What Would 3 Degrees Do To You?
January/February by Alan Kesselheim
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" I could walk 10 or 15 miles a day, carry a heavy pack full of food and luxuries, but then I'd sit in camp six hours a day. I could never do this hike that way, or it would take me years, and who knows what might come along to stop me in that time? Instead I go light, I enjoy myself, and I can cover distances that I'd never be able to otherwise. " |
Andrew Skurka |
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" My message is to backpackers. What will happen to the country you love, the places you go to find meaning and balance in your lives? Think about it. " |
Andrew Skurka |
On April 9, 2007, Andrew Skurka started into the riveting
chasm from Grandview Point, on the South Rim of the Grand Canyon,
walking toward California. He would walk, non-stop, for the next seven months, powered by his urgent concern over climate change.
It was a quiet send-off - no fanfare, no camera crew, no family. Day One.
Skurka moved alone down the switchbacks, past the gritty layers of cross-bedded sandstone, through ancient seabed sediments, into the gaping hole carved by the Colorado River. It felt the way it always did at the start of something big. Like he needed to cross a threshold, away from the logistics and planning and packing, the scheming with dates and routes and food, figuring snowpack and weather, resupply points and water sources, negotiating with sponsors, saying goodbye to family and friends.
Leave it back there.
He looked ahead and down toward the Tonto bench, shrugged his light pack into a more comfortable position. Not here yet. It will take a few days, maybe a week. He breathed deep, tried to stop the internal chatter. Just walk.
The first mile fell away. 6,874 to go, he told himself, and chuckled out loud at the monstrosity of the number. Skurka's practiced, steady, three-mile-an-hour pace kicked in. His hiking poles swung in metronomic rhythm, absorbing the shock of his steps. The shadow of a raven flickered overhead. The hum of tourist traffic along the South Rim receded. The Grand Canyon spilled into the distance, only the first of a string of humbling, powerful, heart-constricting places he would touch along the route.
The overview map of his hike came to mind, a map he had studied and conjured and talked about for a year already. A long, snaking line in the continent, a ragged loop yo-yoing from southern California to Canada, across the northern tier to the Continental Divide Trail, and then dropping south again back to Grand Canyon. The Great Western Loop, he had dubbed it. If all went according to plan, he would stand at Grandview Point again in early November.
The Great Western Loop. It sounds a bit pretentious, but the dimensions, especially if accomplished in a single, continuous, hiking season, are staggering. Almost 7,000 miles, following five established long-distance trails, including both the Pacific Crest and Continental Divide. At the start, Skurka would pioneer a route using two-track, creekbed, and cobbled-together connections to cross the Sonoran and Mojave deserts. Along the way, he'd touch 12 national parks and 75 wilderness areas. The crux, with a very real potential to bar his success, was how to make the entire loop without winter intruding.
What it required, first, was a whopping daily average of roughly 33 miles, including layover days. Day in, day out, more than 30 clicks on the leg-powered odometer. Second, it meant pushing winter north up the Sierras and Cascades, turning east to Montana, and then outrunning winter south down the ragged chain of the Rockies. Of course it meant a great many other things, like water availability, food resupplies, staying healthy, eating right, maintaining mental fortitude; but it boiled down to this - 35 miles a day and escaping the trip-ending clutches of winter.
Skurka is no neophyte when it comes to epic hikes. In July 2005, he completed an 11-month, 7,778 -mile, coast-to-coast hike from Cape Gaspe', Quebec to Cape Alava on the Olympic Peninsula. He is the veteran of many long-distance trails and has developed his niche as a professional athlete by going far, going fast, and going solo. His sponsors include GoLite, Balance Bar, and DeFeet. In 2006, at the ripe age of 25, he was honored by the Explorer's Club for his exploits.
"Endurance has always been my thing," Skurka says. "In high school and college I ran cross-country. Out of that came my interest in long hikes. I love putting in a 45-mile day, thinking about the ground I covered, and feeling that good hurt." In the end, the good hurt won out over the Wall Street ambitions Skurka once held.
Skurka's regimen sounds borderline masochistic, but his other passion is to make his travel as comfortable and painless as possible. Most hikers can endure brief doses of masochism for a goal, but that sort of spurt wouldn't have the staying power to get Skurka around the loop. From his early days on the Appalachian Trail, he has evolved a lightweight style that allows him to cover an astonishing amount of ground without burning out or injuring himself. To the contrary, it's a style he thrives on.
"When I started the AT, I carried a 50-pound pack and had to average about 20 miles a day to get done on time," he remembers. "It didn't take me long to figure out that I was NOT having fun. My joints ached, my feet hurt, every day was an exhausting slog. As soon as I could I started sending things home, stripping down the load. By the time I got to New England, I was going light and enjoying myself."
What Skurka has developed stands in stark contrast to the classic Colin Fletcher hiking tradition, which involves carrying your "house" on your back. His fully outfitted, long-distance pack, sans food and water, weighs in at a feathery seven pounds. Colin Fletcher's backpack alone weighed more than that. Even in full winter conditions, Skurka's payload bulks up to only 14 pounds.
"Still, I carry a few things I consider luxuries," Skurka says. "My puffy down coat, for one. And a nice camera."
There is no getting away from the fact that Skurka's style is Spartan by most definitions. The reward, from his point of view, is that he can enjoy himself, cover ground, and not have to endure a grueling, body-pounding, mentally demoralizing journey.
"It is incredibly empowering for me to go this far with a tiny amount of stuff, to take on a continuous trip of this magnitude and spend so little money doing it; to keep it this simple. This kind of travel has completely changed my life."
The fast and light backcountry lifestyle is part of Skurka's equation for success, but what motivates this mission is his gathering concern over climate change, and its impact on the environment.
"I'm only 26," he says, "but sometimes I feel like an old geezer badgering people about the state of the world. I want people to think about what 3 degrees in temperature rise would do to their home environment, their favorite wilderness, the way they live."
Skurka is specifically addressing the people who use wilderness areas and love the outdoors. His route highlights and surrounds some of the most scenic and iconic feral land in North America, much of which stands on the cusp of dramatic change.
"Not enough attention is being paid to the effects on wilderness areas," Skurka says. "People aren't looking at their lifestyles.
"These are places I spend months at a time walking through. It's not like you can identify specific things and pinpoint the impacts of climate change. It's more that the conditions are all lining up with predictions.
"Plants like the Joshua tree and saguaro cactus in the Southwest require a pretty narrow climate window. Those parameters are in flux, so the future of that signature vegetation hangs in the balance. All the glaciers will be gone in Glacier National Park in 20 years, maybe even less. Everything from the snowpack in the Sierras to fires in northern Montana to record-setting heat in the Pacific Northwest testifies to the changes underway."
Skurka plans to share his experiences and his observations with audiences after his return through slide programs and lectures. In a way, he can serve as a direct, on-the-ground witness to what's happening across a huge swath of North America.
"This is an important story to tell," he insists. "People need to hear about this."
Most hikers see the shifts incrementally, if they see them at all. They only periodically experience the effects first hand and only on a local level. For Skurka, the confrontation with climate is intimate, personal and daily.
"My message is to backpackers. What will happen to the country you love, the places you go to find meaning and balance in your lives? Think about it."
Some critics would argue that hikers like Skurka travel so fast that they miss the wilderness experience altogether. How is it possible to cover that kind of ground and actually appreciate anything, they ask.
"I get that a lot," Skurka admits. "And because I get it a lot I've thought about it."
"Look, here's the deal," he sighs. "I walk three miles an hour, 12 hours a day. Three miles an hour isn't that fast. I experience a great deal at that pace, and I see amazing stuff all the time. It's not like I'm whizzing down the highway.
"I could walk 10 or 15 miles a day, carry a heavy pack full of food and luxuries, but then I'd sit in camp six hours a day. I could never do this hike that way, or it would take me years, and who knows what might come along to stop me in that time? Instead I go light, I enjoy myself, and I can cover distances that I'd never be able to otherwise. "
Skurka doesn't discount the value of a dawdling pace, or a more relaxed, social approach to the wilderness experience. It just isn't his mode.
Every decision he makes, from menu items to squares of toilet paper per day is couched to facilitate the backcountry life he has grown accustomed to.
"I try to live lightweight, which requires a certain harmony with the natural world. I have to pay attention," he says.
Skurka's seven-pound pack load is made up of essentials, no more and no less. He uses a down sleeping quilt rather than a mummy bag. Why waste all that loft underneath you where you don't need it? His GoLite "Jam" backpack weighs 16 ounces, a single pound, yet is comfortable and durable enough to last the entire trip. For shelter, Skurka uses a tarp rather than a tent. His stove is a customized Fancy Feast cat food can fueled by denatured alcohol. He carries a single titanium pot and his utensil is a Lexan spoon with the handle cut in half. And he indulges himself with four squares of t.p. per day.
To cut corners, much of Skurka's outfit does double duty. He increases the efficiency of his sleeping quilt by wearing a jacket on cold nights. He folds extra clothing under his torso-length, egg-crate sleeping pad to add insulation. His hiking poles become tarp poles in camp.
Things that many hikers consider essentials Skurka eschews completely. Hiking boots, for instance. He uses very lightweight trail running shoes instead. They are breathable, they dry quickly, and they don't weigh you down with every step, thousands of times a day, he argues.
"Trail running is actually a lot harder on your feet than hiking is," Skurka says.
Skurka only carries bear spray in prime grizzly habitat, and he also goes without a water filter. Most of the time he hikes along ridgelines and through high country. Water close to its source he drinks without treatment, and has never been sick. Water from sources he doesn't trust he treats with Aqua Mira tablets.
The biggest weight variable in Skurka's load is food and water, and it can vary a great deal.
"In California, I had some big waterless stretches," Skurka remembers. "I was carrying 40-50 pounds and still putting in the miles. That was tough. In southern California, I was going along, carrying almost 40 pounds of water across the desert, everything I needed, and then I arrived in Palm Springs to pick up my next food drop. Talk about a disconnect with reality!"
Then there was a 380-mile piece between Anaconda, Mont., and Mack's Inn, Idaho, with no chance for a food resupply. Three hundred eighty miles and 10 days. "I felt like I was starving after five days," he says.
Likely, he was. Skurka's trail diet runs on 4,500 calories daily, but even at that, he figures he loses about half a pound every day. Given the demands he puts on his body, there is no margin for skimping. Typically, he stops to resupply every four days, or roughly every 140 miles.
"When I stop, I pig out," he says. His mother, Karen, is his logistics manager. She spices his mail packages with cupcakes and homemade goodies, baked cookies contributed by his sister, and other treats. Even so, Skurka reports going from a starting weight of 173 to a low of 155 during the rigorous trail section in southern Colorado, but then managed to bulk back up to roughly 163 by the finish.
The daily menu runs on what Skurka refers to as "the caloric-drip plan." He eats half a dozen, small, calorie-packed snacks throughout the day, punctuated by his one hot meal, dinner. Fortunately, he enjoys energy bars, because they make up roughly 75 percent of his diet, starting with three every morning for breakfast. On an average day, Skurka downs 11 bars of various kinds, which, over seven months, adds up to some 2,300.
"All my dinners use one-and-a-half to two cups of hot water boiled on my little cat food can stove," Skurka reports.
The entrée rotation is austere. Dried beans and rice, angel hair pasta, roasted garlic cous-cous, and mashed potato burritos. Oh yes, and for dessert, a small bar of dark chocolate. Skurka's daily fuel blend, and when you exercise as rigorously as he does, that's precisely what it amounts to, comes 60 percent from carbohydrates, and 20 percent each from protein and fat.
So it goes, day in and day out. Thirty-five miles, three miles an hour, 12 hours in rain or shine, 4,500 calories. Stop every four days and refuel. It's a rhythm full of country, good and bad, weather systems, views of wild and ravaged terrain, interactions with wildlife and humans, lots of time spent inside the head.
"I can't imagine living any other way," Skurka says. "Loneliness isn't a problem. I'm pretty comfortable with myself and being solitary. There are long stretches where I'm on auto-pilot. My thoughts just drift wherever - childhood memories, conversations with friends, philosophical tangents. When I think about what else I might be doing - sitting at a computer, stuck in a cubicle, commuting an hour to work every day - I can't come up with anyplace I belong more."
But that doesn't mean it's always easy.
When reflecting on the toughest, most frightening moments, Skurka doesn't gravitate to confrontations with grizzlies or bad falls. What he remembers are the attitude-sapping stresses, the maladies of a long-distance routine.
"Most of my challenges have been self-induced, "he says.
"I think the toughest stretch was in the north Cascades. I was really sick of snow. I'd been dealing, off and on, with snow for 900 miles. Not constantly, but almost daily. By the time I got to the Cascades I was in a bad mental place.
"I was hiking 37 miles a day, 15 and 16 hours. For one section, I sent myself the wrong maps, so I was navigating off of a 1:500,000-scale quad. I remember going into Stehekin, Wash., and almost collapsing on the street from exhaustion and mental stress."
The other hard part is walking day after day through ravaged country. The heavily logged foothills in northern California, for example, or land grant blocks in New Mexico. Often as not, it was the contrast with stunning wild country that brought on Skurka's malaise. To hit clearcut after being immersed in the High Sierra, where he walked almost a week without seeing a soul. Or to be stuck on forest roads after the rugged mountainous wilderness of the San Juans in southern Colorado.
"It's hard to be rejuvenated by mile after mile of logging road or overgrazed landscapes."
Skurka does remember one vivid day when things hung in precarious balance.
"I was deep in southwestern Colorado, way up high in the San Juans. It was late September already. Winter was in the air. I got slammed by the remnants of a tropical storm. Twenty-four hours of non-stop, torrential rains. Thirty-five degrees. Thirty-mile-an-hour winds. I was up on the high ridges above treeline.
"I decided I had to make a break for lower country. I started running down an old road, then followed a creek bed. After about 10 miles, I got completely cliffed out. No place to go. Total hypothermia conditions. I was really cold, really wet, for 24 hours straight."
Karen Skurka remembers the message her son left on her phone that day.
"Andy called us but we weren't home," she says. "It just happened to be the only week of the whole trip he carried a cell phone. He didn't know how much battery power he had left. He was breathless. You could hear the wind and storm in the background. He said that this was something of an emergency. He told us he loved us, said he'd call in from the next town.
"Some parents worry about the late night call on prom weekend. But, for us, that was an anxious couple of days, waiting for Andy to call in again. Every time the phone rang, I held my breath, hoping for his voice."
In the end, it's like any routine. For most of us, the daily grind has to do with going to work, dealing with details, keeping up with chores and errands, juggling life. Sometimes it's heady, great stuff. Other times it wears us down to the point that getting out of bed in the morning takes a Herculean effort. Skurka's routine has its ups and downs, too; swinging between rewards and demands, exhilaration and exhaustion.
"I know the long hikes will come to an end at some point, but right now this is a very positive thing," he says. "Who knows where the trail will lead?"
One of the toughest sections of the Great Western Loop came near the end, making his way along sketchy trails through the prickly deserts of New Mexico and Arizona. Along the way, Skurka ran into an old-timer in western New Mexico who talked about how the weather patterns had changed.
"He told me that his parents used to plant pinto beans there on that land," he says. "No way was there enough water to grow beans anymore. He kept talking about how hot the summers had gotten."
Skurka's last town stop, six days from the end, was Flagstaff, Ariz. While there, he picked up the newspaper and noticed two stories. One discussed the persistence of the outdated Smokey Bear fire-fighting philosophy. Another noted a new study claiming that within five years, 36 states will face water-supply shortages.
So. On Saturday, Nov. 3, Andrew Skurka arrived full circle at Grandview Point. He pulled in right on schedule, late in the afternoon, the last miles fueled by a final Balance Bar snack. His family met him there, arms raised in triumph. His logistics guru mother held him tight. He stood, once again, overlooking the Grand Canyon.
In his wake, nearly 7,000 miles of lonely, lovely trail and the memories that crowd up in a messy, mental collage. In his heart, the message of a land on the cusp. In front of him, another threshold to cross.
Find out more about Andy Skurka's adventures and philosophy at www.andrewskurka.com.
Alan Kesselheim has been a freelance writer for more than 20 years. He is the author of nine acclaimed books and hundreds of magazine articles. He lives with his family in Bozeman, Mont.