afternoon hiking the four-mile Bluff Trail, accessed right from our campsite. We bought crab cakes from a local fish shop and green beans and squash from a roadside farm stand, so dinner was easy and delicious. I made a caramel-banana pie (from a recipe I tore out of ��ϳԹ�� magazine) in a cast-iron pan over the fire. That evening, we FaceTimed our families from the picnic table, and they were thrilled to see us having a good time. Nobody’s feelings were hurt that we weren’t there.

At the state park, you can picnic or hike amid massive Monterey pines—seen here—and eucalyptus, explore tidepools, and fish, among other activities. Dogs are allowed at campgrounds but not on trails or its beaches. (Photo: Getty/Elis Cora)

Later that night, some kids at the site next to ours started kicking the soccer ball around and invited our two to join. Suddenly, we had friendly neighbors. They were the Petersens from a town not far away, and they go camping every Thanksgiving. They’d roasted a turkey all day in their Dutch oven over the campfire, while a second cast-iron pot was filled with potatoes and stuffing. (I took notes for my next Thanksgiving camp menu.) They welcomed us over for dessert, so we brought our pie and sat around the fire chatting amiably.

Our first Campsgiving was a success.

Last year we decided to camp with friends in Moab, Utah, over the holiday weekend. Arches National Park was surprisingly quiet—trails were empty once you got away from the parking lot—and we had the slot canyons of the all to ourselves. (I reserved self-guided tickets for the Fiery Furnace for the four of us one week in advance.)

Last year during the Thanksgiving weekend, the author and her family ran into very few tourists at Arches National Park. (Photo: Megan Michelson)

Finding an empty first-come, first-served campsite in , nine miles south of the park’s visitor center and close to the town of Moab, was easy. We just drove around until we spotted one we liked that was empty. Temperatures got down into the thirties at night, but it was nothing that s’mores around the campfire, a down jacket, and a flask of whiskey couldn’t fix.

Space, spectacular sunsets, and high-desert scenery that many hope to visit—not bad for a campsite that costs $15 a night. (Photo: Megan Michelson)

This Thanksgiving, we’re again camping on California’s central coast, and guess who we’re camping next to? Yep, our new friends, the Petersens. They’re bringing the Dutch oven and the soccer ball; we’re bringing the pie. It’s going to be great.

Tips to Having an Equally Wonderful Campsgiving

Thanksgiving shouldn’t be something you dread. In a , 85 percent of those surveyed said they’ve lied or come up with an excuse to get out of attending a family holiday. And in 2023, the American Psychological Association that 38 percent of people are more stressed during the holidays (only 8 percent of respondents said they felt happier). Why are we doing this to ourselves? My advice is to go pitch a tent in nature somewhere instead.

Here are a few things I’ve contemplated when planning our family’s annual late-November camping trip.

Consider the Weather

Camping this time of year can mean you’re in for cold temperatures and variable weather, depending where you’re headed. If this doesn’t sound appealing, head south to warmer climes or rent a camper van or an RV so you have an indoor option if a storm rolls in.

Be prepared for colder weather with seasonally appropriate gear and clothing. If this is new to you, check out some ��ϳԹ��-recommended fall camping equipment.�� (Photo: Getty/Jacob Rushing)

is a great place to start for peer-to-peer camper-van or RV rentals, or check out for high-end Sprinter vans, with pick-up locations across the country. Usually, you can get better rates on these rentals during the colder seasons, too.

Book a Campsite in Advance

Campsite availability in late November is pretty wide-open—it’s much easier to book a popular site now than during the summer. That said, it’s still wise to make a reservation ahead of time if you’re headed to an in-demand spot.

Also keep in mind that many campgrounds close for the winter, so be sure to check that your campsite of choice is open before you get on the road. is the booking site for national park campgrounds, while sites like , , and are good resources for finding public and private campgrounds. I like for occasions when we’re looking for dispersed campsites on public lands.

Set the Scene

You can make a campsite festive with a few thoughtful additions. A tablecloth and picnic blankets draped over the benches can be a nice touch. Your holiday centerpiece can be pine cones or driftwood collected from around camp.

Remember that it gets dark early in November, so pack headlamps, solar-powered string lights, or LED lanterns to brighten up your campsite. I like these to hang from tree to tree and this rechargeable to set on the table.

Cook a Memorable Campfire Feast

The campfire is an open invitation to draw new friends into the Campsgiving atmosphere (Photo: Megan Michelson)

There are no rules about what to whip up over your Thanksgiving camp stove. Anything goes. But you might keep it simple to maximize your day outdoors exploring.

I like to prep meals at home before we leave. These turkey meatballs are easy to make both at camp or ahead of time, and here’s a one-pot stuffing bowl that’s a cinch to put together. You could cook soup or chili at home and reheat it over the fire or stove. Or a box of pasta or mac and cheese and some tinned fish will get the job done, too.

Dessert can be marshmallows on a stick, or if you want to get fancy, check out these camp-friendly recipes for sweet potato pie��Ի� apple crisp.

Finally, for a festive fall cocktail, I like this cranberry spritz (make the cranberry simple syrup in the recipe at home in advance).

The author in her happy place: a campsite with her family (Photo: Megan Michelson)

Megan Michelson is an ��ϳԹ�� contributing editor. S’mores are one of her favorite foods.��

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Northern Lights Hunting with This Indigenous Tracker Was the Most Moving ��ϳԹ�� of My Life

jversteegh — Sun, 03 Nov 2024 11:30:48 +0000

Joe Buffalo Child grew up beneath the northern lights, but one starry winter night in particular remains etched in his memory. He was six years old and camping with his grandparents to monitor the family trapline, a 50-mile stretch of snares set for rabbits and muskrats in the snowy boreal forest outside Yellowknife, the capital of Canada’s Northwest Territories. Slipping out of the cozy tent, his breath fogging as he gazed skyward, it wasn’t long before Buffalo Child found what he was seeking: “It was stars, stars, stars, then—boom! The aurora’s there,” he told me, his eyes sparkling at the flashback.

On trapline trips like these, learned about the many ways nature was tied to the traditions of his people, the , who have inhabited central and northwest Canada for over 30,000 years. By day, his grandfather took him hunting or fishing—outings that came with important lessons, like how to predict an approaching storm by studying the movement of the clouds or the height of a seagull’s flight. Come dusk, bathed in the gas lamp’s honey glow, his grandmother shared spiritual beliefs, like how Buffalo Child’s beloved tie-dyed sky dance, known in the Denesuline language as ya’ke ngas (“the sky is stirring”), carried messages from his ancestors.

“I was on the land under the aurora even as a baby,” he said. “The aurora’s always been part of our life.”

This deep knowledge of nature and cultural connection to the night sky were foundational to his future as a professional northern-lights chaser and guide for his company . Now 60 years old, Buffalo Child has spent nearly two decades sharing his aurora-tracking abilities with those willing to make the journey up to Yellowknife. He is considered one of the most well-known aurora hunters in North America.

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The Worst Kind of Type 2 Fun in the Arctic

Alison Osius — Tue, 22 Oct 2024 12:00:22 +0000

More than 40 years ago, the then park ranger Jon Waterman took his first journey to Alaska’s Noatak River. Captivated by the profusion of wildlife, the rich habitat, and the unfamiliar landscape, he spent years kayaking, packrafting, skiing, dogsledding, and backpacking in Arctic North America—often alone for weeks at a time. After three decades away from the Noatak, he returned with his 15-year-old son, Alistair, in 2021 to find a flooded river and a scarcity of the once abundant caribou. The Arctic had warmed nearly four times faster than the rest of the world.

The next year, 2022, Waterman took a last journey to document the changes. The following is excerpted and adapted from his prologue in Into the Thaw: Witnessing Wonder amid the Arctic Climate Crisis (Patagonia Books, November 12).

A former ranger in Rocky Mountain��Ի� Denali national parks, Waterman is the author of 17 books, including (National Geographic Books), In the Shadow of Denali, Kayaking the Vermilion Sea, Running Dry, and Arctic Crossing. He has made five films about adventure and wild places.

Jon Waterman among icebergs at the end of his 2,200-mile journey across the Arctic in September 1999. (Photo: Jon Waterman Collection)

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The below is adapted from Into the Thaw: Witnessing Wonder amid the Arctic Climate Crisis.

A Certain Type of Fun, July 10-12, 2022

In eventually reaching the Noatak Headwaters and passing through different ecosystems, Waterman and Chris Korbulic, his partner on the 2022 journey, will see stands of fireweed, known to colonize areas recently burned in wildfires. (Photo: Chris Korbulic)

My hands, thighs, and calves have repeatedly locked up in painful dehydration cramps, undoubtedly caused by our toil with leaden packs in eighty-degree heat up the steep streambed or its slippery, egg-shaped boulders. After my water bottle slid out of an outside pack pocket and disappeared amid one of several waist-deep stream fords or in thick alders yesterday, I carefully slide the bear spray can (looped in a sling around my shoulders) to the side so it doesn’t get knocked out of its pouch, an action I will come to regret. Now, to slake my thirst, I submerge my head in Kalulutok Creek like a water dog.

Kalulutok Creek would be called a river in most parts of the world. Here in Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve, amid the largest span of legislated wilderness in the United States, it’s just a creek compared to the massive Noatak River that we’re bound for. But in my mind—after we splash-walked packrafts and forded its depths at least 30 times yesterday—Kalulutok will always be an ice-cold, wild river.

Chris Korbulic surveys the Noatak headwaters valley, increasingly overgrown with shrubs and hazed by wildfire smoke; over 3 million acres burned in Alaska in 2022. (Photo: Jon Waterman)

It drains the Endicott and Schwatka Mountains, which are filled with the most spectacular granite and limestone spires of the entire Brooks Range. One valley to the east of us is sky-lined with sharp, flinty peaks called the Arrigetch, or “fingers of the outstretched hand” in Iñupiaq.

As the continent’s most northerly mountains, the sea-fossil-filled Brooks Range—with more than a half-dozen time-worn peaks over 8,000 feet high—is seen on a map as the last curl of the Rocky Mountains before they stairstep into foothills and coastal plains along the Arctic Ocean. The Brooks Range stretches 200 miles south to north and 700 miles to the east, where it jabs into Canada. Although there are more than 400 named peaks, since the Brooks Range is remote and relatively untraveled, it’s rare that anyone bothers to climb these mountains. My river-slogger companion, Chris, and I will be exceptions.

Chris Korbulic (front) and Jon Waterman fly into Walker Lake on the south side of the Brooks Range, in early July 2022. (Photo: Chris Korbulic)

We carry a water filter, but it would be silly to use it. We’re higher and farther north than giardiasis-infected beavers and there is no sign of caribou. The creek is fed from the pure ice of shrunken glaciers above and ancient permafrost in the ground below. In what seems like prodigious heat for the Arctic, the taps here are all wide-open.

An Inuit man praises his qimmiq (Eskimo husky) on the sea ice in Elu Inlet Nunavut, Canada, in May 1999. The qimmiq has served for 4,500 years of travel across the Arctic but is now threatened with extinction by snowmachines. (Photo: Jon Waterman)

Thirty-nine years ago, I decided to learn all I could about life above the Arctic Circle. As a climber, I traded my worship of high mountains for the High Arctic. I felt that unlike the study of crevasse extrication and avalanche avoidance—you couldn’t just read about the Arctic or sign up for courses. You have to go on immersive journeys and figure out how the interlocked parts of the natural world fit together. Along this path, acts of curiosity out on the land and the water can open an earned universe of wonders. But you must spend time in the villages, too, with the kindhearted people of the North to make sure you get it right. And you can’t call the Arctic “the Far North”—it is “home” rather than “far” to the many people who live there.

The author on the sea ice outside the village of Tuktoyaktuk, the Northwest Territories in April 1998, with his dog Elias, preparing to set out on a long solo journey across the Northwest Passage. (Photo: Jon Waterman Collection)

So, after twoscore of Arctic journeys, in the summer of 2022, I’m on one more trip. I could not be on such an ambitious trip without all the previous experiences. (The more I learn, it sometimes feels like the less I know about the Arctic.)

But this time the agenda is different. I hope to understand the climate crisis better.

Chris Korbulic and I are here to document it however we can. Since my first trip above the Arctic Circle in 1983, I have seen extraordinary changes in the landscape. Only three days underway and we’ve already flown over a wildfire to access our Walker Lake drop-off point. And yesterday we trudged underneath several bizarre, tear-drop-shaped landslide thaw slumps—a.k.a. thermokarsts—caused by the permafrost thaw.

Beneath multiple thermokarst landslides caused by permafrost thaw, the author and his friend tow packrafts up Kalulutok Creek in Gates of the Arctic National Park to avoid bushwhacking in the valley, now overgrown with brush. (Photo: Chris Korbulic)

In much of Alaska, the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme (AMAP) says that permafrost thaw from 2005 to 2010 has caused the ground to sink more than four inches, and in places to the north of us, twice that. The land collapses as the permafrost below it thaws, like logs pulled out from beneath a woodpile. AMAP believes this will amount to a “large-scale degradation of near-surface permafrost by the end of the twenty-first century.” Roads and buildings and pipelines—along with hillsides, Iñupiat homes, forests, and even lakes—will fall crazily aslant, or get sucked into the ground as if taken by an earthquake.

The Alaskan village of Kivalina—doomed, like many Iñupiat villages, Waterman observes—is surrounded by the Chukchi Sea and the lagoon fed by the polluted Kivalina and Wulik Rivers. (Photo: Chris Korbulic)

On this remote wilderness trip, we don’t expect a picnic—known as Type 1 Fun to modern-day adventurers. A journey across the thaw on foot and by packraft for 500-plus miles won’t resemble a backcountry ski trip or a long weekend backpack on Lower 48 trails. We have planned for Type 2 Fun: an ambitious expedition that will make us suffer and give us the potential to extend ourselves just enough that there will be hours, or even days, that won’t seem like fun until much later when we’re back home. Then our short-circuited memories will allow us to plan the next trip as if nothing went wrong on this one. An important part of wilderness mastery is to avoid Type 3 Fun: a wreckage of accidents, injuries, near-starvation, or rescue. We’ve both been on Type 3 Fun trips that we’d rather forget.

Chris Korbulic paddles on the vast Noatak River in the most recent expedition, two years ago. (Photo: Jon Waterman )

Today, to get Chris, a caffeine connoisseur, to stop, I simply utter, “Coffee?” His face lights up as he throws off his pack and pulls out the stove. I pull out the fuel bottle. Since Chris isn’t a conversational bon vivant, I’ve learned not to ask too many questions, but a cup of coffee might stimulate a considerate comment or two about the weather. As I fire up the trusty MSR stove with a lighter, we crowd around and toast our hands over the hot windscreen as if it’s our humble campfire. We’re cold and wet with sweat and we shiver in the wind. But at least we’re out of the forest-fire smoke—this summer more than two million acres have burned in dried-out Alaska.

Chris Korbulic is able to ditch his giant pack inside the packraft here on the Noatak River headwaters alongside Tupik Creek (Photo: Jon Waterman)

Today, with the all-day uphill climb and inevitable back-and-forth route decisions through the gorge ahead, we’ll be lucky to trudge even five miles to the lake below the pass. Why, I ask myself, as Chris puts on his pack and shifts into high gear, could we not have simply flown into the headwaters of the Noatak River instead of crossing the Brooks Range to get here? I heave on my pack and wonder how I’ll catch Chris, already far ahead.

Shards of caribou bones and antlers lie on the tundra as ghostly business cards of a bygone migration, greened with mold, and minutely chiseled and mined for calcium by tiny vole teeth. We kick steps across a snowfield, then work our way down a steep, multicolored boulderfield, whorled red and peppered with white quartz unlike any rocks I’ve seen before. As rain shakes out of the sky like Parmesan cheese from a can, we weave in and out of leafy alder thickets while I examine yet another fresh pile of grizzly feces. I stop to pick apart the scat and thumb through stems and leaves and root pieces. This griz appears to be on a vegetarian diet.

“Hey, bear!” We yell the old cautionary refrain again and again until we’re hoarse. I hold tight to the pepper spray looped over my shoulder to keep it from grabby alder branches.

A male grizzly (brown bear) grazes like a cow amid willow and fireweed. Several thousand grizzlies roam throughout Alaska. (Photo: Jon Waterman)

A half mile farther the route dead-ends so we’re forced to descend into the gorge again. With Chris 20 yards behind, I plunge step down through a near-vertical slope of alders and play Tarzan for my descent as I hang onto a flexible yet stout branch, and swing down a short cliff into another alder thicket. A branch whacks me in the chest and knocks off the pepper-spray safety plug. When I swing onto the ground, I get caught on another branch that depresses the trigger in an abrupt explosion that shoots straight out from my chest in a surreal orange cloud. Instinctively I hold my breath and close my eyes and continue to shimmy downward, but I know I’m covered in red-hot pepper spray.

When I run out of breath, I squint, keep my mouth closed, breathe carefully through my nose, and scurry out of the orange capsaicin cloud. Down in a boulderfield that pulses with a stream, I open my mouth, take a deep breath, and yell to Chris that I’m O.K. as I strip off my shirt and try to wring it out in the stream. I tie the contaminated shirt on the outside of my pack and put on a sweater. My hands prickle with pepper.

Then we’re off again. As we clamber up steep scree to exit the gorge, my lips, nasal passages, forehead, and thighs burn from the pepper. The pepper spray spreads from my thighs to my crotch like a troop of red ants, but I can hardly remove my pants amid the incoming storm clouds and wind. With the last of the alders below us, we enter the alpine world above the tree line. By the time we reach the lake, the drizzle has become a steady rain. I’m nauseous and overheated underneath my rain jacket with the red pepper spray that I wish I had saved for an aggressive bear instead of a self-douche. Atop wet tundra that feels like a sponge underfoot, we pitch the Megamid tent with a paddle lashed to a ski pole and guy out the corners with four of the several million surrounding boulders left by the reduction of tectonic litter.

Boykinia, one of many protein-rich plants that bears eat, bloom alongside the lake camp on the pass above the Noatak headwaters. (Photo: Jon Waterman)

I fire up the stove and boil the water, and we inhale four portions of freeze-dried pasta inside the tent. We depart from wilderness bear decorum to cook outside and away from the tent because it’s cold and we’re tired. Chris immediately heads out with his camera. His eyes are watery from just being within several feet of me.

I’ve been reduced like this before—wounded and exhausted and temporarily knocked off my game. So, I tell myself that this too will pass, that I’ll get in gear and regain my mojo. That maybe, I can eventually get my shy partner to loosen up and talk. That we will discover an extraordinary new world—the headwaters of the Noatak River—from up on the pass in the morning. And that I will find a way to withstand my transformation into a spicy human burrito.

Snow feels likely tonight. It’s mid-July, yet winter has slid in like a glacier over the Kalulutok Valley.

I am too brain-dead to write in my journal, too physically wiped out and overheated in the wrong places to even think of a simple jaunt through the flowers to see the view that awaits us. I pull down my orange-stained pants and red underwear, grab a cup filled with ice water. I try not to moan as I put in my extra-hot penis and let it go numb.

Type 2 Fun for sure.

Into the Thaw: Witnessing Wonder Amid the Arctic Climate Crisis (Patagonia Books)

Jon Waterman lives in Carbondale, Colorado. An all-round adventurer, he has climbed the famous Cassin Ridge on Denali in winter; soloed the Northwest Passage; sailed to Hawaii picking up microplastics; dogsledded into and up Canada’s Mount Logan; and run the Colorado River 1,450 miles from source to sea. He is a recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship and three grants from the National Geographic Society Expeditions Council. Into the Thaw is available to purchase from Patagonia Books and for pre-order on Amazon for November 19.

The author, Jon Waterman, in the field (Photo: Chris Korbulic )

For more by this author:

A Former National Park Ranger Reveals His Favorite Wild Places in the U.S.

The post The Worst Kind of Type 2 Fun in the Arctic appeared first on ��ϳԹ�� Online.

If You Live in a Mountain Town, Get Ready for Lots of Houseguests

Alison Osius — Thu, 29 Aug 2024 10:00:49 +0000

They don’t call it lifestyle property for nothing. Anyone who is fortunate enough to live in a beautiful place can expect visitors and a lot of houseguests. I know because I live in a mountain town.

When I was younger and living in a shared house in Aspen, I rashly, widely urged friends to visit, to crash in sleeping bags. But then there were more and more. Someone who supposedly knew my brother from college called and asked if she and her brother could stay a few days. (It’s always “a few.”) One of my housemates had a romance with a visiting British guy, who came back the next winter with two of his friends. By then she’d met someone new, and so she left the three Brits sleeping in our living room for days, until I was elected to tell them to decamp.

We’re here! And on vacation—while you’re not!��(Photo: mihailomilovanovic/Getty)

In those days of land lines, one time when I came back from work, a visiting friend said, “I called Russia.”

“You … what?”

“I had to call Russia. You can tell me when you get the bill.”

Of course, I’ve stayed in many a friend’s house, and I love having people for dinner and to visit. But early on in Aspen, my housemates and I realized we had to manage the situation. I started warning people ahead to say I would be working and couldn’t ski with them every day, nor go out every night. Guests who are on vacation and locals who are not are fundamentally at cross purposes.

Weekend arrivals are much appreciated. (Photo: Jamie Kingham/Getty)

Eventually I got married, moved 30 miles down valley to Carbondale, entered many years of kids and schools, and had visitors, but not the same sort of volume. Lately, though, they are surging anew.

Friends are taking early retirement. Some are self-employed or have reduced their hours, and some are working “very part time.” And there are always teachers with summers off, or just people on breaks: lighthearted, blithe.

Recently a friend said he was coming to town and asked to stay. My husband and I said sure. “I’ll get there Monday or Tuesday,” the next text said. He arrived Sunday morning: “Oh, I thought it was Monday.”

Friends pass through on long road trips, with loaded roof racks and bike racks. People I haven’t seen in years write, “How are you?” and I know what that means. People ask all the time if I can take time off or do things on weekdays. But I work full-time, and in the last month we’ve had six sets of visitors. I wanted to see every one of them (and insisted on hosting some for certain events), but PTO is finite.

The other change is this: now I work at home. The pandemic. A friend who also works at home recently told her nephew sorry, no, he and his wife couldn’t come stay on a Tuesday through Thursday. Her old guest room is now her office, which she must use to work. It’s always easier to have friends on a weekend, but visitors forget, because they’re on vacation.

Our kids and their friends come, stay, ski, and eat all they want. I love it—and just hope it snows. (Photo: Alison Osius)

So, a few suggested tenets for visiting friends in mountain towns and other beautiful places.

1. Ask your hosts well ahead of time if a date works, and offer an easy option to decline. I.e.: “We can also camp, so no worries if you have too much going on.” A dear friend came through last week, knew we had our son and his girlfriend here in addition to two people in a van in the driveway, and mercifully said, “Can you come meet us for dinner one night?”

2. It helps to keep your stay to three nights, per the old saying about fish. (An exception is family, especially our now grown kids … er, and all their friends.)

3. No one was ever anything but pleased with a thoughtful house gift. Anything’ll do. And/or bring food! A cooler is good, too, so you can bring more!

4. Offer to contribute to meals and cover at least one dinner, whether it’s cooked in your host’s house—that’s fine! that’s heaven!—or at a restaurant.

5. Please put your dishes in the dishwasher. They can’t make it there from the counter on their own.

6. On leaving, put sheets and towels in the laundry room, and clean up the bathroom a little.

7. Aim to visit on weekends. At the end of “Everybody’s Free to Wear Sunscreen,” Baz Luhrmann says, “Trust me about the sunscreen.” Trust me about the weekends. Midweek is tricky when people work.

8. Help me out. I work a lot. I prefer people not bang on my office door shouting, “Time to stop!” Or chide, “You’re not working again, are you?” or ask, “When are you going to retire?” I like my job, and I’d like to keep it.

With my brother, Ted Osius, in Da Nang, Vietnam, in 2016. Ted and his family lived in embassy housing in Hanoi and hosted visitors (like me) continually, with a philosophy of benign neglect. ��(Photo: Alison Osius Collection)

Last, I practice what my brother and his husband—who hosted me and everybody else under the sun while they were in the State Department in embassy housing overseas—always called benign neglect. Make your own plans, come and go as you like. I’m glad to see you and will join in if I can, but mostly give you a hug and a house key.

Alison Osius, a senior editor at ��ϳԹ��, lives in Carbondale, in Western Colorado. Having stayed with her brother and his family in Indonesia and Vietnam, she hopes they will take her up on visiting her to ski in Colorado next spring break. She’d hit the slopes with them on the weekend.

The author with friends Katie Kemble and Jill LaRue, in front of the A-frame in Icicle Creek Canyon, Leavenworth, Washington, where they all once lived and hosted many wanderers. (Photo: Alison Osius Collection)

For more by this author, see:

Colorado’s Storm King Mountain Memorial Trail Takes You to Sacred Grounds

Don’t Let Altitude Sickness Ruin Your Mountain Vacation. Heed This Doctor’s Tips to Avoid It.

In 2022 A Stranger Saved Us in a Storm at Green River. Trying to Find Him, I Just Got a Surprise.

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These New ��ϳԹ�� Memoirs Lay It All on the Line

mturner — Wed, 24 Jul 2024 09:00:36 +0000

When I worked as an editor at ��ϳԹ��, the formula for a typical adventure memoir often read like this: get trapped in blizzard, trigger avalanche, capsize in Southern Ocean, watch as climbing partner falls hundreds of feet to certain death. But now the adventure world has become much more open to things that were rarely mentioned back then: mental illness, body image, trauma.

This opening has made room for a new kind of exposure in the wild. These books reveal what’s really going on for the people writing them, with room for honesty, vulnerability, grief, and questions without easy answers.

These are the books I’m reading this summer, many of them by longtime ��ϳԹ�� contributors.

(Photo: Courtesy Simon & Schuster)

1. In My Time Of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife,��by Sebastian Junger

After years as a combat reporter in some of the most dangerous places on earth, Junger was weathering the pandemic on Cape Cod with his wife and two young daughters when he doubled over in pain. As doctors worked to save his life—his pancreatic artery had burst—Junger crossed a threshold. “I became aware of a dark pit below me and to my left. The pit was the purest black and so infinitely deep that it had no real depth at all. It exerted a pull that was slow but unanswerable, and I knew that if I went into the hole, I was never coming back.”

Junger, an ��ϳԹ�� contributor and the author of The Perfect Storm (among many other books), thankfully did come back, with this searching meditation on what life—and death—mean to all of us. “You will know yourself best at that moment; you will be at your most real, your most honest, your most uncalculated. If you could travel back in time to make use of such knowledge during your life, you would become exactly the person you’d always hoped to be—but none of us do that. We don’t get that knowledge until it’s too late.”

(Photo: Courtesy Milkweed Editions)

2. Becoming Little Shell: Returning Home to the Landless Indians of Montana,��by Chris La Tray

Montana poet laureate Chris La Tray’s father wanted no part of his Chippewa heritage. So much so that when young Chris went to his grandfather’s funeral, he was floored to see that most of his relatives were Indigenous. “Here was a collection of people I’d never known but was clearly connected to,” he writes. “Who were they? Why didn’t I know them? Why was I never allowed to know them?”

La Tray’s chronicle of his journey to track down that heritage is as much a history of a forgotten tribe struggling to get federal recognition as it is a personal homecoming. When he is finally accepted as an enrolled member of the Little Shell Tribe of the Chippewa Indians, “The moment is overpowering,” he writes. “I take a breath. I’m part of this, part of them. I wipe the sweat from my brow and take a quick look around me for snakes. Then I follow the trail down the slope, across time, through genocide and diaspora, and fear and death and now rebirth, to food, to companionship, and increasingly, to community.”

(Photo: Courtesy Little A)

3. A Light Through the Cracks: A Climber’s Story,��by Beth Rodden

Beth Rodden sheds her skin as climbing’s girl next door to write with honesty and precision about the years-long buried trauma that followed her infamous 2000 kidnapping—in which Rodden, Tommy Caldwell, and their climbing partners were shot at by Islamic militants while big wall climbing in Kyrgyzstan. But she also reveals harder things: the disordered eating rituals she used to believe helped her float up rock and the desire that awakened when she left Caldwell for her now-husband Randy.

Ultimately, she shares a newfound strength as a happier mother and wife, one who uses her squishy mama belly as just another climbing tool, her flesh “wrapping around the rock like cling wrap on a chocolate chip cookie.” As Rodden realizes, “I had treated myself like a robot for so long, thinking my discipline made me better than regular people. I finally understood that pursuing ‘greatness’ didn’t fill me the way a ‘normal life’ did. If I wanted to have a big life, I needed to live a smaller one.”

(Photo: Courtesy Random House)

4. The Color of Everything: A Journey to Quiet the Chaos Within,��by Cory Richards

Rarely, if ever, has a climber produced a more searing survival story. Among the things that photographer Cory Richards has survived: summiting Everest without oxygen; windstorms at 25,000 feet; and the 2010 avalanche on the Pakistani peak Gasherbrum II that launched his self-portrait onto the 125th anniversary cover of National Geographic. But what he has endured is much harder: his brother’s fists; unwilling stays in rehab facilities and institutions; recurring panic attacks; and hollow mornings after paid-for sex.

Richards holds almost nothing back, owning the psychiatric diagnoses that have saddled him since he was a boy. “I chose to live madly to outrun madness itself,” he writes. “I’ve thought that by rebellion, doing more, being better, and being different, I might be able to out-climb, out-explore, or out-create the disquiet of my mind. But what if the noise and madness were the gift?”

(Photo: Courtesy Pantheon)

5. Sharks Don’t Sink: ��ϳԹ��s of a Rogue Shark Scientist,��by Jasmin Graham

When she was six, Jasmin Graham’s father gave her a yellow Tweety Bird fishing rod and took her fishing off the pier in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. So began a love of the ocean that led her to a master’s in marine biology and a career as a shark scientist—a dream come true even if being a young Black woman scientist also came with sexism and racial microagressions.

Burned out and scrolling Instagram late one night, she was startled alert. “My life was changed forever by a single photograph,” she writes. “It was of a Black female researcher floating underwater with an adorable nurse shark. I felt like I had discovered a unicorn.” As a result, she and three other Black shark experts founded the nonprofit to generate more opportunities in the field.

“I see myself and my people in sharks,” Graham writes. “All too often Black people are perceived and treated much like sharks: feared, misunderstood, and brutalized, often without recourse; assumed to be threatening when so often we’re the ones under threat; portrayed unfairly in the media, so that others are predisposed to have a negative interaction with us.”

(Photo: Courtesy Grove Press)

6. Fi: A Memoir,��by Alexandra Fuller

In her darkest hour, Alexandra Fuller retreats to a sheep wagon in a high alpine meadow where she can be alone in the agony of her grief. Her son Fuller, or Fi, has just died from a seizure at the age of 21—“in the fatness of summer, in the fullness of youth, on the brink of manhood”—and the wild is the only place she can exist as she breaks apart.

The author of four previous memoirs, including the award-winning Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, Fuller raised her children in Wyoming with echoes of her own wild childhood in Zimbabwe, picking them up after school on horseback, “whooping and hollering, cantering home through aspen groves, horses steaming, dogs panting.” As she tells Fi’s surviving sisters, “He’s our ancestor now. Our young ancestor: feel him in the wind and the sun and the trees, feel him there.”

(Photo: Courtesy Parallax Press)

7. Brief Flashings in the Phenomenal World: Zen and the Art of Running Free,��by Katie Arnold

A former editor at ��ϳԹ�� and a frequent contributor, competitive ultrarunner Arnold was celebrating her tenth anniversary on Idaho’s Middle Fork of the Salmon River when the raft flipped, ejecting her into the shallow water and shattering her tibial plateau. Her husband was at the oars, and back home she finds herself immobilized, seething with anger at him she can’t burn off. The brief flashings in the title come from Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, the classic collection of talks by the late Japanese Zen master Shunryu Suzuki, who describes the everyday awakenings we all experience as “flashings in the vast phenomenal world.”

As Arnold writes, “they are happening all around us, all the time—while eating an ice cream cone or riding our bike or sitting broken beside a river—but we’re usually too distracted to notice.” With Suzuki Roshi as her guide, Arnold begins again, putting one foot in front of the other, back to her husband—whose equanimity, she realizes, makes him a natural Zen master—and all the way to victory at the Leadville 100 ultramarathon.

(Photo: Courtesy HarperOne)

8. Never Leave the Dogs Behind: A Memoir,��by Brianna Madia

We love it when influencers expose their vulnerabilities, but the mercurial social media world can quickly turn against them. Brianna Madia ( and author of the bestseller Nowhere for Very Long) watches her #vanlife bubble pop when she and her ex-husband’s dog Dagwood gets run over. A GoFundMe campaign saves Dagwood’s life, but when Madia admits that it was their own van that hit the dog, she’s the one who takes the blame for not disclosing it sooner. Never mind that her ex was the one driving.

The resulting online bullying is epic and profane, with multiple subreddit threads devoted entirely to proving her a fraud. Holed up in a trailer in the desert outside Moab with her four dogs, Madia hits red-rock bottom. Her recovery, in its tenuous progress, feels raw and believable in the book. And when she enlists a digital forensic investigator and reveals the real names of internet trolls stalking her—well, now who are the ones exposed?

(Photo: Courtesy Zando – Get Lifted Books)

9. Wild Life: Finding My Purpose in an Untamed World,��by Rae Wynn-Grant

Rae Wynn-Grant knew what she wanted at a young age: obsessed with wildlife shows hosted by Marlin Perkins and Steve Irwin, she casually told her parents one night at dinner that she was going to host a nature show on TV. Never mind that she lacked the three attributes she figured were essential: being white, male, and having a British or Australian accent.

Today Wynn-Grant is a wildlife ecologist, National Geographic Explorer—and, like her hero Perkins—co-host of Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom reboot, Protecting the Wild. ��“One thing that I didn’t anticipate was that the knowledge I gained in the field, studying predators and their prey, would apply to my own life,” she writes. “As a young Black mother and professional, I’ve built a career for myself in a space dominated by older white men and charted my own path in a society riddled with ill-fitting expectations.”

(Photo: Courtesy Grand Central Publishing)

10. This Ordinary Stardust: A Scientist’s Path from Grief to Wonder,��by Alan Townsend

“While our flashes may be brief,” writes Alan Townsend in this remarkable memoir, “some of them are impossibly bright, and everything that matters is contained in the ways your own light sparks the ones that lie in everybody else.” Townsend, an ecosystem ecologist and dean of the University of Montana’s College of Forestry and Conservation, finds his own ecosystem rocked when both his wife and four-year-old daughter are diagnosed with brain tumors.

His wife, a dedicated scientist herself, shows him how to walk through uncertainty with grace and light, while his young daughter possesses a heart as big as the giant stuffed lion that is her companion in the hospital. It is science, in the end, that offers Townsend some measure of comfort. Each of us is a collection of trillions of atoms, he reminds us, coming together and coming apart. “No matter what happens, we’re still here,” he writes. “And we always will be.”

(Photo: W. W. Norton & Company)

11. We Loved It All: A Memory of Life,��by Lydia Millet

Can you feel the loss of something you never knew in the first place? This is the question novelist and conservationist Lydia Millet poses in her first nonfiction book, an examination of extinction, humanity, and our soul. We surround our children with animals, she notes, stuffed and plastic tigers and bears and dinosaurs, and teach them how to live through storybooks starring animals. But then something happens.

“The other animals don’t vanish from our lives as we grow up: they stick around, working in sales,” Millet writes. From the Geiko gecko to Tony the Tiger, “much is lost when the animals are turned into brand ambassadors: their reduction takes a toll on our imaginations.” Millet writes about “endlings,” an individual who is the last of its kind, and about species loneliness, that piercing longing we feel as we hold ourselves farther apart from our animal neighbors.

This is a memoir to be sure—from Millet’s first loves to her own shortcomings as a parent—but more than that, it is an uncomfortable mirror held up to all of us, a species disconnected, obsessed with our own reflection. Perhaps our duty as parents is, as much to care for our own children’s well being, to teach them to care for and about the other species who will—with any luck—serve as their companions.

MORE GREAT BOOKS TO ADD TO YOUR READING LIST:

The 2024 Reading List for Athletes

��ϳԹ��’s Ultimate Bookshelf

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Navigating Orca Alley: One Family’s Journey Among Rudder-Bashing Whales

jversteegh — Tue, 09 Jul 2024 10:00:17 +0000

We landed awkwardly on a wave and the boat shuddered, our aluminum hull protesting loudly under the impact. Seconds later, I felt another violent thud and immediately feared the worst—orcas! Foghorn in hand, I readied myself to wake the rest of the crew, reciting our response plan in my mind. Noisemakers, full revs to shallower water, radio call, check the bilges. Run like hell and hope they lose interest!

But I hesitated in the intervening silence. After many days underway with relatively little sleep, I knew my nerves were raw, my internal radar struggling to decipher clutter from true danger. I forced myself to count to ten. Breathe, listen, wait. The usual sounds resumed. Water rushing beside us. Gulls calling hoarsely in the dark. Wind whistling against the halyards. No 8,000-pound whale body-slamming our boat. At least not yet.

It was 2 A.M., and I was on night watch 15 miles off the west coast of Portugal, feeling anything but at home on the sea. Familiar constellations offered reassurance that we hadn’t sailed off the edge of the earth, while the wildly tilting horizon suggested otherwise, making Orion dance like a jester. It was mid-November during a new moon, the sea black besides occasional phosphorescence rising in our wake.

We rode easily over the ten-foot swell that lingered from an earlier storm, but the west wind had begun to kick up an unpleasant chop with short, sharp waves whose crests looked eerily like orca fins. Alone on deck, my mind wandered to worst-case scenarios. I pictured my seven- and nine-year-old sons, Dawson and Huxley, being shaken from sleep as my husband, Pat, sprinted up on deck in his underwear to find that we had been struck by an orca.

Most unsettling of all was the unwelcome reconfiguration of my relationship to the natural world: suddenly, I was afraid of a creature I’d long regarded as friend. As a wildlife biologist in Alaska, I’ve worked in the company of orcas; as a sailor, I’ve celebrated each surprise sighting at sea; as a mother, I’ve reveled in my sons’ fascination with them.

But now, rather than being graced by the presence of whales, I was worried we’d be taken down by them.

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Colorado’s Storm King Mountain Memorial Trail Takes You to Sacred Grounds

Alison Osius — Mon, 01 Jul 2024 11:00:09 +0000

May 2024

This time when I see the first tree hung with the blowing, ragged shirts, the sight is more familiar, less stark than before. I am more prepared.

Hiking the Storm King Mountain Memorial Trail, near Glenwood Springs, Colorado, my son Ted and I approach another tree, this one with firefighter helmets at its base.

The trail crosses to the Main Ridge, also known as Hell’s Gate, then drops down to pass the 12 memorial crosses below. This view is toward the south and west, and the summit of the mountain is northward. (Photo: Alison Osius)

In the wildfire of 1994, the ridge we’re on was the dividing line between the firefighters who lived or did not: those who escaped over the other side or those who were caught as they labored uphill, not knowing that the fire behind them would move upward at speeds up to 35 feet per second. There had not been a similar since the loss of 13 in Mann Gulch, Montana, 45 years before.

A tree on the Main Ridge is tied with T-shirts in commemoration, and two firefighter helmets lay at its base. (Photo: Alison Osius)

Ted and I look around, west at the wide valley spreading out from the sinuous Colorado River, the fluted edges of Hogback Ridge to the south catching evening light. At the end of May, the slopes around us have just changed from the light green of spring into fresh early-summer emerald.

It is a hot day, and we stand in the breeze in a saddle beneath the 8,797-foot apex of the ridge; the same saddle the survivors attained in 1994 is the hike’s destination. “This wind is heavenly,” I say.

“It would be bad for firefighters,” Ted responds. “It’s really beautiful here,” he says, turning to me with a faint grimace.

Unspeakable tragedy happened in this spot. The beauty is no justification, but a solace, a benediction.

From here, the trail descends along the fire break the firefighters battled to establish, and then loops back to rejoin the approach. We start down the loose, gravelly trail, toward the first cross.

July 1994

1994 was a drought year. On Saturday, July 2, an intense thunderstorm roared in from the west, and lightning struck a tree on a major ridge of Storm King Mountain, five miles west of��Glenwood Springs. The next morning a tendril of smoke showed, visible from the adjacent I-70, and was reported by many. That day the fire was named the South Canyon Fire, but it was on Storm King Mountain, off the Canyon Creek turnoff; like many, I just call it the Storm King Fire.

A grouping of crosses on Storm King (Photo: Alison Osius)

Accidents in mountaineering and aviation and hospitals are often caused not by one error or element, but a series, in what is often referred to as the of causation. Various factors, each of which can be represented as a layer of cheese, and each of which could have altered the course of events, line up. Elements that affected or might in some way have prevented the accident are holes that, unfortunately, align.

A day after the fire started, over three dozen lightning-sparked fires were burning in the encompassing Grand Junction District, managed by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). As days passed with agencies spread thin, major resources were diverted to the largest fire, in Paonia, 70 miles from Glenwood Springs, which burned three houses. I live in Carbondale, 12 miles from Glenwood and 58 from Paonia; we smelled the smoke, and ashes flecked our neighbors’ trampoline.

Prior to the tenth anniversary (left to right) Marilyn Fagerstrom, with the Lefthand Volunteer Fire Department in Boulder County; Michael Brantner, Forest Service in Woodland Park; and Boyd Lebeda, Colorado State Forest Service in Alamosa, visit the 14 memorial crosses on Storm King Mountain. Eric Hipke, one of the survivors, also accompanied the group.�� (Photo: Helen H. Richardson/The Denver Post/Getty Images)

On July 4, three crew members from the White River National Forest carried chainsaws up Storm King mountain and made assessments. The next day, July 5, seven BLM and��Forest Service firefighters hiked up to the fire, located on what is known as the Main Ridge (or Hell’s Gate Ridge). Crew members cut a helicopter landing spot (called H1) and an air tanker dropped retardant.

According to the 250-page investigation prepared by the South Canyon Fire lnteragency Investigation Team for the Chief of the Forest Service and the Director of the BLM, at 5:30 p.m. the first crew left for equipment changes, and at 5:45 p.m., eight smoke jumpers parachuted in above the fire. On July 6, more firefighters arrived, putting 49 on the mountain by the afternoon. The report states that 16 smokejumpers, 20 hotshots, a six-person helitack crew (two at the fire and four at the helibase), and 12 BLM/Forest Service firefighters (ll at the fire, one at the helibase) were assigned to the fire.

That afternoon a helicopter dropped water, but after a cold front moved in at 3:00 p.m. and the winds picked up, drops became ineffective.

The same day, July 6, 1994, I was walking 10-month-old Teddy around town in his stroller. I remember the day as bright and hot, and looking up thinking, Where’d that wind come from? It was blowing, and the undersides of nearby tree leaves turned up, glinting.

Bonnie Holtby was a third-generation firefighter and at 21 years old the youngest of those lost. Her father, Dr. Ralph Holtby, left his own helmet, inscribed to “our daughter.” (Photo: Ted Benge)

That was the day the fire on the Main Ridge of Storm King spread, likely by lofted , down into the adjacent West Drainage and then moved rapidly up that narrow canyon and east to the Main Ridge. ��

I wheeled Teddy home. That evening our friend and employer Michael Kennedy, then owner of Climbing magazine, called saying that 14 firefighters had been killed on Storm King.

July 2001

The South Canyon Fire and what happened is important history in the area, and I’d heard from a couple of local friends that I should go, in part to see the mementos brought here in tribute. In 2001, my sister Lucy and I took our boys partway up when Teddy (what we called him when he was younger) and his brother, Roy, were seven and four, and her son, Sam, was eight months old. The trailhead is just off I-70, where it runs alongside the Colorado River. We carried the younger kids in backpacks, and Teddy walked.

The memorial trail first began as a path made by family and friends, and over ensuing months was improved by the BLM, Forest Service, Air Force cadets, and 100-plus volunteers as a tribute to the 14 who lost their lives—and firefighters everywhere.

The Storm King 14 were aged 21 to 44. Ten of them were in their 20s. (Photo: Courtesy Post Independent)

Nine of the lost were from the 20-person Prineville Hotshot Team from Oregon: Kathi Walsleben Beck, 24, Tamera Jean Bickett, 25, Scott Alan Blecha, 27, Levi Brinkley, 22, Douglas Michael Dunbar, 22, Terri Ann Hagan, 28, Bonnie Jean Holtby, 21, Rob Johnson, 26, and Jon R. Kelso, 27. Four of the five women on the Prineville team were killed. Three of the deceased were smokejumpers, who parachuted in: Don Mackey, 34, Roger Roth, 30, and Jim Thrash, 44, and two were helitack crew (meaning they were transported by helicopter): Richard Kent Tyler, 33, and Robert E. Browning, Jr., 27.

(Photo: Courtesy Gaia GPS)

The roundtrip hike is only four miles, but steep, rising 1,500 feet. As my sister, the children, and I started out, we stopped and read the excellent interpretive signs—giving the firefighters’ names and faces, different maps, and other information—at the trailhead, then started up the path, deliberately left rough as a reminder of the conditions firefighters face, 700 feet to a minor ridgeline looking over at the Main Ridge.

The trail begins just off I-70 by a parking area and kiosk. (Photo: Alison Osius)

We peered into the drainage east of us, where the fire had ascended, and then we all dipped slightly down the hillside to an observation platform, with more plaques and a wide view. I had read Fire on the Mountain,��the meticulously researched account of the tragedy by John N. Maclean (son of Norman Maclean, who wrote Young Men and Fire about the 1949 Mann Gulch disaster), but the visuals and signage here showed me something I’d never understood: where on the rib opposite us one group of firefighters had escaped to previously burned terrain, deployed their fire shelters, and lived.

Other visitors had stopped at the observation point, unwilling or unable to continue the steepening second half of the trail, some leaving messages and flowers. Teddy knelt by a potted African violet, opened his Nalgene bottle, and watered it. That was as far as our young party could go, too, and we turned around and descended.

June 2004

Three years after that first, abbreviated hike, when I thought both Teddy and Roy, now aged ten and seven, could make the full ascent, I brought them again, and two of their friends the same age.

At the trailhead, we all looked at images of each of the men’s and women’s faces, read out their names, and talked about some of them. One, Levi Brinkley, was a triplet. Two others—Roger Roth and Terri Hagen—were from the Iroquois Nation. I knew that one firefighter, Kathi Beck, had a subscription to Climbing, where I was an editor at the time, giving me a small sense of connection to her.

Scott Blecha’s is the first cross a hiker on the loop will reach. It is only about 100 feet below the ridge. He was 27. (Photo: Ted Benge)

The five of us proceeded, with breaks and snacks, to the observation point, crossed the gully, and hiked up the other side. At the Main Ridge we saw the T-shirts, left by others as remembrances and in solidarity, tied on trees, then reached the vantage point where the photos I’d studied so often in the book had been taken. There, two firefighters, Sarah Doehring and Sunny Archuleta, pulled out a camera and took a few pictures at the top of the ridge. Archuleta saw the fire advancing toward the other firefighters, and realized disaster loomed. He knew that documentation would be crucial to later study.

The west-flank crew on the fireline, 13 of them, approached the ridge in a line on the last rise. The terrain is uneven, rolling, and they could not see what was coming up behind them. I’ve always remembered how they carried packs, chainsaws, and water, not realizing they should drop them to increase their speed; the fire must have still seemed some distance off. Between 4:14 p.m. and 4:18 p.m. the fire spread below the west flank of the ridge. The wind whipped the flames into a “blowup” (a “sudden increase in fireline intensity or rate of spread,” according to the USDA, often involving violent convection) racing up the drainage in two minutes. The fire caught the west-flank crew on the final 300-foot rise, a stone’s throw from safety on the other side.

Interpretive sign at the trailhead to the four-mile hike (Photo: Alison Osius)

Two other firefighters, Brad Haugh and Kevin Erickson, who had waited by a tree (subsequently referred to in accounts as The Tree) 200 feet below the ridgeline to encourage the crew on the way up, had to flee, receiving first- and second-degree burns respectively.

Only one of the west-flank crew, Eric Hipke, made it to the ridge, but with his fingers badly burned and burns elsewhere. From there, he escaped down the eastern drainage with help from Erickson and Haugh. Scott Blecha was found only about 100 feet below the ridge. The rest were engulfed closely grouped together 200 to 280 feet below. A few had deployed their shelters.

The view looking northeast as a hiker comes out of the forest to the first ridge, across the West Drainage. Major sites in the accident are labeled. (Photo: Courtesy J. Kautz, U.S. Forest Service, Missoula, MT.)

Browning and Tyler, on the helitack crew, were last seen on the ridge jogging upwards, heading northwest, possibly toward a flat outcropping, but were caught by the fire. Eight others to the south fled up toward a helicopter landing spot on higher terrain on the Main Ridge, deploying their shelters 100 and 200 yards below it. They survived.

On our 2004 hike, the time the boys were elementary-school aged, as we reached the Main Ridge, Teddy said, “Let’s all take off our hats.”

We started carefully down the loose slope to the main site, me in the rear, searching for the memorials below. “A cross!” the boys called out, coming to Scott Blecha’s, so terribly, painfully close to the ridge top. We gazed at flags, medals, beads, and hats left there for him. Then we descended, the boys calling out as they came upon each cross, and reading each firefighter’s name aloud. Names. As my life proceeds, I have found names more and more important; speaking them to be an honor. We brushed the red dust off little treasures and marveled at pocket knives, badges, always more hats, empty bottles of favorite beer. We gently opened an enamel box to find a guitar pick, then closed it again.

On the way home, I asked the boys what they learned. Teddy said people should communicate, and his friend Carson said, “That nature is powerful, and to pay attention.” I need to remember that myself.

June 2024

As I write, it’s fire season, with two devastating blazes in New Mexico and another in Southern California. I’ve already seen two small wildfires where I live, heard the sirens; seen posts about fires along nearby highway 70; known, as ever, to be grateful when it rains. I often think of what the Storm King crew went through and what the young crews fighting fires endure today. ��ϳԹ�� has published stories about many wildfires, including Torched, about smokejumpers across the West, in 1997, and 19: The True Story of the Yarnell Hill Fire, investigating the deadliest fire in the U.S., in 2013.

A few days before my most recent hike with Ted, our third time to Storm King, I looked through Fire on the Mountain again, gazed at the faces of the ten men and four women, most in their twenties. Wildland firefighting is an exhausting job often done by students or youth with seasonal work.

Visitors from all over make the hike every year, leaving notes of thanks to firefighters. The hike is south facing and sunny, so ideally done in spring or fall, but it’s meaningful any time. (Photo: Alison Osius)

At the trailhead a metal box contains a visitor register and many dozen custom patches and stickers, left by hundreds of visiting firefighters. In it is a photo of a young Jon Kelso, labeled as “entertaining his cousins,” ages four to 15.

We start up the first section, and Ted stops partway to wait for me. “They were just young men and women drawn to adventure,” he says when I join him.

Cicadas chirr, my trekking poles click. I smell sage.

Ted has grown up. He’s now 30 years old. This year he moved in with his partner, Aisha, and—after years in finance and much thought—recently bought a longtime area guiding and horseback company, Capitol Peak Outfitters, in Old Snowmass, near Aspen. He has been hunting with his father since age five and knows more about the woods than I do.

We step over an oval of scat in the trail. “Coyote,” he says.

“How do you know?”

“By the hair in it, and the shape.” He nudges it with his toe. “Sometimes you can see bones in there.”

On July 6, 1995, on the one-year anniversary, a memorial service took place on Storm King Mountain, west of Glenwood Springs. The Mackey family erected 14 crosses where the firefighters lost their lives the year before. (Photo: Raymond Gehman/Getty)

The air is dusty and hot, with temps in the 80s and the sun blasting the sandy slopes, and I keep coughing, dry little barks.

“Is that cough from the thyroid cancer?” he asks.

That was eight years ago. So many things have happened in 30 years. In 1994, his brother hadn’t even been born.

After my father (for whom Ted is named) died, suddenly and at only 54, my mother sometimes said: “I feel so bad for him. He’s missing everything.” I keep thinking of the 14 firefighters who have missed everything in these years.

Higher, we make out the marble crosses, always a poignant sight, and the still-maintained fireline. We cross the drainage and begin the final ascent.

Ted Benge of Carbondale starts up the final rise to the Main Ridge, which demarcated those who survived and those who died in the line of duty. This section of the trail roughly parallels that up from the drainage, where 12 crosses are located. On the hike, that part of the trail is the descent. To the left of the frame is the summit and the area of the two other crosses. (Photo: Alison Osius)

Birds sing and, using an app, Ted identifies the spotted towhee and evening grosbeak. Lizards scuttle in our path.

We traverse the ridgeline, stopping to read a plaque, festooned with flags, bracelets, and beads, marking the helitack crew sites. An empty green bottle flanks the stanchion. “Jagermeister,” Ted says with a chuckle. We pass a flat red rock covered in ten firefighter medals. Finely wrought belt buckles from other squads line another stand.

A sign indicating the escape route down the drainage to the east of the ridge is decorated with finely wrought belt buckles from other companies. (Photo: Alison Osius)

Moments further, I tell Ted, “This is where they took the pictures.” I gaze down, remembering the images, taken from this spot, of the landscape and fire line.

Often over the years, I have thought of the dilemma of Hipke, the sole survivor of the west-flank group. Third in line on the way to the ridge and feeling urgent as the crew evacuated along the fireline, he thought of hurrying around the two people in front of him but out of decency hesitated. When they paused, however, one saying the word, “shelter,” he ran through, in the last seconds hurling himself over the top of the ridge.

A report on reads: “We estimate that after a short hesitation, Hotshot [Scott] Blecha stepped around the group, and continued up the hill. Our timeline places Hipke about 45 seconds behind [Kevin] Erickson [who had waited at The Tree]. We estimate that Blecha followed about 40 seconds (100 feet) behind Hipke.”

Hipke has since made a documentary film, which came out ten years ago, called “.”

At the first cross, for Scott Blecha, Ted and I feel a fresh rush of sorrow.

“Scott was trying so hard,” Ted says. “Think if you gave it everything you had, and you were so exhausted. And it was so hot.”

Most of the crosses are grouped closely together on a slope just below the ridge that could have led to an escape. Two crosses are higher, where two of the cohort sought safety. Ted Benge visits the site in May. (Photo: Alison Osius)

Jim Thrash is next. We read all the names, stop at every one. Some of the crosses are so close together. More mementos—chainsaw chains, pocket knives, dreamcatchers. Skis: for Levi Brinkley, the triplet. The skis have been here since the first time I hiked the trail.

I remembered that Jon Kelso was found beside Terri Hagen, to whom he had once been engaged. Around his cross’s arm a chainsaw chain is rusted fast.

A dreamcatcher for Terri Hagen, who was from the from the Onondaga tribe of the Iroquois Nation (Photo: Ted Benge)

So many ball caps. Some newish, some tattered. “This one has lichen!” Ted says, turning over a white brim with delicate orange-rust patches. A foot-tall dreamcatcher hovers above Terri.

We find the cross for Don Mackey, who had reached safety but circled down to warn his crew, and brought up the rear, with Bonnie Holtby, a third-generation firefighter. “Traps,” Ted says, pointing to the rusted iron teeth, and I suddenly remember the boys identifying those hunting traps last time.

Last time, though I knew Bonnie’s cross was here, I was bewildered to have trouble finding it. It turned out to be overgrown by a bush. That has been cleared now.

Ted reads aloud from the words scratched into her father’s own helmet, left here now: “This hard hat is left in memory of our daughter, Bonnie Jean… Here in respect to Bonnie, where she gave her life on the line.” He looks up at me, stricken, and repeats, “Our daughter.” At 21, Bonnie was the youngest of the lost.

All this area was once black, and now it’s green. Full regrowth takes 100 years.

We begin our descent, cross the gully. “Look!” Ted says. “A bear!” I have difficulty spotting it, then pick out the roly-poly cinnamon body just before it trundles into the thick oak below the lowest point of the fire line.

“It’s probably a boar,” he says.

“How do you know?”

“No cub.” He adds: “It covered that hillside in about two minutes. Put its snout down and just went through that tangled scrub oak.”

In 2002, the Coal Seam Fire, which started underground, burned 29 homes in West Glenwood and more than 12,000 acres of land but with no loss of life. Here in 2002, (left to right) Matt Hein, Ben Schlup, and Myles Richards visit a memorial in Glenwood Springs for the 14 men and women on Storm King Mountain in 1994. The firefighters camped in the park where the memorial stands. (Photo: Karl Gehring/The Denver Post/Getty Images)

I often recommend the memorial hike and experience to visitors. No one has ever taken me up on the idea except my brother. He understood the hike and returned reverent.

In the car, Ted says, “It’s very tragic, but going there is not horrible, because of all the respect shown by the other firefighters.”

Many lessons were learned, too (see video below)—such as for firefighters to become situationally ��(and to be included in briefings and able to speak up more); for managers to have intimate knowledge of terrain and conditions; for weather warnings to be communicated to those on site; and for better cooperation and coordination between agencies, and better communications between managers and firefighters. Storm King is considered a turning point in wildland firefighting culture, helping those to come later.

The statue in Two Rivers Park, Glenwood Springs, is surrounded by rocks, each with a plaque for one of the individuals. On a recent evening, a young girl and her mother slowly read every one. (Photo: Alison Osius)

July 6, 2024, marks the of the Storm King tragedy. Please give the families privacy and refrain from hiking the memorial trail that morning.

The trail is just off I-70, commonly used by people traveling to the Colorado mountains and Utah desert. It is south-facing, better done in spring or autumn than the summer sun, but always a sacred journey. Stay on the trails to protect the hillsides, and bring plenty of water. Go and remember the people, honor them, say their names.

During this fire season, let’s salute and appreciate the people who are on the line trying to keep the rest of us safe.��

Watch: Lessons From the Storm King Fire

Alison Osius is a senior editor at ��ϳԹ�� magazine and ��ϳԹ�� Online. She has lived in Western Colorado since 1988, when she moved to Aspen for a job at Climbing magazine. Now residing in Carbondale, she is an avid climber, hiker, and skier. She can be reached at aosius@outsideinc.com.

The author on a recent hike in Aspen, Colorado. (Photo: Michael Benge)

For more by this author, see:

This Is the Most Beautiful Town in Colorado

Must-Know Camping Tips from a Lifelong Camper

In 2022 A Stranger Saved Us in a Storm at Green River. Trying to Find Him, I Just Got a Surprise.

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