Buy my book?

It just occurred to me today that it's the first week of December. Only 22 more shopping days until Christmas! I wanted to take advantage of the holidays to order more copies of my book about the 2008 Iditarod Trail Invitational and market it again, but I never got around to it. I placed a big order today and I'm hoping I still have a chance.

To be honest, I could use the "author boost." I have been at work on a second book, a sequel to "Ghost Trails," if you will, about 2009. I feel satisfied with how it's going so far, but the going has been slow. I've been at work on it, on and off, since September, and I'm barely through Chapter 4. Still, I'm happy with the way detail and depth is progressing in my writing, but I'm having a harder time separating myself from the events and emotions I'm writing about, which is crucial. So I come to a hard place and I go away from it for a while, sometimes weeks, and find I always return with renewed perspective. What will happen when and if I finish this book, I'm not sure. Maybe another self-published blog marketing project, maybe the traditional publishing route, or maybe I'll put it in a drawer. We'll see.

Until then, if you like this blog and haven't read the book, now would be a good time to buy it. I wrote "Ghost Trails" about my adventure in the 2008 ITI (the year I didn't get frostbite and finished), as well as the different events in my life that brought me to the starting line. What I set out to communicate in "Ghost Trails" is that you don't have to be an amazing person to accomplish amazing, life-changing things. You just need determination, and childlike awe, and love. It's intended to be an inspirational story, about struggling and achieving joy amid tough physical and mental conditions. It's an adventure story about winter in Alaska.

And now ... it's on sale! I was able to get a good deal through my publisher and can sell it for $11.95, which is $4 off the list price. Shipping is $4.80 extra in the states and $10 internationally. Buying more than one does not increasing the cost of shipping, unless you buy more than three, in which shipping increases to $10 for orders of three to ten books. It would make a good Christmas gift for people who like cycling, adventure stories or Alaska. I should disclose that it does not contain any color pictures. There are a few black and white pictures for the purpose of illustration, but it is far from a photo book. It's a story. A good one, really. I've received a lot of positive feedback in the past year.

The first chapter of the book can be read at this link. If you're interested in purchasing a book and you live in Juneau, contact me directly. I won't charge any shipping and can personally deliver to anywhere in town. Because of lead time, this book will probably arrive fairly close to Christmas - as in after Dec. 20. Keep that in mind when ordering. I'm going to do everything I can to have it delivered by Dec. 25. If you would like me to send it directly to another address than the one you're ordering from, just indicate that in the notes.

Purchase a signed copy(ies) for $11.95 by clicking on the button below. Thanks for supporting this well-fed author. Happy holidays!

Waiting on the sun

It has been a rocky sort of week, and I have been navigating it with about as much grace as I usually exhibit when riding my bicycle across broken stone beaches (which is to say, I'm lucky I don't have a head wound.) Upheavals at work, downheavals elsewhere. I'd like to believe things will even out soon, but there's really now way of knowing what's around that next band of coastal cliffs. So I do what I always do when I am feeling uneasy - I cling to happy sunshines on the 10-day weather forecast. Right now, there's seven of 'em, starting Thursday afternoon. When Juneau's weather forecast calls for "Sunny with 0 percent chance of precipitation," you can all but take that to the bank — because our default setting is rain/snow and forecasters have no reason to show such certainty unless they're actually certain. Now that I've said it, I've probably doomed myself to seven more days of rain. But I like to choose the path of optimism.

Not that the weather or other aspects of the present have been all that bad this week. Yesterday, Sean and I got out for a relaxing walk on the Dan Moller trail, which I've been running on fairly often recently, trying to build up a little bit of a base should I decide to completely throw caution to the wind and enter February's Little Su 50K on foot (this is unlikely, but who knows — nothing in life is certain.) I expected the trail to be packed by snowmachines and told Sean as much, but they recently closed the gate to motorized traffic and then the trail received a foot or more of unconsolidated snow up high. Not so good for running right now, but a great wallow. Sean is usually a skier, so I think he has just about filled up his annual quota of postholing, hanging out with me. Personally, I like postholing. It's endlessly frustrating and invigorating at the same time. I try to stay out of shallow ski tracks. :-)

Today I did some climbing intervals up the Eaglecrest Road. I've added more high-impact cycling to my rides in case I decide to enter the Susitna 100 with my Pugsley (more likely than running the Little Su 50K, but also up in the air.) To say I lack direction right now would be an accurate statement. It's unsettling, having no real training routine or goals, and that uncertainty stretches into other aspects of my life. I have a home I'm never at, a cat I never see, and three bicycles stored in three different places stretched across 15 miles of town. I'm still drifting. I survived the latest round of layoffs at my place of employment, and I'm not even sure how I feel about that. I mean, I'm happy about it, in general. But when I'm deep into a climbing interval, and my thoughts only register in shrieks and groans, I find myself emerging from the haze with a single question — "What if?"

But the sun will come out tomorrow (or late Thursday, or maybe Friday, or maybe not even until Saturday). Regardless, there will be sun.

Rainforest trail

This is where I go when time closes in,
This place hidden away from the seasons.
Too dark for berries.
Too dense for snow.
This is where I go.

This is where I ride when weather closes in,
And sheets of rain fall from the sky.
Sheltered and narrow,
Sun-deprived.
This is where I ride.

This is where I climb when life opens wide,
With choices strewn about a borderless maze.
Endless loop,
Lost in time.
This is where I climb.

Ride to mile 25

I finally switched out the tires on my mountain bike. This is perhaps the latest I've made the switch to studs since I moved to Alaska. As I pumped the front tire up to 55 psi, the valve started to make that horrible hissing noise that indicates I have only seconds to release pressure before the twisted tube explodes (I pop more tubes this way than I'd care to admit.) I frantically grabbed at the hose and valve but it was too late. The tube exploded out of the tire right in my face, and the blast startled me so much that I jerked my hand away from the valve and punched the hub hard enough to bruise the entire backside of my right hand. My cat cowered against the door, horrified. I thought I had screwed up any opportunity to ride the ice-slicked streets, but then I found another heavily patched 29" tube stuffed in an old Camelbak.

This is my fifth season as a holiday orphan. Every year I tell myself that the expense, work hurdles and hassle of holiday travel isn't worth it, and every year the holidays roll around and I miss my family something fierce. I would even like to go with my sister on her Black Friday shopping frenzy, pushing against the roiling masses of humanity and frantic consumerism just for a glittering piece of something I don't need and never wanted. My own personal Hell would probably look something like Black Friday, but that is how much I miss my sister and the rest of my family.

I think about them when I ride, plying the damp streets and chilled air for comfort amid the homesickness. I think about coconut cream pie and ribbon Jello and table cloths that look like flannel sheets. I think about my Grandma lovingly demanding that all 47 of us recite what we're thankful for and I think about my Grandpa smiling as we chatter on about great friends and that super cool concert we went to the week before. I think about the Cowboys on TV and bowling with my cousins and even scoring more than 100 for the first time in my life. I think about Slurpees at 7-11 and sunlight on brown yards and launching sweet air beneath four tires off the train tracks. I find myself lost in memories when I ride around Thanksgiving, every year.

And I think about ways I can get home for Christmas, but I know it's already too late.

Erin and Hig

The following is an article I wrote about a couple who is stopping in Juneau next week to give a slideshow presentation about their yearlong, 4,000-mile journey up the Pacific Coast. If you must buy something on Black Friday, I recommend buying Erin's book: "A Long Trek Home: 4,000 Miles By Boot, Raft and Ski." Find out more about it here: http://www.groundtruthtrekking.org. Until then, Happy Thanksgiving!

4,000 miles by boot, raft and ski

By Jill Homer
Juneau Empire

When Erin McKittrick and her husband, Brentwood “Hig” Higman, last visited Juneau, an unseen October drizzle pattered on their tiny rafts as they paddled into the inky darkness along Gastineau Channel. At first, the city was just a small island of lights in a sea of night. Then they could make out the fog-obscured shapes of buildings, and then the crimson stream of car lights on Egan Drive, and then the imposing towers of the cruise ship dock where they landed.

“As we paddled into Juneau, the rain seemed unrelenting,” Erin wrote in her blog. “Even through the layers of gloves and mitts, my hands were cold and wet. On a remote coast, I would have shrugged off the spat in the weather ... But coming into town? Each building glowed; windows of lit gold shining over the water as dusk fell on the channel. And each and every window taunted me with its promise of warmth and dryness.”

It was the largest city they had seen in several months, and one of the few outposts of civilization along more than a thousand miles of Pacific Coast that they had walked and paddled since leaving Seattle four months earlier, in June 2007. Behind them were a lifetime’s worth of adventures that most can only dream about: Climbing snow-bound mountains, packrafting glacier-lined channels and frolicking in the surf with dolphins. But these experiences didn’t echo in their world-weary thoughts as they approached the inviting lights of Juneau. They only had one thing on their minds: Pizza.

“Pack bulging with poorly arranged gear, packrafts haphazardly strapped on top, we stumbled through the door of Bullwinkle’s Pizza,” Erin wrote in “A Long Trek Home,” her recently released autobiography about the trek. “The tops of our sodden dry suits bulged awkwardly, stretched over the modifed sleeping pads we were wearing as life vests and camera gear we stuffed next to our skin to keep it dry and warm. ... A football game was blaring on the giant flat screen TV, and as we snacked on pizza, we tried to puzzle the rules of the game, which neither of us really knew. I felt like an alien species, visiting this strange indoor world.”

The meandering journey that brought the couple to Juneau’s quintessential pizza parlor took them more than 4,000 miles from their former home in Seattle to the Aleutian Islands over the course of a year. From the soggy shores of Southeast to the deep-frozen wilderness of the Copper River Basin, Erin and Hig’s trek brought them closer to their goal — to better understand the relationships between humans, communities, ecosystems and natural resources. As they walked, packrafted and skied, they came to a deeper understanding about their own desires for beauty and simplicity in their lives.

“Coming into Juneau was more extreme that usual,” Hig said. “It was straight from the water, and water is always wilderness. We went straight from that to busy streets.”

Erin and Hig will return to these busy streets on Tuesday, Dec. 1, for a book signing and slideshow presentation about the journey at Centennial Hall. Hig estimated he and Erin took 22,000 photos over the course of the trip, and plan to show at least 100 in Juneau.

At the presentation, Erin expects to field the usual questions: “What gear did you use?” “How far did you walk every day?” “Are you crazy?” But she also plans to talk about “A Long Trek Home,” written as a poetic love letter to Alaska, the wilderness and the seasons of the year. In the book, Erin also addresses the environmental issues facing Alaska, such as the effects of climate change, logging and the proposed Pebble Mine.

“It is an adventure narrative fundamentally,” Erin said. “I do present some of the issues, but it’s all tied into the story.”

The section of the book addressing the couple’s trek through the Juneau region is titled “Hospitality,” a reference to the Southeast Alaskans who took them in and offered them food and shelter during their autumn visit. Erin said they left Juneau by packrafting across the Gastineau Channel, walking around the point of Douglas Island, crossing Stephens Passage to Admiralty Island and walking the Glass Peninsula. She said at that point in their journey, their movement was mostly aquatic, and the endless series of rain-shrouded islands and channels is a bit of a blur.

“After four months in the Inside Passage, we had come to wonder how much it had left to offer us: Thinking of drizzly coastlines and thick forest brush, and turning our thoughts prematurely to the open Gulf of Alaska coast,” she wrote in her blog. “But there are always surprises. The ocean between Petersburg and Juneau was one of the most alive chunks of coast we’ve seen the whole trip. Humpback whales sang for us the rest of that night, and a good part of the next one.”

After leaving Juneau, they still had more than 2,000 miles to trek, and the whole of Alaska’s brutal winter to hike, ski and camp through. But before they could enter the subzero cold and snow of the Interior in winter, they had to pass through the spectacular storms and ice of the Gulf of Alaska. In one of the trip’s more harrowing experiences, Erin and Hig paddled across Icy Bay late into the evening in a rainstorm, fighting wind and current that threatened to pull them into a morass of churning ice. Fear of hypothermia and sinking their rafts amid the swirling bergs kept them paddling even as exhaustion and darkness closed in.

“It was a very long, frightening five hours we had no wish ever to repeat,” Erin said. It also become one of Erin and Hig’s more memorable experiences.

“Definitely the Lost Coast,” Erin said of her favorite section of the trip. “Leaving the Glacier Bay section is so remote and there were so many storms and so many bays to cross. It was really a wonderful place.”

Their trek ended on Unimak Island, where a treacherous 12-mile ocean crossing keeps grizzly bears, caribou and packraft-bound humans from ranging any farther. At that point, Erin and Hig had been traveling under their own power for more than a year, becoming more accustomed to a simple lifestyle. Erin was pregnant with the couple’s first child. They had endured hunger, cold and powerful isolation, and emerged with an understanding that their future no longer fit with the glittering complexity of the big city.

“We had made so many plans during our long walk,” Erin wrote in “A Long Trek Home.” “Now that we accomplished one extravagant goal that we set for ourselves, we had to start looking to the next. Not all of our days could be extraordinary. But our lives could still be.”

They moved from Seattle to Seldovia, a small village just off the road system on Kachemak Bay, where Hig grew up. They built a small yurt, complete with what Erin sees as a glut of modern conveniences: Internet, a wood stove and little shelves that lock into the lattice of the yurt’s frame. On Valentine’s Day, Erin gave birth to a son, Katmai. Now Erin said the family is preparing for new Alaska wilderness journeys, such as a monthlong trek through the northwestern region of the state with an 18-month-old in tow. A baby may slow them down, Erin said, but he certainly won’t stop them.

“He loves to go on hikes,” Erin said. “Baby’s are pretty portable; they don’t take much stuff.”

As to her answer to the common question of whether they’re adrenaline junkies or just plain crazy, Erin said she didn’t feel like walking from Seattle to the Aleutian Islands was any more dangerous than tasks most people take on every day, such as driving on the freeway.

“We’re very cautious people,” Erin said. “We evaluated hazards, and would think through risks.”

“We want to do it again in 23 1/2 years,” Hig said. “We’ll change in that time and so will the places we’ve been to. The experience will spread out, and provide some of the depth we often lack.”

Thaw

Running on the Dan Moller Trail at about noon yesterday. I've been short on time these past few mornings and playing with options for shorter, higher-intensity workouts. Running in the snow has all the intensity of running in loose sand on a beach, except for add a steady incline. I'm in pretty good shape for foot-powered stuff because of all the hiking I've been doing, but my lungs were being put through a shredder. Six miles took just over an hour. Slow but painful. Powerful stuff, running. No matter how you approach it, or where you do it, it burns.

Same run, same spot, today. During the descent, I punched through a deep posthole, wrenched my knee, and had to walk down.

Another Sunday with Pugsley

I've still got the bike love. Lately, I've been genuinely worried about it fading. I mean, these things happen. I rode a bicycle across the country in 2003 and then barely touched it for the next two years. This past summer, with three months solely focused on mountain bike training and a 2,700-mile jaunt down the Continental Divide, was pretty much the bike binge to end all bike binges. I've been admittedly bipolar about the activity ever since. But snowbiking brought me out of my first bike funk; who knows, maybe it can happen again.

This is what it looked like when I woke up in the morning. I'm still sick, sore throat and the like, but when you have a free morning and a date with your favorite snow bike, these things just don't seem to matter.

I hit up the Lake Creek trail. The gate's still closed, the snow's still shallow and the muskeg definitely isn't completely frozen yet, but the trail was surprisingly rideable up to the first meadow.

The thing about snowbiking that really makes it for me is the downhilling, picking a line and kicking up powder as the squishy tires hold true to an unseen surface. It's a blissfully weightless feeling, a bit like snowboarding, except for with Pugsley I can hit the flats, the dirt, the pavement, and keep on rolling.

Another thing about snowbiking that makes it for me is of course, the snow. Seriously, how can anyone be grumpy in a scene like this? You almost expect carolers to come out from behind the trees and sing "Winter Wonderland" as reindeer prance about.

I haven't been keeping track of my mileage for a good long while, partly because I fear how low the numbers might me, and partly because I don't have working odometers on either of my bikes, and I no longer have a boyfriend who is willing to do small tasks like ordering and installing odometers for a girlfriend who is truly, unforgivably lazy when it comes to optional (and non-optional) bike maintenance. But I do want to start tracking my effort, because I do want to enter a couple of snowbike races in 2010, and I want to be strong and tough and maybe even fast during those races. And I also want to climb mountains, snowshoe run, snowboard, learn to ski, and bomb downhill on my Pugsley.

Either way, I think it's going to be a good winter.