Why I Rode My Bike to Alaska and What the Nat Geo Film Missed
Hubris probably got the best of me. I wanted to finish off Ron Kauk’s testpiece, Magic Line, quickly, so I decided to skip the gear placements in the crux and just go for it. I got pumped, couldn’t place gear and tried to sprint to the next rest. Then I slipped. Thankfully, my belayer pulled in several armfuls of slack with lightning speed. I slammed into the wall just a few feet above the ground and instantly knew I had remodeled something in my leg. I never imagined that an Achilles rupture would mean two years until I could properly climb again.
What surprised me most about my forced time off was that my morale was basically unaffected. I always thought my happiness was based on a constant ability to go rock climbing. But having that taken away gave me time to focus on my family and find purpose beyond pulling on holds. I dove more deeply into my activism work and was happy. Was I losing my edge or just evolving? I am still trying to figure that one out.
One of the things I got involved in was advocating for policy around a piece of legislation called the “Roadless Rule,” which aims to save old-growth forest in Southeast Alaska, specifically Tongass National Forest. The idea is that if they prohibit road building, it makes it much harder to remove trees. President Clinton introduced it, Trump rolled it back and environmental groups lobbied Biden to reinstate it. When I learned the Devils Thumb—a 7,000-foot peak boasting the largest unclimbed alpine face in North America—sits squarely in the middle of the Tongass, I knew I had to go. But I didn’t want to just fly there.
During my research on the Tongass, I’d also come across the term “ground truthing.” The phrase was adopted by environmentalists from the world of mapping and surveying. In her 1970 essay “Ground Truthing,” Terry Tempest Williams defined it as “walking the ground to see for oneself if what has been told is true.” For me, ground truthing is about immersing yourself in a place—tasting it, smelling it, getting it all over you. It’s about experiencing the natural world in its rawest form. It occurred to me that biking to Alaska felt like the best way to get intimate with the place I wanted to protect. I realize now that I must have also had some pent-up adventure stoke and a desire to show myself that I wasn’t getting soft.
So I began working on a plan to ride my bike 2,400 miles from Colorado to Alaska, stopping to climb along the way. I’d sail the Inside Passage to Petersburg, Alaska, to access the Devils Thumb on foot, hiking through the Tongass National Forest. If all went well, the trip would take two to three months. It sounded good in theory. Good enough that when I told my friend Alex Honnold about it, he wanted in.
Alex and I left my house on June 29, 2023. We headed north into Wyoming, aiming for Petersburg using bike directions from Google Maps. We soon found ourselves forging marshes and questing across the desert, following faint cattle trails through southern Wyoming, aiming for Mount Hooker in the Wind River Range before going on to the Bugaboos nearly 1,000 miles away.
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