It's a cold summer so far

First! Applications for my February 2026 Arizona Beginner Guided Trips are now open! If you want to go from zero outdoors experience to being able to plan and execute your own backpacking trips (or hike a long trail like the PCT), these are the trips for you. Plus you get to eat KK’s incredible food when you’re in town! I expect these to sell out. Deets and the application are here.

And there are a few spots left in my fall Utah trips, which are such bonkers-level pleasure cruises. The best place (canyon country) at the best time (shoulder season) with the best people (women, trans and non-binary outdoors nerds). Some backpacking experience is useful for these, but if you have other outdoors experience I can help you fill in the gaps! Deets and the application (and reviews from past participants) are here. (And I just love this reel that one of the hikers made on one of our April trips.)

Also! I’ve been trying to put together a gear library for these trips so that people can borrow ultralight gear to try out before having to commit to buying stuff, and Superior Wilderness Designs just sent me five of their super cute fifty-liter Long Haul packs to loan out! They’re made of water and puncture-resistant x-pac and are around 2 lbs (or lighter) each. They have great features, like an internal frame, big side water bottle pockets (that cinch), big hipbelt pockets, wide roll-tops, shoulder pads with good padding and mesh outside pockets. The Long Haul is a great size, big enough for any trail in the lower 48 without being too voluminous. If you come on one of my trips you can now use one of these sweet packs!

This summer in Fairbanks is colder than normal, so far. There’s been a little rain most days and even when it warms the nights are still dropping, keeping the mosquitoes from being born. Climate change is so fascinating! A mild winter, and now this. It’s funny to think about what the future holds, where things will land after the dust settles. Maybe one day we can grow more stuff in Alaska? But first, tundra fires? And the salmon die? And it’ll be warm, but still dark in winter? Hot-dark? We are leading with curiosity here!

My boyfriend works studying ice, among other things, so he is a repository of permafrost facts. He told me that here in the interior, the black spruce bog that covers much of the land is often where the permafrost is closest to the surface- just fifty centimeters down, or so.

“That’s not very much soil?” I said. “No wonder the spruce trees look like that.”

“No,” he replied. “The land here is basically just dirty ice.”

Dirty ice. I think about the first humans that crossed the Bering land bridge as the glaciers retreated. They unlocked a new continent, full of megafauna that were easy to kill. They went south for a long time- the arctic and sub-arctic were some of the last places in the Americas where humans settled. This far north, life was extra hard and famine was often a thing but at least there was less drama, or at least from what I’ve read that seemed to be one of the motivating factors. Whenever I want to feel small and impotent I ask myself, “could I make a rain jacket out of seal intestine?” and the answer is always “no.” In Anchorage when I went to the museum on first Fridays I would seek out the seal intestine rain jacket in its glass case, alongside the skin boat and booties made of woven grass, and stare at it as a sort of grounding exercise. Life is fucking hard. Life has always been very hard. This is, and has always been, the price we pay for embodiment.

Being alive in a body to watch the sunset with real human eyeballs is just that worth it, I guess. Also eating, cuddling, waking up from a really good nap. Having dogs. The cost? Loss. Loss of every single thing we love and the things we don’t love too.

This weekend, Jon and I drove down to the Alaska Range to do some bikepacking. We borrowed his friends’ sled dogs to pull us and brought our fatbikes so we could mash over the rocks on an old mining road. Alaska has seen way less resource extraction (logging, mining etc) than the lower 48, so it lacks the network of old dirt roads you can find down there and appropriate for adventure activities like bikepacking. The few old roads here that do exist (usually to a small abandoned mine, much of the boreal forest is no good for logging) feel special, and it’s always exciting to find a new one that one can explore for any distance. We went to Coal Mine Road south of Delta- it only runs for like 8 miles but then you can journey further on foot from its end, climbing the tundra to high ridges that overlook broad river valleys and distant glaciated peaks. I have spent very little time in the Alaska Range- Alaska is huge!! And when I lived in Anchorage the closer mountains, the Chugach and the Talkeetnas, were easier to prioritize. Now that I’m in Fairbanks, the Alaska Range are the closer mountains, so it makes more sense to go there, and even then I feel like I could spend years and years exploring and still only be able to conceptualize the smallest corners. The land here is just so big, and human development is mere specs upon its surface, most things built in the seventies during the oil boom and decaying since then, many dreams abandoned, boarded up, and no sign of another boom again ever, unless we tear up the land and poison the water for balls-to-the wall mining. And who wants that? No-one but our fascist billionaire overlords. I would rather the settlements here melt back into the earth, the land grow quiet, the population of humans get small again. Some land can only support so many humans, you know? Should only support so many humans. Dirty ice.

That the land exists is the important part. If it comes down to the land existing or me existing, I would choose the land. We can’t exist without the land anyway, you know?

Speaking of embodiment, if you have never been pulled on a bike by a sled dog, I highly recommend trying it at least once during your one wild precious life. It’s like riding an e-bike but it’s a dog. A d-bike. The dog is SO happy to pull you, even uphill. And you’re happy because you’re being pulled uphill! Everyone is happy! We got to the end of the dirt road and set up our camp on some grass out of the wind (that part of the Alaska range has lots of wind, apparently), and poked around the old mining equipment and wandered across the tundra and marveled at the distant, snow-capped peaks and the wild, unknowable valleys full of animals who care not for our human dramas. The willows had not yet leafed out and the night was cold though we were cozy in our sleeping bags and the dogs roamed under the midnight sun, hunting voles.

In a few weeks I fly to the western Brooks Range with a few friends to spend ten days backpacking there. This will be my biggest personal trip of the year, and I’m so excited to spend some time in a new area ahead of my guided trips in July. We fly to Kotzebue first, a town in western Alaska that felt, when I visited in 2018 after paddling the Noatak river, like Russia (although I’ve never been to Russia) and is indeed not far from Russia, and then we’ll take a bush flight to a remote drainage I have never been to, but one of my friends who’s going has, and was able to provide a start and end point between which we made our route, the walking of which will hopefully be tolerable, if not excellent. We’re splitting the bush flights in and out of the Brooks with other people to make it more affordable, but the cost of the flights is still a lot- about two thousand dollars for me, between my flights from Fairbanks to Kotzebue and back and then the bush plane- I could fly to New Zealand this winter for less! And that, my friends, is why not many people backpack in the Brooks Range. It feels a little crazy to spend this much just to go backpacking, but Alaska is my home and I want to keep exploring here, and most of the state is off the road system and this is just how much that costs. If we weren’t splitting the bush plane (for our flight out, we’re getting on the plane another group is using to fly in, so we’re splitting that flight six ways, and the flight in we’re splitting three ways) it would cost even more.

There are less expensive ways to enter the Brooks range, but they’re limited- for my guided trips, for example, we fly from Fairbanks to a village that has daily commercial flights- the planes are still small, they seat just nine people, but since they carry mail and freight and things it’s cheaper because it’s subsidized? I’m not really sure. If you don’t want to pay for a bush flight, starting from a village that has commercial flights in and out or from the haul road (the only road in the Alaskan arctic) is the way to go.

I hope the route we made in the western Brooks is good walking. I hope it doesn’t cold rain all day every day and I like my snacks! I’ll let you all know how it goes.

That’s all for now,

Carrot