Wherein the lights come out and my old car sh*ts the bed

It's ok tho

fun times in Utah in April

First! My intermediate Utah trips in April are beginning to fill up- these trips are going to be so nice- wonderful slickrock, wonderful canyons so quiet you can hear the blood rush in your ears, wonderful company- women, trans and nonbinary people at a similar skill level, hilarious geniuses who know what all the birds are, etc. I literally pick you up in Las Vegas and drive you five hours to Escalante, where we’ll stay in a comfortable rental house and eat green curry, probably (depending on everyone’s dietary restrictions). The other guys will not do this!! (Ha ha, the other guys are fine too, but my trips are special ok!) The application for the Utah trips is here.

similarly fun times, in Arizona in February

Also, there are just a few spots left in my February Arizona beginner trips- the bougiest trip imaginable wherein we spend two days practicing our skills at the rental house while our personal chef KK prepares all our meals, and then three days backpacking in the most beautiful saguaro forest. Really the ideal environment in which to learn backpacking, if you ask me! Deets for those trips are here.

A bit ago I alluded to having an incredible conversation about death with my friend Nicole Antoinette, and that conversation is now available for listening here! If you ever wanted to know exactly how much money I make a year, how much I have in savings and how I plan to pay for retirement (I don’t), I really lay it all out in this podcast. Nicole is one of the best podcasts hosts out there, and her ability to facilitate riveting conversations is without parallel! And not to toot our own horn but we do manage to find answers to several questions that have plagued humanity for millennia so if you’re feeling existential don’t worry, we got you.

vibes at my cabin, lately

The beautiful yellow leaves have mostly fallen from the trees here in the Alaskan interior, and there’s a blustery cold rain, and dark comes soon enough now that you have to plan around it. The upside of all this is that on clear nights the aurora has started to appear- I knew Fairbanks got the northern lights more often than Anchorage, where you rarely see them, but I didn’t know it would happen this often? When I take my dogs out for a final potty before bed they’re often there, unspooling above the potholed dirt road that leads to my cabin.

my friend who lives in the cabin next to mine texts me when they’re out

Seeing the lights always makes me cry, like seeing a good sunrise, or golden hour in the desert. Proof that the universe loves us and wants us to be happy! Indisputable proof! Also, getting to see the aurora so often is going to be cold comfort (pun intended) when I’m shitting outside at -30F – I get to see the northern lights! I get to see the northern lights! I’ll whisper to myself, while pulling on eleventy billion layers just to visit the outhouse in the morning. You get really good at pooping fast, a friend said to me. Or you hold it until you get to work. Well I work from home, so joke’s on them!

I know for people who have resided in the interior for a while it’s just normal, but it is truly wild to me that I now live in the coldest city in the US. I love how psychedelic winter can be, I love feeling like I live on Venus, I love skiing! and yet- this winter is going to be a real test. There are so many things about living in Alaska that feed my soul- an abundance of undeveloped Outside, a place-based culture, intact ecosystems incl. apex predators! (Speaking of predators, here’s a wonderful article about the wildlife of Anchorage, as seen by a woman who puts up trail cameras in a park in the city- wolf packs chasing moose calves! Brown bears! You can also watch her videos on youtube here.) I also love the human history and indigenous culture of Alaska. And there’s no scarcity of water, no scarcity of winter. Not many rules. It kind of feels like its own country?

Loufus Borealis, aka the Northern Loaf Wolf, spotted on the trails in Fairbanks

And yet, the hard things about living in Alaska can sometimes feel like… a lot. The cold and the dark. Being isolated from everyone else on the planet. Being isolated even from other parts of Alaska, since it’s so large and a number of towns aren’t even on the road system, and the roads are icy and hellish in winter anyway. The politicians here, I believe, want all the residents to leave so they can turn the state into a resource colony with balls-to-the-wall mining, and no-one to witness and fight to protect the land, and worker camps as the only human settlements. To do this they’re slowly making the state unlivable by defunding every service (including snow plowing in Anchorage, the largest city, where it snowed eight feet last winter) and also letting the housing crisis gallop along unchecked. That’s pretty demoralizing! But there’s demoralizing stuff in every state right now, so.

It's hard to know where to make a home, in this year of our lord 2024. Or maybe human embodiment has always felt this way. Today’s unspeakable horrors and then more unspeakable horrors, hulking on the horizon. So it goes.

universe still luvs us tho

Speaking of things that can go wrong, if you listened to the podcast I did with Nicole Antoinette you’ll have yourself a chuckle when I tell you that yesterday my car shit the bed. Well, technically my 2008 Subaru forester is still drivable, but I shouldn’t be driving it much and I need to buy another car. It all started when I discovered that a rear wheel bearing needed replacing, and then the mechanic was like “oh and your alternator is going to die soon, you should replace that too.” I was going to do the repairs myself- I was like “I’m sick of throwing money at this old car I’m finally gonna learn to work on it!” and my mechanically inclined friend Tara, who even has access to a shop, came to town and we met at the shop, but then the more youtube videos I watched on the bearing that were like “this repair is really really hard, it’s a super hard repair and it’s really easy to mess up” the more I was like huh, maybe I’ll let the mechanic do this one and just do the alternator, and then the mechanic called and was like “yeah bad news, the bolts are so rusted they’re like fused and to get the bearing off we’d have to take all this other stuff apart that is also fused with rust and probably destroy it and those parts would also need to get replaced, that repair alone would cost more than $2k if we can do it at all, this car has 210,000 miles on it you should probably get rid of it.” And I just recently put new brakes on the car, and replaced a bunch of the lug studs, and got four new tires, and in November I had the headgasket replaced…

So now I need to find a new (old) car, and the used car market here is rough, and winter is coming. But it’s ok. The reason you’ll have a chuckle about this if you listened to Nicole’s podcast is because on the podcast I talk about how I never built credit because I thought the whole concept was stupid and also I didn’t need it for anything, and my credit report is literally blank. Well, at 42 years old, for the first time in my life I wish that I had credit, because if I did I would lease a new car. I’m tired of driving old cars that are like ticking time bombs, especially living in a place where I need to drive long distances all the time and the weather can literally kill you. But I’ll figure it out. I always figure it out. And I might start trying to build my credit. Maybe! Maybe not!! Also, I’m still going to replace the alternator in this car myself, so that I can drive it at least sometimes until I get another car. My very first car repair! Youtube makes it look easy, I’ll let you know how it goes.

There was a moment where I was like “maybe I just won’t have a car this winter, I’ll spend the money on a fatbike instead and it’ll be sort of an adventure, biking everywhere.” But then I thought about needing to fill my water jugs, or take trash to the dump, or get out of town, or what if my dogs have an emergency? And in my twenties it maybe would’ve been an adventure but at this point it would just be stressful. So I shall sell this old Subaru and get a different old Subaru!

yeah cars are great but have you ever seen THE NORTHERN LIGHTS

In a week I’ll get BETS back from my editor, and I’m so excited to see her edits. While waiting I’ve been thinking of how I’ll market this book- the market has changed quite a bit since I last self-published a book, in 2015. As far as I can tell, booktok (tiktok accounts that talk about books) is currently the number one driver of book sales. If you go to Amazon and filter for best-selling books on the site, many of the books in the top spots are there because of booktok. Some of them are new books, some are old books that booktok gets wind of and they start selling like mad again, or for the first time. So I’ll focus all my marketing efforts, at least initially, on booktok. Which I think consists of just… sending the book to booktok accounts? I don’t know. It would be cool if it was that simple. “Hey can I send you this book for free?” and then they read it and like it? Or they don’t, which is fine too. But that seems too easy. I haven’t started reaching out to any of the accounts yet, so we shall see!

Here’s a video of Quito on the full moon, practicing howling.

That’s all for now,

Carrot