Business before yammerings: my caltopo online course is tomorrow (Sunday)! 11am EST/2pm PST, sliding scale. Learn how to make a cross-country route for walking! Details and registration are here.
Also! I just opened registration for my 2025 Arizona beginner guided backpacking trips. They’ll be in February. The cool thing about these hikes (as opposed to my other guided trips) is that they require zero outdoors experience in order to join! These beginner trips are for women, trans and non-binary people who want to learn to backpack in the style of long-distance hiking in a small, supportive group- we’ll spend a day and a half at a rental house practicing our skills and eating incredible meals prepared by our *personal chef* Kelly Kate Warren, and then we’ll spend three days backpacking. It is a VERY good time. These trips sold out this year, so register ASAP if you want a spot! Full details and testimonials from this year’s participants are here.
I made it to Fairbanks. I’m staying at a friend’s place while I look for the perfect cabin- I want a place that’s such a good fit I don’t have to move for a really long time. Spring is further along here, as the Alaskan interior gallops towards its legitimately warm, if brief summer (as opposed to south-central Alaska, where Anchorage is- the air temperature there, moderated by the sea, thaws to “springtime” temps and then lingers there until August, when autumn returns). Yesterday I went on a walk in the birch forest here- the ground was mostly bare of snow, the sun warmed the air to a balmy 57 degrees, and I even saw two mosquitoes. There were no green things yet but I could smell the dirt, a noticeable change from wintertime when there are very few smells at all. I inhaled deeply and put my hands on the curled bark a birch tree, sending my breath down into it to feel its vibes. I’ve been doing this since I was a kid- growing up I didn’t have parents but I did have the boreal forest, and I’ve always felt really close to trees- like I can feel their energy, and they can feel mine. What I got back from the birch was pure pleasure- the tree was so happy about the warmth of the sun, so happy to be moving its water about. Seemingly still and solemn on the outside, inwardly this tree was ecstatic.
Being in the interior is having the opposite effect on me, but in a good way- my nervous system is finally calming down. There may not be huge mountain ranges in Fairbanks with their glaciers and drama, but there is lots of boreal forest, and lots of peace. Maybe it’s temporary but I feel like I’ve reached a point in my life where I can no longer tolerate the stimulation of a city. I used to think the dystopic, crumbling stripmall and concrete chaos of Anchorage was charming, like a living art installation, and I didn’t mind driving fifteen minutes to reach the wilderness (such a short distance!) but more and more I just want to be in the nature, instead of having to drive to it at all. I want to be able to feel the forest outside my bedroom window, I want to hear its murmurings in my sleep. And I love the way this part of Alaska is a different sort of crumbling dystopia- interspersed in the infinite boreal forest are all sorts of hodge-podge cabins and dwellings, built in whatever fantastical style the owner dreamed up and with whatever materials they could get their hands on, some of them occupied and some of them melting into the peat bog, some neat and tidy and some surrounded in acres of wrecked vehicles and junk, which is also melting into the peat bog. This land called Alaska, although colonized by the US, feels less so than the lower 48, and sometimes it feels just barely so- as though having a grid (in some places) and grocery stores and roads (in some places) is just a phase it’s going through, a blip on the long timeline of its being, and shortly the commercial goods and imported foods will stop arriving, and the humans here will return to the way they lived before, and the barges and planes will never be seen again.
But maybe I just think about collapse too much these days, a side effect of writing speculative fiction. My goal for the month of May is to finish another draft of my novel and then hire an editor, so that I can move forward with the self-publishing process. I’m really excited! I just want it to be out there so people can read it and I can move on to the next novel- I have so many ideas.
Speaking of good books, I just read Cheap Land Colorado by Ted Conover (recommended by a reader of this newsletter) and I think it’s one of my favorite things I’ve ever read. The book is a portrait of poor people in remote rural areas of the US west, in particular the flatlands of southeastern Colorado- decades ago the prairie there was subdivided into hundreds of arid, waterless five-acre plots that were then sold for cheap to people that, essentially, had nowhere else to go- the mentally ill, the disabled, the addicted- and this book follows various families in their attempts to scratch out a life there. While the horror of extreme poverty is still there, between the lines, the author chooses to focus mostly on the beauty of life in this wind-swept place, which is alternately roasting hot and one of the coldest places in the country- the freedom that people have when they’re so poor as to exist entirely outside of capitalism, and the joy that comes with living so close to the natural world. This book is like Steinbeck, only modernized and also better? It’s like Matthew Desmond’s Evicted, but off-grid. It scratched a weird sort of itch for me, and also cured my desire to buy worthless land. Now I want to buy land that has water, and other things that make sense for living. Which is more expensive, so I probably won’t ever be able to do it. Well.
Those are all my thoughts for today. I’ll leave you with a beautiful review from one of the participants of my guided beginner backpacking trips this February, to try and trick you into signing up for next February, which you can do here.
Amy says: When I decided in July 2023 that I wanted to do a thru-hike of Vermont’s Long Trail (272 miles), I knew I’d have to learn a lot of skills to be successful. I’d never been backpacking before in my life, and I’m not the type to just buy a bunch of equipment and show up at a southern terminus and start walking. Plus, if I did that, my family (and my psychiatrist) would have been really freaked out.
But how to learn? I picked up a lot from books, and from going out on my own for a night or two at a time. But thru-hiking is a whole different beast from a couple of days here and there. I looked into various training programs, but I don’t do great in formal training environments, and I didn’t really feel like spending more time with dudes telling me what to do. I didn’t want a wilderness leadership training program or an AMC this or an REI that.
Then I saw that Carrot was leading a women+ writing retreat/backpacking trip in Arizona in February, and that she advertised the trip as a way to learn to thru-hike from a woman who’d hiked 10s of thousands of miles. I signed up.
Carrot met with me over zoom twice before the trip, to help me choose equipment, plan my menu, and get ready in every way for the trip. I was a little scared, since I’m older than the average thru-hiker (late 40s), and because I’m kind of a scaredy cat. (okay, I have some issues with anxiety. Also, I’m afraid of heights.)
This is getting wordy! But — I can’t say enough good things about my experience on the backpacking trip. Carrot was so helpful beforehand, the trip was so well-planned, the desert was breathtaking. The other women on the trip were amazing humans I’m so blessed to know now, and doing something so hard with such cool people surrounded by such nature — was really extraordinary. KK, our basecamp chef, made incredible food for us all before and after we were out in the desert. The house we stayed in was comfortable and welcoming. KK’s dog was silly and wonderful.
Before we went into the desert, we had a couple days at the house to get to know each other and try out our equipment. Carrot looked at everything each of us had and advised us what we could leave behind to save weight. She showed us how she liked to pack her own pack. She helped us learn to pitch our shelters. (I had a brand-new single wall trekking pole tent I’d bought on her advice, but it was winter in Boston so I hadn’t had much chance to test it out yet.). She checked out the food we’d brought. She helped us figure out how to use our satellite messengers and how to use the navigation app.
On the trip itself, Carrot continued her same low-key style of guiding. If she saw someone struggling with something, she’d ask if we wanted help rather than jumping in and showing us The Right Way. She’d make suggestions if we wanted them, but she was also cool stepping back and letting us figure something out for ourselves. She often gave advice in the form of “I like to do x“ or “I find that y works best for me; but other people do a or b”. She never made anyone feel silly or slow or dumb. She answered every question we asked her, including of course the ubiquitous poop-related ones. Okay, not every question — invariably my “are we there yet papa smurf?” questions were answered with some variant of ‘you tell me’ — a chill way to make sure we were all building our navigational and planning skills.
“How far to the next water source?” she’d ask, and we’d look on the app. “So how much water do you want to carry?”
I hiked at the back of the pack for the entire time, usually about 20 minutes to half an hour behind the rest of the group. I especially appreciated how Carrot kept an eye out for me but, as with the rest of her guiding, in as low-key a way as possible. She never made me feel that I wasn’t going fast enough or that I was a burden because I was at the back of the group. Every so often I’d turn a bend and find her chilling in the shade of a saguaro, or see her across a canyon and wave at her, so I felt safe knowing she was keeping track of me, but it never felt overbearing or infantalizing. She always reassured me that my pace was just fine and that she could see I was making good choices for myself.
I learned so many little things from Carrot over the course of that trip: about the early signs of heat exhaustion (the Umbles), about how to pitch a tent on rock or sand, about how to travel with a group but also hike alone, about what can distract the mind from scary heights, and how to pick a good tent site. I learned so much too from the other women on that trip — we learned from each other. One woman had a brand new Jetboil stove she wasn’t sure yet how to use — I was so proud that I had a Jetboil I DID already know how to use — so I could help her.
On the third day out, I developed a couple blisters and a couple more hot spots. Carrot pulled out her bag of tape and taped my feet, explaining what she was doing as she went along. SHE TAPED MY GROSS, DIRTY, BLISTERED FEET. I was so grateful. The feeling was very like my experience with birth doulas.
Actually, that’s what a backpacking trip with Carrot feels like: like traveling with a backpacking doula. A doula knows you can do the thing and she’s there to help you through it while making sure YOU know you can do the thing too.
At the end of the trip, Carrot said I was “durable and competent” and I knew she meant it, and I FELT THAT WAY TOO. I know my upcoming thru-hike will be a difficult journey and that I have a lot more to learn, but I also know that I’m about as prepared as someone relatively new to backpacking could be. I took “durable and competent” back to my family and friends and that’s helped so much with THEIR anxiety for me, too.
I know I wouldn’t have learned as much or had so much fun in a more formal training environment, or, frankly, in a group with men. Carrot combines professionalism, warmth, respect, a light touch, deep experience, humor, and great planning to lead what I’m sure must be the best newbie “learn to thru-hike” backpacking trips on the planet.
PS. KK’s cooking rules.
Christmas Valley, Oregon is a town where old RVs go to die, but before their last gasp, provide homes for those who otherwise might be homeless. The high sagebrush desert flows up against hills where juniper trees start out in solitary defiance, increase in numbers with altitude and eventually merge into Ponderosa and lodgepole forests.
I could spend weeks in Christmas Valley talking to the locals just to hear their stories.
Lovely images and testimonials. You’ve really made a difference in people lives via delivering a unique, special time. Hope your Fairbanks exploration is successful.