A Story of My Own

Podcast Published by the Dirtbag Diaries. Text Below, Audio Available to Listen Online Here.

For most of my adult life, I’ve fought to stop, or at least slow down, climate change. It started in University, then through a series of questionable decisions turned into a haphazard career. 

Fast forward a decade, and now I can say that I’ve helped organized some of the largest, most iconic campaigns and protests around climate change and fossil fuels in North America. Like the People’s Climate March that brought nearly 400,000 people to New York City. And the campaign that pushed President Obama to reject the permit for the Keystone XL pipeline. I’ve put on a suit and sat down with elected officials to call for strong climate change legislation. I’ve been thrown out of a United Nations climate change conference for being a little too vigorous in demanding our governments take more urgent action on climate change. And, more than a couple times I’ve been arrested for both opposing massive fossil fuel projects and supporting bold climate legislation. I’ve down it all with an aim to bend the course of history away from the superstorms, mass displacement, food shortages and wildfires scientists warn are becoming the new normal on our road to a dystopian, climate changed future. 

Funny thing, for most of that time, I couldn’t tell you why. Sure, I could recite, and often wrote, the talking points: to stop sea level rise, stand with small island nations and Indigenous peoples, keep fossil fuels in the ground and save the Arctic. But I heard the story of a young woman whose family sold the farm they had run for generations because of a persistent drought. And my friends from the South Pacific told stories about how coastal erosion and climate charged storms had razed the villages they called home. And anytime I heard someone tell a deeply personal story, I felt embarrassed that I didn’t have a story of my own. 

In all my years of climate activism, I’ve written dozens of articles and hundreds of tweets about the Arctic. I lamented the steady retreat of the sea ice and harkened the now open Northwest Passage to a doomsday beacon. When companies like Shell and BP looked to at the ice-free Arctic Ocean as an opportunity to drill rather than an alarm bell, I took them to task. I attached a photo of an emaciated polar bear to most of my op-eds to drive the point home. 

But, my experience with the Arctic was mostly that of commentator. My time above the Arctic Circle, was limited to a single trip where I hiked, climbed and surfed my way across Norway’s Lofoten Islands. And, while I had spent a good amount of time in Canada’s Northwest Territories, none of that was what I considered the “proper Arctic” – a land of barren tundra, hulking muskox, herds of lithe caribou and, of course, emaciated polar bears. 

This past summer I decided to cash in all my vacation days and head north to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. My friend Malcolm had spent many of his formative years on Arctic expeditions with his parents, kayaking the Arctic Ocean to some of the most remote places on our planet. 

Now an adult, he wanted to return North to retrace a trip through the Arctic Refuge he had taken as a teenager. I jumped at the chance to join him. 

We left my house in Vancouver in early June. Nearly 3,000 miles of blacktop and gravel roads later, we arrived at the the northernmost road-accessible point in the state, a remote, desolate oil camp called Deadhorse, Alaska.  

We arrived in Deadhorse on June 8th, in the middle of a blizzard. After a fitful night camped out behind one of the dozens of prefabricated trailers that make up the town’s buildings, we packed five weeks worth of food and gear into duffle bags and hopped on a small, twin engine plane bound for Kaktovik, a tiny Inupiat village on the shore of the Arctic Ocean, and the only permanent settlement within the Arctic Refuge.

We had a simple plan. Arrive in Kaktovik and assemble a folding double kayak, then paddle east to Demarcation Bay, a wide inlet near the Alaska-Yukon border. From there, we would light out overland into the foothills of the eastern Brooks Range mountains, our goal was the Clarence and Turner River valleys, home to the Porcupine Caribou herd, the last mega-herd of its kind anywhere in North America. 

We reasoned that an early June departure would land us smack dab in the middle of the herd’s annual migration, when tens of thousands of caribou make their way down to Alaska’s North Slope to calve. Then, after a few weeks in an out-on-the-land, John McPhee-esque idyl, I’d return, with revelations about climate change, renewed in my purpose to fight the good fight. 

This plan, like most good plans, fell apart the minute we stepped off the plane.

The first problem was Nanook. 

As we hauled our overstuffed baggage off the plane on the Kaktovik airstrip, a young Inuit woman made an off hand comment that Nanook was in town the night before. 

The word triggered something deep in my memory. It’s a word I had heard as a child in one of the many picture books about the north my parents had brought from their time in Canada’s Northwest Territories. I couldn’t place the memory, but something told me to worry. Before I could put the pieces together, our pilot clarified things. 

“Polar bear patrol still out?” he asked the woman. 

My heart leapt into my throat. 

Nanook is the the Inuit word for polar bear. But, unlike the cute drawing of a polar bears in my childhood picture books, this very real, very large young male polar bear had, of late, taken to the streets of Kaktovik in search of its next meal which, given our plan to sleep in lightweight backpacking tents, could definitely be us. Especially since we were armed with nothing more than two cans of bear spray – something the locals had told us over and over would do little more than “season us for the bears”. 

A polar bear in town also bore serious trouble for our expedition. It meant that the sea ice hadn’t broken up yet since polar bears typically follow the ice break up out on to the pack ice to hunt seals. This presented a problem since our folding kayak was decidedly not “ice-worthy”. 

The irony was palpable. After nearly a decade of lamenting the loss of sea ice, the seasonal break up was later than usual, and I was trapped by it. And, after penning so many articles crowned by the image of a starving polar bear, I was one of the easiest meals around for the thousand pound white ursine who had made this corner of the Arctic his home. 

We decided to delay our plans to kayak and head inland to wait out the ice. After two days triple-hauling hundreds of pounds of food, gear and a kayak inland we headed into the refuge on foot. 

For the first time since we crossed north of the Brooks Range, the sun emerged and we could see clear from the coast to the snow-capped peak of Mount Chamberlain. With luck, we thought, we could make it to the foothills beneath the peak in two, maybe three days. 

We were very wrong. 

For two days we trudged through icy, knee deep muskeg swamps and over ankle busting tussocks. When we finally dropped our packs on the gravel shores of the Okipilak River, we had made it less than a third of the way to the mountains. I wrote in my journal that night: Arctic: 2, Cam: 0. 

The next day, we decided to stay put on the river and explore without the burden of our massive packs, but we didn’t get far. Less than a mile out of out camp, we crested a faint tundra ridge. We peered over the top and found that overnight hundreds of caribou, maybe even a thousand, had made their way into the shallow valley surrounding the Okipilak.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but we had wandered into the heart of the 10-02 area of the Arctic Refuge, the geographical centre of the debate over whether or not to drill for oil in this part of Alaska’s North Slope. Here, where a 1998 US Geological Survey study estimated between 5.7 and 16 billion barrels of oil underground, and where, according to a whole swath of politicians, lay nothing but a blank wasteland, I sat, awestruck by the largest single gathering of wildlife I have ever seen. 

For the next two days, a sea of caribou moved around our camp and over the Okipilak. Some calves, only a few days old, struggled to cross the frigid glacier river on wobbly, newborn legs. Others, a little older and more curious, wandered within a dozen feet of us and our camp. They would edge closer and closer until they got spooked and broke into a sprint back under the watchful eyes of the adults. 

The herd moved slowly, in search of the small green shoots that made their first spring appearance from beneath the endless brown of the tundra. We walked slowly and crouched in the high grasses to watch the caribou. When we would inevitably get too close, a single caribou would break into a run. Those nearby would join, and in a second, groups of ten to a hundred would gallop like a living wave, breaking across the tundra. 

On the third day, we awoke to an empty valley. A few caribou lingered downriver, but the bulk of the herd had left almost as quickly as they had arrived and moved on to continue their summer journey across the Refuge.

The weather turned the next day and we made our way back to Kaktovik. We hoped our time inland had given the sea ice a chance to melt. But, after an initial bout of excitement over some open water near the shore, we managed a sum total of forty-five minutes in the kayak before we ran headlong into an endless horizon of unbroken sea ice. 

In that moment, I knew that our plans for five weeks in the Arctic had fallen apart. More than that, I had failed to find the grand renewal I convinced myself lay somewhere in Arctic. 

Before we left Kaktovik, we sat down with a local Inupiat guide and hunter named Robert Thompson. Robert had spent most of his life in the Arctic Refuge, a hunter, a guide and for the past few decades, one of the most dedicated opponents of drilling in the Refuge. 

While we sat in his living room, surrounded by maps, photos, animal skulls and antlers from all corners of the Arctic Refuge, Thompson lamented the impacts of climate change in the Arctic he had seen in his own lifetime. He talked about how Muskox were starving thanks to changes in the melt-freeze cycle, how houses in Kaktovik collapsed when the permafrost melted and he talked about how unpredictable the sea ice was becoming season after season.

When I asked him about the threat of drilling in the Arctic Refuge, he offered a concise and matter of fact answer. 

“I don’t want to be surrounded by an oil field,” he said. 

Simple, but it made so much sense. A lifetime in the Refuge had bred an intimate relationship with land and place. Robert cared about climate change because of what it meant for this place he loved. 

The same truth rang for Malcolm, my expedition partner. He had spent so much of his youth on trips above the Arctic Circle that places like this were etched into his being. The Arctic had become a part of who they were. Protecting it just made sense. After my few days in the Refuge, I wanted to feel that way, but I still felt like an imposter; like a tourist in a place I had, at least on paper, dedicated a large part of my life to help “save.” 

Two days later, posted up on a Fairbanks barstool, deep in self-doubt and lament about my failed arctic adventure, I couldn’t get my conversation with Robert out of my head. His connection to place in the Arctic was so strong. Did I have any connections like that? I let my mind wander to the places I had spent so many of my formative years: the Rocky Mountains, the wild Pacific Coast of Vancouver Island, the northern boreal forest and, even the tiny squat ski hill on the prairies where I made my first turns. 

I started forming a list of the places I loved, the places I knew intimately, the landscape etched the contours of into my psyche through years of exploration. And, the more I thought about them, the more I realized that they too faced serious threats. The image was nowhere near as striking as a photo of an emaciated polar bear, but the fact that my hometown ski hill’s season has grown shorter and more erratic year after year hurt me. The knowledge that, just this past summer, wildfires razed the forests around Timothy Lake, where my grandfather taught me to fish--it felt like a personal attack. 

So it hit me: I do have a story, and a reason why I do this. For me, like so many others, I do this to protect the places I love. Places where I created some of my most lasting and important memories – like Snow Valley Ski Club, a tiny ski hill in Edmonton, Alberta where the lift takes twice as long to get you up as the run takes to get down. Or Tofino, on Canada’s far western coastline where I caught both my first surf break and saw my first Orca in the wild. And the places where I continue to play, explore and make new memories. 

My Arctic expedition turned into a pretty epic failure. The story I brought home is no grand tale of adventure. But, despite the sea ice, the muskeg and tussocks, and more than a couple moments where the Arctic nearly broke me, I fell in love with the place. 

What’s more, I did come away with a revelation, even if it’s not the one I expected.

Choss and Rain: Climbing (and Failing) in Alaska

Published in Climbing Magazine. Available online here.

I went to Alaska with plans to spend five weeks in the Arctic. My friend Malcolm and I had designs on kayaking from a small village on the northern shores of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to a remote bay where we would head out overland to scramble up mountains, explore valleys, and search for the tens of thousands of caribou who migrate through the region every summer. But, like all good plans, it all fell apart pretty quickly.

Our kayak route was clogged with miles and miles of sea ice, an endless white horizon, the last thing you want to see when you’re planning is to set out in a thin skinned, folding kayak.

After two weeks exploring as far as our feet would take us over the tundra and waiting for the ice to melt, we threw in the towel. We had been defeated by the ice. So, we did the only rationale thing I could think of. We went climbing.

The problem was, everything I knew about climbing in Alaska started with a chartered bush plane flight. Having emptied most of my bank account getting to and from the Arctic, there was no way I could afford that. But, I reasoned, Alaska is a state larger than Texas, covered largely by rocks and mountains. There had to be some climbing that didn’t require a plane. Right?

I fired up Mountain Project and poured over the entries for Alaska. I was right, Alaska was home to dozens of climbing areas, everything from near roadside bouldering to bolted routes and alpine trad. I smiled, un-interested in the warnings of unstable weather, swarming mosquitos and ornery grizzlies that seemed to mark every area description.

Flipping through the options, I was entranced by a place called Resurrection Bay where “route development potential” lay on seaside walls under which whales, bears and moose frequently frolicked. There were warnings that “there are reasons why climbers have avoided this area: RAIN RAIN RAIN, multi-day challenging access, expensive. Make sure you have loads of time, money, and optimism to succeed here,” but we seemed to be on the edge of a rare window of hot, dry weather. That, and we were pretty good at ignoring other peoples’ advice, no matter how wise.

We set out for the town of Seward, where we planned to launch our kayak to paddle out in search of first ascents. Enroute, we stopped for a warm-up on the cliffs that overhang the Seward Highway just south of Anchorage. Here, a few minutes drive from downtown Anchorage, rocky bluffs where the Chugach Mountains meet the wide, muddy tidal flats of Turnagain arm are home to one of Alaska’s most expansive bolted climbing areas.

Most of the climbs start just off the highway and ascend up crumbly, moss and lichen covered schist. It’s hard to call it “sport” climbing, but most of the routes are bolted, single pitch outings. And, while you’re rarely more than a stone’s throw from the Seward Highway, the views out over Turnagain Arm and up towards the glaciated peaks at it’s end are stunning. On a clear day, I’m told you can even see Denali out across the inlet.

Sunrise Ridge, about 20 minutes south of Anchorage, is one of the only long, multi-pitch adventures on the Seward Highway, and it’s where we chose to stretch our legs in the endless sunlight of an early July evening. With a number of different variations, and lengths ranging from three to five pitches, the ridge is a popular route, especially as a post-work solo among local Anchorage climbers.

The climbing was easy, fun, and some of the chossiest rock I’d ever been on. Three bolts up the first pitch, I pulled off a handhold. Two bolts above that, I lost my footing on a long section of crumbling shale, raining pebbles down on Malcolm while I tried to excavate ridges for my feet and hands from the pile of tiny rocks. The crumbling rock and collapsing holds were a quick awakening to the unique fun that is climbing in Alaska.

We arrived in Seward late the next morning. A fishing village that’s embraced the booming tourist trade, Seward is home to a number of guiding services for the nearby Exit Glacier, Harding Icefield, and Kenai Fjord National Park. I hoped we could get some beta from local guides, but most were already out with clients, and so we got mostly shrugs and a few dire warnings to be careful of trying to access any rock on private property when we asked around for beta. One local kayak guide, who let us in on the location of some of the best shoreline camping in the region, told us she had friends who had put up a bolted route somewhere in Resurrection Bay, but she couldn’t remember sure exactly where it was. Gesturing to a map on the wall of her office, she vaguely pointed at the bay’s entire eastern shoreline.

We wanted to go light, but also had absolutely no clue what we were getting ourselves into. So, I carefully packed our rope, a double rack and whatever slings and hardware I could scavenge from my van into dry sacks.

We paddled for three days past cliffs and sea spires, but none with a landing spot for our kayak, calm enough waters to attempt belaying from our tiny boat, or rock that looked safe to climb. I thought about free soloing a few of the spires, but couldn’t puzzle out a way to get onto the rock that didn’t involve some serious time in the freezing ocean. So, we filled our days with paddle strokes, salmon fishing, whales, seals, bears, otters and the countless sea birds that call the Gulf of Alaska home.

On the fourth day, we arrived at a protected beach near the edge of Kenai Fjords National Park called Porcupine Cove. A single basalt cliff line rose above the high tide line, split by a prominent crack stretching to the dense forest some 60 feet above. Beside it, a massive block, likely another cliff that had collapsed sometime in the past.

After we landed, set up camp, and ate lunch, I dove into the thick brush above the cliff and found some decent trees to set up an anchor. Rappelling the route for inspection, it looked promising. The upper section was littered with detritus from the forest above, but the rock looked OK. The crux would be a short overhanging section of rotten rock, but below that was a splitter crack. I looked out over the ocean, and, as if on cue, a sea lion popped it’s head from the waves and stared back at me dangling from the cliff.

After a few technical face moves, I made my way into the crack. The rock felt weird, almost like climbing on a chalkboard, but the hand jams were bomber, there were plentiful footholds, and I was on toprope. It felt like solid 5.9. Starting to feel the flow, I made my way up the lower crack, stopping just below the overhanging crux.

From there, I had two options. The direct line would follow the crack into the overhang, through a couple powerful moves on rotten rock onto an upper ramp to the final, I hoped, easy slabs above. The other was to step far to the left, onto an exposed, blank looking section of near vertical slab.

“Take!” I yelled down, sitting back into my harness to weigh my options. From above, and from the ground, it had looked like the chalkboard-esque rock continued up the entire route. But now, halfway up, I was staring at crumbly, dark gray schist. As I hung there, feeling around the holds on the overhang, the wall was dissolving under my feet. It seemed like every second hold snapped off in a rain of pebbles, moss, dirt, and other assorted choss.

Eventually, I decided on the lefthand route. I pulled two more moves up the crack and stepped left, easing my toes onto the thin edges and balancing my way onto the exposed slab. I wished I had set the anchor more to my left, realizing a fall anywhere above me might start a nasty pendulum, swinging me into the crumbly, jagged edge of the overhanging section.

Precariously balanced, I exhaled, sucked my hips to the wall and started up the slab. The first few holds felt good, and my confidence was starting to return when I heard an inaudible popping noise and looked up to see the edge I had using for my right hand had come off the wall, flaking off like a giant fish scale. I dug my toes in and held tight with my other hand in a sort of lopsided, desperate starfish pose. My face pressed against the dirty rock, I inhaled quickly, sucking in dusty, dried moss.

Thankfully, I held on. I would have been safe either way, held in place by the toprope, but I didn’t relish the idea of taking a big swing into the rocks to my right, so I downclimbed below the overhang and had Malcolm lower me to the beach. It was his turn.

Malcolm quickly dispatched the lower section of the route, reached the crux, and tried to muscle directly up the crack. He made it about four moves before pulling out a massive chunk of rock and dirt, and then lowering back to the deck.

We each tried again half a dozen times, even exploring a potential face climb to the far right of the crack. But each time we hit that band of crumbling schist, pulling and kicking off holds we had depended on during previous attempts. As afternoon became evening, it was clear we weren’t getting up this wall on a toprope, let alone climbing it clean from the ground up.

I pulled the rope, Malcolm bushwhacked up to clean the anchors and I resigned myself to bouldering on the nearby block. It was fun, with a couple challenging problems on it’s one overhanging side, but the ridiculousness of our plan was starting to weigh on me.

I laughed, because frankly, there’s nothing else to do when you spend three days on approach to fail to toprope a single-pitch climb. Over dinner, we talked about our plan to cross Resurrection Bay the next morning and start searching for the mythical route we had heard of back in town. That night, we slept beside bear tracks on a narrow stretch of beach between the ocean and a tiny lake.

We woke up to rain. Like a cold, gray sheet, the water fell down, sideways, and sometimes even up from the ocean. From our conversations with guides in town we knew this kind of weather was more the rule than the exception and so, weather window closed, we packed up camp and set out, paddling the whole way back to Seward in one long day.

North of Anchorage, sandwiched between the Matanuska and Susitna Valleys, the Talkeetna Mountains are one of Alaska’s best kept secrets. They are small, as far Alaskan mountains go, and lack famous summits like Denali, Hunter, or Deborah. But, what they lack in height and fame, the Talkeentas make up for in something I was desperate to find, easy to access granite.

About two hours drive north of Anchorage, past the city of Wasilla— famous as the place where Sarah Palin got her political start on city council— lies Hatcher Pass, a high mountain road home to the largest collection of developed granite climbing in Alaska. Lucky for us, the rains that had socked us in from Seward back to Anchorage seemed to be avoiding Hatcher Pass.

We decided to start in the Archangel Valley area, lured by the promise of 10-15 minute approaches. Driving up the rutted out dirt road, we entered a sweeping alpine valley, complete with babbling brooks, rolling green and yellow tundra, and towering granite cliffs. It was the first time I’d ever driven to alpine climbing.

We spent our first afternoon exploring the rock closest to the road, ticking some moderate crack climbs off, warming up and trying to make sense of the guidebook ratings, scratching our heads when, more than once, 5.8s gave us more trouble than much harder routes.

The next day, we turned out eyes to Toto, a classic six pitch 5.10 Hatcher Pass trad route a stone’s throw from our campsite. As I started leading up the first pitch, it felt good to be back on granite, to have a renewed faith in our gear placements, and feel like most of the holds would stay on the wall.

The first two pitches went easily. Pitch one was another confusingly hard, but fun, stretch of 5.8. Pitch two was easy 5.7 with a weird move through wide cracks near a mid-pitch belay station. Pitch three was a wandering stretch of 5.8 climbing that bounced between a bolted arete and a run-out slab where you had to excavate gear placements from beneath a mix of living and dead moss and grass. It was one of the strangest sections of climbing I had ever found, something I was starting to realize was par for the course in Alaska.

Next was a sustained, 5.9+ thin finger crack that ended below a section of the climb that had collapsed in a recent rockslide.

Rain started falling around halfway through my lead, but with much grunting and atrocious style, I finished the pitch just as the precipitation started to darken the low angle slab between the top of the crack and the belay station.

“It’s just spitting, it’s fine,” I muttered to myself as I set up the anchor.

The wind and rain picked up as Malcom made his way up the pitch, valiantly finding traction for his feet on the rain slicked quartzite. As he topped out the crack, I smugly dismissed the rain, just in time to watch his legs fly out from under him, the wet rock and lichen conspiring to form an icy slick surface on the slabs.

He recovered and picked his way gingerly up to the belay where we debated our options. I wandered out to the start of the next pitch, a gut-wrenchingly exposed stretch of 5.9 around a blind corner.

“Maybe if the rain lets up?”

Malcolm shrugged, happy to follow if I was willing to lead. I reached around toward the crack I would have to climb and wiped a pool of water from the rock into my palm. We were going down.

Our descent took four hours when I managed to get our rope stuck on the first rappel, forcing me to jug all the way back to the anchors, rebuild the rappel, and descend a different line. We were drenched and shivering by the time we made it back to the van. But, I was excited, it was still the most consistent climbing we had managed to do in all our time in Alaska.

The next day was clear, sunny, and warm. Still tired from our attempt on Toto, we spent a lazy few hours climbing single pitch trad routes on the Monolith, another nearby crag. Nothing was standout memorable, save for getting shut down on a 5.9 route called Zig Zag, but the climbing was fun and relaxing after our previous day’s epic.

That night we ate peanut butter noodles and made a plan to climb High Dive, another classic Hatcher Pass multi-pitch, the following day.

The sun was burning when we started down the Reed Lakes Trail the next morning. We hiked for an hour and a half, passing turquoise alpine lakes, waterfalls, dozens of day hikers, a few backpackers, and what looked like awesome single-pitch climbing and bouldering in the Lower Reed Lakes area.

Eventually, we arrived at a larger lake and picked our way to the far shore where a series of granite cliffs stretched up alongside a wide, sweeping waterfall. We racked up as clouds started rolling in over the mountains.

The first two pitches were classic, easy Alaskan trad. In other words, they wandered, had weird grassy run-outs, and required digging out gear placements. The third pitch, ostensibly the reason to climb the first two, is the real fun part. Twin cracks stretch up a sheer granite headwall, hanging you out over a primordial alpine landscape, complete with rolling clouds, shimmering lakes, and summer snow-patches hanging near the summits of the surrounding peaks.

It was a perfect stretch of climbing, fun-hard with easy gear placements, powerful moves, and one of the most picturesque topouts I’ve ever found—a tiny platform under a roof that offers a view, on a clear day, all the way to the ocean.

Unfortunately, I only had the view for about 30 seconds. As Malcolm called up to confirm he was on belay, the clouds picked up speed, pouring over the surrounding peaks down towards the lake below. He dispatched the pitch quickly, but it was starting to rain as we moved on to the short 5.6 section that finishes the route.

We climbed quickly as the rain picked up. After a quick summit high-five, I coiled the rope and we started to walk off, deciding against rappelling the route in the coming weather, our experience on Toto still fresh in both our minds.

The skies opened up, letting loose a deluge of biblical proportions, immediately making me regret my decision to walk down a wet grassy slope in my climbing shoes. We slid, slipped, and shimmied down the slope, alternating between boot-skiing in rock shoes and glissading on the wet grass.

I was soaking wet when we arrived back at the base of the climb. But, I was ecstatic. We had managed to climb an entire route in Alaska. We hadn’t retreated because of choss, been rained off, or been shut down by one of the countless natural forces that seem to conspire against anyone adventuring in the 49th state.

We trudged back the van on muddy trails, smiling wide and soaked to the bone. All told, I only managed to successfully climb two moderate multi-pitch routes in Alaska. Measured against a failed Arctic expedition, a questionable trip to climb in Resurrection Bay and countless other rainouts and failures, it shouldn’t feel like a successful trip. But, if I learned anything during my summer in Alaska, it’s that failing and changing plans comes with the territory, just like choss and rain.

Yalla - Pedalling Through Palestine

Published in The Bikepacking Journal. Not Published Online.

The weather is perfect. My bike is running great, and there’s no dangerous wildlife to worry about, no swollen, glacial rivers to ford. There hasn’t even been a single downed tree to carry my bike over or around.

And yet, something is wrong. I have the kind of ominous feeling I get when I’m at home riding

through grizzly country. The feeling that, at any moment, I could turn a corner and a perfect day of bikepacking could turn into anything but.

I can’t exactly place why. The fact that Alaa, my local riding partner, seems on edge isn’t helping. And, when I stopped to snap a photo of a golden-domed mosque, I noticed that the old, moustachioed man on the roadside gave me less of a “what are you and your weird bike doing here?” stare, and more of “you and that weird bike really shouldn’t be here” glare.

At the next crossroads, Alaa stops and pulls out his phone. The red line of our route, a trail he’s been piecing together for a couple years but never ridden in full, points straight ahead, but Alaa suggests we hang a left and try to avoid riding directly through the next town. He doesn’t explain why, but we’re riding his route, so I follow him onto a gravel path that winds into some olive orchards.

We rejoin the route’s red line again midway up a steep climb and stop at a small shop to pick up water and snacks for the rest of the day. As with every town we’ve stopped in so far, some children gather and start asking us questions. They look at me and say, “Shalom.”

Alaa answers them quickly in Arabic. He’s run through these answers dozens of times, explaining that, yes, the bikes are pretty expensive, that he’s from the nearby city of Nablus, that I’m from Canada, and that we’re riding south that day to Birzeit.

“Yes, all the way to Birzeit,” he explains.

Midway through our interrogation, a dark purple sedan pulls up and three serious looking men step out. Their stares are ice cold, and they cut a beeline directly towards us. My shoulders instinctively tense.

Alaa waves and shouts, “Al-salaamu alaykum.”

A moment that feels like an hour passes before they reply, “Alaykum a salaam.”

With the opening, Alaa starts into the same refrain he delivered to the kids: bikes, Nablus, Canada, Birzeit. The man who seems to be the group’s leader nods and responds with what sounds like a lecture. Alaa shrugs and smiles, seemingly admitting to whatever the man is accusing him of. The man nods, turns to me, and breaks into a wide, toothy grin.

“Welcome to Palestine. Most welcome!” he exclaims, grabbing my hand and shoulder to give me a sort of full-body handshake.

GRAFFITI

Whether you call it Palestine, the West Bank, or the Occupied Territories, the stretch of land between Jordan and Israel is one of the most complicated places on the planet. Layer upon layer of culture, religion, and politics have accumulated for generations, and you can feel all of it as you ride through the land.

It’s not just history, though. There’s an energy in Palestinian day-to-day life that, to an outsider, is electrifying, terrifying, and confusing all at once. I spent most of the long November nights mentally unpacking each day, trying to understand how politics, culture, and the daily realities of life were shaping my ride through the West Bank.

The night after our experience with the men in the purple sedan, Alaa tried to explain what happened over plates of molokhia, a dark green, herb-packed Palestinian soup served with iridescent yellow saffron rice. The town was close to an Israeli settlement, and there had been deep conflict between the communities over the years. The day before we rode through, Israeli soldiers had fired tear gas and rubber bullets at a protest close to the town.

As he explained the situation between bites of food, I remembered seeing “price tagging” graffiti on the walls of Sebastiya, another nearby Palestinian town, the night before. Painted in the bright blue of the Israeli flag, the graffiti was a mix of six-pointed stars, fighter jets, Hebrew letters, and, crudely, the hatched circles of a rifle’s targeting scope. Palestinians I spoke to called it clear intimidation. Israeli settlers brushed it off as the work of kids and teenagers letting off steam.

In Nablus, an ancient Samaritan city that’s become one of the largest Palestinian cities in the West Bank—and Alaa’s hometown—posters of martyrs adorned the walls of the bazaar. They mostly showed fallen young men holding assault rifles, standing proud and defiant. The posters carried more images of swords and guns. All of it was surrounded by graffiti in the red, black, white, and green of the Palestinian flag.

The posters and graffiti were even thicker across the walls of Bourin, where we had met the men in the dark purple sedan. The walls were also adorned by streams of yellow flags emblazoned with the image of a crossed rifle and sword. The flags showed the town’s support for Fatah, a Palestinian political party once listed by most of the Western world as a terrorist organization.

I was used to staring at my surroundings on a bikepacking trip and trying to glean some understanding, but nowhere else was there so much weight, history, and allegory in the small town graffiti.

ROCKS

“There’s a checkpoint ahead. We’re going to turn right just before it,” Alaa explained to me at the top of a long, paved climb. I mentally prepared myself to ride at high speed towards a roadblock manned by heavily armed teenagers doing their compulsory national service in the Israeli Defence Forces.

The guards’ stares followed us from behind dark sunglasses as we drew closer. I waved nervously, unsure exactly what to do, as their stares tracked us through an arcing right turn about 50 meters before the checkpoint.

Through the turn, we settled into another long climb. Razor wire and blue on white Star of David flags marked the edge of an Israeli settlement on the ridge above us. A bright red sign beside the road reads:

This Road leads to Area “A”. Under the Palestinian Authority the entrance for Israeli citizens is forbidden, dangerous to your lives and is against the Israeli law.

Under the Oslo Accords, a set of agreements between Israel and the Palestinian Authority signed in 1993 and updated in 1995, Area A is the part of the West Bank solely under Palestinian control. Comprising about 18 percent of the West Bank’s lands, it’s joined by Area B, under joint Palestinian-Israeli control, and Area C, lands under full Israeli control.

“Even when I’m on my own, other Palestinians think I’m an Israeli settler,” Alaa explained. “Palestinians don’t ride bikes like this, so whenever I’m riding, I have to stop a lot and explain who I am, that I’m from Nablus, and all that.”

He shrugged with a sort of “it is what it is” smile, and we turned onto a dirt road. Alaa is remarkably calm given that I’ve seen children in some small towns instinctively pick up rocks at the sight of us on our bikes. Assuming we’re settlers, they prepare for conflict, only dropping their rocks when they finally accept Alaa’s story and ask me questions about Canada in broken English.

I’m never sure how to feel in these moments. Part of me is terrified, the natural reaction when the locals pick up rocks to potentially throw at you. Another part of me is heartened to see such resilience and readiness to fight among these youth. A third part reminds me that this is one of the most politically charged places on earth, and if anything, this is just another sign of the intractable conflict among the people who live within these hills.

UNICYCLE

Before he started bikepacking, Alaa was a unicyclist. He wanted to join a circus troupe because travelling with the group to study and perform was one of the few opportunities he had to travel outside of the West Bank.

A unicycle was key to his plan. But, there wasn’t anyone in Palestine selling one, so he traveled over 50 miles from his home in Nablus to meet an Israeli unicycle dealer at a checkpoint to buy the single-wheeled machine. The taxi ride there was uneventful, and the purchase went off exactly as planned. He tried out the unicycle, handed the Israeli shekels to the seller, and prepared to head back home. Unfortunately, there weren’t any taxis to take him back to Nablus, so he started doing the logical thing: riding his unicycle.

Keep in mind that at this point, Alaa hadn’t really learned how to ride a unicycle. In fits and starts, he figured it out, eventually hitting a decent pace as he became, perhaps, the first Palestinian to try long-distance unicycling.

The sun had just started to set the first time an Israeli military patrol pulled him over. It was well and truly dark by the time the second patrol stopped him. Finding nothing amiss about Alaa or his ride—short of the fact he was riding 50 miles on a unicycle—the patrols eventually let him pass, and well after sunset, his first long ride was done.

Now with two wheels under him, Alaa is a master route maker. As the checkpoint and the settlement dropped out of view behind us, Alaa guided us onto a stretch of rocky singletrack. The trail cut a route around the Israeli checkpoints on the main road, creating a sort of backdoor that Palestinians, especially the semi-nomadic Bedouin shepherds, use. It was a stark reminder that though I can pass through checkpoints as a tourist, for Alaa, this is a land where the freedom of a bike extends only to the next border. The checkpoint I passed through to enter the West Bank isn’t open to him. Rather, it’s just another piece of what will be a 708-kilometer-long wall surrounding most of the West Bank. Currently, around 500 kilometers of barriers have been built along the border, with another 200 kilometers either planned or under construction.

JORDAN

A steep, rough sheep track forced us off our bikes and onto a short hike-a-bike through a thick cypress forest. Pushing our bikes along a bouldery trail, we popped out into a clearing with a small beige building tucked into the foliage on one side.

“It’s from Jordan,” Alaa explained. “Military, from the war.” He meant the period between the end of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War and the 1967 Six-Day War, when the West Bank was annexed by its neighbour Jordan, now one of only two countries (the other being Egypt) in the region with which Israel has a peace treaty.

We stopped for a moment and took in the view. Below us were churches, synagogues, and mosques. In the distance, the peaks of Jordan’s Abarim Mountains were barely visible in the midday haze. In the other direction, we could just make out the silhouette of Jerusalem on the horizon. Beyond that, Israel stretched to the Mediterranean Sea.

Staring out at the view, biting into a piece of halva—the tahini candy popular across the region—my brain searched for a simple way to sum up my ride through the West Bank. But, like an easy solution or explanation to the political situation in the region, anything I came up with felt cheap.

Our route took us past a pair of breweries run by Palestinian Christians. We biked through towns where flags, posters, and graffiti professed support for Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and other militants. We passed tour buses full of day trippers from Jerusalem visiting Wadi Qelt, a long canyon where sublime desert singletrack passes ancient arched Roman aqueducts, oasis retreats dating back to the Ottoman empire, and a Greek Orthodox monastery residing on a cliff’s edge.

I saw Israeli soldiers at the gates of a national park smiling and joking with Palestinian children. Then, I listened to a group of Israeli mountain bikers react with suspicion and disdain when I stopped on a popular trail to chat and explain that I was riding through the West Bank with a Palestinian.

As I looked out across the Judean hills, I had no grand epiphany. Instead, I just asked Alaa where we were headed next, dropped in behind him, and started pedalling.

Giving Mountains Back Their Indigenous Names - Navajo climber Len Necefer is using social media to remind us of our wild places' indigenous histories

Published in Outside Magazine. Available online here.

Last September, a 29-year-old Navajo climber named Len Necefer posted a photo of a young woman named Monserrat A Matehuala standing on the summit of Longs Peak, one of Colorado’s best known 14ers. What was significant was not that she summited—hundreds do each year. It was the location in the geotag that accompanied the post: Neníisótoyóú’u, the mountain’s Arapaho name.

The post was just one salvo in a quiet campaign waged by Necefer, a member of the Navajo Nation who now lives in Colorado. He earned his PhD in engineering from Carnegie Mellon, and then began working for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Indian Energy Policy and Programs. In March 2017, Necefer also founded Natives Outdoors. While it began as a social media effort to advocate for public lands and diversify the outdoor industry, it soon became something much larger. Today, Natives Outdoors makes gear (trucker hats, shirts) and works with athletes, brands, and organizations to spread its message.

“The creation of the first national parks, like Yellowstone and Glacier, was predicated on the forced removal of indigenous populations from these areas,” says Necefer. “It created this myth that these are untouched wilderness areas.”

When he first began his geotagging eforts, Necefer knew that Facebook’s check-in function had the option to create new locations. As an engineer, he also knew that Facebook and Instagram have an integrated back-end. So if he checked in somewhere on Facebook and created a new location through Facebook, it would generate a geotag for that location on both social media platforms. Meaning he could then take a photo, post it on Instagram, and tag it with the new location.

The idea for indigenous geotags first came to Necefer in early 2017, a few months after he had finished climbing the four sacred mountains of the Navajo Nation: Sisnaajini (Blanca Peak) in Colorado; Dookʼoʼoosłííd, Nuvatukya’ovi, and Wi:munakwa (the San Francisco Peaks) in Arizona; Dibe Ntsaa (Hesperus Mountain) in Colorado; and Tsoodził (Mount Taylor) in New Mexico. He had climbed the mountains for ceremonial reasons, but like most climbers, Necefer also came home with summit photos and was eager to share them on social media. “I wanted to share the photos and thought I would love to share them with the indigenous place names,” he says. “When I couldn’t find them, I decided to create them.”

By September, Necefer had expanded the project into the Colorado Front Range and began to involve his @NativesOutdoors Instagram followers and other Native American climbers in the project. On one climb, he and five other indigenous climbers summited Mount Belford, a 14,203-foot peak in Colorado’s Collegiate Range. Their summit photo, posted on September 7, tagged the mountain as Hiwoxuu Hookuhu’ee.

“The climb was nontechnical and straightforward,” says Necefer. And yet, he says, it was the first significant peak for many in the group, who grew up (like Necefer) not thinking that climbing was something that indigenous people did. “The more I researched, the more I learned that there were a lot of first ascents by Native people.”

This research, which Necefer describes as a blend of scholarly research and gathering traditional indigenous knowledge, led him to the work of Andrew Cowell, a linguistics professor at the University of Colorado–Boulder who worked with Arapaho elders to record traditional names for 300 locations across the western United States, including dozens within Colorado’s Rocky Mountain National Park. “The University of Colorado had a webpage, but it hadn’t been updated since 2004,” Necefer says.

Necefer has since worked to create indigenous place-name geotags for what he estimates as more than 40 mountains, most of them in and around Colorado. He also inspired Joseph Whitson, a non-Native student at the University of Minnesota, to launch another Instagram account, @IndigenousGeotags. That handle aims to use social media to educate Americans about the traditional indigenous lands where national parks now sit.

“I think Len’s work is incredibly important,” Whitson says. “Restoring names is a way of reclaiming not just the peaks, but all the cultural significance embedded in the names themselves.”

That effort is occurring offline, too. In Minnesota, for example, lawmakers plan to rename Lake Calhoun to its Dakota name of Maka Ska. In Washington, a proposal to rename Squaw Creek to Swaram Creek, its Methow name, has gained widespread support from both Native and non-Native groups, including the U.S. Forest Service.

Whether or not they’re successful, Necefer sees the project as a way of getting people tuned into a bigger conversation about the indigenous histories of wild places. “Once people see the names, they get curious,” he says. “It gives you just a little bit of information and can spark the interest in finding out more.”