it’s the new year for the patagonian ice sheet too, you know

12/24

We got to el Chaltén in the early afternoon after what I’d call a fairly harrowing bus ride – our driver consistently passing smaller vehicles at a high speed, all while wind howled and we tipped slightly side to side. They knew what they were doing though and us gripping our armrests did nothing to affect the overall safety, which was safe, despite appearances Walking for the first time through the small, bristling blue mountain town with all our bags (walking out the door with your baaaags) we dropped them in the room at Campo Hostel. I took a nap – much needed after almost fainting on the plane. Woke up in time for a sunsoaked Christmas dinner at the tepid Nomades, which we picked for the patio and didn’t love the pizza. A wander around town as the sun set over Fitz Roy, our first glimpse, the southern hemisphere stars peeking out. We tried the bar our server had said was having a Christmas party, the Bourbon Smokehouse, which perhaps unsurprisingly was not our vibe – loud pounding American pop music, AI videos of steampunk ice skating playing on a loop on the tv, a single lit wreath all the evidence of the Christmas spirit. No worries, though. We read in the hostel main room and slept just after midnight. Feliz navidad.

12/25

Up the next morning for a Christmas breakfast at the hostel. Matt made an egg scramble, I accidentally stole baguette from our roommate, Laura Alexandra from Belgium. A long breakfast at the hostel table chatting with her after that comedic introduction. She is traveling for a year after quitting her job in a clean room as a lab technician. She met her girlfriend there – we joked about them getting to know each other seeing only each others eyes under beehive lab clean suits, very romantic. She was off to Ushuaia, to see penguins, the end of the world. We packed up and headed on a Christmas hike: tres Lagos at Fitz Roy, supposedly a 9 hour hike and it was long, the first 7 miles winding slowly through windy shrub and low pines, maybe Nires, before a 1k ascent up a steep incline to the lakes. A popular hike but few people on the same late trajectory as us, we reached the lakes at 7pm and made it down by 9:30, an hour before sunset. On our way down Miguel and Joaquin stopped us, muy cansado, they’d been hiking since 9am and were struggling, we gave them bars and water and a headlamp. Me encanta nueva orleans, Miguel said. Cultura Africana, musica, Comida. Encantamos tambien, we said. Back in town, dinner at B Fitz, a perfect mountain town dive bar, playing wistful American rock, we got hamburguesas with chimichurri and just before sunset, spotted Miguel and Joaquin make it into town. No mas hiking, time for cerveza. A cold one, the first and only NA beer in Patagonia, at Patagonia brewing with a book. I called it before Matt, around midnight.

12/26

A late, lazy morning. After consulting windguru we’d decided to leave for the trek on Saturday, and after the 15 mile hike on Thursday we used Friday as a rest and prep day. I sat on the sun-drenched patio at Mathilde for a couple hours, reading the Deadly Education trilogy, before Matt joined for another couple hours. We ordered flat whites, licuado, huevos, croissant with jamon. We moved our chairs around to chase sun and shade, intermittently, a slow and languid bask. Then we split for awhile, Matt down to the rio with a book, I went on a short run down a flat gravel road with a commanding view of Fitz Roy. A small cemetery in the howling wind, spiky meadow grass, possibly calafete, wildflowers pushing up against the waving ocean of grasses, smell sweet on the wind. Running, thinking about running, why I love it so much, the feel of dirt stretching to meet my feet, limbs loose and free. Dirt-streaked legs, sweat pooling under the brim of my hat, fresh air pumping endorphins straight into my brain, embodied inside the music in big headphones, unable and unwilling to stop dancing and smiling my way down the path. Oh boy I love running! Back to the hostel for a hot shower, then back to b Fitz for an early patio dinner, jarra limonada for me in a golden pool of light, Fitz commanding presence hanging over as always. Then we packed for the trek. Mess of plastic grocery bags and food and gear taking over our hostel room, Laura Alexandra giggling at our back and forths while we pack. We did the usual food – apples, baguette, cheese and sausage for lunches, ramen for dinner, oats and dried fruits for breakfast, an abundance of coffee, some extra chips, chocolate, and bars for snacks. To sleep fairly early, I spent a few anxious hours googling and downloading trip reports. The huemel is no joke and I feel some wariness about the Tyroleans, the passes, the wind, all of which will be proven justified in time.

12.27

Trek day!!! We started early, for us, around 11am after spending the morning prepping – last minute bag adjustments, leaving our non-trek gear at the hostel front desk, and of course, lattes para llevar. We also snagged a couple empanadas and a sandwich for that days lunch and set off. Despite different info online, the rangers at the glacier national parque didn’t check anything – not our permits, or harness and carabiners for the traverse, or our general knowledge. They did check that we paid! Fair enough, honestly, although after the loop I can’t help but think that there should be a tiny bit more oversight on who is setting off on this one. But! Not on day one! We joined a stream of hikers headed to a viewpoint, but they all went left and we went right at the Cerro Huemel junction. A beautiful, slow ascent through windblown forest, twisted branches fallen across the path forewarning what was to come. Saturday was the highest wind day, which is why we delayed the hike to be in lower and gentler terrain. Meadow grass dotted with yellow and white wildflowers, muddy stretches trampled by vaca were the most challenging terrain of the day. Good spirits, heavy packs, we chatted with with a British couple picnicking in their foldout chairs. The pass is hard, they said, and we could see in their eyes that they meant it. An American named Dave, from Spokane, chatted with us for a couple miles, we’d see him later. Night one camp came early, around 3pm, It was one of the most obvious “shelter” spots I’ve ever seen – wind was screaming along the edges if you step out, but the campsites were tucked in beside a huge rock face and buffeted on all sides by twisted, bent over huge trees – some kind of rough barked oak. We picked spots behind wind blocks built up from fallen branches and set out to try to enjoy the site. The meadow was bright with sunlight but plagued with wind so strong we could fall into it and it held us. We picked our way across the plains to the Toro Lago, never seen anything like it, glacial blue lightened with silt, wind stirring up whitecaps, crashing on the rocky shore, wreathed by giant peaks, erosion cascading in wave patterns down the rock cliff sides. We laughed in the face of the sun and wind and strength, nothing else to do, can’t read the kindles we optimistically brought down to the lakeshore. We traverse the shore and hop rocks to a small inlet where Matt spies an insect crawling along the rock. We sort of can’t believe it – it’s black-armored and many-sectioned, with a long spiked tail, pincers, about an inch and a half long. We watch, stunned, as it crawls beneath the rock into the freezing water and disappears. “Only sickos out here” Matt says, not knowing how right he is. We learn later it’s the only insect that lives on the Patagonian ice fields, occupying a niche that no other living organisms other than microorganisms survive. It’s an Andiperla, colloquially the Patagonia ice dragon, and it’s definitely a sicko. Its blood contains a natural kind of antifreeze and it feeds on microscopic organisms in the ice. Back to camp, we make ramen and read, in bed, due to the wind and cold. Two Swedish women stop by for a chat, friends since kindergarten, in their forties probably. They’re bright and sharp and funny, and the one who lives in BC, above Vancouver, tells us stories of her town: the grizzly who comes into town frequently and opens all the car doors parked along the street. Animatedly, she describes all the doors popped open and we laugh, the most Canadian story, all the unlocked cars and the bear who takes advantage of them. It went in one morning after she’d come back from the pub and she tells us, at first she didn’t know what happened, was she really that drunk? Why is there a banana peel? Before realizing the bear had been inside. One time, in winter, the grizzly stuck its face through her cat door, its huge face menacing in the kitchen. We see two trekkers stretching, practicing with their harnesses, in bright neon and black clean hiking gear. Matt later says, they’re district 1. We sleep early. I set an alarm for 2am and crawl out of my tent and step onto the windy plain to stargaze in the southern hemisphere night sky, which I’ve never seen. The Karina nebula shines cloudy and bright, the Southern Cross buried inside. I see the large and small Magellanic Clouds and read that, with a telescope, one can see nebulas – star births and deaths – inside. The southern night sky is famous for astrophotography and learning about the formation and dissolution of stars. I fall back asleep, head spinning.

12.28

I wake up nervous about our first Tyrolean Traverse. We’re still discussing possibly finding the river ford instead of using it, even as we breakfast and pack up and set off. It’s immediately less windy than the day before, which feels like a good omen, but quickly the day feels intense, starting with a quick exposed scramble up some boulders on the far side of the lake toward the traverse. Smooth rock walking to the traverse, a zipline strung over the raging Rio Tunel below. Probably 15 feet above the river, rock on both sides, the zipline is drilled into cliff on both sides. Mary and Nicola, from Leon, France, are there when we arrive. We’d met them the night before and they were friendly and funny, we were happy to see them at the traverse. Mary across first, seeming nervous but handling herself well. Nicola next, he kindly leaves his rope so we can pull the pulley back over. I put the harness on, heart pounding and unable to stop myself from shaking, catastrophizing a bit, imagining the harness failing and me falling into the river, but trying to seem outwardly calm. I clip myself in the way the YouTube videos and screenshots saved on my phone show – one carabiner on belay loop, onto the pulley, the second steel carabiner on the harness backup line and direct on the cable, pack clipped by its haul loop to it. Then I push off before I can second guess. It’s loud but I’m facing up, hand over hand pulling, and it’s over quickly, less than thirty seconds. Feet scramble onto the steep rock on the far side, unclipping the harness and pack with shaking hands is the hardest part. Matt pulls the pulley and harness back over to himself and crosses, after a quick shouting convo with me, Mary and Nicola trying to yell across the noise. A slight line behind him as the rest of the camp pulls up, but the four of us head out onto trail. Any sense of relief with the traverse behind us is gone quickly, as the next five ish miles up the pass are all hard-earned. Past the traverse, the trail climbs quickly, steeply up and over a tall rise and we’re dropped into a glacial valley. This glacier is a dizzying presence far below us, and the trail skirts around it – staying high on the moraine, which in theory is simple but in practice is extremely slow going. We have to watch for cairns, as the trail is faint and misdirected in some places. Moraines are glacier features – mounds of rock and sediment pushed up by the glacier, and hiking across them is difficult due to steep downslopes and shifting rock and sand underfoot. It’s laborious, energy-sucking work to cross the valley this way and the wind has really picked up in earnest. We keep leapfrogging with the French couple, sometimes they’re leading and sometimes we are, once they get off trail and accidentally descend to the actual glacier, where a thin layer of sand disguises slippery ice. I fall hard, scrape up my hands, and we have to climb up and out to rejoin trail. Once I lead us wrong, down an old campsite use trail to water, adding a few slippery minutes. We stop for a break at a former campsite tucked into a nook between rises in the pass. Big windbreaks made of rock give us extra shelter. Matt and I joke that it’s like being in the trenches in WW1. Mary and Nicola, one trench away, laugh. Back on and up the pass. This is Paso de Viento, and it lives up to its name. Once out of the moraine valley, the trail is more solid, more trail-like, but it’s challenging in new ways, namely the slope and the increase of wind. It’s so strong that gusts can make you misstep, if your foot is in the air when one hits it’ll knock you off balance. The best thing I can liken it to is standing waist deep in the ocean, and having your back turned and getting hit by surprise by a strong wave. You’re likely going to be able to keep your balance without falling over, but you’ll need to brace and adjust and focus to do so. And the noise – like a rushing wind tunnel circling both ears – like the earth is screaming at you. Whenever it quiets, the silence rings like stepping outside a loud concert. So we’re all locked in. Me, followed by Matt, followed by Nicola, followed by Mary – all four of us bent forward and pushing onward, upward, the steep rock slope. The glacier falls lower and lower below us, the crevasses like veins criss crossing ice, stripes of sediment banding it, snowy spires like spikes you can’t help but imagine falling into. It’s thousands of feet below us now and we’re still climbing. Occasionally bracing for gusts, occasionally reaching to scramble with our hands, a few parts so steep that looking up at them, I’m hard-pressed to believe they’re the actual trail. No switchbacks in Patagonia. Mary and Nicola pass us and we watch them disappear up and over the ridge. We keep pressing, behind us another man, Portuguese, whose name I never learn. Finally the top. Coming over the pass is something I won’t soon forget – the first glimpse of the southern Patagonia ice sheet. There really aren’t words for it. The magnitude, the vastness. It looks like an ocean, with peaks rising out of it like tiny islands. It goes on and on and on and on – fading to blinding whiteness at the horizon instead of dropping off the way horizons usually do. Instead, if you try to see the end of it, it’s like looking into the sun. It’s the third largest ice sheet on the planet behind Antarctica and Greenland, and if you thought coming over the pass meant the wind would stop, you’d be very wrong, because it only picked up on the other side. We paused for a few photos and some sips of water. On the map, it showed a lookout so I insisted we press onward to it, but of course when we got there there was zero shelter from the wind so we couldn’t really stay. I took us on a wrong path for a moment and we had to take a big step over a long drop, the ice sheet spinning dizzying below, hearts racing like, this can’t be right, and it wasn’t. The downhill was worse than the ascent, at least immediately on the other side of the pass. Steep scree in vaguely switchback-style trail but at a sharper angle, I found myself frequently thinking this was more of a goat trail than built for a slow bipedal creature with a pack on their backs. Multiple times on this exposed descent, we stopped to let gusts of wind go by, afraid of being knocked off balance while gravity was so adamantly pulling us down. Eventually, we landed on the floor between Paso de Viento and Paso Huemel. The last two miles to camp were lower and flatter, following a river winding through a steep-walled valley. Moss-covered rocks, talus fields, and peat until arriving at Paso Viento camp, snugly tucked against a large boulder field at the edge of a glittering alpine lake. We’re there early again, by 430, but we’re exhausted from the day. I start to set up my tent as rain threatens from gray clouds, then my tent pole snaps. I’ve had this Nemo Hornet 1p since 2017, the last piece of gear standing from my CDT thru hike syndicate haul. Slowly over time I’ve replaced everything else, and this tent has been pushing its demise for multiple years. It has patched sewn in the rain fly, some better than others, it has multiple guylines replaced with paracord or twine, holes in the netting covered in duct tape, and a myriad other things wrong with it, but the pole snapping seems to be the final straw. I’m cursing in the wind blown rain when someone who has been in his tent since we got there pops his head out and asks if I need help. He’s Martín, from the Czech Republic, and quickly one of the most hilariously wild men I’ve ever met. A couple missing front teeth, a thick accent, Martín leaps into action while dialoguing with me. I’ve been trying to remove the cracked piece of carbon fiber from the tent pole but my fingers don’t have the strength to do it. Martin pulls it easily. “That’s what I was trying to do! You must be stronger than me.” “Yes, a little bit” he says. He sees my taped up rain fly, “expert fix” he chortles. Matt comes over and they laugh together at how beat up my tent is. He’s hiking the cerro too, but clockwise instead of counter clockwise. “I’m the only fish swimming against the current. Fish that go with the current are dead fish” He does manage to give my tent poles a temporary fix and we get it standing again, battened down against the fierce winds and rain just starting to fall. I offer him some of Matt’s whiskey as a thanks, and the three of us stand in the light rain and wind while he regales us with more stories. He doesn’t have a map, he doesn’t have a harness for the zip lines. He tells us he hung onto the zipline and crawled, dropping when he was sure he was close enough to get out. He tells us about a 92 year old man in New Zealand with a gold claim who he helps out sometimes. He’s a master of physical comedy and communication, and we’re all laughing as he replays the story of how he heard me cursing and realized he’d need to put down his soothing drink and come be a hero. I show him the map for his day tomorrow, what we did today, and he says he memorizes it, no problem. Eventually, he goes back to his tent and Matt and I make ramen again. Dave and the guided group (four young women and their guide, we think, a French man) roll in a bit later. We all pass out early and sleep hard.

12.29

After a windy night, periodically spattered with light rain, the next day dawns cloudy but not stormy. We pack up, make breakfast and coffee. Matt decries the hot mush but I find it hearty, filling. Either way it’s all we have. The first five miles of the day pass breezily, comparatively. It’s slow ups and downs, none too dramatic, mostly in a similarly peaty and boulder-strewn way as our approach to the Viento camp. Every time we crest a hill we see the ice sheet again, and in tandem, of course, get hit with a peak of icy wind. We sit down for lunch with a view and are just getting our sandwiches made when wind picks up so strongly that baguette goes flying down the hillside, all our cheese and sausage drops from the rock into the dirt, baguette lands in my afternoon coffee, we’re forced to shovel our food and coffee down and pack back up, grouchy at the wind taking the moment from us. Paso Huemel begins – slowly until it’s not. We’d been approaching the ascent all day and when we finally reach the summit push, it’s not anywhere near as long as Viento, but it’s much steeper and more exposed, with sharper drop offs and similar gusts of wind. “Every step sure,” another thing Martín said, pops in my head as I’m taking careful steps and trying not to slip, or think about what could happen if I did. In a break from the rushing wind, Matt says “time to lock back in” – I’m already there. The push is steep enough that multiple sections require scrambling with our hands, but it’s over quickly, blessedly, and the top gives us more views. Behind us, the ice sheet stretching off into the blinding white abyss. In front of us, Lago Viedma, studded with icebergs, cerulean blue. We break for a snack with Mary and Nicola and talk about other treks, ones in France, ones in the US, and when we start again, I know we’re approaching what is widely considered the hardest part of the Huemel. I’d been wary of it since I read about it. A descent where you drop 2k feet in less than a mile. I’d asked around and knew it was mostly in tree cover, meaning there were trees and roots to grasp so it’s not fully exposed, but I also knew there was no way it would be chill. And it wasn’t. It’s wild to be careening down something so steeply that you have to use trees, rocks, roots, to stop yourself from rolling head over heels down the cliff and have it be actual trail, but that’s the journey of the descent of Huemel. My shoes don’t have tread like they should for this, so I’m on my butt more than others, scooting along and bracing the downward fall with my feet and hands. Matt is behind me, above me, and luckily we’d discussed what that meant before we’d started, namely that it’s easy to kick rocks down accidentally and if there’s someone below you, it’s bad news for them, so he stayed far enough behind me to keep that from happening. It’s a tough line to walk, because I wanted to be near enough that I could hear if anything happened or he fell and be able to get to him quickly, but I couldn’t be so near that a rock he kicked up could hit me. We tested that line once, on the very worst section, a part so steep that the park had slung up ropes to hang on while you descend. The trail in this section was so degraded that it’s just a rockslide, nothing solid, no way to keep your feet. I’d just made it down the last rope and was clinging to a tree on the far side of trail when I heard a big crash, and a bowling ball sized rock whizzed down the trail about ten feet from where I stood, picking up speed as it crashed down the slope. I called out “you good?” And Matt called back “are you good??” We both were. But too close. A bit further down I paused to slow my heartbeat and rest my legs, and Matt did the same far above. It had gotten hot, and I was covered in a cold and tense sweat. I made one more scary mistake, approaching an especially steep section I saw a second path branch off that looked more level. I started down it, but quickly realized it required a few big steps with a couple hundred foot big drop below, and I turned to go back up the way I came and take the other fork. Gravity pulled at me as I tried to turn around and I slipped, just a couple feet, before grasping a tree, but my heart was pounding and I had to stop and take a few deep breaths before continuing, scooting down on my butt, down the other fork. Each tree that slowed my momentum, each root that held my step, each rock that i grabbed to brace myself, I whispered “gracias, gracias” as I made my way down. At the bottom of the descent, finally, I sat and waited for Matt. I hugged my knees and put my head between them. “Gracias, gracias, gracias” I kept saying. Matt and I walked the last mile to camp together, joking now that we could, about the big rock. Laughing because it was terrifying. Laughing because it could’ve hit me, but it didn’t. Laughing because the ground was flat now and we had done the hardest work of the Huemel. Our reward was beyond what we could ever have hoped for. The Bahía camp at lago viedma was stunning. Icebergs bobbing in the bay just steps from a small grove of trees that blocked the wind. We dropped our packs and rushed down the short boulder field to the shore. Me, Matt, Mary and Nicola all stripped down and dove into the freezing water, as bits of glacier floated all around us. Basking in the sun on rocks watching icebergs crack and calve. Big chunks would break off periodically, dropping into the water with a loud splash, or icebergs would suddenly flip upside down, revealing a bluer belly to bob on the surface. “Opa” Matt cried, making everyone laugh. “Again! Again!” Matt and Nicola started throwing rocks at the ice chunks, knocking bits off, sinking smaller icebergs. One had a perfect round hole in it, and the three of us spent about an hour trying to get a rock through the hole. Nicola landed it first, followed by Matt, and the two of them destroyed it before I could, not that I was ever that close. Throwing a rock and hitting ice, making it crack and bits of iceberg splash into the water is immensely satisfying and I do recommend it to anyone who finds themself with leisure time and the inclination to toss rocks near a bay of icebergs. Golden sun, clean(er) bodies, i was filled to the brim with appreciation for this moment and the work that had brought us here. Even better, some time later the guided group and Dave all arrived safely. The guided group went on to the next site, but Dave dove into the water and stayed at our camp. My tent pole finally snapped for good, and I Jerry-rigged the rainfly to an acceptable tautness with our harness rope and tree branches, crossing my fingers that we wouldn’t get a downpour. The five of us ate dinner together before going to sleep. I slept fitfully, probably the wind and the odd, squashed shape of my broken tent.

12.30

I set an alarm for 4:30 and crept out of my tent, carrying my sleeping bag, for sunrise over the iceberg bay. The sky was dark blue already, and I could still see the southern cross shimmering above. The icebergs had changed overnight. Their hulking forms in the half-dawn had rearranged, like a gigantic chessboard, some pieces moving out further into the lake, others shifting around each other, jockeying for space. Matt came out around 5 and we sat, mostly in silence, as the sky lightened and the birds started to sing. Navy to azure to sky blue, the sunrise was calm and gradual, without the warm tones or bright streaks we sometimes see at dawn. It felt less like a curtain being pulled back or a spotlight turning on, and more like a clarifying. A sharpening and brightening of what was already there. Once it was up, we crept back into tents for another couple of hours of sleep. Up again at 730, we sat in the beach windbreak for coffee and breakfast, savoring the relatively low wind, warm temps, and unbeatable view at this campsite for just a while longer. Mary and Nicola waved on their way out, we wouldn’t see them again, and Matt and I packed up ahead of Dave and started down the trail. A bright, cloudy morning, sun intermittently breaking through, occasional spits of fast rain. The day was the easiest of all – a gentle path skirting the shore of Lago Viedma, occasionally rising enough to see views of the nose of the ice sheet, the icebergs we’d slept by. Since the Huemel has no chill, ever, it did give us some trouble on the way out when wind intermittently picked up again, blowing us off balance, frustrating us, especially when paired with sideways driving rain. But the home stretch is always imperfect, and we pushed through it with minimal complaining. When we reached the second (and final) Tyrolean traverse, this one longer than the first but much less high, we were met by Saira and Eloise, from London, traveling for a year. Saira is a climber, and helped us all across, mostly me, since for some reason this second traverse caused a panic and incompetence I didn’t expect. We all crossed without incident, but I screwed up and added time to our journey by forgetting to secure the pulley so Saira had to reharness and fetch it for me. As we got across, Dave made it to the zipline, and we coached him through it before continuing. The last mile was suddenly blazing hot. We had to climb over a couple of cow fences, because of course we did, before reaching the boat station that’s the technical end of the circuit, though you can walk 6 more miles to town, we elected to share a taxi back to el Chaltén with Saira and Eloise. Saira kept up the conversation in Spanish with the cab driver, the rest of us leaned back in relief. Saira and Eloise are traveling for a year together around South America, and seemed as beat by Huemel as we were, headed to chile next for more trekking. Back in el chalten, we’re walking down the street with our bags when we see a man at the corner, waiting for us, it’s Martin. He jokes “you’re late” and points to his wrist. He walked with us to our hostel. He tells us he’s camping in town, off for another hike early in the morning. Will be in el calafete the day after us, because he needs to get a phone. We say goodbye to him, drop our things at the new hostel, then go to pick up our clean(er) clothes from our old hostel. We shower, return the harness, and hit the Mathilde patio for a jarra limonada and cerveza before our planned, and earned, steak dinner. At half past five, opening time, we somehow don’t beat the first dinner rush to the butch Cassidy themed steakhouse. It’s hopping in there, and the steaks are perfect, the vibe impeccable. When enjoy the performance from a waiter who is expertly cracking up a table of older women – like watching the Sistine chapel get painted, we say. A master of his craft. After dinner, back to the hostel for some phone time, before heading to La Esquina for dessert, which id been personally looking forward to. An all day cafe, la esquina is clearly popular with locals, and the tables are spread with an eclectic mix of types of meals for 9pm. A couple eats avocado toast, eggs and smoothies. Another table splits coffees and desserts. Another table has a bread basket with olive oil for dipping and a huge pasta dish. Matt and I go for a cheesecake and a brownie torta, and both are the size of our heads. Out the window, we see a common site in el chalten, a perro munching on a hunk of raw cow. This is dog paradise, we’ve decided, this slow, windy mountain town where the dogs roam the streets and chow down on steak. After dessert, I’m ready to sleep. There’s nothing like this feeling for me – returning to town, and a shower and a bed and sheets and a hot, good meal, after days out in the wilderness. It remains my favorite high, and I think I like distance running so much because it’s a shortcut to that feeling that’s achievable living in a city, in a few hours instead of days.

12.31

Accidentally jarred awake by the loudest alarm I’ve ever set, I’m up and in the lobby drinking coffee at 830. Free breakfast at this hotel, Matt joins later and we eat eggs, toast, yogurt, coffee. We pack our things and head to our bus around 11am, first stopping to take a tourist picture, and take some for others, by the el chalten sign. It’s the clearest day we’ve had yet, and Fitz Roy towers in the distance behind the sign. The bus is nice this time, double decker, and I spend most of the journey journaling before we get back to El calafete. We drop our bags at the hostel then head to get a snack while we wait for our room to be ready. The first bakery we try is out of bread, the second sends us packing with our sandwiches instead of letting us eat there. We find a park bench and eat, before walking back to check in for another siesta. The cafe on our block has a little white dog inside, who presses her nose to the glass and wags both times we walk by. All towns should have local shop dogs, I think, not for the first time on this trip. Our hotel has a little pug who brings me a toy to throw for him while we’re walking up to our room. The picture window in this room opens wide, and the trees blowing in the wind and sunshine outside are a calming balm. Matt sleeps, I finish the cheesecake and then this entry. Tonight is the last night of 2025, the dawn of a new year, and we’re at the tip of the continent, the end of the world, unlocking something new. As always, gracias. L

do u remember september

I guess I came back from San Diego and decided not to write for a month, not ideal, but I’ll just do it while the memories still exist. Before I lose them to new summers, new memories, new dirt roads and small towns, new strangers at gas pumps, the new lives I’m crossing my fingers to live. 
After San Diego, a lovely, light-filled week of coworkers, long walks in flower-scented streets, feeling pangs of nostalgia for the verdant aesthetic beauty of Los Angeles, I made it back to Alaska. 
Back to Anchorage, my third and final time, I’d booked a hotel near the airport and waited there for Emma, whose own flight was landing at midnight. 
She took the hotel shuttle in and Kit and I greeted her, then went straight to bed.
The next morning, we went to the Fire Island Bakery – my second time there – and got a breakfast sandwich that still makes my mouth water to think about. I wish I could remember the exact ingredients – it was cold, which I thought I wouldn’t like – but it had a fried egg, arugula, some kind of chili paste. 
We got the same cake I’d gotten with Matt and Danielle – passion fruit polenta pistachio – to go, then got on the road toward Hope.
We stopped on the Turnagain Arm at Crow Pass, my second time on the hike, a perfect day hike for a quick romp. Three miles up, huge bang for your buck with the views, the glacier lake, Raven glacier. We were the only ones who trekked down to the toe to peer in the ice cave.
Back down, we drove toward Hope, where I’d booked a site for us on a narrow spit of land that juts out toward the bore tide mud flats. Hope felt quiet. It was very much the end of the season, mostly locals now, but we were there for Saturday night music. It happened at an outdoor space just a short walk from our campsite. An indoor brewpub where you could get food and beers, then walk out to the big backyard where the stage was set up and the people of Hope had turned out. 
I was struck by a few things in the crowd: an aging hippie vibe was the primary demographic, despite a few kids toddling around in rain slicker suits, and there seemed to be an unofficial theme of hats with decorative horns. There were plenty of flies around, and some people had colorful, bejeweled fly swatters. 
It was a dog-friendly space, and like always, I was pulled into a few conversations with dog-lovers while Kit wagged and whined dramatically.
The band was mostly playing classic rock covers, Emma and Kit and I bobbed around for awhile and left as the sun was setting around 10:30.
A short walk back to camp, we fell asleep to hearing their finale waft across the night air, a Doors song, all the way to where we were snug in the camper bed.
Next morning, up early and walked to town for a coffee. At the store, the band from the night before was just rolling out of bed in the hotel above the store, and we chatted with them while they loaded up to go play their next set. 
Then we drove to a little gift shop in town that was plastered in sort of hippie signage, and had a free cup of coffee and a chat with the owner. I bought disco ball earrings and a map of the Turnagain Arm. Emma got a hat for her boyfriend, and bought me a kitschy 90s postcard. 
Then we drove to the Alaska Wildlife Refuge, which was genuinely such a cool spot. It was raining pretty hard, so having an easy, raincoat-laden walk with hot coffees in hand around the wildlife park was a great way to spend the day. We saw bison, foxes, wolves, a porcupine, and of course, the highlight was a grizzly bear showing off for the tourists. The bear, JP they called him, had been at the refuge since he was a tiny cub. He’d never be able to be a wild bear, so his life was always going to be this. He did seem happy, to be honest, paws underneath his head, snoozing right by the fence while people take selfies with him. 
After the refuge, we drove up to Talkeetna, which was probably the last spot on this Alaska trip Id wanted to go but hadn’t been able to make it yet. 
On our way into Talkeetna, we stopped at a boujee lodge and had a beer on the rocking chairs that, on a clear day, would’ve had an expansive view of the valley and Denali. It was definitely the nicest place I went the whole time I was in Alaska, and it felt odd to be around so many other people for whom this experience would be their Alaska experience. I was feeling a little under the weather, and had a momentary gripe with Emma about sleeping in a camper in the rain down some forest road, and not upstairs at this grand lodge filled with fireplaces and hot teas. Talkeetna was genuinely very cold, and that whole day had been so rainy that the river had risen to the point where no jetboats were sailing (which had been our original plan for the next day) and in fact, we heard later from a local, people were having to move their cars to avoid the rising waters.
We left the lodge toward the evening, and had dinner at the brewery in town. The bartender was friendly, and one of the servers and I talked glowingly about new orleans for awhile when we both realized the other had lived there. 
We drove up a little ways out of town to camp on a pullout. The next morning, we had a slow, lazy rainy morning in the camper, eating the cake we’d bought in Anchorage in bed with coffee. 
Then we drove back into town. Since it was again too wet to do much outside, and all the jet boat tours had been cancelled, we ended up spending the day eating, drinking, and exploring. After two coffee shops and two bars, lots of traipsing, fish and chips, pastries, and dozens of funny conversations with locals, we headed back to Anchorage. 
Some of the folks we met:
Drinking next to us at a bar, the man who owned the jetboat company that we’d been booked and cancelled on. He laughed. Sorry! It’s a day off.
A younger guy, the only mechanic in town, who came out to look at my truck in the rain when I mentioned to the bartender I was hoping to see a mechanic before I started my drive back to Louisiana. 
His name is already lost to me, but he kindly checked my fluids and engine, beer and cigarette in hand, before heading back to his barstool.
He told me how glad he is summer is ending, visitors are leaving. Too many people for me, he says. Winter is the best time here. I thought about the show Northern Exposure, and the scenes of people tucking into their beds in winter, and thought I could picture his life.
Emma and I head back to Anchorage for a final dinner before her red eye back to LA. A quick trip, but we saw a lot, even with the bad weather, and I was grateful to have her on my last weekend in Alaska. 
After she left, I went to a hotel in town. I was still feeling a little sick, and wanted a chance to fully warm up and rest up before I started driving.
I got on the road the next day. After a little over five weeks in Alaska, it was time to head south. But first, east, since Alaska pokes off of Canada into the pacific.
It took me a second just now to remember where I camped that first night after leaving, but I slept by a bridge on the dirt road that leads to another entrance to the Wrangells. One other rig was there, but they were gone before I woke up. 
The drive out of Alaska was stunning in a way that shot me in the heart. Mount Wrangell and Mount Blackburn rose high, white and shining, on the horizon. The tundra grasses on the side of every road were now, after a green summer, tinged with oranges and reds. I’d never seen that before, that dense richness of color, how orange and russet and dark and sage greens can all be in one spiky thicket, somehow without clashing, a gently waving blanket everywhere you turn.
Fireweed, too, so brilliantly purple all summer, now crinkling stems and reddening flowers. 
I worked for that day from a large pullout near a river. A man in a truck rolled in midday and started flying a drone. When I was walking back to my truck from the bathroom, I waved at him.
Want to fly it? He asked.
Of course I did. So I flew his drone over the treed hills near us, getting a new perspective on the mountainside, and brought it back to land on the asphalt by our toes. 
He said he was looking for moose, but hadn’t seen any. But anyway, just getting out on a beautiful day and flying was always his real goal.
Not too many of these days left this year, he said, and I knew he was right even though in the bright blue brilliance of this early fall day, the changing leaves were harbingers of the inevitable.
Everywhere I drove the next couple of days, I saw signs of approaching winter. People out on their roofs doing repairs, burning brush and fallen trees, chopping firewood, hunkering in.
Those last days in Alaska were also emptier than any other days I’d had. The big RVs had already gone. The flight seeing tours had stopped running. Fat, roly poly black bears grazed on the side of the road, ears perking when I drove by, likely one of very few vehicles that day. 
Back in Canada, even fewer people. Night one, an off-season Yukon campground. Just me and one RV in a campground for 60. We waved at each other but didn’t speak. I left before sunrise the next morning and made it to a lakeshore to work for the day. A few other rigs there, I spent the sunny day working with one of the clearest, most expansive views id had the whole trip. I threw sticks for kit into the water and pre-mourned the Yukon.
That night, another abandoned campground, just me and Kit and one other rig spread out across what was surely a summer hotspot. 
A morning walk to the dock, we saw fish jumping and a glorious sunrise over water. 
Then a quick stop in Whitehorse, where i hadn’t stopped on the way up. I got an oil change and then walked around the local farmers market, trying to absorb the culture of this place. I loved Whitehorse. It seemed vibrant, artistic, friendly. A running path snaked along a river that cut through the heart of town, reminding me of the best parts of Boise. 
If I move up North, it’ll be to Whitehorse.
I set an alarm every night of this part of the trip hoping to see Northern Lights, but I didn’t.
The next day was a Saturday and I made it to Liard Hot Springs, which almost everyone who had driven the Alcan had told me was a must, and it was. A gorgeous natural hot spring built into a peaceful, clean public space. And at $5 per person admission, a genuine public space. 
I read on my kindle while soaking, then hit the road in late morning.
That day was fun. Full of things to see despite how quickly I was speeding through it. At a small town gas station, an RV couple from BC chatted with me about my rig, about the trip. They’d been on the road for about a month and were happy to be getting home, back to their dogs, who normally they’d bring but their neighbors had just lost their dog and wanted the company. 
Blessings, Laura, the woman said before I drove away. 
That night, another small free site, and another long day of driving the next morning. Punctuated with a Tim Horton’s stop and coffee walk in the chainsaw sculpture capital, which bowled me over with morning whimsy. 
I think we got all the way to somewhere near Vancouver that night, and spent the night in a wildfire smoked campground above the road, which had a shower. 
The next morning, work, then a post-work drive toward the Vancouver Island ferry. A scenic drive through Whistler Ski Area, I loved seeing all the peaks and ski mountain towns in shoulder season. Empty, cold, another cleared out campground for the night. 
Early morning drive to a parking lot on the ocean, now I was near Vancouver, and the traffic picked back up. That whole workday was fairly chaotic. Lots of vehicles and picnickers and beach walkers rolling through, but I managed a busy work day and a walk on the beach before I loaded Kit up to get the ferry to Vancouver Island. 
I’d met a group of friends in Dawson who had invited me and Kit to see their small town off the coast of Vancouver Island, on an even smaller island named Gabriola, so we took a ferry followed by a smaller ferry. 
On the dog deck of the ferry, Kit and I made lots of friends, including with a woman who was bringing a brand new puppy back to her home at a horse ranch near Victoria. I told her I was jealous of her dogs new life.
The islands up there are really something else. The beauty is overwhelming. Life is slower, kinder, maybe a result of the beauty and the ocean breezes. They’re doing it right on Vancouver Island, I’ll say that. 
I parked outside Bryce’s tiny a frame off grid home he’d built himself, and spent the next couple of days exploring Gabriola with Kit and Izzy, his Aussie, in tow.
We swam in the ocean, hiked the tallest peak on the island, ate sunset pizza on a viewpoint over the ocean, and serendipitously saw a pod of Orcas at golden hour. I’d never seen orcas, and I couldn’t believe how loud they were. Even from probably a quarter mile away, I could hear them breathing, talking to each other, and blowing from their blowholes. We watched them in a stupor until they disappeared beneath the water, reappearing another mile or so away. 
I spent the weekend in Vancouver Island. Thursday night in a small campground directly on the water, Kit and I walked the beach and looked at stars. 
The next day, friday, i worked at the campground and then drove a bit to a part of the Juan de Fuca trail, which normally is quite a long backpacking trail along the coast but most of it is closed this year due to heavy rains and mudslides last winter. 
But the part we were able to do was gorgeous. An easy couple mile hike down to the beach, where lots of other backpackers had sprawled along sites right at the tide line. It’s the closest I’ve ever slept to ocean, and the rushing sound of it in my ears all night was both enthralling and a little restless. 
The next morning, a stunning misty morning walk and then a hike out. The sun came out midday, and Kit and I did a trail run along the coast on a popular trail, then jumped in the ocean. A woman we’d seen hiking called to us, “a run and then a swim, eh? Perfect Sunday” and we barked our agreement. 
Holy cow I’ve been writing for a year and I’m still in Canada. 
Will finish later. 
Ok, so we drove to the ferry in Victoria after the run and swim, but not before I stopped at a little food truck rest area and had the best ice cream sandwich of my life – homemade shortbread cookies with homemade strawberry ice cream. 
Then the last ferry shuttled us from Canada back to the US, where we camped at a paid campground to avoid the nighttime free site search on the Olympic peninsula. 
The next morning, Sunday, up early and drove into Seattle to spend the day with friends. 
Parked by Furhad’s new apartment after a harrowing completely vertical drive up a terrifying hill, Seattle is awful for a truck camper, but we made it, and headed in to meet up with Furhad, Jon and Brittany, Wesleyan friends in town. 
We spent the day walking around a big open air flea market, eating truly amazing Japanese food, and enjoying the Puget Sound views at a couple of breweries. When the sun set, we headed back to Furhad’s for a rooftop hot tub soak and an early bed time. 
I snuck kit in and we slept on Furhad’s couch. He just moved in, so the place is still taking shape. After so many months in remote places, I was restless, tossing and turning from the city lights and noises below his big glass windows. Sleepless! In Seattle of all places!
The next morning, I drove to my coworkers place and spent the morning coworking with her and her dog, Dodo, in a lovely colorful little home in Queen Anne. We ordered lunch in, and took a midday dog walk, and generally had a lovely day before I hit the road to meet Cassie at Alki Beach for sunset. 
We ran into Brie there, another serendipitous meeting. I love that so many of my loved ones live in Seattle, a city I adore with a wilderness I want to see more of nearby. Maybe just not with the camper.
Drove out after dark, spent the night at a rest area and up early again to a state park to work for the day. In the early afternoon, the camper filled with black flies, which I hated, and I headed out and into Spokane to shoot some content at a coworking space. I spent the night nearby, and then the next morning finally was able to take the truck to a mechanic who wasn’t drunk at a bar. I spent the day working at the Spokane library after getting a clean bill of truck health. Furhad was in town for a conference, so we grabbed lunch before I got back on the road toward Bozeman. 
I got a campsite on my route into Bozeman because I was shooting more content there and needed a shower desperately. The next day, I spent pretty much the whole day doing a content shoot plus working at a coworking space in town. Some of the content was town broll, so I got to hike M mountain as part of it. I drove out to a little pullout trailhead near town for the night. It was a quiet spot, and the most stars I’d seen on the whole trip. 
Up early the next morning, lots of trail runners and dog walkers, so we joined on a little morning coffee walk of our own then back to town because I felt I needed a few more broll shots. 
We saw the Gallatin River, U of M, and a couple downtown hotspots so I could get more footage. Then back on the road, a long drive this time, another weekend approaching. I’d originally wanted to backpack in the badlands, but the badlands are not dog friendly at all, so I replanned the weekend and did a 11 mile trail run in the black hills on Saturday, spent the night at a crowded boondock spot right outside the Badlands. I got to drive around and see it, one of the few lower 48 spots that had been on my list but I’ve missed in the past.
I liked the howling wind, the impermeable drop offs, the mounds of striation, the big horned sheep picking their way down the cliffs. 
I disliked that, with Kit, I wasn’t allowed off the road, I disliked the crowds, I disliked the noise.
The trail run that day had also honestly tired me out, so I was feeling the happy heaviness of post long run and as much as it was cool to see the park, I was much more excited to simply watch the sun set from my bed with a bowl of ravioli. 
The next day was a very long push, about 12 hours of driving on Sunday, to get to Madison, Wisconsin.
I had chatgpt give me a place to stop and run, and wasn’t disappointed by the Blue Mound State Park in Minnesota, which felt most like Laura Ingalls Wilder of any place I’ve been. I felt I needed a big bonnet to shade my eyes, but the prairie was clean, sprigged with blue flowers, and cicadas buzzed everywhere. It was hot, though, and Kit panted furiously and begged to be done. 
I took a portable shower in the parking lot before the final push to Madison. I pulled into Taylor’s apartment complex around 9, and Kit and I were both grateful to see an air conditioned room with a couch.
I spent the next two days coworking with Taylor at her apartment. We did a spin class (she’s an instructor), walked around Madison and filmed content for the same coworking brand. She and her partner, miles, doted on Kit and Kit hammed it up, loving living inside again. 
But eventually we left. We drove away and I lucked into a great site on the shores of Lake Michigan, and had one of my favorite workdays in a long time there. A morning run on the beach, barefoot, no one else there, Kit leaping in and out of the tide, listening to The Decemberists and Sufjan Stevens and singing along loudly, badly. 
Then I showered at the campground and set up for the day in the beach parking lot with an expansive ocean view out the window. 
Once I finished for the day, we drove again, this time to a KOA in Ohio. Up early in the morning, another parking lot, this one on the shore of Lake Erie. We worked the day with the ocean in our ears again. 
A big marine construction project was taking place on the pier. I wanted to stop and ask questions, but the crew seemed busy. I saw men in diving suits, I saw hazmat suits and walkie talkies, I saw huge Dunkin iced coffees. 
Off again for more night driving, another bigger push, this time to a rest area in New York State. 
Up early again, and spent the day working at a public library in Johnstown, New York, intermittent walks around town, a latte. A nice friday 
After work, to the Pine Barrens preserve near Schenectady for a ten mile Friday night run. Stunned by changing leaves, by bursts of red exclamation point bushes, by small brooks and gorgeous trail and a park of kids playing soccer.
Another rest area, and then a final morning push to Boston, where I dropped Kit at a rover and squeezed Meg and Grep, before we headed to Meg’s bachelorette agenda, which was apple cider at an apple orchard followed by a spa day.
I don’t think I realized the state my body has been in from all this driving and running and logistics and hunching over a laptop but when I immediately fell asleep in the relax zone at the spa I was like. Oh.
Anyway, up early again this morning, though I think 2:30am is actually too early to be anything other than last night, because I’m just about to land in Las Vegas for another work conference I’m shooting social coverage at.
I’m looking forward to dry desert running when I can squeeze it in, whatever pool situation my hotel has, and for something funny to happen, because it always, always does.
This entry is really for me, but if you read it, it’s for you too.
Xo 
Laura

be(a)rry season

ok that last entry was sort of morose which can happen, even in Alaska!!!

but we’re so back yall and the last couple of weeks have been wild which can also happen. Especially in Alaska!!!

After I last wrote, I drove into Anchorage to pick up Danielle from the airport – not before spending a couple hours at a laundromat near Wasilla. It was attached to a gas station and was a known resupply for off grid folks. I chatted with a man there who lived on a claim nearby (he called it a claim) and said the station was where everyone got their town fix. “We used to have showers, too, but those were getting abused.” He shook his head. “Absolutely abused” and didn’t clarify further.

He’s a chef, new orleans trained, and we talked about the lack of good food in Alaska. “Best food is private chefs like me, but you won’t find anything like we can make at a restaurant. Save your money” was his advice, which luckily I was already taking.

Danielle flew in around 8pm and we headed straight down the Seward Highway. I hadn’t gone that direction yet, and we were both stunned by the Turnagain Arm – massive, snowy peaks seeming to rise out of the ocean, glaciers down every road. Mud flats inviting in the famous bore tide – an occasional 15 foot wave that surfers hike out on the dangerous mud flats to try to catch. The sun was setting and we did gas station dinner, looked for a campsite near Hope and ended up at a peaceful little paid site right past town. The next morning, we got coffees and split a burrito from the coffee shop in town, browsed a book barn, and then spent the day working from a scenic trailhead that opened up onto the mud flats and bay. It was a windy, chilly day, with a low gray overhang of clouds and occasional rainbursts. Seagulls soundtracked the morning with short, braying calls and when the sun did peek out, the water droplets caught in seagrass, the rivulets that wound through the tidal flats, all of it shone like cut glass.

We drove back up the coast afterward, stopping at Subway and eating in the back of the camper at the Girdwood rest stop where the gas station attendant inside was shaken up. He was telling everyone in line, and then me when it was my turn, that he’d just been visited by American and Russian secret service, since Trump and Putin had just met at the Alyeska Resort up the mountain in Girdwood. “They had their guns, I had to walk them through the whole downstairs, all the storage. They were quiet and didn’t say anything. I’m a teacher and a massage therapist, you know. I’m not about that life.” Me neither, I agreed. 

A quick grocery stop, stocking our carts with ramen, gushers, chips, chocolate, cabbage, plums, instant coffee – we headed to a free site on the Knik River. This quickly proved to be a mistake, as the Friday night local crowd at this massive, waterfront beach was rowdy – ATVs zooming by, music blasting, almost constant gunshots from somewhere up the hill. A 1920s Argentinian taxi pulled in just feet from Danielle’s tent, which would’ve been a cool rig to see if it hadn’t parked so close and its inhabitants hadn’t stood directly in our camp smoking cigarettes and talking for hours, until close to midnight. 

A drizzle blew in and luckily shut down most of the noise, and we were able to fall asleep. 

The next morning, coffee and pastries and back on the McCarthy road. Danielle and I had both taken the next week off work and booked a bush plane with Wrangell Mountain Air that would drop us in the middle of the Wrangell-St Elias Wilderness on Sunday morning, so we spent most of Saturday getting there. It was a slow, fun drive, with lots of scenic stops. We got lucky on the McCarthy road with the only actually nice site – a little lakeside spot. We made Mac n cheese, packed our packs, and went on a long, meandering sunset walk down the dirt road to stretch our legs before falling asleep early. 

Up at 5am the next morning to finish the drive into McCarthy and walk over the footbridge to the Wrangell office. We had a little time for a latte and sightseeing in town, then we threw our packs in a beat up bus and were driven down to MXY, the McCarthy airstrip.

It was both of our first bush plane – kits first plane. Our pilot, Jared, tied our packs down in the back. He tied our two bear sprays to a wing instead of letting them in the plane, which did seem reasonable. Then we hopped up into the little red and yellow plane and took off.

I was nervous initially but quickly wasn’t. I loved the flight, so did Danielle. We had amazing aerial views of this range that was so hard to fathom from the ground, even more fathomless from above.

First the McCarthy-Kennicott stretch, all these tiny outbuildings deep in the woods, and root glacier, Mount Blackburn looming above it.

Then the Nizina River, braided, muddied water, cutting across the valley floor, an old rusted bridge washed out, going nowhere, spanning a narrow part. “This time of year? 15-20 feet deep.” Said Jared. A massive stone face lined with layers of sediment, rising much higher than the plane as we cruised by it. “About 750 million years of geology right there”. And then we saw where we were headed, Nizina Glacier, a long-tongued lacustrine glacier ending in a lake studded with icebergs. Some topped with black debris, some that bright icy blue that signifies recent submersion, some gleaming white in the sunlight, all floating in a silty bright brown lakebed. The glacial features of the spit of land at Doubtful Creek, which will become important, were mostly big sandy berms, almost like dunes, pushed up in multiple ridges that fanned out from the lake toward the mountains, little vegetation near the lakeshore but accumulating to brush and forest closer to the mountains.  

Jared landed expertly at the Doubtful Creek airstrip, a tiny bush runway, marked by little orange tape flags stuck in rock cairns. The landing was bumpy, but exhilarating. Kit, who had leapt into Danielle’s lap the moment we took off, jumped out the plane doors as soon as they opened.

We got our packs out, undid our bear spray from the wing, and watched as Jared took off and soared out of the valley. Leaving us in still, quiet, sunny, remote wilderness. 

The plan was to stay for two nights and explore the area, so we headed to find a spot to establish a base camp. There aren’t trails in the Wrangell backcountry. Danielle is a seasoned off trail hiker, and I do okay, so we weren’t worried about finding fun things to do. Cross-checking Gaia with the terrain we could see, we made our way across the first few berms toward the lake. It was harder terrain than it initially looked like. The berms were tall and scrambly, the ravines between them were brushy, tangled. We crossed a small creek, maybe shin deep, and scrambled up the other side with wet shoes. But it was fun. A sunny day, a good friend, both of us enjoying the physicality and the wildness of having been left in pristine nature by a plane. 

We made it to the lakeshore and quickly found the spot we wanted. Flat, even, sandy, with incredible views of the glacier and icebergs but far enough from the water to be safe from what the Wrangell rangers had warned us about, the glacier suddenly calving and throwing icebergs that created waves in the lake that could flood your tent if you were too close.

Glaciers are constantly moving, cracking, changing, and the Nizina Glacier was no different. Up close to it, its loud cracks and sloughs almost fade into the background, like a rickety gentle giant snoring and stretching.

We made a clean camp. Left our tents on the beach and walked our food in a bear canister and Ursack to the brush about 100 feet away. 

Then we headed off to explore. We walked up the lakeshore toward the toe of the glacier and got our bearings. The Wrangell rangers had told us about a network of slot canyons that was rumored to be in the tall, steep mountain wall to our west. East was the lake. Directly north was the glacier, spilling down from the gap between two tall peaks. And south was a long, narrow walk to where the Nizina River cut our path off with its 15 foot high river crossings. This spit of land we were on was hemmed in on all sides by dangerous, impassible features. We could explore up and down this roughly 1 mile wide, 3 mile long stretch. We could possibly find slot canyons and dive into them. But we couldn’t get off. We couldn’t get out. Not without the Doubtful Creek airstrip, and a plane, and a pilot. This becomes important. 

We had lunch looking at the tall, bright white wall of the toe, cracked with crevasses exposing bright blue slashes. Leaning against our packs, with a berm rising behind us, I remember feeling so lucky. So grateful. So excited to be there and explore and read. A bit of rock fall behind us startled us, but because we were down below the berm, we couldn’t see what had caused it and after listening a moment for more noise, we forgot about it. The glacier makes noise, causes rockfall.

We got up and kept going up the narrow sand strip by the glacier. And then we saw something. Huge piles of scat, two of them, fresh enough that flies were all over it. Danielle said, what is that? It’s huge? We both wanted it to be something else and for a moment we looked for signs it was horse, moose, anything but a massive bear that passed recently enough to have flies stuck to the scat. But the tracks in the sand, once we saw them, were unmistakably bear. 

The bear had come through very recently and we spent some time with the tracks, trying to deduce direction, timing. Neither of us is what I’d call a tracker but we’ve both seen a lot of tracks and were able to figure some things out. First, it had dug a little wallow to sit or sleep in, which led us both to think that it had been here before we’d arrived, earlier in the morning. It was headed toward our camp, which seemed to fit that hypothesis, because surely it wouldn’t have gone that direction if it had heard us, which it would have heard us. And finally, it was a grizzly bear. Claw indentations, a longer and narrower foot pad than a black bear. 

We were spooked, of course, but said to each other, we knew there were bears out here. This one probably just passed through on its way to somewhere else. It’s not like we didn’t know there were bears out here.

So we kept walking. I kept Kit on leash and we made it pretty far up the glacier, til when we’d have to either start seriously bushwhacking or turn around. We turned around and headed back toward our camp. 

Now that we were looking, we noticed bear tracks everywhere. Literally everywhere. In every bit of sand soft enough for tracks, we saw bear tracks. Not just the initial trail we were following. Lots of back and forth, criss-crossing the entire flat lakeshore section. Old tracks, new tracks, tracks everywhere, all off them with claws. Around 3, our camp was in site again. Danielle said, “oh my god I see it.”

And there it was. Maybe 50 feet from our camp, maybe closer, hugging the brushy hillside. Massive, brown, a hump, unmistakably a grizzly bear. We were probably 250 feet from it and didn’t want to approach closer. We yelled, and waved our arms, and Kit barked like crazy, and the bear did not leave. It looked at us. And then went back to its slow amble along the hill. We kept yelling, kept waving, and the bear just kept looking at us. 

We didn’t know what to do. Bears are supposed to be afraid of humans. Bears are supposed to be afraid of dogs. This one was not. All three of us, Kit valiantly growling and barking as loudly as I’ve ever heard her, and the bear just stayed where it was. 

Danielle used her Garmin to message the Wrangell people to ask them if there were problem bears around. We kept our eyes on it and kept yelling at it. After what seemed like an hour but was probably at least 30 minutes, it ambled away, slowly, up the hill and into the brush. We went back to our tents and, both genuinely terrified, tried to figure out what to do.

We inspected our food and brought it over. The bear didn’t appear to have messed with it. We couldn’t see any tracks around our tents. Either the bear had passed by without sniffing too closely around, or we’d caught it before it had made it all the way to our camp, we weren’t sure.

After some back and forth, we decided to move camp. We didn’t know where the bear was exactly, or if there were more, but the evidence on the beach seemed obvious that this bear was using the beach as a channel to walk. This makes sense. Wild animals are known to use trail, to stick to the flattest, easiest places to walk. We’d done the same thing, after all.

So even if the bear didn’t return to mess with us specifically, it seemed likely it would be back to the beach, and we didn’t want to be there when it did. 

Packed up, after a brief heart stopping moment when Danielle thought she saw another bear, and I turned to see a bright flash of black moving quickly and thought it was sprinting at us. This, happily, was just a fat ugly crow.

We hiked up the brushy hill in the opposite direction from where we saw the bear go and started weighing options. Brush is bad, generally, that’s where bears typically live, that’s where you can accidentally surprise them because they don’t see you, so we weren’t thrilled about our options. The beach had seemed safest. 

We decided on a rocky peninsula on the second berm out from the lake. There was minimal brush, no trees, and a narrow promontory jutted out away from the main part of the raised area. We set up tents on the edge of it, so that behind us was a steep scree drop off to the beach and before us was quite a bit of flat land without vegetation, so we could see for awhile. We were also far from the creek, another place that could draw the bear and would also inhibit our ability to hear it coming. 

Something we did notice, as we started setting up, is there were several bushes of soapberries on our chosen stretch of land. Nothing super close to us, but definitely there. But then again, there were berry bushes everywhere. As we searched for somewhere to put food, we encountered more scat, more tracks, and settled in to the conclusion that this bear, if not more, literally just lived here, and we were stuck with it. 

Danielle heard back on her Garmin, and we elected to change our plan to get picked up the next day instead of the one following. This turned out to be a good idea.

We ate dinner about 200 feet from our tents, nervously watching all the time. We were like, well, we should try to enjoy ourselves, but that was much easier said than done. And it wasn’t done. I was eaten up in knots of anxiety – jumpy and tense. We’d done everything we could, we thought. Moved to the only place we could find without obvious bear activity, a place we couldn’t imagine a bear needing to come. We had a scentless camp, we had a dog. All we could do now was try to sleep.

Again, easier said than done. 

One shining moment – after we’d settled in to read we heard a massive crack and drop and ran out to see a car-sized new iceberg freshly calved off the glacier, and we got to see the huge ripple of waves crash onto the lakeshore from high above. 

Then back to our tents, to restless sleep, to listening for every noise. I did sleep, on and off, but woke up frequently and was afraid all over again every time I remembered where we were, and what else was there.

But we did make it to the next morning and after we got our food from its bear cans, we could tell it hadn’t been approached or messed with which was also reassuring. Danielle, me and Kit sat down to make coffee. Right before I started pouring water into my pot, Danielle said “oh my god I see it again. It’s here again.” And there it was, closer this time, maybe 50 feet away, eating soapberries at a bush. We stood up, waved, yelled, Kit barked and growled, and again the bear didn’t move. We kept yelling and started packing up. Danielle kept an eye on it while I packed, and she saw it stand up to get a better view of us. I’m glad I missed that. I knew this creature was huge and ferocious without needing to see it standing.

Eventually, it turned away. Not in any hurry. Just ambling. We finished packing and made our way to the airstrip. We were over it. A short, harrowing walk at a fast clip, yelling and barking constantly, trying to skirt where we thought the bear had gone. Crossing the same creek as yesterday, we saw our tracks mixed with bear tracks, like it had been right behind us, or maybe right before us, and we hadn’t noticed. Numerous piles of bear scat, old and new, between us and the airstrip. This bear just lived here, that’s all, and we were gonna see ourselves out.

We waited at the airstrip, which had lots of visibility and was far from the water and the berries, and relaxed there (a little). Made coffee and climbed a viewpoint to look out over where we’d been. I think we were both really bummed to leave, bummed that this experience turned so harrowing, angry at the sheer bad luck of picking a spot that was both completely hemmed in and completely occupied. And very ready to be out of there. Jared picked us up again, and was reassuring that we’d done the right things, though I can’t imagine he’d want to make us feel bad about bailing, so he likely wouldn’t have said if he thought we were soft. A bear that isn’t afraid of humans, that you can’t get away from, that keeps coming to your camp, that’s not a good situation. Sorry that happened.

Back in McCarthy, we heard similar things from the rangers. They’d never had bear activity at Doubtful, so they asked us to write up a report for the park of what had happened.

Morgan said she would’ve done the same thing. That if you do everything you can do, move camps, keep food away, and the bear returns, you need to get out. 

I don’t know. In retrospect I don’t think we could’ve done anything differently. I do think it’s by far the most likely that the bear wanted nothing to do with us, its behavior wasn’t threatening or defensive. But staying there increased our odds of continued interactions dramatically, and every interaction has the chance to go badly. It could have become more curious about us or Kit, we could have accidentally startled it, and even if those things didn’t happen, Danielle and I still would’ve had a stressful, restless time if we’d stayed. We wouldn’t have done the hikes we wanted to do. We would’ve sat in camp, eyes glued to the horizon, and so in the end, I’m very glad we bailed. 

We drove out of McCarthy relieved. A few miles down the road, however, another situation developed. We rounded a corner just in time to see a Honda CRV coming toward us accelerate into a ditch off the shoulder. It was stuck, very stuck, wheels spinning uselessly, water gurgling in the engine. Danielle and I stopped and got out. The driver was an elderly man, Rob, in his 70s, with a packet of printed papers of Google maps, hotel confirmations, agenda items, traveling alone to a BnB in McCarthy. He seemed very confused. “I don’t know how that happened.” He said. “I’m always getting into a mess.” I made small talk with him while Danielle got a hold of EMS in McCarthy, and other vehicles started to stop. A local in a truck simply hitched his tow strap to Rob’s car and pulled him out, while Rob stayed on the phone with AAA, not seeming to fully understand what was going on, that he didn’t need to wait hours for AAA to come down this 50 miles of gravel road because he was being actively pulled out by a private citizen.

EMS talked to Rob, assessed his condition, and stayed on the phone with him while he drove into town, with another vehicle of helpful passers-by offering to caravan in with him. It was really amazing to see this tiny town come together to help an elderly tourist make the drive safely.

However, it was also another adrenaline-filled situation that set us back an hour or so in our drive out, which becomes important. 

Stopped for pulled pork sandwiches as the light was leaving the valley at Chitina, that were way better than they had any right to be for being so remote, or maybe we were starving and still coming down from everything that had happened. 

But now it was late, and dark, and we needed to find somewhere to sleep. The first pullout I pulled into I rejected, it was a dead end pullout down a paved road right off the highway and no other rigs were sleeping. The vibe felt off, too easy to access from the main highway but also not visible to passers-by. Something about it skeeved me out and even though I was exhausted, I pressed on, there was an rv park only another 15 minutes west. 

It was around 10:45 when we pulled into this rv park, I say that to say that it was late but not 2am, not scary late, not witching hour late. Immediately, again, the vibe was off, this time Danielle thought so too. We didn’t see any sort of self pay or late check in instructions, and we didn’t really look. Why is this place so weird??? We said and I immediately started circling around the short driveway to leave.

Suddenly, a golf cart with lights on came roaring out and blocked me from the exit. I braked so I didn’t hit it, heart racing. A shirtless man, probably in his 50s, was driving it. I rolled my window down a touch and Kit sat up and let out a growl. This man had completely crazy eyes, dark, rage-filled, and he was furious. He snarled, “so you think it’s just okay to trespass on private property?” “I thought it was an rv park, was just looking to somewhere to sleep” “there’s a sign, and a number to call for late check ins.” “We didn’t see it. We’re leaving. Apologies for disturbing you.” He didn’t reply, just breathed heavily, in and out, glaring at me. I rolled my window up and turned the wheel enough to get around his cart and he followed me all the way back to the highway, lights bright in my rear view. I was hyperventilating, in shock, watching him in my mirrors but he didn’t follow us past his property. Back on the highway, another 20 miles and a turn off down a smaller road, we found a pullout with a couple other rigs and felt safe enough to stop. 

We slept.

The next day, we got after it again, choosing to hike out an 8ish mile trail from Gold Mint trailhead near Hatcher Pass to the Rainier Hut and stay the night up there. The weather was bad the whole time, consistent light rain with spurts of downpour, but toward the top it got to be a total whiteout. We crossed slick boulder fields in a 1k vert scramble in .3 miles in very low visibility, soaked to the bone, and were thrilled when we got to the little red hut in the mountains. The hike was really beautiful – mostly a long ascent through the Little Susitna Valley, a gleaming river soundtracking the way, blueberries on bushes, bright spots of snow still stuck in the high crevices. But it was wet and overgrown, with multiple sections so bushwacky that we were dodging full grown willows and sinking into ankle deep mud. So, tiring, and glad to have a hut at the top. 

After warming up with hot chocolate and ramen at the hut, we spent the night there and hiked the next morning to a turquoise glacial lake, complete with an overhanging glacier, called Moonstone where we skipped rocks, took photos, and enjoyed the empty, howling beauty of this quiet basin. The way down was easier, and we made it town in time to shower at the Anchorage rec center before picking up Matt from the airport.

The joke with Matt is that anywhere he goes, the sun shines, just a lucky guy like that, so we happily absorbed him into the group and, true to form, the skies cleared and the birds sang and we had a beautiful four days.

We ate his first night at the Double Musky in Girdwood, a strange Cajun place with lots of local flair, and camped nearby for night one. The next morning, coffee and blueberry pancakes with the berries we’d picked on the Mint hike. 

Then we drove out to Seward, where we wandered the town, got rockfish tacos, learned about the Iditarod history, and had a picnic while we watched an otter swim in the Prince William Sound. 

A quick hike up to a viewpoint over Exit Glacier in Kenai Fjords National Park – dancing purple fireweed, bright blue sky, shining glacier, yellow flowers and marmots whistling just before sunset. 

After hiking down, we found a spot on the river with big views of peaks and wide river, and settled in for a campfire, some salad and rotisserie chicken, smores, the last of my fake beers from Dawson.

Next day, up and out to Crow Pass for an overnight, not before stopping at Moose Pass to watch a bush plane take off from the lake in the bright morning sunrise and getting coffee and breakfast burritos from the General Store, where the barista told us about the history of Moose Pass, how the family-owned store had been there since the town’s founding, the original proprietor had founded Moose Pass, her son had built the water wheel that gave the town electricity, and also broke the town speed record going backward on a forklift. His son still delivers all the mail in Moose Pass, walking around town with a mailbag and German shepherd. 

At Crow Creek Trail, we had perfect weather. A stunning, ridge-view, easy three mile hike up to the pass with salmon berries to snack on the whole way. We explored the area after reaching the pass and found a scramble up to a top-down view of Raven Glacier, and on a big snow field, we looked down at it while Kit ate snowballs and sprinted furiously around. 

We set up by the lake in a sublimely picturesque setting, attempted to make a fire with great effort but no success, made ramen and ate chocolate and watched the light move across the mountain and lake. A mountain goat herd lives up here, so we watched them migrate across the rock face with binoculars, which ended up being unnecessary as the next morning, in the brilliant light of another blue sky day, the goats came down and into our camp while we had coffee. They didn’t make it all the way, Kit woke up and barked up a storm to scatter them. 

We spent the morning at Raven Glacier. We found a little use trail down to its toe so we spent a few hours just walking on and around it. It had an ice cave at its mouth, it reminded me of an eerie, icy version of the set pieces in the Cabinet of Dr Caligari – these oblong shapes, bright blue, canted, resting in the mouth of a dark cave that dripped with glacial melt. A silty river poured out of the cave, and Matt, Kit and I were standing on an iceberg close to the mouth when a piece dropped into the water and it startled all three of us enough to squeal and run, Danielle laughing from her photographers perch above us. 

We made a cup of coffee on the stone rivershore and listened to the glacier move, the wind howl, the water pour over rock. 

Then we traipsed out, not in a hurry, enjoying the beautiful hike down. Danielle filled a cup with salmon berries as we hiked, giant sherbet orange compound berries with a tart sweetness like a raspberry, but earthier somehow, grassier, sharper.

Down early, we decided to see what Whittier was about, the drive surprised us all (none of us did any research) by needing to take turns with oncoming traffic being released into a long one-way tunnel, 2.5 miles, through mountains. The town itself was a narrow strip of tourist traps, with a Princess cruise ship docked at the port, nowhere to go unless you had a boat. A town of cars, we said. A huge facility, built during the Cold War, abandoned after the 1964 earthquake but still standing, covered in black mold and decay, looming over the entire town, and near it, a new version of the same structure – concrete, minimalist – where 90% of Whittier’s residents live. Inside there’s a grocery store, a hospital, and everything the residents need to live so they don’t have to leave this building in the winter, except by tunnels that connect to other parts of town. 

Anyway, Whittier was not the vibe, and we decided to bail pretty quickly though it took hours to get out of town because the tourist train from Anchorage had come through the tunnel and messed something up, so the car release was delayed by several hours, which gave us plenty of time in the car to laugh about how weird Whittier is and book a hipcamp near Palmer for the night. 

When we finally drove out, along the Turnagain arm, Matt and I spied a whale that barely surfaced in the sound, just its sleek slippery back, as the sun dipped into golden hour. 

We stopped in Anchorage at a Taco King, an Alaska chain, honestly a perfect meal with well-cooked and seasoned Mexican staples and a surprisingly good salsa bar. We loved taco king so much Danielle and I ate it again the next night, and then I ate it again the next night, but that’s beside the point. 

Our night hipcamp was also strange, a place that advertises as “$12 to come sleep in my field” and that’s exactly what it was. It was still loud, ATVs and gunshots, but quieter than the Knik and good enough for a starry final night with Matt and Danielle. The next day, we did coffee and pastries in Palmer then headed back to the Hatcher Pass area for a quick traipse in the hills, where we mostly collected and ate blueberries. Kit has learned to eat blueberries off the bush, and all four of us left muddy and stained with blue juice but feeling like we’d had a real Alaska experience, as the trailhead was full of locals with huge buckets beating down foliage to get into blueberry thickets and pick their fill. 

Down to Anchorage, we continued our pastry and latte tour at Fire Island Bakery, which was actually really amazing, then dropped Danielle at the Anchorage museum and Matt and I hit a couple thrift stores. Then back to the rec center for much needed showers, an hour in the parking lot packing up and reorganizing, and we headed to the airport. We dropped Matt, Danielle and I got dinner, then I dropped her. 

Kit and I headed out to the Bird Creek campground on the Seward Highway for an early night sleep.

Monday, I worked from the campground then headed into town to drop Kit with a dogsitter bc I’m on a plane now to San Diego for a work trip. This morning’s flight came early – I’d slept again (sans Kit) on a pullout on the Seward Highway and drove the turnagain arm at 3:30am to the airport, bright cold stars above, a wind starting to feel autumnal, windows down, the waves on the sound roaring nearby. 

This is a really long one, thanks for sticking with it (if you did) and if anyone did get this far, please know that I am grateful for anyone that ever reads anything I write!!! Especially these long rambling journal entries that are not edited for length or clarity, and read like a “me me me me me” epistle. I am keeping this is mostly for me because my memory is terrible, but if it makes you happy or feel like you learned something or felt something, then I’m happy about that, too. 

I’m also grateful for friends who come laugh with me and send it with me and happily sleep in tents for ten days because I don’t have a house and can’t host properly, who spend their money and vacation time eating ramen on the ground and hanging out in rec center parking lots and filling water jugs at gas stations with me. 

I’ve only got about another month left on this trip, when I’m back from San Diego it’s only a weekend before I’ll likely start heading south toward the lower 48, the life I left behind such as it is. 

I don’t feel like now is the right time for ruminating on that, or possibly that this is even the proper outlet, but I’m always at least kind of thinking about what’s next.

If there’s one thing I know about life!! it’s that every day you have to wake up and do something. You’ve gotta sit somewhere, stand somewhere, exist somewhere. Barring disaster, it’ll keep being that way forever and the only person that controls the direction of your feet is you. 

so rest assured that barring disaster, I’ll be somewhere. Doing something. 

xo

L

rosemary and time

Week whatever on the road, i mainly am noticing that quite a bit of time has elapsed because the last time i did laundry, i was very close to the us border and ive now worn every item I brought in the camper multiple times. and since I started running again, this is now a problem. 

I’m picking up Danielle tomorrow from Anchorage so most of this week has been chore mode, extracurricular work mode, getting ahead on work work mode, but I’ve sprinkled in several runs and hikes – including a run ranked high in my personal run collection, 3.5 steady graded uphill miles to a prominence overlooking Denali, which chose that day to shine bright, white, immense on the horizon

very roundabout sentence but what I’m saying is that things are good.

I spent last Friday in McCarthy and was blessed with a perfect Alaska Friday night. Met up with a friends friend, a new friend, another Alaska Laura, for a hike out to Root Glacier. 

Her friends were in town, a collection of young fisherfolks, all finished with their season on the water and heading back to the lower 48 after one more weekend in Alaska. I’d heard of a town-wide softball game on Fridays at 7, but it was rained out, or didn’t happen, but we improvised our own game on the soaked field. There was a wheelbarrow of mitts and a bucket of balls behind a backstop decorated with a tiny Superman onesie, an inside joke no one there could explain. The field felt full of ghosts, like Field of Dreams, the gloomy mist hung low around and we sprinted around bases with full bellies, laughing, because in adulthood going from standing to sprinting is so rare, there’s no way to do it without feeling silly and ungainly, like an impatient toddler suddenly sprouted to full height. 

Another Laura, a longtime McCarthy resident, put me on the back of her 4 wheeler for the drive back to town for a couple drinks and live music at The Golden – the only operational bar inside of a National Park. Hot Dish played, we tapped our toes, then I headed back to the camper, to Kit, to a sky just barely graying close to midnight, a strong wind pushing out the clouds and leaving fresh, clear air behind.

The next day I wanted to get some big hours in, so I spent Saturday mostly driving. A few stops to peep at glaciers. Kit and I had lunch at a pull off by a lake overlooking the Chugach range.

In the late afternoon, i stopped to hike a short trail not far from Anchorage, Gold Mint, to Hatcher Pass, a rocky ridge, tall, beautiful. A family in nice clothing was gathering at the trailhead, I assumed for photos, but when I passed them on my way back, they were scattering ashes. 

Night at a free site, and woke up early to hit Kesugi Ridge to trail run. Kit and I ran a half marathon up and down a mountain in rain, wind, a bit of hail. It was perfect. An alpine pass with pockets of snow. A ridge overlooking Denali, not that we could see it, but the way the entire valley below us was hidden almost made it better. Being up there, way up in the land of boulders and icy sheets and marmots and fast wind, it felt like the rest of the world didn’t exist. Like we were the last two on the planet. I’ve had this feeling before – that feeling that you’re trespassing in a plane of existence not meant for humans. If you don’t have thick fur, hooves, fangs – you can’t hack it way up here. Not when winter comes. 

And we can’t, we head down the mountain and pick blueberries in the last bits of golden light a couple miles before the trailhead, where the wind is calmed, back below the treeline. 

In the parking lot, I run into a young guy I had seen on trail and his dog, Kai. Standing in rain and wind, covered in mud and legs shaking from my run, he and I laugh together about the irreverent, wild perfection of Alaska, of Denali, of spending our days in the rain when we could’ve stayed in a house.

I’ve had service lately, so my thoughts have been scattered and disjointed. It’s easy to get back into the habit of scrolling news and social media whenever I have a free moment. I have to actively remind myself to hey – look up, there’s a river. There’s a mountain. There’s a cloud. Two nights ago I was sleeping on the Susitna River beach, and it was raining so I crawled into bed with Kit and scrolled my phone. When I got up to use the bathroom, grumbling at getting out of my warm little nest, I jumped down from the camper to see a massive orange moon rising above the water. 

It’s a private joke I have with myself when living out here. How I’m constantly being forced to stop being in a bad mood because something beautiful happens. 

Like how my dad used to tell us, mostly Ellen, “you can be grumpy, or you can be happy.”

You can be grumpy, or you can look at the moon. Can’t do both.

It’s because of my access to internet, which is to say my current participation in society, that I’m angry. I’m angry because the world is so beautiful and bountiful and there is so much needless, stupid, cruel suffering. I’m angry because we have the ingenuity and capacity and compassion as humans to create a good society and instead we have engineered a bad one – one characterized by greed and wretchedness, inequality, hatred, villainy, selfishness. I’m of course talking about Trump, and Gaza, and pedophiles, and billionaires, and white supremacists, and gun violence, and and and and and. And my rage is fueled intentionally by algorithms that reward enraged clicks, that turn empathy into ad sales, that engulf my primitive brain with overwhelming floods of big, bad, sad. 

And my anger is performative or outlet-less, my actions are limited, social media or tossing and turning at 3am in righteous rage is not doing anything to help anyone, and it isn’t making me happy, and when I think about the privilege I have to even have these existential yearnings by a river in Alaska I want to scream. 

Time keeps passing and my hair is thinning, I put rosemary on my scalp every evening, retinol on my face every night. I’m getting older and my life keeps getting bigger which means that conversely, my experience is so much smaller. The more of the planet I see, the more conversations I repeat inside my head, the more grueling physical or mental experiences I force my unwitting, fragile meat skeleton to undergo, the more consumed I am with the desire to find or create something better within me or around me that will make the noise fade, the sharp edges blur, the fast passage of time slow. 

I create a to-do list, one for now, one for when I’m back in New Orleans, because I’ve learned that keeping myself busy keeps the energy in check and mobilizes it toward something more constructive than sporadically dumping way too much information on a public-facing blog. I run, and run, and run, because exorcising my demons means exercising my demons. My demons wearing track suits, doing the hurdles, cheeks puffed in exertion, too out-of-breath to whisper snide asides at me. 

And, just in time for me to put this away, the moon is rising.

Night! 

a glacial erratic

it’s hard to believe but this time last week I was in Nashville, at the Gaylord Opryland Convention Center, a bizarre Disneyland-like indoor mall/convention center complete with indoor forests and rivers, bridges and atriums, a waterpark, Marvel character dinners, and roving pedestrian, distinctly southern crowds whose motivations I never quite figured out. 

To be specific, at this exact time last Wednesday I was sitting in a freezing cold production room on the basement level of the center, scarfing down a plate of food I’d taken from the upstairs buffet and squirreled away to the video room so I could keep editing. I’d sent my DP home, and me and another editor, Peyton, were burning the late night oil, in big-headphones Premiere solidarity, taking occasional breaks to complain to each other about shaky footage or last-minute requests. 

Right now, just one Wednesday later, I’m in the tiny, remote town of McCarthy, Alaska, accessible only by footbridge over a river brawling below, one that Kit refused to walk across so I had to carry her like a tiny princess baby . 

I didn’t feel that overwhelmed about the fact of being in Alaska until I landed back in Anchorage after a week in the lower 48. I’d spent the week telling people who asked, “I live in New Orleans, what about you?” thinking the whole “but I currently live in a truck in Alaska” was one of those conversation-ending type of things to say, which it definitely is. I mean it doesn’t end conversations as much as it ends the part where I can still ask questions instead of answering them. 

Well, at least with most people. The types that need to be drawn out a bit, like the types that attend IT conferences who it was my job to chat with last week. 

I’ve met a lot of strangers on this trip so far, and there definitely are characters out there who you could say anything to without fear of your reply being incorporated into their thoughts. Like you could say “I’m on fire” and they’d maybe pause for a second to look at you funny before carrying on with their story.   

Every uber driver I had in Nashville was that type – who was happy to provide a stream of consciousness chatter without any input, which was very welcome after weeks of being in my head. I took a red eye to Nashville, and as much as I think I’m immune to aging, nothing will remind me that I have, in fact, gotten older, like taking a red eye. I didn’t sleep at all, but I also was seated in the very last row in the aisle seat closest to the bathrooms. The doors swinging open, people standing, the smell, there was no shot I’d get a wink, and I didn’t. 

In the sleepy dawn, already 90 degrees in Tennessee, my uber driver gave me his thoughts on all the most recent superhero movies, I nodded and hmmed in the backseat.

I got dropped at Will and Dani’s around 6am and let myself in the back door. Upstairs, the house was quiet except the boys’ room, so I snuck in to spend a little time in Peter and Clark’s world. Clark just turned four and wanted to show me his new toys, specifically a t-Rex, egged on by Peter. “Did you get my birthday present?” Clark asked and when I looked stumped, Peter queried, “well, what did you get him last year?” I think my days of skirting by without gifts for the nieces and nephews might be officially over, or at least the ones where they don’t realize or feel a way about it.

I spent the morning with their family. It was the kids first day of homeschool, so I mostly drank coffee and chatted with whoever wanted to chat, before we all hit an Italian place for lunch and I got another Uber to the Gaylord to check in for a week of onsite video work for an ITSM client conference. 

I almost was like, I’ll skip this part in my blog this week, but in the interest of whatever I’m doing with this project – romanticizing, remembering, encapsulating a moment in time, whatever – I’ll write as much as feels right.

I’ve done a few conferences, and a couple for social media now, so I knew what to expect going into the week. Long days, late nights editing in my hotel room, but as much work as they are, this type of thing is really why I do what I do. I love the variety, the characters I meet, I love making on-the-fly decisions and solving problems in real-time. 

I sometimes do wonder what my life would be like if I’d picked a different career. Or taken different steps in the one I have. But at least I’m sure that I’m really good at and enjoy onsite producing. So that’s good. I’ll save the rest for LinkedIn. 

The days flew by. Early call times, lots of coffee, lots of talking to people, lots of sitting cross-legged on the expo floor with big headphones on making cuts and posting them. 

On the last night, the conference sponsored a night out at a Honky Tonk on Broadway. My fellow editors were skipping it to work on edits but since I’m a person incapable of skipping things that sound weird or fun, I went, and clocked an hour and bit on a cut while my dp brought me hors d’ouvres. I finished in time to hear Trace Adkins sing Honkytonkbadonkadonk and then I was like – ok I’m ready to go.

Up early the next morning to finish the cut that was admittedly very hard to finish at a rooftop bar, and then back to the airport, back to Anchorage, back to my truck and my dog and moody, misty mountains and waterfalls and endless spruce and midnight sun.

It rained, on and off, for my first 24 hours back. Kit and I cuddled in the truck and watched Department Q, which I started bingeing on the hotel tv in Nashville. Saturday morning, I drove to Valdez, a port town on the Prince William Sound.

I’ve finally like – arrived – in mainland Alaska and have the full month of August here. My plans from here on are loose and my priorities are roughly, have fun.

My desire to run has come back with a burning fury, and with it my desire to, frankly, be alive. My sleep is better, food tastes better, my attitude is better. The riotous mind will hush if you go for a run. 

So in Valdez I stayed three nights and ran. I did other things, too. I worked. I went on a glacier kayaking tour. I grocery shopped and walked around town with a latte. I sat at a bar and talked to a bartender about winters in Valdez, about showing up at your friends houses if you hadn’t seen them in too long and forcing them outside, about all the life the Valdez residents live in the summers and all the community they build in the winters. But mostly I ran, and loved running.

I ran up a mountain to a cerulean lake, I ran down the Prince William Sound by the hatchery, smell of fish on the wind, I ran down the boardwalk surrounded by tall mountains and waterfalls, I ran through town and stopped at a hoop to put up some shots. I love running before I run, when I’m stretching and drinking coffee and listening to music, I love it during, when I’m feeling wind and sun on my face and passing different sights and feeling the pavement stretch up to meet my feet. And I really love it after, when my limbs are heavy and tingly and everything tastes better and you get to shower and put on soft clothes and lay down and feel all your tension melt away.

Anyway, everything is better now because I’m running again. 

I liked Valdez, but I really love where I am now, in McCarthy, flanked by Wrangell, Blackburn, and St. Elias, three permafrosted peaks that touch the sky, to call them big is an understatement,

to call this place wild is woefully underrepresenting it. Walking down the dirt road toward the old Kennicott Mine this evening, in a place I hadn’t seen a pedestrian in miles, I came across a mysterious sign half-hidden in the brush that said “Tony Zak’s Point of View. Everyone Welcome.”  Behind it was a narrow trail, and I climbed about fifty feet up to a platform with a view of the peaks. I couldn’t believe this was here, seemingly just for me.

On the way back into town, I saw an old building that said Tony Zak on it. A man was outside, puttering in the front yard. I asked, do you know who Tony Zak is?

The man, who didn’t tell me his name, brought me into the old cabin and told me everything about Tony Zak, a Polish-American World War 2 vet who’d lived in that very cabin and loved McCarthy. He’d be drunk as a skunk half the time, but he was the town’s welcoming committee. He’d give the kids candy and the adults plum brandy, shipped in from Fairbanks. He loved to read and he’d sit here in this chair, surrounded by books, and look out at Blackburn. They saw him away, scattered his ashes onto the Kennicott Glacier in 1998. 

I asked the right guy, I said. You did, he said. 

I built that platform up to the point of view. And it made sis happy, didn’t it?

I said it did.

Im staying at a little paid site across the footbridge from McCarthy. I can see a glacier out my front window. Tomorrow, I’m gonna run.

xo

Laura 

goldensides & glaciers

another (two) weeks ! 

after I finished that last entry, I packed up the rig, changed into a festival outfit, and headed to town.

I spent all day that Sunday at the Dawson city music festival – something I had zero expectations about, as I learned of its existence less than 48 hours before, but nevertheless I loved it more than I thought I would! 

Things I loved: it was diverse, incredible non-alcoholic drink options, multiple venues across the town, super small walkable footprint, midnight sun

Pretty amazing to spill out of a dark venue at 10pm into an old western fronted historic main street full of cool young Canadians and have the sun still be blaring, so we could all still see each others smiles and lit cigarettes clear as day 

I got to see charlotte cornfield at a park in the center of town, Mama’s Broke, a gorgeous band – two women, stringed instruments, harmonies and traditional melodies – at a restored historic theatre with three levels of tiny balconies with recessed lighting, like the muppets in opera boxes, or The Gilded Age, never seen anything like it.

But really the festival will stay in my mind because of the people I met. I think I had long (10+ minute) conversations with 6-7 people, and probably met another dozen?

Sometimes when I’m traveling alone I feel like a Sim, like I’ve got that little diamond-shaped bar over my head that gets down into the red danger zone when I’ve been alone too long, so I need to go to town and get the levels back up into the green. This festival brought me into the green for days afterwards. 

Some highlights:

• Bryce, walking his Aussie, Izzy, along the banks of the Yukon, a carpenter who lives in Vancouver Island and had just finished a tree planting season
• Ava and James, a young couple working at the hotel in town for the season, reading James Joyce together in the grass, from Montreal 
• Mason, a young photographer who grew up in Dawson and once, in fourth grade, correctly guessed the date of the “break up” – when the ice on the river break for the first time in the spring. Dawson City residents have had a tradition of betting on the break up date since the 1800s
• Julia, who walked me all around the Pit, a famous (and perfect) dive bar to show me all the paintings and tell me the history of the Dawson City artist halin de repentigny, whose pieces decorate the entire town
• A group of early 20-something friends who’d just gotten off a river trip, who asked me to take a sourtoe shot with them
• I should explain, the sourtoe is a shot with a frostbitten, desiccated human toe in it. 100% real, 100% illegal presumably. Man in a sailor cap named Captain Jack has been serving them for thirty years. He gives you a certificate when you do it. Again, I’ve recently stopped drinking, and a water toe shot didn’t seem like. Good. But I watched and cheered and squealed involuntarily along with the crowd when someone threw a shot back and we heard the toe hit her lips.

After Dawson, I drove into Tombstone Territorial Park. At the risk of having said this too many times already in this blog to the point where you all might stop believing me, tombstone took my breath away.

Driving in just after a storm had cleared, shoals of golden light pooling in the folds of massive, mist-wreathed peaks unique in their lack of vegetation, and in the shiny, metallic swaths that painted them with mirrored stripes. Again it’s too much. I pull over to take a picture and delete it immediately, would rather remember what I see with my eyes than disrespect this place with my faraway bad composition.

It’s nothing I’ve seen before, its scale, its emptiness. The entire park looks like high alpine – somewhere you’d have to hike 5000 feet of elevation to reach. Tiny mirror lakes, sharp tundra grass, cut with wide and shallow rivers, sparkling with smooth stones.

My vanlife friends from Boise, Dan and Kaelan and their dog Benny, are there and I meet them for two nights at a river confluence. Kit and Benny tear into each other on a narrow spit of gravel between rivers, while their humans catch up in a more composed way, smiling and laughing instead of wagging and sprinting.

We eat, and hike, and work our remote jobs, and laugh and laugh and I’m once again full, grateful, happy. On the first night we stay up way too late talking politics, Boise, being aunts and uncles. It’s hard to call it a night when it’s still so bright outside – Kaelan puts on sunglasses and says she’s winding down, faking twilight. On the second night we make a fire and spear smores until the rain sends us to our respective rigs.

They leave on a rainy day, and I stay put another night and day. It pours all night and the next day and I’m confined to my camper. It’s cold – maybe 40 degrees, and Kit and I cuddle, light incense, power through work. Once I’m done, I turn off WiFi and there’s not a lick of service so I drink hot chocolate and read for seven hours. I finish two

novels and start another.

The next day, Starlink went down in the middle of the workday. I drove to the visitor center, only to find their Internet was out too. I found out later that there was an international service interruption, but at the time, the rangers and I joked about how long it would take us to find out the world had ended here in the deep Yukon.

So instead of working, or being able to tell anyone at work that I couldn’t work, I drank tea with the two rangers and talked all things Yukon + Alaska. The younger gal, an indigenous daughter of two different Yukon tribes, invited me to a fiddle festival on the Dempster Highway, halfway to the Arctic Ocean, where she said sober people dance til 5am. The timing didn’t work for me, but I told her I’d catch it next year.

I climbed a mountain in Tombstone before I left, a scrambly, precipitous ridge up to Grizzly Lake, views in every direction, marmots taunting kit behind every boulder.

Back down the Dempster, back to Dawson, I refuel and catch the ferry across the river to finally enter mainland Alaska. 

I drive the top of the world highway on a rainy Friday and this is actually the scariest road I’ve been on – all gravel, huge drops, big potholes. I drive slow, but then again, I always drive slow.

I make it to Chicken, Alaska and after wandering the town for awhile, I park in the free lot behind the bar and wander in for a chicken chowder.

In the tiny dive bar wallpapered with license plates, paraphernalia from decades of barflies and passers-by, I sit between two gold miners. They’re there together but they left a seat between them so I didn’t realize. It’s the only seat left at the five seater bar, and soon I’m in their conversation, in their friend group, in their summer night.

They show me a video of taking the hoverboat out to their claim, I watch wilderness whip by in their timelapse, oohing and ahhing dutifully.

They walk me through what panning for gold looks like in the modern era: a wetsuit and scuba gear, weighted vest, pushed down and held near the floor of the river holding a massive suction head like a riverbed vacuum, keeping it steady and essentially gulping up the river floor into a long plastic tube which drops it into a sorting mechanism onshore. Every two days, they say, is $1000. So they’re out every day, Sunday – Sunday, until their arms are shaking so badly they have to quit. “A wild and scenic river, and we’re out there every day getting gold.”

I try to angle for an invite to the claim to try my luck, and the man who owns the claim scoffs. We’ve tried that before, he says. No more tourists. No more girls, they’re impossible, you can never tell what they want, or if they’re just in it for the gold.

What if there’s no ambiguity, I offer, and we both are very sure that I’m only in it for the gold?

He sizes me up, and narrows his eyes. No deal, he says.

I have a long and giggly conversation with the bartender, Mack, from Fairbanks, who works in local news for her day job. We agree on many things: dogs, driving slow, the toast that comes with the chicken chowder.

I fall asleep in the bar parking lot, sober and happy.

The next day is Saturday, and I’ve gotta make it close to Anchorage. It’s a long, winding drive through Tok and into the Matanuska Wilderness. I stop and hike up to a lookout over the Tok River, shouting for bears, not seeing any. Matanuska is only an hour and a bit from Anchorage, so I spend the night there in a gravel site – Abascom – between Knob Lakes. I have enough service to watch an episode of Bojack Horseman and pass out early, shutting my shades against the beaming sunlight at 11:30.

Sunday, I see the Matanuska Glacier, I take a leisurely morning walk with coffee, I hit a laundromat to take my first shower in ten days, and then I go to Anchorage to get on a flight to Nashville. Uhhh I’m losing steam.

I’ll catch up on the rest of this later.

Xx

L

into the

It’s been a week and uh. Things have changed!

I’m sitting now at a small gravel site near a pond with a large, active beaver dam, deep in the Yukon. A few miles outside of Dawson City. Far enough north for midnight sun. Far enough beyond any expectation I had for this part of the hemisphere as to leave me mostly lost for words.

My first hint that I was entering into unknown territory was the day after I last wrote, crossing the Skeena River, heading toward Hyder and Stewart. A massive river, ice blue, moving as fast as I’ve ever seen a river move without whitecaps. No recreation sites along its banks that I can see, which makes sense. It has the look of a current that would pull you under if you dared to dip a toe. 

It happened so quickly. All of a sudden, the rivers were wider and faster, the ranges taller. Looking at the Skeena outside my window I thought for the first but not the last time over the past week… wait, where am I??

At the Mediazin Crossing, the ground is banked in funny places like it’s been pushed around by snowdrifts, and full of potholes. Bear proof trash at the gas station, strong wind and spurts of rain, the junction road sign plastered with stickers. A woman with perfect braids and bootcut jeans gets off a motorcycle and fills up, nonchalantly, as I’m staring agape at the entire scene. 

I turned west onto the highway toward Stewart and it was like a Disneyland ride kicked in. Bear bear bear bear porcupine, signs that read “caution: Avalanche” “caution: explosions could happen anytime” “caution: overhead power lines” “caution: bears.” Like, ok, I am cautious!!! 

I make camp and do much-needed laundry at a campground in Hyder. I need loonies so I call the number written on the office window, and two young women in long skirts and flannels come vrooming down the road on an atv to deliver them. 

“We don’t get too many problems with bears, but it’s good you’re here now and not in the fall, because we do get problems with wolves in the fall.”

On Monday morning, I’m working on my laptop at a picnic table when Kit starts whining. I look up and see another black bear head disappear back into the brush. 

I drive up the mining road to see Salmon Glacier, another Indiana Jones ride type drive, dodging potholes and occasional boulders, til I get to the fifth largest glacier in Canada and the largest accessible by vehicle. 

I’m staying in Stewart that evening, and I take Kit on a long walk down a boardwalk the town has built into an estuary with sweeping views of the massive rock faces that surround the town, leaking waterfalls, pocked with snowdrifts. I text Meg a picture and caption, “these ones are too tall, thanks!” 

The prominence is remarkable – probably 8-10k straight up from where the town sits to the peaks. And you’re so close to them. I’ve never seen anything like it in a town. The feeling is most similar to being in Yosemite valley and looking up at el cap. That’s how high, and how close, these peaks are.

It’s a Monday night when I stay at a campground in Stewart, and weirdly social throughout the town. 

On my estuary walk I meet an older man, Daniel, and his little dog Abby. As Kit and Abby walk toward each other, Daniel says “she’s from Louisianan!” and I say, so are we!

We find out we’ve both driven up there from Louisiana, and we laugh that we’re likely the only ones. 

He tells me I have to try to Mexican restaurant in town. The campground host had also been very insistent that I needed to go, so after Daniel and I chat, I walk over to El Tostador.

It’s one of those incongruous places, a foodie destination in the middle of nowhere. The menu is actually incredible. I get shrimp tacos and a flight of salsas I can’t finish. 

A rowdy table busts in, three men in their thirties, clearly looking for a party. 

The table next to me is an older couple from Oregon who dote on Kit. Their border collie, Cookie, had had to get put down just a few weeks ago. The wife feeds Kit steak from her fork. The husband shows me a few pictures of Cookie on his phone and his wife starts crying.

“It’s not fair to pull out pictures of Cookie when I’ve been drinking tequila.”

A younger boy, maybe ten, comes over to love on Kit and tell me about his day, biking up in the mountains above the town. “It was nuclear up there today” and the way he pronounces this, while fanning out his shirt for dramatic effect, makes me burst out laughing. I see his face hitch a little with pride, and he repeats his phrase. “Totally nuclear.” 

The table of men turns their attention to me and I end up joining their table for awhile. They’re Canadian cowboys, they say. They speak French and their English accents are thick, but from what I understand, they came over from Alberta to look for gold in Stewart. But the job was a bust and now they’re all leaving town tomorrow. Enjoying one last night out on the town. They show me how they like to play songs with cutlery. Each of them with a fork, knife, spoon, tapping and singing along to a French song.

One of them is single, he keeps telling me, and his friends insist over and over that he’s a great guy. In fact, what they keep saying, is that he’s like Dutton Ranch in Yellowstone, which I take to mean he’s a successful Canadian cowboy. 

One thing about quitting drinking is that when a night gets to a certain point for the other people who are drinking, it starts to feel very weird for me to keep hanging out so I excuse myself pretty early. I take one of their numbers and say, if you’re in town tomorrow maybe we could meet up, play basketball, get lunch. 

One of them looks at me. I have a wife, he says.

Maybe something was lost in translation.

The next day, I work, and then drive out of town the way I came in. Stopping again at Bear Glacier and at the Mediazin crossing. I drive a few hours north on 37, a road I didn’t realize until I was on it is famous for having no service, few services, lots of potholes.

I set up at a free recreation site off the highway. A German couple, MJ and Louis, is having a fire at the site nearest the lake and I join them for a drink. They’ve spent the last year in Canada, both working, and took some time off to take the van up to Alaska before they go back to Germany.

They’re looking forward to going back. Their family has a farm near Dresden. It’s a beautiful piece of property, large and rare in Germany, they say. And they love their town.

Older American people have only heard of Dresden because it got bombed in the Second World War, says MJ. I say, that’s also why I’ve heard of it but I wasn’t going to lead with that.

My grandparents parents told stories about it, she says. That the bombs were one thing, but what it really was, on the ground, was the firestorm created a cyclone in the middle of town, a wind vortex that sucked people into it. 

They were headed south, and gave me some great recs for going north.

The next day I drive again, this time stopping at Boya Lake, with turquoise water and white sand. 

At my next site, the following day, I work again and a man named Bill bikes over with his dog, Kacey. While Kacey and Kit chase each other in circles, Bill tells me about leaving his job as an electrician at Arizona state.  

Within a few minutes, bill and I are swapping conspiracy theories, and road travel stories.

It feels so natural in the moment to be on a spit of land by a river in British Columbia talking about AI with a retiree on a brain break from work, but later when I’m thinking about it, I’m once again grateful, grateful, humbled by the experience of travel.

The next day I make it to Carcross in the Yukon. I spend all day Friday in town, working from the parking lot and the visitor center. This downtown is designed for tourism, and big buses come in every hour to drop off a new swath.

I eat a chicken sandwich and a blueberry apple fritter that are both actually mindblowingly good, and once I finish work, I head up to the mountains to do a hike, finally, to move my body, which feels so stagnant after a week of mostly working and driving. 

I jump in the lake at Bennett Beach afterward, then head out to a quiet campsite with several other rigs that had a great view of the Windy Mountains. This is First Nations Tagish land, and walking down toward the river, there are signs with information about the Tagish. Carcross used to be Caribou Crossing, because this low, sandy confluence of rivers allowed herds of caribou to pass through. 

Back in the truck, I decide to pull an audible and drive up north to Dawson city for the weekend. Kit and I run around the Carcross Desert dunes before we leave town, getting sandy and hot on this, a tiny and unique area of dunes left by glaciation.

The drive is long, and the Klondike Highway is so remote that I’m driving more cautiously than usual. 

A funny thing about the Yukon also is that sometimes the road is just – gone – they’re doing construction, so the pavement turns to gravel and dirt for anywhere from 5-20 miles. I can’t see other drivers faces, but I wonder if they, too, are taken aback by these frequent interruptions in what I think of as a normal highway travel experience.

In Dawson city, I can see that every vehicle, like mine, is muddy on the underside from these long stretches. 

There’s a music festival in Dawson city this weekend. I get there late Saturday night and watch from the hill above the park, along with several other people with dogs. I chat with a woman, Eyri, who is with her dog, Kino. We hang and watch music for the next couple hours. Her husband joins us. They live in Whitehorse, but Eyri is from Japan and her husband is from

Belgium. She imported him, she says.

They met on an app during covid. It’s a language pen pal app. He wanted to practice Japanese, she wanted to practice English, then they fell in love and she moved him to Whitehorse, Yukon. He doesn’t like winter, Eyri says, but I’m working on it. 

I drove back to this beaver site in the light of the midnight sun, and woke up late this morning.

A van lifer, Hana, and I chat over morning coffee while our dogs run around. 

I’m heading back into town to see more of this festival today. I’m completely intrigued by this Yukon young people music scene, and can’t wait to see more of it. 

I’ve been feeling very annoyed at the limitations of my own consciousness lately, which I’ll explain quickly, before I go. 

Being somewhere like this, the Yukon Territory, the scope and scale are unfathomable. I’m barely scraping the surface of this place – its rhythms and history, its contoured landscapes. 

I rocketed through seven hours of landscapes yesterday. Carmacks, Pelly Crossing, McQuesten. Sporadic rain split the sky open, violent when you’re under it, but huge sweeping vistas revealed a softer side, wispy tendrils drifting down to the valleys. 

It’s so exhausting to, even during this process of writing, know that all my memories, all my photos, all of it is tainted by the necessary distillation of a place so far outside of my experience into turns of phrase I like, days I have, the impatient bodily needs that shadow my days. 

I don’t want my brain to be a sponge while I’m here, a sponge is drilled with pre-made holes, liquid gathers where it’s led. I want to be a sandy shore, where a deluge of water creates rivulets and new pathways that burst through pre-conceived ideas. I want my memories to be The Yukon, not Laura in the Yukon.

Maybe it’s the dozens of hours alone in the car, but my internal monologue has become untenable to me, insufferable. When I find myself thinking in first person my brain screams in a rising tenor, shut up shut up shut UP like Dawn at Buffy to get out, if you know you know.

Every way I look at something and describe it, every frame I choose to point my camera at and press my fat thumb to capture a single square in this unending landscape of things to capture, all of it feels like a choice given to an unworthy, uninteresting, undeserving mortal, who will do the wrong thing, pick the wrong square, recall with flowery phrases the wrong sunset and sleep through the right one.

To stop myself from wanting to jam a Sitka spruce into my brain, I’ve been putting on audiobooks and striking conversations with everyone I see.

Anyway, I guess what I’m saying is that I find traveling unendingly humbling. My smallness against the scope is something that brings me lower, wormier, toadier, with every passing day. 

On my Carcross hike, I passed old mining equipment. Steel pulleys and wheelbarrows left in the sides of hills, rusting over. I realize the path I’m on was broken by miner’s boots, and Kit and I are bouncing up it, untethered. 

I feel a wave of crushing grief, like I often when confronted by history. Wishing I could see what they saw. Always jealous of the stars they must’ve seen, the landscapes unbroken by roads or wires.

Then I remind myself: even though I’ll never see what they saw, I’ve traveled more than all but the very wealthiest would ever have been able to, I’ve eaten better than kings. Just the music I’ve heard alone renders me rich beyond the wildest imaginings of people of that time. No one deserves wealth like this. All I can do is capture it as best I can, and be grateful for it when I remember to be.

Love,

Laura in the Yukon 

the brawling blue

inside/outside

I’m sitting in my camper bed right now, the window on my door is open looking out at Fraser Lake, BC, which I’m backed up against.

It’s 10pm and finally sunset. It’s been raining on and off all afternoon and evening, which made for white-knuckle driving but the payoff is a calm lake, a crisp breeze, a neon sunset. 

Hot pink and slate blue cotton ball clouds float above dark green layers of spruce on the opposite shore. Earlier, a rainbow made a half-circle on the horizon and I saw no less than four grown men come out of their RVs to snap horizontal photos on their iPhones. 

I’m not really supposed to be sleeping where I’m sleeping – it’s a 10 site free campground that’s full, so I pulled into the kayak launch asphalt drive. I’ll leave in the morning, I don’t think anyone will begrudge me a few hours of rest but I’m keeping all my things that I usually unpack inside just in case I need to leave in a hurry. 

It’s Saturday night. I called Emma a couple hours ago but she was on her way out the door to a rooftop DJ show in LA. So instead, pierogis and sunset. 

I’ve been away almost three weeks now. Time is flying. Tomorrow I should hit Hyder, Alaska, if all goes well, and spend a few days there before heading toward the Yukon. 

I hiked the plain of six glaciers in Banff, leaving from the Lake Louise trailhead, on Thursday after work. Met a kiwi couple at the top who said Kit was their dream dog. I said, ok, but you’ll never be able to be one of those people bragging about how your dog never barks. But she is a dream. Kit actually got a lot of attention at Lake Louise, people doing double takes, smiling, reaching out their hands to touch her nose as they passed. A few toddlers said  “hi doggie!!,” an older man said, “hola amigo!” and brushed her head, we smiled at each other.

Met a family of Americans from Oklahoma, parents with two college-aged daughters. Dad was self-proclaimed in misery, huffing to keep up. “I’m not a hiker” he said, I said “well, you’re up here with all the hikers.” They have Aussies at home and were stunned that I’d driven Kit up from Louisiana, by myself. 

Mom looked at me, “how old are you?” 

I’m 33.

Well, still – isn’t your mom worried about you?

Dad brought it back. This is hard for an old guy like me. We need to get down before sunset. 

They hiked on.

After the hike, I needed to drive three hours to Jasper. I’d cut the light close, even though I’d done the 8 mile hike about as quickly as I could’ve.

So i drove the ice field parkway, the promenade de glacieres, at sunset and into night. promenade de glacier suits it better. It did feel like a lineup, a pinup beauty contest where every mountain outdid itself. 

The Canadian Rockies are appallingly gorgeous. Like to the point where I felt embarrassed by my inability to fully perceive what I was looking at. Your eyes start to glaze over, your brain goes fuzzy, it simply cannot deal with it. The scope, the grandeur, is too much for a simple human brain. 

Inundated by endless turreted peaks scraping the sky, a giants castleworld, wreathed in dark clouds and pocked with ice-blue glaciers. Peak after peak carved with spiraling sediment layers, each one beating your brain into mushy “wow” after mushy “wow.” Passing the Columbia ice field, I shook my fist out the window. That’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen!!!! I shouted, at no one, at nothing. The ice field, if it was listening, clearly considered my compliment too non-descript and far too obvious to reply. 

I stopped at the Saskatchewan crossing for food and gas, in equally too stupidly beautiful a spot to do anything other than glare out the window while I waited for my “chicky burg,” the rec from the kid at the gas station who gave Kit a treat and sparked in me a weirdly intense nostalgia for being 17. 

Even more so, the teenagers working at the cafeteria inside, who were laughing as they rolled silverware. Their manager, a hunched, tattooed guy in his 20s, ubiquitous to food service anywhere, just a slightly older kid with petty power who doesn’t care enough to abuse it because he really just wants to be home getting high. 

As I drove on, heater on, sweatshirt and socks, beanie, with a hot thermos of tea, the mountains started to lose their detail. In dusk, I lost the shadows of the notched crags, the tiramisu sediment, and could only see the triangular shapes of the range cresting in blue wave after blue wave. It was a relief, in a way, to glimpse the beauty of the whole without being distracted by the precision of each part. 

Then, insulated from the air, the asphalt, the smell of night and highway, I found myself feeling a suddenly contrarian longing for the days of thru-hiking. It’s easier, much more comfortable, much faster, to rocket through these landscapes. Road trips give you a bigger lens, but they miss the intimacy of kicking up the landscape beneath your feet. Of going to sleep at night with the memory of moving through space tingling in your limbs, instead of seeing it tear by, in pieces, behind glass, between distracted glances at the lcd screen of your phone. 

As a hiker, I remember walking through Yellowstone and writing about how jealous I was of the girls going by with their hot coffees, clean hair in woven braids, their blue jeans and Birkenstocks  and indie rock tunes and phones plugged in.

Maybe the grass is always greener. But surely I will have finally found the greenest possible grass in Alaska. 

The Saskatchewan river accompanied me all the way to Jasper, I kept spying for animals but all I saw was the glint of the aquamarine water, still sharp, bright like a mirror cutting through the valley. All the way until 11:15, when I got to my camp, the river still glowed beside me in the half light. 

The next day, in Jasper, I finally saw where I was. Jasper had a huge fire last year, in 2024. When I booked the site, I had to acknowledge that I was aware that the fire had greatly impacted the area. I can’t even imagine the complaints the parks service must get, and how it must feel to hear from upset visitors about something that is obvious, devastating, irreversible, done. 

The evidence is everywhere. Spindly burnt matchsticks dotting the hills instead of trees. Layers of ash on my shoes, tracked into the bathroom facilities. At least the elk are thriving. A herd migrates lazily through the camp, enjoying the tender shoots of new grass, around 8am. 

In the town of Jasper, more evidence in the form of temporary housing trailer communities, crew in bright hi-viz vests everywhere, brought in to rebuild. Crumbling foundations of a gas station surrounded by a partially-melted chain link fence, charred bricks with a sign explaining that the lost Anglican Church is rebuilding.  

I know wildfires decimate communities and wildlife. And this one clearly was devastating. But I’ve always sort of loved burn areas…maybe not this one specifically…and I was thinking about why, and I think what it comes down to is the sharp context they give to a forest.

Every forest you’ve ever laid eyes on is a snapshot in time. All of the old growth, the new growth, all tangled together in a tapestry that only exists the way it exists at that exact moment. And that’s always true, but they feel unchanging because to our eyes, all the trees look about the same. 

But when you see a forest in the few years after it burns, you really get to see the time pass. The regrowth begin – first as wild grasses, shrubs, and then new trees root and sprout up. Animals remake their homes, trees get taller and start to throw shade. It all begins again. 

The area around Jasper will never look like what it did in the lifetime of anyone currently alive. But people who return to that land year after year will see it change, and grow, and become again. And that is a privilege all its own.

Plus – I love the broken black silhouettes against bright blue sky. I love seeing the views that have always been blocked by forest. I love that many types of wildflowers, like red-orange fireweed, follow wildfires and drape over the folds of the ashy hills like a blanket.  

I did a quick overnight to Jacques Lake on Friday night. I’m almost loath to even mention this, but I almost bailed on the backpack. Because I was scared! Of bears! 

When Leigh was with me, I said something about having been scared on one of my thru hikes and she was like? You were scared? And I was like … yes, I was scared a lot.

So anyway, I feel like possibly I project an image that I’m not afraid when I’m traveling, backpacking, etc by myself but the truth is I often am. I know I’m such a great actor that you’d believe Monarch being a big scaredy-cat has nothing to do with me but alas. We have some similarities. So in the interest of transparency, I didn’t want to go on this backpack.

I got to the trailhead at 6 and was packed and ready to go by 6:30. There were other cars at the trailhead but, since all the other backpackers had seemingly started their 8 mile hike earlier than 6:30, I was alone setting off.

It was windy and overcast, threatening rain but not quite storming. I was wary of tree fall, especially in a burned forest area, but more than that I knew I’d be walking into grizzly territory alone during the twilight hours when bears tend to be active. 

So I almost bailed!

I put my packed pack back in the truck, started it, and sat there in my front seat with Kit, despondently eating sour patch kids. I knew no one would ever know or care if I bailed. I could drive to Jasper. I could get a hotel room. I have a job for gods sakes, no one is making me hike out into grizzly woods and sleep on the ground. 

But then I remembered that I wanted to go sleep on the ground, mostly for the same two reasons that I always want to backpack: which is that a) I want to read in my tent and b) I want to have morning coffee and read next to a lake. And I also know from decades of experience that the tightness in my body, the pressure in my brain, all of it relaxes and unbends when I move my body with my breath for a few hours. Ideally outside. It does not get any better and in fact gets demonstrably worse if I sit in a chair and eat candy. 

So i sucked it up and took off, at a fast clip, doing all kinds of bear shouts and singalongs. I did see a bear track, complete with claws, and had a brief breakdown where I shouted at the sky, at Kit, at myself, I KNOW THERE ARE BEARS OUT HERE. IT ISNT A SURPRISE AND IT ISNT SCARY

When I made it to camp without any issues, because duh, there were about 15 other people there, seeing as this is a literal national park. An older man with a white handlebar mustache was stoking a fire and twirling the ends of his mustache into cirlicues. He loved kit, kept calling her puppers, and told me he’d driven over from Saskie. His crew joined him. He’d brought five older teenagers (two of his kids and three friends) on this trip, given them a bottle of tequila, made them a massive fire, then said “have fun” and went to bed. 

Today I hiked out, got to the truck, went to Tim

Hortons in town, and drove six hours to Fraser Lake. On the way, I saw Mount Robson, the highest peak in the Canadian Rockies. Well I saw some of it, the top was obscured by clouds. Sigh. Just another mountain to shake a fist at. 

A few stray thoughts: 

1. I like walking more than driving as a mode of transportation but I DEFINITELY like sleeping in a camper more than sleeping in a tent
2. I’ve traveled so much alone at this point that it takes a disconcertingly short amount of time to reach familiar shortcuts in the ways I communicate with myself. Deeply, deeply inside jokes and well-worn grooves of interiority that wouldn’t make a lick of sense spoken aloud. Examples (I will not expand on these): several iterations of lyrics to Miley Cyrus’ “we can’t stop,” doing a royal wave to pay homage to mountains I don’t have time to stop at, carry on my wayward dog, etc.
3. When I was with Lara, Matt and Mason, Lara mentioned she’d heard about a new astronomical theory that suggests the Milky Way is being sucked into a black hole. Something about the way light bends, the way our gravitational force is pulling across the universe, it’s the most likely explanation. This doesn’t really change anything for us. It’s like knowing the Sun will explode someday. Humans will be so far gone as a species by then, it doesn’t matter. But still, thinking about us getting pulled into a black hole made everyone feel a little woozy. Lara asked: if it’s true, what would you do? If it’s true that the universe is being sucked into a black hole, I think I’ll drive to Alaska. 

Xo

Follies

it’s been two weeks exactly since I drove out of New Orleans. 

I was reminded of this a couple hours ago, when I checked into a campground a few miles southeast of Calgary, Alberta. 

The teenager at the front office was checking my paperwork, which has my home address, and said, “New Orleans! What!” 

Oh yeah, long way. I drove here in that thing.

She looked out the window and grinned back at me. Your dog is cute. You took some time to get here? 

About two weeks. Wait, exactly. Two weeks exactly. 

Where to from here?

I’m actually driving to Alaska.

I’ve always wanted to do that, the teenager’s mom, who I didn’t think was listening, chimed in.

You should! You’re a lot closer starting out than I was.

Oh. I can’t. I can’t just run away.

I wasn’t sure how to respond. That’s too bad? I hope you can someday? That’s not what I’m doing?

They finished checking me in.

On the road, two weeks is sort of two lifetimes for me to have written nothing, updated nothing, recorded nothing, so forgive me this blow-by-blow recap. 

I left New Orleans later than I wanted to two Mondays ago, because of course work took longer than I thought, of course packing took longer, of course. 

I got out of the city at the prime drive time of 6pm and charted toward a Hipcamp five hours away, just past the Texas/Louisiana border. The first drive was unremarkable. I barely knew where I was in the dark, insulated from the thick, hot air outside by my massive steel steed. In the parking lot of a Chic-Fil-A, a man walked up to me, smoking a cigarette. I like your dog. Gestured at my “Beware of Dog” sign that is a picture of an alligator. 

My first night in the camper was so hot. Kit panted all night and I aimed my little solar fan directly at her face. All the sweaters taking up space in my closet stared at me in judgement. 

The next morning, I was up early and motivated to get 14 hours and leave Texas behind me. I did. It was a long day, I stopped once in a scrubby grassland rest area. Signs everywhere “Watch for rattlesnakes.” Away from the interstate up a little path to a lookout, a hot, dry breeze stopped me in my tracks, rustling the tall grass. This land is beautiful, endless and ancient, once you get away from the asphalt and the barbed wire.

Later, closer to New Mexico, it started raining off and on, dramatic blue and purple light slicing jagged streaks through the open sky like a Mark Maggiori painting. Glimpses of life on the side of the highway. “Biggar Ten Gallon Hats,” “Free 60oz Steak if U can Eat it All,” “Trump Country” scrawled on splintered boards of a rotting mobile home. “Are you ready to meet your Savior?”

I should’ve known something bad was going to happen because I was feeling good. I texted Harper, “I’m so happy to be back out here,” I rolled my windows down and sang along with The Chicks. My first folly.

An early night, I thought. I crushed today. I’m easing back into life on the road, so I’ll go to a paid campground just over the New Mexico border. The sun finally had set and the rain was back in earnest. I’d slowed to a crawl, looking for my turn off the highway toward the campground, which was supposed to be an easy 5 miles from the road

Immediately, I knew I’d misjudged. I pulled off the highway a little too fast because I’d barely seen the turn in the rain, and within seconds my tires were skidding in thick, sticky mud. I slowed to a stop and switched to 4WD. Tentatively started forward, again, my truck rear still wiggling back and forth like an excited dog wag. 

This is where I made a(nother) crucial mistake. In my head, it was too dangerous to keep going in the dark and look for a place to turn around safely. I thought I had enough traction for a three-point turn. 

With some slow movement, followed by rocking the truck back and forth in reverse and drive, I was able to get the nose pointed back toward the highway. Adrenaline coursing through my veins, I thought, I’ve got it.

Then the back tires slid into the ditch on the side of the highway. I got out of the truck, and when my feet sank into the mud I knew I was in big trouble. Revving did nothing. My front tires were spinning now. 

I was panic-texting my friends Page and Cassie who, bless them, stayed with me on the phone for the entire upcoming five hour ordeal. 

Several calls to triple a, a few more attempts to get out with boards beneath my tires, and five hours later, a man named Steve from a tow truck company came and pulled me out of the peanut-butter mud. 

It was 2am at this point, and Steve followed me into town. I drove slow, hazards on, mud pinwheeling off my tires and streaking the windshield. 

Safe at a KOA, I passed out around 4, kit and I both covered in mud and shaking with adrenaline. 

The next day, I took it slow. I was meeting Matt, Mason and Lara in Twin Lakes, Colorado and my marathon couple of days before meant I made good time.

In Salida, a female thru-hiker with a dog had her thumb out so I stopped and took her up the hill to Monarch Pass. 

Her name is already lost to me, but her dog was Ragnar and I was excited to learn that she drove to Alaska a few years ago to spend the summer. I made a notes app list of her hiking and backpacking recs. After the mud incident, it was nice to meet a woman to whom the idea of driving to Alaska was sort of rote. Someone who didn’t look at me in surprise or question my judgement. Someone who’s done it. Back in February, I was at a Mardi Gras party and someone brought up that I was driving to Alaska and a nearby stranger was so insistent that I was crazy, that this was a completely off the rocker thing to do, I remember spitting back, “I didn’t invent driving to Alaska.” 

I met Matt, Mason and Lara at a Twin Lakes campground up above the lake basin. A short sunset walk to the rim, we looked out over the titular lakes and watched fast-moving clouds turn sherbet. Kit pulled at every squirrel and I let her, enjoying her joy at being back in cool mountain air. Back at the campsite, we forked hot dogs over a fire. 

The next day, we lazed out of bed, vacation-style. Coffee, breakfast burritos, and then we packed up and headed to the lakeshore. A few hours of knee-deep in the water somewhere.

We drove out of Twin Lakes and down a long dirt road to a trailhead. We said, something easy, then proceeded to hike 2500 feet straight up a to a 11.6k foot pass. Most of us felt altitude sick or regular sick or both. Heck of a way to realize you’d been at sea level two days before. 

Back at camp, this time a free site, it was cold enough that we all piled into the camper while Matt made dinner. I love feeling the camper bursting at the seams. Many of my favorite memories of my year with this rig involve a pack of humans and dogs filling every inch of the space. 

The next day, we realized we’d all been pretty beat up by the hike. We had another slow morning, then headed into Leadville. Matt, Mason and I hooped for awhile at an ice rink that summers as a court. We got iced coffee, thrifted, and stopped for to-go pizza. 

We had a plan for another hipcamp an hour out of the city, but once we got there, the violent wind and desolate vibe prompted us to change course. Matt, Lara and I went on to Breckenridge to a hotel while Mason headed back to Phoenix. We broke bread before going our separate ways on a windy dirt road, surrounded by glorious sunset. 

While driving straight up a Colorado ski pass in the near-dark to Breckenridge, I moved “go see my mechanic” up my mental to-do list. 

The next day, we went our separate ways again after a bougie hotel breakfast, a quick hot tub, and a short lake walk. Matt and Lara off to Europe, me, headed north. 

My next stop was Boise, and I thought I could make good time there. This was Saturday, just under a week since I’d left. 

A few hours of northern Colorado and southern Wyoming before cutting west toward Idaho. In Rawlins, a town that looms large in my personal lore, a huge sign over the freeway blazed, HIGH WINDS, I80 CLOSED TO ALL CAMPERS. It was about four hours before I’d planned to stop, but I didn’t see a choice.

Incredulous at having yet another thing that has never happened to me happen to me, I pulled over and went back and forth on free sites before deciding to stay at an rv park in town so I could keep service in case something happened.

An hour or so after that decision, my phone blared. High winds and severe thunderstorm warning, seek shelter immediately. 

Kit and I walked over to a brick building, the laundry room, and waited. The power had gone out, so we sat in the dark. 

The storm cleared. Walking back to the (still-standing!!) camper, a huge rainbow arced down the sky. 

The next day, I drove slow to Boise, stopping frequently to duct tape closed a seam of the camper that’s gotten loose and been flapping in around since last year, but got re-opened during the Rawlins windstorm. It’s still not all the way fixed.

In Boise, I headed straight to Sierra and Sid’s for some now-traditional nurturing from my dear friends. An incredible pulled pork sandwich, a perfect shower, a soft bed, lovely conversation. 

The next morning, I was back to business (and work!) after a week mostly off. I brought the truck to Walid, my Boise mechanic. 

He walked around the truck, admonishing me loudly to his coworker, Mohammed. I sold her a perfect, beautiful condition truck! Now look at it! 

In my defense, the mud JUST happened. Oh and the dent in the side wasn’t my fault! I got side swiped on the street in New Orleans, no note. Ok the little dent in the bumper is my fault. Okay the inside is muddy, which I guess is my fault, can you just tell me what’s wrong with it?

Mohammed dropped me off at Push and Pour while Walid worked, a coffee shop I used to frequent that’s down the street from Walid’s shop, which for context is in a Payday Loans parking lot. 

I spent the day working. Intermittently standing up to walk down to the greenbelt and watch the fast-moving water, the Boise recreators, a population I was until very recently a part of. 

Being back in Boise always feels like visiting an ex, which is something I also often literally do when I’m there. Texting a friend I said, I don’t like failing, which is probably why Boise feels like a knife in the gut. I tried, and tried, and tried, but in the end me and Boise were just too different, couldn’t make it work.

Walid calls me to come back and I do. He says, why are you killing me today? He says I can drive the truck, it’s good to go. He says, it’s no charge, call me anytime, if anything happens, I will be thinking about you. 

I pick up Kit from Jake’s on my way out of town. On my way out the door, I sing “you’ll never get away from the sound of the woman you own two houses with” and he sort of laughs.

Kit and I drive up to Goose Lake, north of McCall. I’d been a few summers ago, and remembered it as a tranquil place with sites right on the lakeshore. I pulled into a perfect spot just before sunset.  

I spent two nights and two days at Goose Lake. In that time, I paddle boarded four times, went for a run, many walks, many swims, worked two full days, edited half of Meg’s wedding video, fixed my pantry shelves, bent the aluminum seam back into place, and ate a couple cans of beans. 

When I left, I got a few hours toward Spokane done in the evening after work. The drive through the canyon by Riggins and up the White Bird grade is so genuinely big and scary, I let every vehicle, even big semis, pass me without shame. 

I think I need a “I’m slow, sorry! Feel free to go around or I’ll pull off when it’s safe to do so!” bumper sticker or something. Do they sell those? 

Slept fitfully by the Snake river, high winds throughout the night kept the camper rocking like a boat. The next morning I woke up and drove to Spokane to get Leigh. I stopped and worked a few hours on a forest road south of the city. I sat in my camper taking Zoom calls while logging trucks rolled by. I waved, and they all waved back. 

Picked Leigh up from the Spokane airport and routed to Canada. After a long Wal-Mart trip for some pre-backpacking and camping necessities, I jostled with every other Fourth of July shopper for hot dog buns but made it out unscathed. 

Driving across the Canadian border, the border agent asked a few normal questions. Then, what about the dog? Will the dog be coming back oot of Canada with you? 

This dog? Sitting up straight in the middle seat with her dopey tongue out and drooling since she thinks all drive thru stops are treat-dispensers? Yes, she’ll be coming back oot with me. 

Our first Canadian stop is Murphy’s Ranch in Canmore. Murphy and his family had been drinking whiskey when we arrived. You’ve got a beautiful rig, he says, slinging his arm around my shoulder. 

Don’t flatter me, I say, laughing. 

No, serious. I thought you must be a Canadian girl.

I decide to take this as the compliment it almost for sure is. 

Our site is “the cats meow” according to Murphy, and he’s right. It’s a beautiful spot by a river. Leigh and I make sausages and play ukulele around a campfire. 

The next morning, we’re off to Banff. We stop first at a Tim Horton’s, which of course I completely love, as someone who is a sucker for suburban chains and also, as it turns out, Canada. In Banff Town, I head right to the backcountry permit office because I’ve successfully lobbied Leigh to do a backpacking trip. Her first! 

The ranger is very clear on where I should go. Baker Lake, she says, is one of my favorites and I can’t believe there’s a site on a Friday night. But watch out for porcupines, keep your dog away. 

People have been saying things like “watch out for x” to me about backcountry areas for my entire life, and I can count the times the thing they’ve warned me about made an actual appearance on a single hand, but oh boy did the Banff backcountry add a finger to that hand. 

We packed up at the trailhead, and took off around 5pm to hike 8 miles to the lake. The first 2 miles was a fairly grueling uphill forest road, which did not endear me to Leigh, rightfully so, but I kept pushing and tried to be positive but not annoyingly positive. I’ve had the honor of taking a lot of people on their first ever backpacking trip, and I’ve gotten feedback that my relentless cheeriness can be… irritating. 

So I tried to just talk about other things and we eventually pushed past the uphill slog into gorgeous, glacial-carved alpine terrain. Marmots perched on rocks, whistling. Alpine flowers, patches of snow for Kit to bellyflop on. Snowcapped jagged peaks in every direction. Golden hour bled into blue hour and we got to the backcountry site around 8:30, with plenty of time to set up, cook, and use the old-fashioned rope and pulley bear hang. The site had 10 sites, all full, so it was a reassuringly communal experience for a first-timer. There were tent pads and picnic tables and even two outhouses.

I went to sleep feeling like I’d done my job. I’d given my sister as scenic and safe a first backpacking trip as I thought possible. 

And then, just after 2am, the porcupines came into camp.

I was woken up by Kit whining. I listened to hear what she heard, which sounded like clacking, clearly-rodent like, along with howling vocalizations that sounded to my half-asleep brain like a war chant. With the rhythmic clacking, and the alien whoops, my first coherent thought was “We’re about to be attacked.” 

I woke Leigh up, and she confirmed hearing what I heard. The sound was so legitimately sinister that I found myself unable to think clearly. What do we do? I can’t open my tent flaps because then Kit will see them and might freak out, antagonize them, and get quilled. The ranger had said a dog got quilled there a couple weeks ago, and now I was kicking myself for not asking for more info, for example, what do you do if that happens?

Staying calm enough that my dog wouldn’t get riled up was my only clear course of action, but it rendered me completely useless in actually dealing with the porcupines. 

A seemingly endless amount of time went by, then the girls in the tent one over screamed. The porcupines were chewing her pack! I had Kit curled in my arms in the sleeping bag, shushing her, and she didn’t bark. 

The girls clanged pots and pans, and scared them off. But they came back, prompting another scream.

Around 4, the porcupines presumably cleared out and we all slept a few hours. The next day, I apologized for being so useless. 

I took Sierra on her first ever backpacking trip, and a tree fell a few feet away while we were stopped, looking at a lake. It was incredibly close, and terrifying. Sierra said, does that happen often??? And I said, that has literally never happened. 

Same thing with these porcupines. That was the single time, in all my years of camping and backpacking, probably close to a thousand nights out, that an animal came into my camp. I know it happens. It just has never happened. 

The next day, we hiked out, after detouring to a pass and eating lunch next to two Gatorade blue lakes at the base of a glacier. A group of Canadian women at the pass asked us to take their picture, and they wanted Kit in it. Another kind group gave me some AlCan Highway recs. 

We came back down to the car, and drove to Lake Louise. We got out and walked up to it around 6pm and Leigh and I were both stunned into tears. I’m always fairly raw after coming out from the backcountry. everything feels louder and more confusing. I’m hyper-sensitive to stimulation and walk around in a bit of a stupor. That’s normal. But walking up to that lake, with an icy wind swirling across the water, thunder pealing around the peaks in the distance, water the color of Anakin Solos eyes, and hundreds of tourists doing Tik-Tok dances in front of it, I got the wind knocked out of me. In a good way. 

We got chais and sat on a bench looking at the lake, barely speaking, for about an hour. I was grateful for that solidarity with my sister. Both of us just wanting to sit, look, breathe, after a big day. 

In the morning, another folly. Driving out of camp, I went directly into the site sign and knocked a dampener off my truck, knocked one of the four camper mounts loose. Knocked the sign completely over, we had to put it back into its hole before we peeled out.

Slow with hazards on into town, I spent thirty minutes under my truck with steel cable, trying to jerry-rig something tight enough to replace a missing bolt. Then a nice Canadian man in the parking lot got under the truck with my crescent wrench and hammered the piece back into shape, and re-fastened it. Go slow, he said, you’ll be fine. 

His wife waved at us from the camper while he helped us. On her face, exasperation losing its gentle fight with pride.

Slowly down the mountain to Banff, we spent the day walking the Artist path to Bow Falls, which was stunning, like everything else. The town is nestled so perfectly that every direction you look seems fake, like it was curated and placed like a gallery exhibit. I’m even stunned by the bathroom at the rec center, which feels like it’s out of Star Wars, there’s a button you press on the wall to lock and unlock the doors, and one of those sleek sinks that’s a soap, sink, drier all in one. 

I digress. 

Back down the mountain, another folly. I accidentally booked a hotel forty minutes from the airport and Leigh has a 7am flight. We find a cab company that will take her in the morning, and enjoy our last evening together at a Days Inn in rural Alberta with a two-story water slide into the pool. In the pitch-dark slide, ripping straight down much faster than I expected, I let out a little squeal that earns me some laughs from the kids waiting at the bottom. A little girl says, it was sooooo much slower yesterday. I think they turned it up. Isn’t it great? 

Leigh left while I slept this morning. Alone in the hotel, I worked, did my chores, packed up, and drove to downtown Calgary to film some content for my coworking client. 

If you saw me changing into professional clothes and smearing on makeup in a camper in the busiest, glitziest part of downtown Calgary at a metered parking spot while my dog panted on the bed….no you didn’t. 

Drove through rush hour traffic to this campground, 30 mins from the city, where the woman at the front desk told me… she couldn’t just run away. 

This trip has started off less than auspicious. In my head I’ve started calling this summer Laura’s Folly, like Seward’s Folly, get it? 

Like I’m finally biting off more than I can chew, shooting a shot I can’t make, running a race I can’t finish. 

Living on the road is a constant beating back of chaos in the best of circumstances, even without making mistakes and breaking things and making bad situations worse out of incompetence or arrogance.

But I don’t think I’d like it if it were easy. In the day-to-day, sure, I’d probably enjoy it more if I weren’t incessantly repacking and cleaning and pulling over to find service and trying to get Kit to stop barking. 

But the moments of quiet. Of feeling safe, and cozy, and lucky. Those are so much more meaningful when you’ve squinted through rain-streaked windshields, army-crawled under a hot F150 on a glass-strewn highway pullout, and sweated with a screw gun re-installing shelves covered in stuck stale lentils to get there. 

Or maybe that’s what I’m telling myself, another harmless little folly, one of many on my way up, up, up to the final frontier.

This was a long one. Go to sleep.

Xoxo

i didn’t run a hundred miles

I didn’t run a hundred miles!

I trained for six months to run a hundred miles, and at 2:30am, after 65.8, I quit.

lots of factors factored into my first ever DNF. It wasn’t the race I was supposed to run. I’d had to drop out of the one I’d been training for because I got viciously sick about 30 hours before the start time.

So my makeup race was a different race a month later. Instead of running rolling hills in Tennessee in April, I ran rocky steep mud in Maine in May.

My training this year was entirely in New Orleans on concrete, flat sidewalks, in muggy heat. The Maine hundred was torrential rain, rocky, rooted trail and steep stair climbs and 40 degrees and raining. 

It made sense that I quit. There was a flood warning that day and the course got 2” in 10 hours while we were running, from 6am when the race started til when it stopped around 4pm. Multiple huge sections completely washed out throughout the day. There was a thigh deep water crossing. The steep hills became sit on your butt and scoot hills because of the slippery mud. The flat parts were such thick mud it suctioned my shoes off my feet multiple times. I fell hard into a puddle that was so deep I got wet up to my waist. 

Out of 80 runners, 14 finished.

It made sense that I quit but I still can’t quite believe I quit. 

Here’s what’s weird. I don’t really even remember quitting. Not fully. It was the middle of the night and I was cold. My hands had been puffed up all day. My knuckles so swollen I couldn’t make a fist. At aid stations I kept knocking things over, like I had paws. 

I hadn’t been able to touch or use my phone, because of the wet thing and the paws thing, so I hadn’t even listened to music. I’d been running in focused silence for, by that point, over 20 hours. 

I knew I had a lot of the race left, and I knew the pace I was going meant I didn’t have enough hours to finish before the cutoff, unless I sped up, which was so wildly unlikely that I couldnt imagine a way it would happen. So when I got to the aid station at 100k I said something along the lines of, I’m done, and then the guy told me he needed my number. I remember fumbling with the zipper on my wet wind jacket trying to get to my paper number for a long enough amount of time that someone started to walk around the table to help me. I remember mumbling apologies over and over and over. 

Then a volunteer drove me back to the trailhead. I’d slept in a rental car, a Nissan Rogue, the night before at the same trailhead, so the car was there with my sleeping bag and pad and it was dry. 

And this is where I actually stop remembering, but I woke up having changed, which means I got changed somewhere in the parking lot (which was full of people and pretty brightly lit). My muddy clothes and shoes were underneath the car (smart!). The front seat had a spilled cup of butternut squash soup, which I don’t remember getting or eating. I don’t think I ate much of it, seeing as it was spilled. And I woke up to bright sunlight and the most physical discomfort I’ve ever been in in my entire life. 

Like, by a lot. 

I couldn’t move my legs autonomously. I could sit up, but when I tried to swing my legs out of the car door I couldn’t. I had to pick up my thigh with my hands and move it. 

In the port a potty, I physically couldn’t sit. I had to hold the handle and lean. 

Back in the car, I had to drive to Portland to drop off the rental. Everything had changed. It was day, it was 7am. I had thought I’d still be running at 7am but I wasn’t. I was in a rental car in rural Maine and could barely move. 

I hadn’t eaten much, except that soup, maybe. Most of the race I was eating airheads and turkey and cheese tortilla rollups. But it all got so wet that the airhead coloring washed out and stained my running vest and the candies themselves were white. The turkey roll up tortillas were like tissue paper. 

I stopped at a Dunkin Donuts a few miles from the trailhead and I got honked at pulling in because I was going too slow. It was Mother’s Day and the seating are was full of families. The woman at the front desk gave me a free donut because it was Mother’s Day, even though I said I wasn’t a mom. She said, that’s okay, you can still have one. 

I splashed water on my face in the bathroom. I drank a large coffee and a large coke and ate two donuts and a breakfast sandwich and a huge glass of ice water and my body still felt insane. My mind was so slow, I felt like I was moving in slow motion. I was actively reminding myself to swallow my food, to breathe, to open the car door, to sit. 

It was about an hour drive to the Portland airport, where I was dropping off the car. I still couldn’t move my legs autonomously so I drove the whole way having to pick my thigh up and move my right leg from the gas to the brake, and back to the gas.

I was aware this was dangerous. I stopped several times to take breaks. It took me two hours to get there. I got honked at at least two more times. 

This is the end of the miserable part of the hundred story, as soon as Meg picked me up in Portland I was cocooned by a dear, loving friend who provided a soft place to sleep, a shower and clean clothes, Dominos, reality TV. I was waited on hand and foot until I was better, which I was, much, by about 24 hours later. 

Thinking back on the race, I think mentally I did really well, until I didn’t, which makes the quitting so more infuriating. Even though the course was insanely hard, like the hardest course terrain-wise I’ve ever run for any amount of time let alone 65 miles, let alone the conditions, I was continuously moving and tired but not injured. 

My mantra all day was smooth brain and I stuck with it. No thinking. No thoughts. When I found myself thinking about pace or time or mileage I’d admonish myself, “that’s a wrinkly brain thought” and I’d banish it. 

I ran for a little with a guy who quit at 26, and I suspected immediately he was going to drop because he was thinking way too much. He was talking to me about his splits, his dry socks in his drop bags, his nutrition and I remember thinking, buddy, we’re at mile 12. Your mind is a sunless space. I remember thinking, i would hate to be in there. 

Maybe that’s why i was so out of it once i was done. I’d been so completely breath, move, motion mode for so long. So smooth brain that when I was drinking water at Dunkin Donuts I had to be like, Laura, swallow, THEN breathe. 

When I quit at 230am, I texted a few people that my knee had blown out. But it wasn’t blown out. Which is the freakiest part of the whole thing to me. 

Did I make up an injury so I’d feel okay about quitting? Was I actually feeling my knee hurting? Did it actually hurt? 

The next day, my knees were by far the least of my problems so it’s bizarre that I’d told people that. 

I was, as described above, extremely sore after I stopped running but not acutely injured. I’ve been acutely injured after the last three races I’ve done so I do know the difference. So why did I tell people I was injured? Did I think I was? 

I guess I feel a little betrayed. Like I chose to quit, I know I did, but who was that that made that choice?? It’s really hard to come to terms with something that feels so out of character and, honestly, villainous. 

I remember thinking I was going too slowly to finish on time and I remember thinking my knee hurt. But I didn’t even try to keep going. And I would’ve tried, wouldn’t I have? 

The best way I can describe it is it feels like I blacked out. Like some instinct or lizard person took the controls and was like. No.

And that feeling extended into the next day, when I was at that Dunkin Donuts fighting a battle with my brain to eat without choking, to keep filling my lungs with air and exhaling. 

So what did I learn? Apparently nothing because I’m gonna attempt again in December. But it’s in Louisiana, which is where I’ll be training, and is a beginner hundred, and I’m going to know more and change some stuff about the way I fed and watered myself. 

I do genuinely believe that I couldn’t have done anything else at that aid station at 230am. I had no alternative – not just because of the cutoff and the pacing problem – but because I didn’t actively make the choice, or at least the person writing this didn’t. But what’s to stop that from happening again in December? 

It is so continuously, completely cool that part of living on this earth is getting totally flabbergasted by what happens. 

I started this kinda angry and determined to vent about my villainous lizard that made me drop out of a race but after writing it down I’m really feeling like, that’s so insane that that happened and what a privilege it is to live inside a bizarre body with neurons firing and misfiring inside a wrinkled brain.

This race was a 33rd birthday gift to myself and it’s so fitting and prescient and wacky that I got to learn something I never could have expected yet again, just to remind myself that the human experience is absurd and wild and wonderful. 

I’m heading to Alaska in my camper in two weeks and will be writing more on the road.

If there’s one thing I know, it’s that I don’t know anything!!!!! Not anything!!!!!

And that’s the good stuff.

Lots of love,

Laura