What Price Solitude?

I recall a science fiction story about a world where the human population had grown so great that finding a few moments alone was precious. Only the very rich could afford a pleasant space to themselves.

The longer I live, the more it seems I love solitude, especially in nature. From my home in south Austin, within 10 minutes I can be on the Barton Creek Greenbelt, walking along the cool, shady paths by the creek. Sometimes I bring the dogs, and their feisty romping brings a fresh liveliness to the experience. Never a moment of boredom there. They are ALIVE, tuned in to every sound and smell, every rustle and snap.

I fantasize about the solitude and grandeur of pristine natural settings. Mountains, river valleys, forests, and especially, remote South Pacific islands. In my dreams I fly over coral atolls and see the waves breaking on the outer reefs. Over and over, I walk in slow motion, carrying my surfboard down a green-dappled jungle path, bare feet sifting the sand.

In summer 2007, my 11-yeard-old son and I spent three days in the backcountry at Denali National Park. This was as close to real wilderness as most of us will ever come. Although we were never more than a few miles from the park road, a line of mountains separated us from it, and it turned out to be much harder than we ever imagined to get from the Teklanika River back to the road. More on that in other posts...

I think some people might wonder, wouldn't it be lonely out there? Wouldn't you miss the swirl of human companionship and conversation? Are you some kind of anti-social lone wolf?

I once had my Myers-Briggs type analyzed at work. Turns out I'm an ENTP, combining the four types Extraverted, Intuitive, Thinking, Perceiving. Caution: these words are loaded with rich layers of meanings ascribed by the M-B system; conventional definitions do not fully or correctly apply. The M-B Web site describes the ENTP type as "Quick, ingenious, stimulating, alert, and outspoken. Resourceful in solving new and challenging problems. Adept at generating conceptual possibilities and then analyzing them strategically. Good at reading other people. Bored by routine, will seldom do the same thing the same way, apt to turn to one new interest after another." I view this sort of like a horoscope, with mixed degrees of skepticism and surprise that much of it seems on target for me. But one point here is that I don't seem cut out to be a loner.

Still, I find solitude nourishing, rejuvenating, liberating. Again, especially in natural settings. But what does it cost? There are significant financial costs to get to Alaska or to a remote island, costs so high that most people will probably never get here. And the personal costs can be great--what sacrifices would you have to make, what relationships would be strained or broken, what career paths might be truncated or forsaken?

Certainly, you could find natural solitude in a city park or in your own back yard at the right time of day. Can that be the same as the solitude that comes when you know there are no others around for hundreds or thousands of miles? For me, there is a distinct difference. Agreed, the experience of natural solitude is partly a function of perspective and attitude, the way you look at things. But there is an order of magnitude difference achieved in remote, pristine settings.

How costly and difficult is it becoming to find that "real" solitude? How many of us who have lived awhile can recall visiting some beautiful place in youth, only to return decades later and discovered that tourism or civilization have arrived, that the place is transformed to be almost unrecognizable, that people and buildings and cars and planes are now there, and the solitude has moved on, farther out, farther away.

And so the diaspora continues from civilized, urban zones, with each generation pushing the boundaries farther. All of this drives the importance of setting aside or protecting places, parks, "refuges" where people and animals can find what solitude remains. That also has a price. In the context of this topic, it is some of the most important work being done on spaceship Earth. But it is not free. Someone will pay.

Probably my son will live to return to Alaska in future decades, and he will see it changed. Maybe he will come back with his son or daughter to Denali National Park. And I doubt the park and its mountains, rivers, tundra meadows, taiga forests, bears, wolves, caribou and willow ptarmigans will have changed much. The highway outside the park will have even more pricey hotels and lodges. The paving and parceling of The Last Frontier will have advanced. There will be more people and roads and buildings.

But someone paid to set aside six million acres of wilderness in Alaska. Some people still pay the price to get there. It's worth it.

Denali Backcountry Journal - Part 1 of 2

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The following notes were transcribed almost verbatim from a handwritten journal I kept during a trip with my son Revi, age 10 at the time, to Denali National Park in Alaska.

August 13, 2007



The camper bus dropped us off on the park road just south of Cathedral Mountain. We tossed off our carefully laden backpacks, the bus roared off, and silence loomed up all around us as we contemplated the reality of our situation.

We were alone in a vast wilderness. The late sun was lighting the huge, craggy mountains and the green-red tundra, and passing clouds threw variegated shadows on the soft slopes of the valleys. Words like “beautiful” and “majestic” do not come close to the truth.

Rev and I looked down from the road into the valley and on down around the pass we had to cross to reach the Teklanika River, our assigned backcountry camping unit. We knew we had to cross the stream at the valley bottom, and I was already apprehensive, wondering how we could do this without going barefoot (a park rule no-no) or soaking our boots. The solution turned out to be crossing the stream wearing our spare pairs of wool socks, which we then tied on to my backpack to flop and dry in the air.

Rev was in high spirits, cheerful and clearly excited by the prospect of adventuring.

“Hey bear, ho bear!” we called regularly as we wove through the willows and alders around the stream. Before long, we were working hard, heading up a steep slope.

We had a general idea of where we had to go, but no clearly marked best way to get there. We ended up following a “social trail” that led along the stream and up into the pass. After an hour or so and several rest stops, we rose up into the saddle of the pass and came upon a small lake, its surface like mirrored glass in the still evening air.

I was surprised to see a young woman sitting on the lake shore. As we approached, we saw she had a camp stove and was finishing dinner. Revi thought she also might be sketching the lake. It wasn’t until we had passed by that we looked back and saw her tent nestled behind a hill, hidden from view of the road.

After two more hours of hard going, we at last made it over the pass, topped the last line of hills, and saw the Teklanika valley spread out on either side before us. The view was stunning. We could see away to the right up the valley the gray-white glacier at the river’s head, and the broad gravel bed of the river with its many-braided courses flowing hither and yon in snaking, intersecting lines across the gravel.

Alas, we could also see that we had hours yet to go to traverse the sloping, complex series of hills and tributary stream valleys and draws to get down to the river.

Rev was by now tuckered—we both were. When he suggested pitching the tent right there, I considered briefly this change of plan, then readily agreed.

Barely had we pitched the nice little tent Jim Summers had loaned us, when Rev piped up that a bear was crossing the hillside above us. Stricken, I looked and could easily see that his keen, observant eyes were right. I got out the binoculars and we tracked the bear’s progress. It was indeed a grizzly. It appeared to me to be a youngish male, possibly 300-400 pounds.

Occasionally, he would break into a loping run as he crossed the hill, about a quarter mile away from us. I was deeply concerned, feeling fear take hold. Rev, in contrast, seemed exhilarated, excited to see a bear in the wild. It seemed doubtful to me that the bear did not know we were there, but he paid us no mind. For some 15-20 minutes we tracked his progress away from us in the fading light of evening, til finally he disappeared near the top of a ridge about two miles away. Rev puckishly decided to name the bear, calling him “Suki.”

All that night, I slept fitfully, sure I heard a bear snorting and scratching several times—but I believe it was only the tent flaps in the breeze. Rev slept like a log.

The next morning dawned cool and overcast, though that seems far too simple to convey the grand swirl of clouds of varying shapes and colors, from the high white layer through which the rising sun shone in white, diffuse radiance, to the gray vapor that hung in foggy shrouds in the valley of the Teklanika glacier to the south. I dressed and climbed out of the tent, stretching my legs and stiff neck and back and strolling across the springy tundra, drinking in the glorious, secluded, quiet dawn.

Rev eventually rolled out of bed, and within a few minutes we had breakfast upslope from the tent. We then struck camp, reloaded our heavy packs, and began seeking a pathway down.

Several clear lakes, the largest about a half mile across, were pooled up at the base of the pass where its streams emptied into the Teklanika. On one of these, we watched a raft of brown ducks take off and fly to another, adjacent lake.

Rev’s sharp eyes spotted a group of five Dall sheep on the opposite side of the valley across the Teklanika, five white shapes grazing on the green slope.

We’d been told the park had two weeks of fairly steady rain just before we came, and everything was green and growing.

Coming down the last slopes of the pass, we saw several snowshoe hares in the willow and alder thickets. These seemed strangely unafraid of people, and one allowed us to approach within 10 feet of it.

Likewise, a flock of sparrows with streaked and laddered backs that we walked into on the gravel bar later allowed us to come within six feet, something I’d never seen in wild birds before.
When we’d passed the lakes and were beginning our final descent to the gravel bar, we looked left and were surprised to see a large set of bone-white caribou antlers, seemingly sitting atop a bush on the hillside about a quarter mile away. We never investigated these more closely, but I suspected it was an old wolf or bear kill.

We had barely reached the river gravel bar and had a spot of lunch, and were just looking for a new campsite for our tent, when gray clouds that had been building let loose with a windy rainstorm. We rushed to put up the tent in the mounting rain and did it badly, and the rising wind soon blew it sideways and threatened to blow it over. We got several windward tent poles staked, and hurriedly threw everything inside, using the backpacks to brace the windward wall.

We then spent a soggy day in and out of the tent, mostly in, drawing and writing and playing games. Rev was excited and wiggly, talking a blue streak and poking and tickling me when I tried to doze. We played hangman and 20 questions, and talked and told stories and cuddled in our damp sleeping bags.

Mid-morning the drizzle let up and I got dressed, went out and re-set the tent properly. I tried to dry our sleeping bags, but the rain started again and we retreated back inside our now much cozier, properly set tent.

Mid-afternoon the drizzle broke again and, a bit stir crazy by now, we donned our rain gear and stepped out into a world of mist. We walked down the gravel bar a short distance to the main course of the Teklanika, which gurgled and sluiced swiftly over the barely submerged rocks, carrying gray glacial silt on its way to the sea.

Rev became interested in bubbles coming up from the muddy bottom of the little stream that flowed in the gravel bar next to our tent—unlike the main course of the river, this was clear, rain runoff. Rev believed the bubbles were underground springs, based no doubt on his understanding and recollection of springs he’d seen in Texas.

I pointed out they looked more like air bubbles coming up from tiny creatures down in the mud. Rev decided this was correct and started trying to dig the critters out with a stick. He spent several minutes thus busily engaged, but we never saw any little animals.

We could see a wall of thick gray mist enshrouding the entire southern end of the Teklanika gorge up toward the glacier, and in a few minutes learned this was another wave of misty drizzle sending us back into the shelter of our tent, a tiny dot of light blue in the vast landscape.

By evening, the constant rain had dampened our spirits, and I suggested that we accelerate our schedule and plan to leave the park a day earlier, to which Rev readily agreed. This decided, we moved our campsite late that evening farther down the river, hiking about two hours, intending to get closer to Igloo Campground, where we could catch a camper bus out.

The plan was to have easier going walking on the flat river gravel bar and avoid the up and down journey back over the saddle pass. This turned out to be a disastrously flawed set of assumptions.

That night in the tent, everything was damp except for a plastic bag of dry clothes. A similar bag was now full of sopping wet jeans, socks and other clothing, and this became another 20-30 pounds for our packs.

Rev complained that he was ill, but I later concluded that he was probably just cold and exhausted. He said he could not warm up, complaining that his bag was wet. We traded sleeping bags and I had him put on his fleece jacket and a precious pair of dry socks from the plastic bag. Finally he dropped off in the crepuscular gloaming of August dusk in Alaska, with the dying day’s light finally fading around 11:30 p.m.

I must have been very tired, because I normally sleep fitfully and wake tossing and turning often in tents. But this night I slept straight through, because the next thing I remember was opening my eyes to see the gray light of morning in the tent.

This day proved to be an ordeal of physical endurance that would push us both to the limits of will and strength.

Continued in Part 2...

Denali Backcountry Journal - Part 2 of 2

The following notes were transcribed almost verbatim from a handwritten journal I kept during a trip to Denali National Park in Alaska with my son Revi, who was age 10 at the time.

August 15, 2007

I got Rev up and we struck camp and left at 5:30 a.m. He was unhappy and grumbling, but I knew we had to get going if we wanted to catch the first camper bus and make the 12:15 p.m. train to Anchorage. We never made that train.

Our first obstacle was a braid of the Teklanika we had to cross in order to walk further upriver on flat gravel, not the river’s main course, but too wide to jump and too deep to walk across on exposed rocks. I decided we had to walk through in our boots—the park backcountry video had strongly advised not to try to cross rivers barefoot, and we had no other shoes.

I had shouldered the sopping bag of jeans and clothes and the wet tent, taking most of the weight. My pack must now have weighed 50-60 pounds, maybe more. We trudged upriver for an hour or two, then came to our first serious obstacle.

The main course of the Teklanika here ran right up against a sheer cliff, a shoulder of Cathedral Mountain on the left or west side of the river, blocking our access to further travel on the flat gravel bar. We could not cross the swift-moving main course—this would have meant submerging to the waist at least, and was far too dangerous. To fall into such frigid glacier melt, or to lose a backpack sinking like a heavy stone, was too great a risk. The temperatures were mild at this season for Alaska—daily highs near 65 degrees Fahrenheit and nightly lows near 45 degrees. But to lose the tent and have no warm retreat, to be left out in the rain exposed, could lead to life-threatening hypothermia. We thus had to climb around this section of river, going up over the mountainous hill, hoping to return to the river past the cliff.

We could either try to climb the steep cliff or backtrack, hoping to find an easier path of ascent. I thought I could see a way up, and we began to try to scale the rocky cliff with heavy packs—this proved to be foolish. I could probably have made it, though my legs began to tremble with strain about ¾ of the way up. Rev, however, bogged down about 1/3 of the way up. I tried coaxing and coaching him, but he began to be frightened and I finally saw it was no use. Unable to help him down with my pack on, I finally threw it 20 feet to the bottom.

Back on the river shore, we felt defeated and discouraged. We backtracked upriver from the cliff, and within 50 yards we found a path leading up a slope covered with trees and green vegetation. This proved far easier to climb, offering firmer footholds than the loose rock of the bare cliff, plus trees to pull ourselves up.

Within minutes, we were up on the cliff rim. Then began an hour or more of hiking through dense vegetation. It began to rain again and we were soon wetter than at any point on the trip, as we pushed through branches and threaded a slow course through the forest.

We finally found faint trails, possibly make by earlier hikers but also no doubt used by animals. Again we began calling “Hey bear, Ho bear!” At one point the trail came out near the cliff rim, some 300 feet or more above the riverbed, and we caught a grand view of the Teklanika below, looking back toward the site of our failed first ascent.

Finally, we descended back to the river gravel bar, hoping we were now home free to walk an easier route to the camper bus stop. This was not to be.

After another hour or so, again we came to a place where the river’s main course hugged a cliff on the western shore. I now began to regret my decision not to go back the way we had come over the saddle pass—not for the last time!

We had no choice and again climbed up and through the forest on yet another out flung spur of Cathedral Mountain. This began encouragingly through more level and open terrain, but we soon discovered it led into a sodden bog around a lake, where the path became a stream full of 1-2 feet of water in places.

As we rounded this spur and came back around toward the river, we got our first experience of traveling through the tundra. The ground was soggy and damp—our feet sank into the uneven hillocks, making travel tiresome and slow. Low shrubs from ankle height to occasional waist or chest high groves of willow and alder regularly blocked the way, requiring that we go around or push through the tight tangle of branches.

This section nearly did Rev in. We had now been hiking through wet, rugged terrain for close to four hours with heavy packs. Even though we could see the river with its welcome flat gravel bar ahead, the tundra and willow thickets tired him to the point of frustrated exhaustion.
We finally returned to the river and were able to proceed another hour or so until we reached our final obstacle on the river and could go no further that way. A small, white sign read “Critical Wildlife Closure: Closed to All Entry.”

This matched the closure zone I had marked on the National Geological Survey topo map I had bought in the park, but it confused us because we thought the Igloo Campground bus stop was adjacent to this point on the river, and the park road bridge over the Teklanika should have been visible just downriver, but we could see neither.

We had no choice but to leave the river at this point, and so began the harrowing final stage of our wilderness adventure.

We scaled the river cliff up a stream-carved gully, following one of the omni-present social trails that always seemed to emerge at such points. We had now been hiking with heavy loads for 6-7 hours. I powered up my mobile phone, and while I could get no cell service to make calls, I could see that it was now about 1 p.m. We had missed the 12:15 p.m. train, and probably the 2 p.m. bus back to Anchorage as well.

Revi was beyond exhausted. He moved so slowly that I had to constantly wait for him to catch up to me (though I typically seem to walk faster than most people at any time). He wanted to stop, and I tried to think through the wisdom of pitching the tent so we could both sleep for an hour or so before going on.

But we were now on the flat tundra meadows just west of the Teklanika, and the ground everywhere was soaking wet. Both of us at this point were determined not to spend another cold, wet night in the tent. So we pressed on.

I read and re-read the map and tried to compare it with the landscape. According to my best judgment, if the mountains we were seeing were in fact Cathedral Mt and Igloo Mt, the Igloo Campground stop and the park road should be right across from the boundary of the river closure zone, yet the road was nowhere in sight. I decided, based on the map and the land, that the road had to be about a mile west across the tundra meadows, though we couldn’t see it.

Thus we began the most difficult and emotionally charged part of the trip. In spite of frequent rest stops as we slowly slogged across the tundra, Revi was at last stumbling and overwrought. I told him I had made a mistake—we should have gone back over the pass the way we came in, in which case we would probably be on the train to Anchorage by now. At this, Revi became so disconsolate he wept openly, and I said I was sorry for ever bringing him to this point. I told him if we could keep going, although we had missed that day’s train, if we could get out of the wild, we’d spend the night in a nice hotel on the highway.

I hugged my son and assured him that we would do this together, that we would persevere and get out of the wilderness. Even as I said this, fear and worry had begun to gnaw at me. We had now come more than a mile from the river out onto the great tundra meadow. We were closer, almost halfway to what I thought must be Igloo Mt, but still saw no sign of the road. I even climbed a small spruce to a height of about 12 feet, but still saw no road.

One small piece of consolation at this stage: the sun finally made a weak showing and the day warmed a bit. Our way was blocked regularly now by low swales where willows grew taller than my hat and under their entwined branches and trunks bogs split by gurgling clear rainwater streams pooled up around the tundra hummocks.

We began to speak about ways to signal rescuers. Revi suggested accosting one of the flight seeing planes we could hear overhead, but usually not see, every hour or so. I said we might build a fire to make smoke.

At this point, Revi began to voice the optimistic view that the road was definitely there, even saying he could see telephone poles marching up a hill to the south. I climbed a tundra hillock, wiped off the misty lenses of the binoculars and had a thorough look at the horizon from one side to the other, but saw no phone poles.

Nonetheless, Rev continued to say he was sure the road was there. I said nothing, not wanting to voice how unsure and concerned I was becoming. If the road was not there after we worked so hard to cross the tundra, it would mean that my map reading was wrong and we were lost. I had no good plan B if this were the case—we could pitch the tent and at least get some rest, but afterward we’d still be in the same pickle.

I kept these gloomy thoughts to myself, and we kept going. At last, two thirds of the way across the meadow toward Igloo Mountain, looking again with the binoculars, it now appeared there could be a ridge line of hills close to the mountain, lying across the entire horizon at the mountain’s base. It was possible, I told myself, then Rev, that the road could be behind this ridge, hidden from our view.

We began to make for this ridge line, a gently rolling slope ahead of us. At the top, we would know. The road would either be there, or it wouldn’t.

Eagerly, I pressed ahead, calling to Revi to join me. At the summit, I turned to the left, and there it was—a bus stopped on the Igloo Campground bridge.

“Revi, there’s a bus. It’s the road! We’re saved!” I called, waving and shouting.

Slowly, but with great relief, we hiked the last quarter mile to the road, resting several times. Whenever I sat down to wait for Revi to catch up, I would pick the many blueberries that grew everywhere around me, close at hand in the tundra, and pop them into my mouth four and five at a time. They were tart but also sweet and good.

We reached the bridge at 4:30 p.m. Except for several 15-20 minute stops to eat, and many more frequent short rests, we had been hiking steadily with heavy loads for 11 hours. Sitting on the concrete bridge, we took off our soaking wet socks and boots and waited, completely exhausted, for the camper bus.

* * *

That evening at the park Wilderness Access Center, filthy with mud, wearing squishing, soaking boots and socks, I phoned about eight hotels in the canyon area on the highway just outside the park entrance, as well as four to six more in areas just north and south of the park. At every turn, the answer was the same: no vacancies.

I phoned the last area hotel on the list given to me by a park store employee, and luck finally turned our way. The McKinley Chalet Resort had rooms for $250 per night. I gulped, but only briefly, then told them heck yes, send the shuttle bus.

Thus began the kinder, gentler, downhill part of our Alaska trip. We trudged with our sodden things to the room. I cleaned the boots and socks as best I could in the bathtub, and we used the wall blow dryer to try to dry our boots, the only footwear we had. We both took blissful hot showers and donned what we had in the way of clean, dry clothing. We then had one of the best meals I’ve ever had at the hotel bar and grill, with spectacular views of the big, wild Nenana River just outside the windows. The next day, I walked, slow and sore, to the hotel complex laundry and dried all our wet things. Then we caught the Alaska Railroad and traveled in grand style back to Anchorage, lounging in the spacious, comfortable seats, viewing the spectacular scenery passing by from the elevated Dome Car with its arching glass roof and windows all around, and enjoying another fabulous meal in the dining car, which tickled Rev to bust. We’d earned a few comforts, and we took them.