Ideas, opinions, and personal essays from respected writers, thinkers, and activists. A project of Beacon Press, an independent publisher of progressive ideas since 1854.
In honor of Earth Day, we asked a handful of our nature writers: "What
is one thing that people should do to connect with nature? Why
is it important?" Here are their responses. Read, enjoy, and GET OUTSIDE!
Go outside. Be outside. It sounds obvious, I
know, but it's amazing how easy it is to forget this. In the noble but often
all-consuming quest to make sustainable choices and fight big environmental
battles and visit spectacular places, daily time spent present in the outdoors—skiing,
walking the dog, splitting wood, just watching—is the most grounding thing I
know of. It not only hitches me to the details and inhabitants of my own place,
it reminds me that I am nature. Not separate from it. As reliant on my
ecosystem—no matter how fragile or fractured—as a chickadee, a birch tree, a
moose. For me, this realization is the most important thing: the world is my
home.
The best way I know to connect with nature,
sullied and otherwise, is to spend a week descending a river in a canoe. Why a
river? Because water is the root of all biology, and gravity is its only motor.
Why a week? Experienced paddlers agree that it takes at least three days to
leave day-to-day time-clocked headspace behind and enter "river
time," leaving at least three days of circadian gravy. Why is it
important? You can tell me when you get back.
So many things come to mind
with this question, the biggest one being: Go outside. Alone. Spend time alone in nature. But something even more important, I think,
is to come to know well one wild creature that lives where you do. Today,
after cleaning my teeth, the dental hygienist showed me a photo she'd taken and
posted on her Facebook page. It was a photo of a coyote with a dead
snowshoe hare in its jaws that she took near her house. The big white
feet of the hare looked longer than the coyote's face. The coyote's coat
was thick and luxurious. She told me she'd seen lots of showshoe hare
tracks in the snow on her walks, but that was the first hare she'd seen in a while.
She told me she'd dreamed once of being a wildlife biologist. But in a
way, she is. She is a citizen biologist. Because she knows these
creatures intimately, knows their habits, she couldn't stand by if something
threatened them. I believe she'd act. So my advice for Earth
Day is to come to know a species of wild creature that shares your habitat,
even if it's just a house sparrow.
Or a flock of crows. Or a family of raccoons. Or monarch
butterflies. Or a spider. Consider it a neighbor, not just another
animal. When you encounter this animal on your walks outside (alone as
often as you can) say hello, even if it's just a whisper, or a voice in your
head.
It may be a sad and telling measure of our disconnection
from nature that we even feel the need to contemplate the question, “What is one thing that people should do to
connect with nature, and why is it important?” It implies that the
objective is difficult to achieve, requires time and effort, and one can only
attain this level of connectedness through methodical planning and perhaps a
good self-help book. It’s not, it doesn’t, and you don’t really need anything
more than a doorway to a natural environment.
A regular fix of nature doesn’t have to be complicated or
time-consuming. One deep irony being an outdoor writer who works at home is
that I can go an entire day literally without stepping outside once. It’s
easy, in fact, to get lost in what I’m working on and suddenly realize, at the
end of the day, that I have no idea whether it’s warm or cold outside, sunny,
windy, or snowing. Then I know what I have to do: walk out into my back yard.
I take nothing—especially not my phone. I have two trees and
a garden and it’s mostly quiet back there except for the birds flitting between
my trees. I see the colors of flowers and drink in a big visual gulp of green.
In an adequate dose, green can solve any problem; I’m convinced of that. And I
just stand out there, doing nothing except listening and watching—feeling the
sun’s warmth, the breeze on my arms. My blood pressure takes a nice, healthful
dip and levels off. I’m pretty sure it does, anyway, based on the instantaneous
sense of relaxation I gain just by stepping out there.
Often, I only spend ten minutes in my yard—not a very deep
commitment to connecting with nature on a given day, I admit. But there’s a
huge ROI in psychological and emotional gains for the insignificant time and effort
invested. I’m no health professional or psychologist, but I will confidently
predict that if you carve out ten minutes in every workday to stand under trees
and listen to birds singing, you will live longer, raise smarter children,
develop amazing abs, enjoy a more vigorous sex life, and smile more often. Or
at least the last thing.
I need and regularly get more than ten minutes a day outside
(in a good week, all day, every day). You should, too. Leave home for a day or
a week and go someplace off the grid. Hike a mountain, paddle a river, climb a
cliff, sit by a lake, fish a stream. We evolved to live in the natural world
and we starve ourselves physically and emotionally when we divorce ourselves
from it.
But in the interim, those ten minutes under a tree—now
that’s the ticket.
Today's post might provide a little inspiration for your 2013 vacation, much as editor Alexis Rizzuto received for her outdoor adventures.
At this time of year, I start pulling out maps and guidebooks and poring over my lengthy—and always growing—list of outdoor trips I want to take. (My document slugged “Trip Ideas” is now 11,855 words long.) There are two reasons: First, to make those big dream trips happen, you have to think, plan, and dream months in advance. Plus, the planning is almost as much fun as taking the trip.
Here are my 10 favorite family adventures at The Big Outside (another list that will keep growing and evolving), to help give you some ideas and inspiration for 2013. All have a story and photo gallery, and most also have a video. In a couple of weeks, I’ll share my list of 10 all-time favorite adventures at The Big Outside, domestic and international, that are not necessarily for families—although there are definitely trips that could be on either list (and there’s no overlap between the two lists).
Here’s wishing you an adventurous 2013.
Campsite below Zoroaster Temple, along the Tonto Trail in the Grand Canyon.
Today's post is from Tom Hallock, Associate Publisher of Beacon Press.
I was thrilled when I realized that our family’s annual White Mountains High Huts trip would coincide with one by Beacon author Michael Lanza and his family. We made plans to hike together on the Webster Jackson trail and exchanged cell phone numbers. Michael and his family arrived first and, with Nate and Alix eager to start their climb, set off. Michael texted to say that they we were just a few minutes ahead of us, assuming that two adults would be able to catch up with hikers going at a “family pace.” It never happened (see trail photo). My brother-in-law and I had a great hike at our own pace and met other family and friends at Appalachian Mountain Club's Mizpah Hut, hiking to Lake of the Clouds the following day. Our own “Before They’re Gone” moment came when the hut naturalist told us that the entire White Mountains alpine zone, the largest one east of the Rockies, could be gone in 25 years, as a result of acid rain. Hiking in the alpine zones of the Whites is an incredible experience, whether you’re in a cloud (which you are half the time) or making the trip on a clear day. I always return feeling gratitude to the AMC staff and volunteers for all they do to protect this environment and make it possible for us to experience it.
We stand on the rim of an unnamed slot canyon in the backcountry of Utah’s Capitol Reef National Park, in a spot that just a handful of people have seen before us. We’ve arrived here after hiking about two hours uphill on the Navajo Knobs Trail, and then heading off-trail, navigating a circuitous route up steep slickrock and below a sheer-walled fin of white Navajo Sandstone hundreds of feet tall, stabbing into the blue sky. Now I peer down at the narrow, deep, and shadowy crack that we have come to rappel into, and feel a little flush of anxiety.
By making the 100-foot drop into this slot canyon, to be followed by three more rappels, we will commit ourselves to going all the way through it—there will be no option to climb back out the way we’re going in. We know the walls will close in to about two feet or less apart. We also know that one long horizontal traverse through that claustrophobic chasm will require employing the rock climbing technique known as “chimneying,” where you press your feet, hands, and back against opposing rock walls, and meticulously reposition feet and hands one at a time to inch slowly sideways as you would climb up or down a chimney.
My wife, Penny, looks at me and asks gravely, “Are you sure about this?”
Neither of us is worried about ourselves. We are thinking about the two little people in our party who have never done anything quite like this before: our 11-year-old son, Nate, and daughter Alex, who turned nine a week ago.
We do have an ace in the hole, though: our other companion today, my buddy Steve Howe. Steve has been Backpacker Magazine’s Rocky Mountain Editor for years—which is how we became friends—and runs Redrock Adventure Guides. Having lived in nearby Torrey for more than two decades, he knows Capitol Reef’s backcountry quite possibly better than anyone. He and a friend of his made what was probably the first descent of this slot canyon only months ago, and Steve went down it most recently two days ago.
Although this slot has no known name, for purposes of organizing this park’s largely anonymous wilderness in his own mind, Steve has dubbed it Stegosaur Canyon, and the unnamed but distinctive white fin soaring above us The Stegosaur. He calls the narrows section that we’re looking down on a “butt-crack slot”—a highly visual descriptor meant to inspire a mental image of a slice in the rock that continues narrowing as it drops deeper, eventually pinching down to just inches wide. Someone losing their grip on the walls in the chimney section could fall and become wedged in.
It is definitely serious stuff. But Steve and I had also discussed the difficulty of the slot canyon in painstaking detail at his house last night, and he showed me his pictures of it. I thought about the challenging situations Nate and Alex have handled well before—particularly rock climbing, which most closely parallels this endeavor, and where they had to follow instructions and remain calm. I became convinced that they could manage this.
When I tell Penny again that I think the kids will be fine—and Alex and Nate both insist they want to do it—she gives in to the implacable momentum of will to move forward. But she tells me, not entirely in a joking tone, “I’m holding you responsible.”
Yes, well then. It’s good to know where you stand.
We’ve come to Capitol Reef in the last week of March, on our kids’ weeklong spring break from school, to spend a couple of days on off-trail dayhikes with Steve and then backpack for three days into Spring Canyon.
Dominated by the Waterpocket Fold, a spine of sandstone ridges, cliffs, canyons, and spires that extends nearly 100 miles from Thousand Lake Mountain to Lake Powell in southern Utah, Capitol Reef is one of the largely overlooked gems of the National Park System. Situated between more-famous Zion and Bryce national parks to the southwest and Arches to the east, with minimal infrastructure and roads to attract the masses of tourists who never stray far from their vehicle, Capitol Reef (like Canyonlands, another easterly neighbor) sees a small fraction of the visitors that flood those other parks. So few people venture into the backcountry that you can show up at the visitor center’s backcountry desk here on the day you want to start a multi-day trip and grab a permit for wherever you want to hike, no reservation needed. Try that at Yosemite or Grand Canyon.
On previous visits, I had discovered that Capitol Reef has scenery comparable to its neighboring parks—but it feels wilder, less overrun. I’ve squeezed through other slot canyons here, hiked trails through a landscape of rock formations that look sculpted by a giant child with an unlimited supply of mud and crayons, and camped below night skies lit up like Times Square with stars.
During conversations at home before the trip, the kids had eagerly suggested we go backpacking and descending a slot canyon during their spring break. So we came here fired up for an adventure.
Nate and the rest of the party scramble up a rising, flared crack on an off-trail hike in Capitol Reef. Click on the photo to see the complete photo gallery.
Dayhiking Off-Trail
Yesterday, our first day in the park, we dayhiked with Steve from the end of the park’s Scenic Drive into Capitol Gorge, a wide, sandy-bottomed canyon of sheer walls. Steve pointed out petroglyphs of bighorn sheep, deer, and sun figures that are 900 to 2,000 years old, carved by Fremont Indians who once inhabited these canyons. After walking 30 minutes down Capitol Gorge, we turned onto The Tanks Trail, ascending steeply a quarter-mile to rock basins the size of small swimming pools, filled with water—features found throughout the Waterpocket Fold, explaining its name.
Then we left the trail behind, following Steve up and up onto the almost barren, wildly contorted, otherworldly rock-scape of the reef formation. Domes of rippled white, red, and golden sandstone, petrified sand dunes from the age of dinosaurs, rose above us on all sides. Alex noticed something moving in the distance, and we all turned to watch a bighorn sheep grazing on one of the rare patches of vegetation growing up there. We scrambled, often on all fours, up a steep slope of loose, shifting talus blocks, traversed a sidewalk-like ledge across a cliff, and wriggled our way up a flaring groove in stone.
Explore Capitol Reef off-trail and you quickly understand why it remains so unknown: It would take years of patient, hit-or-miss forays over its convoluted, labyrinthine topography—and countless episodes of getting turned back by impassable cliffs and canyons—to piece together a twisting, seemingly improbable route that actually got you from point A to point B. In other words, it would take the kind of time that Steve has put into getting to know this park.
At a high pass, we sat down in warm sunshine and gusts of cool, early spring wind for a break. Below us unfolded a valley lined by white and golden cliffs and spires, a spot also unlabeled on maps but Steve says is known to a few locals as Sand Blow Canyon. We hiked to its upper end, to the base of a feature that actually is named on maps and visible from many points in the park, a massive dome called the Golden Throne.
Whenever we walked across beach sand yesterday, I looked for other footprints, but saw none. In 22 years of exploring Capitol Reef, Steve told us, “I have never, ever encountered another person while hiking off-trail in the park.”
As if to punctuate that point, near the end of our rugged, six-mile, mostly off-trail dayhike, as we descended a gully of loose rock, Steve noted, “Probably no one has walked through here since I came here 10 years ago.”
That gully narrowed into a slot that abruptly turned vertical. We pulled out two ropes and we adults rappelled about 12 feet over blocks of stone jammed in between the slot’s walls; we lowered Alex and Nate over. Then we descended one at a time, helping the kids as needed, through a vertical chimney that was sort of like a twisting sandstone laundry chute. That dropped us into a short, narrow hallway that terminated at a cliff, where we made a 25-foot rappel—lowering the kids again—to the ground. As the late-afternoon March sunshine started throwing long shadows across the cliffs and domes in the distance, we picked up the Golden Throne Trail and hiked the two miles back to our car.
After seeing how Nate and Alex did on that rugged day, Steve told me, “Your kids can handle Stegosaur Canyon.”
Now we are about to find out.
On the rim of Stegosaur Canyon, we put on climbing harnesses. Steve makes the 100-foot rappel first, followed by Nate, who rappels on his own, though I back him up with a belay on a second rope. I lower Alex, then Penny and I follow—and we are in the hole.
I see none of the usual signs of human traffic, like a beaten path or the branches of the occasional bush broken off. We scramble over rocks deposited by periodic flash floods, push through brush, and use a rope to lower over two vertical drops of about 15 feet. The walls steadily close in and rise maybe a couple hundred feet above us, keeping us in cool shade. Then the canyon makes a 90-degree left turn, and we stop at the mouth of the narrows.
The walls close in to two feet or less apart—too tight to squeeze through wearing our daypacks, which we take off to carry in one hand while edging sideways over sand and rocks. At the chimney section, Steve and I cross first with Nate between us, talking him through placing his feet, hands, and back side against small features in the walls to inch gradually across the traverse. Maybe 20 feet below us, the canyon constricts to a crack less than a foot wide with several inches of standing water.
Leaving Nate at the other end of the 100-foot traverse, Steve and I chimney back and repeat the procedure with Alex. Both kids traverse it slowly and calmly—just the way they should—and beam with pride at the other end. Beyond the chimney section, we hike through more sandy-bottom narrows, the walls still not much more than shoulder-width apart, to emerge from the canyon’s mouth, where it ends in a 100-foot pour-off that we rappel and lower off.
Later, back at Steve’s house, he and I measure Stegosaur Canyon’s length on his mapping program: it’s 0.6 mile long. It took us three hours to descend the slot canyon itself, sandwiched between an approach hike of about three hours and an exit hike of another hour or more—a pretty full day, and one of my kids’ most exciting adventures to date.
Backpacking Spring Canyon
At the park visitor center on our third morning in Capitol Reef, the ranger at the backcountry desk tells me that we’re the only party that has obtained a permit to backpack into Spring Canyon today, our third day in the park. We’ll see a few dayhikers in Chimney Rock Canyon, the tributary of Spring Canyon where we’ll begin and end our three-day hike. Beyond that, we’ll have the entire canyon to ourselves.
It’s at least nine miles from the Chimney Rock Trailhead to the bottom end of Spring Canyon, where it meets the Fremont River. While some hikers knock it off in a day, backpackers often do it as an overnight trip, to spend a night below Spring’s soaring red walls. But at the canyon’s mouth, you have to ford the river to reach UT 24. When we eyeballed the river yesterday, we decided it was moving too fast and deep to ford it with the kids. So we’ll hike in six or seven miles and camp two nights, giving us a day to explore farther down canyon before hiking back out the way we came in.
The temperature sits around 60 degrees and the sun filters through a slight haze; we wear T-shirts and shorts without breaking much of a sweat starting up the Chimney Rock Trail. To our left, burnt red and orange walls rise some 300 feet tall above steep slopes of broken rock and fine sand; to our right stand darker burgundy cliffs of Moenkopi Shale with horizontal striations in hues of red, including the severe pinnacle called Chimney Rock. A 30-minute climb through switchbacks on a good trail brings us to a pass, where we start the gentle descent into broad, sun-baked Chimney Rock Canyon.
Towering red cliffs with patches of white and orange and black water-stain streaks rise up on both sides; enormous boulders pile up below the cliffs. In the canyon bottom, the trail ends and we follow the dry, sandy channel to the junction with Spring Canyon, about three miles from the trailhead. The route continues down the canyon bottom of sand, cobblestones, and slickrock, beneath walls several hundred feet high.
At a pour-off, we walk a wide slickrock ledge above a narrow gorge maybe 12 feet deep, with walls sculpted in dramatic, smooth curves. At another pour-off, we detour up onto a goat path across a steep, crumbling slope. Some six to seven miles in, after more than four hours of hiking, we pitch the tent on a grassy bench beneath cliffs topped by domes and spires—our home for the next two nights.
Accessible and not very difficult, Spring Canyon is one of the more popular backpacking destinations in Capitol Reef. But “popular” has a different meaning in this park. While we’re not exploring virgin terrain, as we were Stegosaur Canyon, not seeing anyone else in here allows my kids to feel like explorers.
On our middle day we hike a couple of miles farther down the canyon and back. We scramble over boulders and I boost Nate and Alex up into cave-like “windows” in the rock that they crawl inside. Even though daytime temperatures have reached around 60 degrees every day since we arrived in the park, in a narrows that rarely sees direct sunlight we find thick plates of ice in the inch-deep trickle of water flowing from a spring—a reminder that winter only made its exit a week ago.
The kids spend at least an hour of our walk telling me about wild dreams they’ve had. Their stories sound to me like a perfect soundtrack to a dreamlike landscape—one that we have to entirely ourselves for a few days of hiking and exploring.
May 6, 2012, marks the 150th anniversary of the death of Henry David Thoreau, the father of American nature writing. His influence on contemporary environmental writing is still very significant, and this weekend, we're highlighting that influence on our blog. Today, we hear from Michael Lanza and Elizabeth Gehrman.
I would be less than honest to claim that, when I read Thoreau’s classic Walden; or, Life in the Woods, years ago, I couldn’t put it down. To me, it seemed like the book begged to be put down. By modern literary standards, it is not the most accessible read. It probably wasn’t back when it was first published in 1854, either.
I grew up not far from Walden Pond, where, beginning on July 4, 1845, Thoreau lived for two years, two months, and two days alone in a cabin “to front only the essential facts of life, and… suck out all the marrow of life.” That’s heady stuff. I’ve walked the trail around the pond—which can take an hour only if you dawdle—and visited the replica of his tiny cabin that stands there today. In reality, the second-growth forest (less dense than Thoreau’s prose) in which he dwelled just two miles from town probably felt little more isolated back then than it does today, within earshot of a busy highway.
But the degree of Thoreau’s isolation is not what matters; and in an era when so much entertainment delivers an intellectual experience akin to eating apple sauce—no chewing necessary—perhaps we should celebrate writing that requires some brain effort to interpret. Thoreau’s real importance was introducing ideas about returning to nature that were ahead of his time and helped inspire the conservation movement, among other social trends to which he contributed (transcendentalism, abolition, and civil disobedience, to name-drop a few noteworthy examples). His words ring particularly prescient now, when we lament the myriad, tragic consequences of so many children spending so little time outdoors. Certainly, all of us who today write about personal experiences in nature stand on Thoreau’s shoulders.
As no less an authority than the late John Updike once wrote: “A century and a half after its publication, Walden has become such a totem of the back-to-nature, preservationist, anti-business, civil-disobedience mindset, and Thoreau so vivid a protester, so perfect a crank and hermit saint, that the book risks being as revered and unread as the Bible.”
Maybe Thoreau’s classic work should be required reading for all high-school students, or at least any who would aspire to join the long parade of writers walking rocky trails in his footsteps. Those who put in the time and effort might discover the meaning that has stirred so many people. And I doubt we’ll ever have an app for that.
Though I dutifully recorded and often revisited quotes from it — so many I could never choose just one to cite here — what I remember most from my high school English reading of Walden is that it was a bit of a slog. I was no philosopher, and though I grew up on an island, my playgrounds the Niagara River and acres of untamed forest, nature had never really flipped my introspection switch. Maybe, as an only child, I had enough solitude; I was content simply to explore the woods and water without feeling the need to examine myself in the bargain. It wasn’t until college, when I got around to Cape Cod, that I really discovered Thoreau.
Where Walden turns inward, Cape Cod turns outward. Often described as Thoreau’s “happy” book, it is not so much about nature as about people in nature. It tells of those who are drawn to the sea — the oystermen and lighthouse keepers and industrious old women who come to it because of work or circumstance or its inexorable pull on the soul. “Cape Cod is but another name for human culture,” Thoreau writes early on. His initial tale of a horrific shipwreck never strays far from his mind as he recounts the power of the “vast and wild” Atlantic over the lives cast upon its shores with an eye for detail that any journalist would envy.
And that, it seems to me, is more affecting than bean-planting any day.
A longtime backpacker, climber, and skier, Michael Lanza knows our national parks like the back of his hand. As a father, he hopes to share these special places with his two young children. But he has seen firsthand the changes wrought by the warming climate and understands what lies ahead: a vastly changed landscape. So he and his wife take his nine-year-old son, Nate, and seven-year-old daughter, Alex, on an ambitious journey to see as many climate-threatened wild places as they can fit into a year: backpacking in the Grand Canyon, Glacier, the North Cascades, Mount Rainier, Rocky Mountain, and along the wild Olympic coast; sea kayaking in Alaska's Glacier Bay; hiking to Yosemite's waterfalls; rock climbing in Joshua Tree National Park; cross-country skiing in Yellowstone; and canoeing in the Everglades.
It's hard to argue that there's anything more urgent and potentially catastrophic than climate change. In reading countless journal articles and conducting numerous interviews for my book, Before They're Gone—A Family's Year-Long Quest to Explore America's Most Endangered National Parks, it was hard to maintain optimism in the face of forecasts that the steady diminishing of mountain snows means that Yosemite’s famous waterfalls will peter out earlier in the year; that every glacier in Glacier National Park is doomed to melt away; that Joshua Tree National Park will one day no longer support its namesake tree, and much of the Everglades is fated to sink beneath the sea. The issue became powerfully immediate to me in realizing that much of this fallout will occur within the lifetimes of my children.
Many scientists now believe that a rise of 3 degrees Celsius (5.4 degrees Fahrenheit) in average temperatures worldwide is unavoidable in this century, which could erase 40 percent of all species on the planet. It was really disturbing to interview one leading scientist after another and hear every one of them express fear that we’re facing the greatest disaster in the history of human civilization.
It's frightening to contemplate what this will mean for people all over the world. Many scientists I interviewed echoed the comments of USGS research ecologist Nathan Stephenson, who told me, “Sometimes people say, ‘If this has happened in the past, why should we be worried?’ The simple answer is: you would not have wanted to be alive then. Civilizations have fallen on slight changes in climate.”
As I wrote in my book: Our conversation about climate has not achieved the degree of honesty we would use when talking with our own kids. We would not encourage them to make choices fraught with such a high degree of risk. Yet we as a people have embraced just that kind of choice time and again.
Still, I feel optimistic—partly because optimism offers the only hope for the world our kids will inherit. I think we’re at the brink of a tectonic shift in public perception and understanding of climate change, one that could, hopefully, drive public policy in the right direction. Record high temperatures are being constantly recorded all over the world. A recent poll showed a large majority of Americans believe that extreme weather events of recent years are connected to climate change. Major corporations are calculating the impacts of rising temperatures on their business. The Pentagon is preparing for a world growing more politically unstable as crop failures increase and societies grapple with simply feeding their people.
We have to hope—especially for our children and grandchildren—this positive shift in public awareness and action will happen fast enough and isn’t coming too late. We have no reasonable option but to do much better than we are now.
When Alexis Rizzuto was planning the vacation she took this past fall, she didn't pore over travel guides or look to glossy magazines for inspiration. Alexis is an editor at Beacon Press, so she just took a look at the amazing books she's been working on. Our blog editor, Jessie Bennett, spoke with Alexis about her trip, and about the books and authors who inspired it, in particular Michael Lanza's newly published Before They're Gone: A Family's Year-Long Quest to Explore America's Most Endangered National Parks.
A slightly modified version of the Before They're Gone book cover.
What books inspired your trip or came back to you while you were on the trip?
I would not have taken this trip if it weren't for Before They're Gone by Michael Lanza. And our upcoming book, Dirt Work by Christine Byl, because she was out on these very trails breaking them for the rest of us. I met our author Brad Tyer, so Opportunity, Montana is another connection to this trip. We were in a different part of Montana than he writes about, but, still, the reason that we went to Montana is the reason he went to Montana: because we wanted to see pristine wilderness and beautiful wildlife. At that time, I hadn't yet realized about the whole extractive resource colony aspect of Montana, but now I appreciate the beauty of it even more.
And our Steve Hawley book, Recovering a Lost River. We took a rafting trip down the Snake River in his honor. And of course, Mr. Hornaday's War. We not only made a pilgrimage to Mt. Hornaday, but when I saw my first bison in Yellowstone, I almost cried. From then on, we mostly saw bison in herds, but the first bison I saw was alone out on a prairie, and having in mind what I had just read in Stefan Bechtel’s book about the bison slaughter and their recovery, I felt so grateful that this bison was still there, a survivor.
How did Michael Lanza help you plan your trip?
He helped me from day one. He inspired the trip, and then I said, "Okay, I want to go see some of these places that you wrote about. What do you suggest?" I said I would maybe like to start with Yellowstone and he said, "Well, if you want to see Yellowstone, you should add on Glacier National Park and the Tetons as well." He told me what time of year to go, too—September, because the students have to go back to school so there won't be as many families. It wouldn’t be as crowded, and it's still warm then. But the farther north you go, the cooler it gets, so he told us to start north while it's still kind of warm in Glacier and then work our way south to Yellowstone and then the Tetons. And he told me how many hours it would take to drive between these places and where to stay when we got there... I mean, everything. He gave me a whole itinerary.
St. Mary Lake, Glacier National Park. Photo courtesy Alexis Rizzuto. See more photos here.
This is such a bonus to being an editor here!
Yeah, like, "I don't want to exploit you, but..." I was so clueless. I had never been to that part of the country before; I had no idea what to do. I was asking him for basic advice, and he just gave me every detail I could have possibly needed.
How long was your trip?
It was two weeks.
What kind of gear did Michael tell you to bring?
Well, we weren't camping--we were just hiking.
But did you get bear repellent?
(Laughs) Yes, we did get bear repellent.
Did you have to use bear repellent?
Thank God we did not. But I thought about that story in the book, about his kid, Nate. He's stalking around with the bear repellent, and Michael turns around and Nate has it aimed at him. He told me that there was an instance where one of his friends discharged the bear repellent in a garage, and even days later you couldn't go into the garage without your eyes watering--it's really serious stuff.
So we did have it and we did have it at the ready at all times because there were plenty of bears there. We only laid eyes on one, but we would be walking down a trail and somebody would be coming back the other way and they would say, "Oh, we just saw a grizzly up there." And there was another trail we were on where a park ranger came by and said, "We're closing this part of the trail because of bear activity." And then we were on another trail--we were pretty much by ourselves on this one trail--and we came across some large, very fresh piles of bear poop, right in the middle of the trail. And then we heard rustling in the woods. We hightailed it out of there. And just as we were coming out of the trailhead, a park ranger was driving up, and the first thing she asked us was, "Did you see any bears?" We said, "No, but... you know we just saw some pretty fresh scat. And we thought we saw something in the woods." And she said, "Well you probably did--there's a mother grizzly here with her two cubs."
But it's not like there aren't warnings. At every trailhead, there's a billboard, saying, "You are entering grizzly territory. Here's what you do..." And the main thing to do is make noise. Clap, yell, sing. We had bells that we would shake, I had stuff to clank against my metal water bottle. We made sure that we were making noise, because if they hear you coming they'll just go away. They don't want to see you.
We went on plenty of trails that said, "Prime grizzly territory: be bear aware." (Laughs) That was the catch phrase in the Tetons area, I think. They had these big stickers everywhere saying, "Be Bear Aware," put away your food, and don't do anything that would attract them.
Don't carry pic-a-nic baskets?
Right. (Laughs) So Michael gave us advice about some things to bring, but since we weren't camping, it was just basic hiking gear and protection. And he gave us some ideas about where to stay. We stayed in the parks, in cabins mostly. It was really nice to wake up and be in the park. You’d fall asleep to the sound of great horned owls and wake up to the morning light on the mountainsides.
Both he and Christine Byl suggested a particular trail in Glacier. You get to this trail by going up this road called "Going to the Sun Road." And all the guidebooks say, "Oh, you have to do the Going to the Sun Road, it's spectacular. Everybody does it. Millions of people a year do it." We renamed that road the "Going in My Pants Road." Because you're on the side of a mountain. There's like a 5,000 foot sheer drop right next to you. And there's a low rock wall that's all that's between you and pitching off the side of the mountain. Millions of people do it every year, and nobody dies, so obviously it's okay, but I was clinging to my husband, I could not look out the window. I was like, "Oh, my God, we're going to die." He was actually feeling the same way. So we get to the top of the Going to the Sun Road, and the High Line trail is the trail that both Michael and Christine said, "Oh, you have to do this trail." We looked at this trail, and we're like, "There's no frigging way we're going to do this trail."
Was it for more experienced hikers?
No. There were kids on it. But it was basically the same thing as the road, only narrower and with no rocks between you and the fall. And they said, "You'll see great mountain goats up there, and you'll get great views up there, and everyone should do this trail." But the thing was, the other trail that we picked, we saw mountain goats, we saw beautiful views. Yes, it was a trail that children and old people were also on. But, who cares? It was so beautiful. Wildflower meadows and frolicking animals, sparkling lakes. They call the area the American Alps.
Proof that Alexis saw a mountain goat on the wimpy trail.
Children and old people are for me a very good sign that I can handle it.
Yeah! It was one of the most beautiful hikes we had, even though it wasn't the serious hiker trail. I didn't care. We saw everything we came to see. So I told Michael, "Your children will laugh at me for being such a wuss." They could do the High Line trail in their sleep.
Did it give you more of an appreciation for all of the stuff that they did in the book?
Yeah, oh yeah. Definitely. And my husband got so sick of me because everything we did, I said, "Well Michael Lanza did this," and, "Michael Lanza writes about this in his book." "I learned about this from Michael Lanza." He was like, "Michael Lanza! Michael Lanza! Michael Lanza! Why don't you marry HIM?" (Laughs) Actually, they’ve met and get along very well.
But, I was able to tell Alex, for instance, well... it's not a happy story, but not all the stories in the book are happy. It's about climate change. And one of the things we saw firsthand was that the glaciers in Glacier National Park, as Michael admitted, are really not that impressive any more because they're already such a small percentage of what they used to be. Sometimes it's hard to tell the difference between a glacier and a bunch of snow in a bowl in the mountains. But the other thing I was able to tell Alex about and to see firsthand, which was heartbreaking, is the lodgepole pines are being infested by pine bark beetles because the winters are not cold enough to kill their eggs. It used to be that the winters were cold enough to kill most of the eggs so that when the pine bark beetles hatched in the spring, there weren't enough of them to wipe out entire forests, but now, there are. And these forests--we saw entire, entire mountainsides, brown.
There were two kinds of tree deaths that we saw. One of them was good, one of them was bad. And I learned this from Michael Lanza, too. The good tree deaths-- we would see the remains of the dead trees --those were from forest fires. And, actually, that's good because among the skeletons of the old trees there was lush growth of the younger trees coming up. And the forest fires enrich the soil, and actually allow the pine cone seeds to germinate. They only germinate at the temperatures brought about by forest fires. So we would walk through forests like that and, yes, there was destruction, but there was also life and hope and the proper cycle going on.
But then, when we would see one of these pine bark beetle forests, it was just heartbreaking, because you could imagine what the mountainside looked like when it was green. And now there's not a shred of life on it.
The wildlife was amazing. We saw herds of bison, we saw elk, we saw a black bear, we saw mountain goats, amazing bird life--we saw a pair of sand hill cranes, up pretty close, closely enough that we heard their calls and watched them fly off. I'd never seen sand hill cranes. I don't think they're endangered, they're not that rare, but I had never seen them before. We were on a place called Antelope Flats where we saw a herd of pronghorn antelope. And there was a whole flock of western meadowlarks, which are a beautiful bird. They've got a bright yellow chest, and their song was amazing. [Ed's note: You can listen to meadowlark song at the Cornell All About Birds website.]
We got up close and personal with some mule deer. First we encountered the male on his own. He walked right up to us, we could have fed him, he was so close. And then he went away, and we continued down the trail and there was the female with two fawns. And they also didn't care that we were there. There was a newsletter they hand out in the National Parks where it explains that there are certain distances that you are supposed to maintain between yourself and certain kinds of wildlife. So, obviously, a grizzly bear you're supposed to give a large amount of space. (Laughs) For bighorn sheep, the space is a little shorter. But you're supposed to give deer space as well. But these deer, they were on the trail, and we wanted to give them the kind of space we were supposed to give them, but they just weren't leaving! So we ended up waiting for quite a while, then we just squeezed past them. They didn't care.
The other beautiful thing is the breathtaking landscapes. Being from the East, you're just not used to the space, and the breadth, and the hugeness of the mountains and the canyons and the plains.
It's hard to use superlative words and have them actually mean anything these days, but I just kept turning to Alex and saying, "This blows my mind."
Michael Lanza is a freelance photographer and writer. The creator ofTheBigOutside.com, Lanza dedicates his site to sharing personal hiking adventures and offering guidance to fellow wilderness enthusiasts. He is the Northwest Editor of Backpacker magazine, blogs for backpacker.com, and a former editor for AMC Outdoors magazine. Author of previously published hiking guides, Lanza's newest book, Before They're Gone (Beacon Press, spring 2012), examines climate change in national parks through the lens of family hiking excursions.
We’re just seconds beyond the sign at the start of the Gunsight Pass Trail that reads “Entering Grizzly Country” when Nate, who’s a month shy of his tenth birthday, begins aggressively making the case for why he should be armed.
“Why can’t I carry a pepper spray?” he asks me—again and again.
It’s an idyllic, late-summer afternoon in the Northern Rockies—the sun shining warmly, a gently cooling breeze rippling the air, not a white speck of moisture in the sky. We are heading out on a three-day family backpacking trip to Gunsight Pass in Montana’s Glacier National Park. One of the logistically easiest and shortest multi-day hikes in the park, the 20-mile traverse from Gunsight Pass Trailhead to Lake McDonald Lodge—both of which are on the Going-to-the-Sun Road and served by the park’s free shuttle bus—takes in some of Glacier’s most spectacular scenery, including views of one of its largest rivers of ice (all of which are steadily shrinking), scores of waterfalls, and a backcountry campsite at Lake Ellen Wilson that is one of the prettiest in the park.
Unfortunately, I was not able to get a permit for the full traverse; it’s popular and backpacker numbers are restricted to avoid overuse and preserve a sense of solitude. So instead, we’ll spend two nights at Gunsight Lake, dayhike to Gunsight Pass, and then backtrack to the Gunsight Pass Trailhead on our last day.
Having hiked the traverse before, I knew Nate and our seven-year-old daughter, Alex, easily have the stamina for the three six-mile days we’ll do. The much bigger concern for my wife, Penny, and me was the preoccupying idea of backpacking in grizzly-bear country with our young kids. In fact, a year ago, I had a close encounter with a sow griz and her two cubs on the Gunsight Pass Trail. Although we know that such encounters are rare, we’ll have to be diligent about making sure the kids don’t inadvertently bring a pocketful of Jolly Ranchers into the tent for the night.
Thinking along similar lines, my hyper-focused son is consumed by the conviction that he should be armed with one of the pepper-spray canisters holstered to the hipbelts of Penny’s and my backpacks. When not distracted by throwing sticks into the raging creek at Deadwood Falls, or watching for moose in the boggy, partly forested flats of the St. Mary River, he persistently returns to his argument that he is just as capable as his mother or me of calmly deploying pepper spray at a charging grizzly. I try, in vain, to convince him that an adult is better able to react to that inconceivably frightful circumstance—although I’m not really sure I believe that.
Glacier National Park covers a million acres straddling the Continental Divide hard against the Canadian border. More than a hundred peaks here in the northernmost U.S. Rockies rise above 8,000 feet, the highest over 10,000 feet. Meat-cleaver wedges of billion-year-old rock line up in rows stretching to far horizons, blades pointed upward.
The Blackfeet Indians called these mountains “the backbone of the world.” The description fits a place where the land vaults up so dramatically from the very edge of the Plains—and where Triple Divide Peak is one of only two North American mountains that funnel waters to three oceans: the Atlantic, Pacific, and Arctic. George Bird Grinnell, a writer who began lobbying to create a national park here in the 1880s, called these mountains “the Crown of the Continent.” The Great Northern Railway, hoping to bring paying tourists in, dubbed the area “Little Switzerland.”
With just one road crossing the park—the Going-to-the-Sun Road, a 50-mile-long ribbon of pavement clinging to avalanche-prone mountainsides—Glacier is more than anything a backpacker’s park. More than 700 miles of trails crisscross it. While you can see quite a lot of world-class scenery on dayhikes, most of this vast, wild area is accessible only to people willing to carry on their backs everything they need to survive for days in the wilderness.
The Gunsight Pass Trail is a great choice for first-time Glacier backpackers and anyone who wants a short backcountry trip with easy transportation logistics. It’s also not crowded with dayhikers like trails around Many Glacier and Logan Pass—all good reasons for making it my kids’ first multi-day hike in Glacier.
Best of all, though, the views really are among the finest in the park.
On our first afternoon, we walk past an overlook of the Blackfoot Glacier, one of the park’s largest, which sprawls across the cirque at the head of the St. Mary River. A little while later, we stroll into camp at Gunsight Lake, a long, blue-green gem embraced by an arc of rugged mountains, including Mt. Jackson, one of just a half-dozen in the park that rise above 10,000 feet.
After Nate and Alex play by the lakeshore for a while, launching driftwood boats and bombing them with rocks, I accede to giving them a lesson in using the pepper spray—and letting Nate carry one canister, but only in camp, where there are at least 15 other backpackers spread among several sites under the pines, a substantial human presence to deter ursine visits. For the remainder of our time in this camp, tonight, tomorrow, and on our last morning, Nate will assume the role of the world’s smallest bodyguard, escorting Penny, Alex, and me around the campground with the canister hanging from a belt loop on his shorts, looking like a mortar shell against his skinny thigh.
Alex glances over her shoulder at me with a look that says, “Soooo, what now?”
On our second morning, the four of us have stopped high up the Gunsight Pass Trail. Cliffs rise steeply up to a small glacier on our left, and drop off precipitously on our right a thousand feet down to the clear, emerald waters of Gunsight Lake. We’re dayhiking from our campsite on the lake to Gunsight Pass. And the critter obstructing us brings authenticity to the phrase “goat path.”
A young mountain goat, as white as fresh snow, with sharp, straight horns and coal-black eyes, stands in the trail, occasionally lifting its head from nibbling on plants to return Alex’s quizzical glance. I meet Alex’s look, smile, and shrug. We wait.
When the goat finally relinquishes the trail to us, scrambling nimbly down the cliff below us, we peer over the brink to see where it went. Alex mutters in awe, “I can’t believe it went down there.”
Continuing upward, we look out over a deep cirque carved out by ancient ice that has mostly disappeared. Waterfalls too numerous to count pour hundreds of feet down cliffs. Snowfields and a lobe of the Harrison Glacier dapple the mountainsides above us.
Some three hours after leaving our campsite, we reach wind-hammered Gunsight Pass, 6,900 feet above sea level and three miles and 2,000 feet above Gunsight Lake. We sit and eat lunch on big, flat-topped rocks, perched on the rim of a vast stone bathtub—the high basin embracing Lake Ellen Wilson, where more waterfalls plunge over cliffs and stream into the emerald lake.
It was just a couple of miles beyond this lake, at Lincoln Pass, where a friend and I ran into a grizzly sow and her cubs less than a year ago. We won’t walk that far today, but those bears and others are wandering around out there somewhere, perhaps even within the considerable expanse of sub-alpine meadows, boulder fields, and scattered copses of conifer trees that we can see from here. After our lunch break, we turn around to retrace the trail back to our camp on Gunsight Lake. Once there, the kids play more at the edge of the lake, Penny holes up in the tent with her book, and I lay on the sun-warmed stones of the beach.
I wanted to bring Nate and Alex to this iconic park in part to see its glaciers before they all melt away completely, a fate that U.S. Geological Survey researchers here predict may occur by 2020—when my kids are barely young adults. It seems incomprehensible that climate change could so rapidly remove ice that has inhabited this landscape for at least 7,000 years. But scientists tell me with amazement how they have observed and recorded for two decades this park’s glaciers collapsing, retreating, shrinking ever faster.
With average temperatures climbing steadily higher, and the health of glacial ice so inextricably tied to temperature, there is no disagreement among scientists that this park will lose the very natural feature for which it was named. The far-reaching impacts of this transformation on streams, vegetation, and wildlife remain largely unpredictable.
Of course, for our kids, other things will leave a more lasting impression than melting glaciers: playing on the shore of Gunsight Lake, seeing a mountain goat up close—and for Nate, feeling the cold power of a canister of Counter Assault pepper spray in his hands.
But I think they will also take away some subtle but ultimately more valuable gifts from Glacier National Park.
On our last morning, we pack up camp beneath battleship-gray skies. Just as we hit the trail to hike back to our car, the first raindrops start falling. We plod through four hours of steady rain that slowly soaks our boots and pants, giving my kids a valuable lesson in hardship that they endure with patience beyond their years. They even surprise me with how positive and unruffled they remain throughout our long, wet, raw walk—affirming my belief that, even at their age, they draw knowledge and self-confidence from our wilderness adventures that they will carry with them always.
Michael Lanza is a freelance photographer and writer. The creator ofTheBigOutside.com, Lanza dedicates his site to sharing personal hiking adventures and offering guidance to fellow wilderness enthusiasts. He is the Northwest Editor of Backpacker magazine, blogs for backpacker.com, and a former editor for AMC Outdoors magazine. Author of previously published hiking guides, Lanza's newest book, Before They're Gone (Beacon Press, spring 2012), examines climate change in national parks through the lens of family hiking excursions.
The water of Johns Hopkins Inlet lies flat, perfectly reflecting the first patches of blue sky we’ve seen since arriving in Glacier Bay yesterday morning. I rest my paddle across the kayak and listen. A barely audible moan of wind floats down from high in the mountains, then fades away. A bald eagle screeches, briefly piercing the quiet; but as soon as the sound passes, the silence that returns seems as deep as the sea we’re floating on.
On the second afternoon of a five-day sea kayaking trip, 55 miles up this Southeast Alaska fjord where cliffs shoot straight up out of the sea and razor peaks smothered in ice and snow rise thousands of feet overhead, I’m taking a moment to enjoy a rare pleasure: listening to the cacophony of nothing.
My seven-year-old daughter, Alex, who is perfectly content to sit back and let me power our two-person kayak loaded with food and gear, points to the eagle perched in its nest in a snag high up a cliff. “He’s watching the kayakers go by,” she informs me. A harbor seal pops its head above water nearby, inspecting us with dark eyes. Alex faintly catches her breath as she and the seal lock gazes. A moment later, it disappears with a “bloop.”
Then a sharp concussion rips open the quiet.
About six miles away, visible at the other end of the inlet, the mile-wide, twelve-mile-long Johns Hopkins Glacier has dropped another immense piece of itself into the sea. The native Tlingits, who have lived on this coast for centuries, call that explosive noise “white thunder,” which strikes me as the best possible descriptor for it.
The Hopkins Glacier is the most active remnant of an unimaginably massive river of ice that filled this realm of liquid water in the geologically very recent past. Tomorrow, we will paddle up this inlet for a close-up view of that dynamic glacier. We’re hoping this improved weather will hold out at least until then.
My family, including my wife, Penny, and our nine-year-old son, Nate, are taking a sea kayaking trip run by Alaska Mountain Guides. With our two guides and six other clients, we’ve come to paddle around Glacier Bay’s upper West Arm, probing deep within a national park the size of Connecticut, at the heart of a contiguous protected wilderness area the size of Greece.
By mid-afternoon, we pull up onto a rocky beach at the mouth of the inlet, where we’ll camp for two nights. The sky has mostly cleared and the water’s still dead calm. Icebergs float in the bay. Glaciers pour off of serrated peaks on all sides; tendrils of clouds wrap themselves around the mountaintops.
And throughout the evening, every 15 or 20 minutes, another sharp report booms down the inlet.
Dan Berk paddles beneath the Lamplugh Glacier in Glacier Bay National Park.
Two centuries ago, there was no Glacier Bay. When British Capt. George Vancouver sailed the H.M.S. Discovery through Southeast Alaska’s Icy Strait in 1794, he wrote in his ship’s log about a “compact sheet of ice as far as the eye can see.” He was looking at a colossus of ancient, frozen water 4,000 feet thick and up to 20 miles wide that reached more than a hundred miles into the St. Elias Mountains. By the time John Muir visited in 1879, the tongue of ice that had touched the waters of Icy Strait had slid 30 miles backward. He wrote that, at night, “the surge from discharging icebergs churned the water into silver fire.”
Glacier Bay has seen the fastest glacial retreat on the planet. The ice has pulled back 65 miles, unveiling a fjord with numerous inlets and 1,200 miles of coastline. While the national park still has more than 50 glaciers covering 1,375 square miles—more than a quarter of the entire park—most are in declining health, a trend driven largely by one factor: In the past 60 years, the state’s average temperature has increased 3° F., more than twice the average warming worldwide.
A scientist who has studied Alaska’s glaciers for 40 years told me that 99 percent of them are shrinking. Just in the four decades since he first kayaked in Glacier Bay, the number of so-called tidewater glaciers, those that extend from the mountains to the sea in various inlets, has gone from a dozen to five.
Named a national monument in 1925 by President Calvin Coolidge and a national park and preserve in 1980 by President Jimmy Carter, Glacier Bay today attracts more than 250,000 visitors a year. The vast majority of them see the bay from the railing of the park’s tour boat, which is certainly a great experience. But so few people go kayaking in the bay—and it is so vast—that kayakers run into very few other people on multi-day trips here.
On our first day, we paddled into Reid Inlet and explored the hundred-foot-tall snout of the Reid Glacier, where a river of gray water poured out of a blue-ice cave. After camping at the inlet’s mouth, we started our second morning with a visit to the ruins of a cabin inhabited eight decades ago by Joe and Shirley “Muz” Ibach. The couple staked their claim to mine the land a year before the bay became a national monument, and were permitted to continue living and mining there for another 16 years, making perhaps $13 after expenses in a good year, until their deaths.
Frowning at what’s left of their former one-room wood structure in the middle of the wilderness, Alex asked me, “How did they entertain themselves?” Even by the simpler lifestyles of those times, it’s hard to imagine such solitude.
Then again, there would be that constant soundtrack of white thunder playing in the background.
Our second campsite in Johns Hopkins Inlet, Glacier Bay National Park.
Another morning of glassy waters greets us as we push the kayaks out into Johns Hopkins Inlet on our third day. Under clear skies and a warm sun that will deliver our trip’s warmest day, pushing 60º F, we cruise slowly up the inlet, passing icebergs ranging from truck-size to chunks of ice that look like abstract mantelpiece sculptures.
Capt. Cook saw these peaks in 1778, during an identical short reprieve from the typically wet, gray Southeast Alaska weather, and named them the Fairweather Mountains. Given that the region receives six feet of rain a year and is much more frequently enveloped in fog than bathed in sunshine, it may be the most misleading place name on the planet.
We’ve arrived in late July, just a few weeks after Johns Hopkins Inlet was opened to kayaks and boats. The park closes this inlet to human traffic every year during spring and early summer to avoid disturbing the thousands of harbor seals that birth their pups and keep them on floating icebergs to protect them from predators.
Glacier Bay is something of a northern paradise, teeming with life. Humpback whales and orcas ply its waters. On the four-hour park ferry tour up the bay that first morning, en route to our drop-off point, we saw brown bears ambling down rocky beaches and mountain goats scrambling up sea cliffs. Scores of Steller sea lions, the largest males ten feet long and over 2,000 pounds, piled up on the barren rock of South Marble Island, where researchers have counted 1,100 of them.
We spotted black-legged kittiwake nesting in sea cliffs, pigeon guillemot with its red legs and beak, and the more-common tufted puffin as well as the rare horned puffin. Some species threatened or endangered outside Alaska, like the bald eagle and marbled murrelet, abound in Glacier Bay.
The bay also offers a rare natural laboratory displaying a living timeline of plant succession in the wake of deglaciation. In the lower bay, ice-free for 250 years, a mature temperate rainforest of spruce and hemlock grows almost impenetrably thick. As one travels up the bay, the forest gets younger, dominated by deciduous cottonwood, willows, and alder. In the upper bay, there’s little vegetation beyond mosses, lichens, and a few determined wildflowers. Waterfalls plummet hundreds of feet down cliffs scarred by the glacier that scraped past just decades ago. The upper bay opens a window onto what North America looked like when the last Ice Age drew to a close 10,000 years ago.
Our group paddles up Johns Hopkins Inlet toward the Johns Hopkins Glacier in Glacier Bay.
As we paddle farther up Johns Hopkins Inlet, the icebergs crowd more densely around us, some as large as tiny islands. We weave more cautiously among them, careful not to get too close, in case one abruptly rolls over.
About three hours from our camp, we take out on a beach of sun-warmed, fine black sand a quarter-mile long, littered with blocks of ice gleaming a brilliant white in the sunshine. Gulls are squawking. Backing the beach, multi-tiered Chocolate Falls sends a column of brown water crashing over cliffs. A half-mile away, the Johns Hopkins Glacier spans the entire head of the inlet, a sheer wall of ice a mile across and 300 feet tall, roaring at us at irregular intervals.
A couple of pairs of binoculars come out and we discover that the bergs across the inlet are covered with hundreds of seals. Some of the seals approach our beach, poking their heads above water to stare at us, then diving under again.
Earlier today, Arlie and Mike, a young American couple living in Vancouver, B.C., had broached the idea of taking a swim in the bay. The water is right around freezing. When I remind Arlie about her idea, we instantly have a party of swimmers: Arlie, Mike, our assistant guide Dan Berk, who’s in his early twenties, and me. We strip to underwear and, with the video camera rolling—of course—dash down the beach shouting and dive into the waves.
I’ve jumped into lakes within several degrees of freezing before, but this is the most frigid dip I’ve ever taken. The shock seems to squeeze my chest; my head pulses with a cold ache. All four of us jump up and immediately turn back for shore as the rest of our group on the beach hoots and laughs—Alex and Nate the loudest. For no logical reason, I turn and dive in again, thinking it will be the finale.
But back on the warm sand, the four of us shivering, Dan suggests one more plunge. I can’t very well back out. So with our half-frozen legs not working as well this time, we jog over and dive in again. This time, when we come out, I chatter through blue lips, “That’s the last one.” We trot around on the warm black sand for several minutes before getting our core body temperatures back up to normal.
We were right to presume that this warm sunshine would offer our only enticing opportunity for a swim. Tomorrow will deliver more raw overcast and a few hours of steady rain as we paddle to our final campsite, where the park tour boat will pick us up the following morning. We will paddle tomorrow among a few icebergs and see more waterfalls, seals, bald eagles, numerous other birds, and even a porpoise—while listening to those sporadic rumbles of white thunder.
[Author’s note: I write more about this trip and Glacier Bay’s climate story in my book, Before They’re Gone: A Family’s Year-Long Quest to Explore America’s Most Endangered National Parks, due out from Beacon Press on April 3, 2012.]
Michael Lanza is a freelance photographer and writer. The creator of TheBigOutside.com, Lanza dedicates his site to sharing personal hiking adventures and offering guidance to fellow wilderness enthusiasts. He is the Northwest Editor of Backpacker magazine, blogs for backpacker.com, and a former editor for AMC Outdoors magazine. Author of previously published hiking guides, Lanza's newest book, Before They're Gone (Beacon Press, spring 2012), examines climate change in national parks through the lens of family hiking excursions.
Fat, perfect snowflakes pour down in a silent, frozen torrent from a blank white page of sky, as if the mountains are inside a Christmas snow globe that someone just shook vigorously. Powder lays several feet deep on the ground and smothers the tall ponderosa pines, looking like dozens of clean, white mittens on their boughs. No wind stirs the still air, and it’s not too cold. The quiet could drown out any negative thoughts.
It’s the kind of day that can make you wish winter lasted all year.
I ask four of my skiing partners what they think of the storm. My question triggers a blizzard of opinions.
“It’s pretty snowy.”
“It’s great!”
“I’m getting snow in my face. I love it!”
“I say it’s perfect.”
They’re strikingly casual about skiing into a snowstorm, but not entirely out of ignorance. They’ve all skied into the backcountry in these conditions before—four years in a row in these same mountains on almost exactly the same dates, in fact. So they’ve come to expect this.
The four are my son Nate, 10, and daughter Alex, seven, and family friends Lili and Sofi, 10-year-old twins. Also with us on this cross-country ski trail are my wife, Penny, and Lili and Sofi’s parents, Vince and Cat. It’s just after Christmas, and we’re on our way to the Skyline yurt, two miles and several hundred vertical feet uphill from ID 21 in Idaho’s Boise National Forest.
The Banner Ridge yurt in the Boise National Forest, Idaho.
For anything else, we’d have trouble tearing our kids away from their new Christmas loot. Not for this annual expedition, though. They’ve been talking about it for weeks.
Michael Lanza is a freelance photographer and writer. The creator of TheBigOutside.com, Lanza dedicates his site to sharing personal hiking adventures and offering guidance to fellow wilderness enthusiasts. He is the Northwest Editor of Backpacker magazine, the voice behind the Trip Doctor blog on backpacker.com, and a former editor for AMC Outdoors magazine. Author of previously published hiking guides, Lanza's newest book, Before They're Gone (Beacon Press, spring 2012), examines climate change in national parks through the lens of family hiking excursions.
National Park Service Director Jonathan Jarvis calls climate change "the greatest threat to the integrity of the national park system that we've ever faced."
Jarvis, who began his NPS career in 1976 and took over as director in October 2009, oversees America's 58 national parks and more than 300 other units of the park system at a time when scientists are learning more about the myriad threats posed by warming temperatures. Those include the expected disappearance of Glacier National Park's glaciers within a decade; snowpack declining virtually everywhere and the sweeping impacts of that on rivers, recreation, and ecosystems; more, larger wildfires and invasive species devastating forests across the West; and the gradual inundation by rising seas of park lands from the Olympic coast to Acadia to the Everglades.
Jarvis has served as a park biologist, chief of natural and cultural resources at several parks, superintendent at Craters of the Moon National Monument, Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve, and Mount Rainier National Park, and director of the Pacific West Region. He says he began working on climate issues 20 years ago. In an exclusive interview with for my upcoming book on parks and climate change, he talked about how the National Park Service is responding to the climate threat, and the possibility of employing drastic measures like irrigating giant sequoia trees.
Michael Lanza is a freelance photographer and writer. The creator of TheBigOutside.com, Lanza dedicates his site to sharing personal hiking adventures and offering guidance to fellow wilderness enthusiasts. He is the Northwest Editor of Backpacker magazine, the voice behind the Trip Doctor blog on backpacker.com, and a former editor for AMC Outdoors magazine. Author of previously published hiking guides, Lanza's newest book, Before They're Gone (Beacon Press, spring 2012), examines climate change in national parks through the lens of family hiking excursions. The following post is an example of one such adventure.
We hiked slowly but steadily uphill through switchbacks in the cool shade of Pacific silver fir and Alaska yellow cedar draped in Spanish moss. With melting snow swelling every river, stream, and rivulet in the 470 miles of waterways within the boundaries of Mt. Rainier National Park, the Cascade Range erupted in a riot of greenery all around us, the forest a happy drunk on an H2O bender.
The temperature was a just-about-perfect 60° F. or so, and a breeze wandered through the big trees—weather copied and pasted directly from my backpacking dreams. I barely broke a sweat despite carrying a pack weighing as much as my nine-year-old son, jammed with much of the gear, clothes, and food for our three-day, 24-mile family backpacking trip across Rainier’s northern flanks, from Mowich Lake to Sunrise. I tried not to think about the forecast of rain for the next two days, or that my itinerary assumed our nine- and seven-year-old kids would happily hike nine miles and 2,000 feet uphill on our last day.
We emerged from the dense forest and crossed a log bridge over a small stream, passing through a threshold of conifers into a spacious meadow—and a vision of impossibility suddenly loomed on the horizon before us.
Michael Lanza is a freelance photographer and writer. The creator of TheBigOutside.com,
Lanza dedicates his site to sharing personal hiking adventures and
offering guidance to fellow wilderness enthusiasts. He is the Northwest
Editor of Backpacker magazine, the voice behind the Trip Doctor blog on backpacker.com, and a former editor for AMC Outdoors magazine. Author of previously published hiking guides, Lanza's newest book, Before They're Gone
(Beacon Press, spring 2012), examines climate change in national parks
through the lens of family hiking excursions. The following post is an
example of one such adventure.
My seven-year-old daughter, Alex, is engaged in some heavy intellectual lifting. I can tell by the way she stares quietly, her brow knitted in thought, at Upper Yosemite Falls. We've hiked for 90 minutes up a thousand vertical feet of hot, dusty trail above Yosemite Valley to stand below this curtain of water that plunges a sheer 1,430 feet off a cliff, ripping through the air with a sound like fighter jets buzzing us.
I can only imagine how it challenges her young sense of perspective. I was an adult when I first saw Yosemite Falls, the tallest in North America at 2,425 feet, consisting of the upper falls in front of us, several hundred feet of cascades below it, and 400-foot-tall Lower Yosemite Falls, out of sight far below us. It awed me then, as it still does. But I'm wondering what it looks like to the eyes of a seven-year-old.
Finally, Alex asks me, "How does the water go up the mountain?"
Michael Lanza is a freelance photographer and writer. The creator of TheBigOutside.com, Lanza dedicates his site to sharing personal hiking adventures and offering guidance to fellow wilderness enthusiasts. He is the Northwest Editor of Backpacker magazine, the voice behind the Trip Doctor blog on backpacker.com, and a former editor for AMC Outdoors magazine. Author of previously published hiking guides, Lanza's newest book, Before They're Gone (Beacon Press, spring 2012), examines climate change in national parks through the lens of family hiking excursions. The following post is an example of one such adventure.
I pause and stare at the trail ahead of us. Barely more than a foot wide and plastered in hard-packed snow and ice, the trail clings to the face of a cliff with a sheer drop-off of hundreds of feet to one side.
Then I look down at my seven-year-old daughter, Alex. Only four feet tall and 50 pounds, she exudes an innocent faith that her dad, holding her hand tightly, will guide her safely across that scary traverse—and the next, and the next, and so on for more than a mile and nearly a thousand vertical feet on our descent of the Grandview Trail, which zigzags across wildly exposed ledges on its steep drop into the Grand Canyon.
Our situation makes me wonder: Do parents whose kids spend seven hours a day in front of electronic screens ever grapple with the existential question haunting me now—is this really a good idea?
Beacon Broadside, a project of Beacon Press, is an online venue for essays, news items, and dispatches from respected writers, thinkers, and activists about our times.
