2020s
Football and film with Kathmandu youth, Summer 2025
Throughout my time in Kathmandu, Nepal I had the incredible opportunity to lead a football (soccer) camp for young girls 6-13 years old as well as assist in the creation of two short films at Voices of Women Media. Football
The football workshop was centered around making football more accessible to young girls in Nepal, a place where there is an extreme lack of funding allocated towards youth sports. All of the promotion for the camp was done over the VOW’s Instagram page, website, through word of mouth, and through fliers posted around the community library. Each session incorporated the basics of handling the ball, learning how to play a team sport, and sparking joy while being active. The practices included activities such as stretching, warming up, passing lines, cone dribbling, scrimmages, and various games with the football.The workshop overall was a huge success! All of the girls were extremely excited to play, and many improved greatly over the duration of the camp. The workshop went exactly as planned, 11 girls (and 3 boys) came to each 1.5 hour training, warmed up, ran various drills, played a large scrimmage, then practiced close-range shooting.
After the session, we had snacks including mango juice, bananas, and granola bars. The players took the trainings very seriously, particularly the older ones. The young girls laughed a lot throughout the sessions which was great to see. I was particularly struck by one of the girls who would sleep in her football jersey, shorts, and socks the night before each training because she was so excited to play.
At the beginning of the workshop my main goal was to keep all of the players engaged and grow their enjoyment and love for football. It was evident that this was a success. Many of the parents of players came up to me after the sessions, thanked me, and said that the girls had never had a female coach before. Additionally, some of the girls said that at school only the boys play football, and it is hard for them to join. I am very proud that after the workshop many of them informed me that they had the confidence to start playing football with the boys during lunchtime due to the camp.
Films
The other portion of my time in Kathmandu was spent working with the Techno Hub. Techno Hub is a multi-week workshop with a group of 12 girls ages 15-16 at Voices of Women Media. The workshop facilitates media and computer trainings, technical camera skills, and helps improve public speaking. The intention of the workshop is to empower young women in local government schools with tech skills for their future. During the time I worked with Techno Hub, we brainstormed, storyboarded, filmed, edited, and produced two short films on social issues that the girls wanted to highlight. One film centered on bullying in school and the other on girls doing all the work in the home. After producing the films, we screened them for their families, and now they are touring the films around Kathmandu Valley at multiple government high schools and colleges.Here is the private link to the two short films on Youtube:
Voices of Women Media: Unseen and Only the Daughter's Duty
I am incredibly humbled to have the ability to engage in work that truly inspires and allows me to uplift fellow women of color in a world which continues to oppress and marginalize our communities. I look forward to continuing this work in the future and returning to Nepal to conduct the football camp again. These experiences would not have been possible without the generosity of the Chase Coggins Memorial Fund.
An Exploration of a Rehabilitated Electrical Dam and the Environmental Effects of Old Infrastructure in the Adirondack Park
This summer I traversed the Whitney Loop, a 55-mile portage-heavy canoe trip. The loop goes through Round Lake, Little Tupper Lake, Rock Pond, Lake Lila, Low’s Lake, and the Bog River flow, with numerous smaller ponds and outlets in between. On the surface, the trip appears to epitomize the vast untouched nature of the American interior. That facade, however, covers up the man-made nature of this landscape. Lows Lake was created by Lows Upper and Lower dams in the early 1900s. Prior to human intervention, the large body of water was a collection of small ponds, streams, marshes and hills. Lows created these dams for their hydroelectric power, to fuel the area’s timber and maple syrup industry. Alongside these efforts, new railroads were constructed to ship products down to New York City. Recently, Lows Lower Dam was closed for repair work by New York State’s Department of Environmental Conservation. The original intent of this rehabilitation work was structural repair. The remnants of these exterior repairs can be seen in the white plaster across the structure. Work was conducted both at the inlet and rear supports. My investigation into the dam closure suggested that the DEC’s project had also, secretly, repaired the old electrical equipment in the dam. They had kept a tight lid on this aspect of the work. I could gather no details from the organization, nor local reporters. Outfitters had only ascertained that PCBs had leaked into the surrounding water. That secondhand information, squeezed out of one of the projects’ workers, was the most that I was able to learn. Nor did a look around the dam itself provide any more information.
Regardless of the secrecy, the benefit of this work is the continued public access to one of the most beautiful parks in the country. Aside from the significant man-made dams like Lows Lower Dam I needed to cross, there were also dozens of beaver dams scattered along the narrow outlets. These opened up to beautiful lakes, covered in windswept trees, loons, and the occasional fellow traveler. At times I portaged on train tracks between these lakes. Other times through paths marked loosely by small patches. During the weeklong trip I camped on beaches, small clearings in the woods, and the many small islands dotting the route. The rehabilitation of Lows Lower Dam represents an essential element of the experience of the Adirondacks. As old infrastructure continues to age, this kind of work will be increasingly needed, and the public needs to be cognizant of the environmental and human risks from decomposing industry.
A journey of strings and banjos and mandolins and songs
The road is empty; dust kicks up. Green trees hang low over us as we drive, drive, drive forward. A tape is playing; it’s a field recording of a young fiddle player in Abingdon singing “Single Girl, Married Girl” by the Carter Family. I have been on a journey of strings and banjos and mandolins and songs, and I feel right at home.This summer, I embarked on a road trip across Appalachia and along the West Coast to meet with folk, country, old-time, and bluegrass musicians who have contributed to shaping the history of American folk music since its beginnings. Through the medium of oral histories (and with complementary photographs), I was able to capture the stories and backgrounds of dozens of musicians—banjo players, singers, fiddlers, tabla drummers, and more—-who find home and community in folk traditions.
The purpose of the project was to seek to create a permanent repository in the Yale Music Library of folk, old-time, and bluegrass oral histories, as well as to share those stories with the wider Yale community through an interactive exhibit in my home college of Saybrook. Preserved through audio files and through film, the journey was a long and beautiful one, populated by a number of conversations that shifted the ways in which I view the links between music, selfhood, and change. I stopped in the folk music hubs of Charlottesville, Floyd, Bristol, Abingdon, Nashville, Louisville, Owensboro, Salinas, Berkeley, Ashland, Florence, and Portland to sit down with musicians and talk about their musical processes, learning about diverse strands of folk practices ranging from Celtic traditions to Hinduism’s spiritual influences. Every conversation I had blew my mind, not only in the scope of its window into musicians’ souls, but in its authenticity, warmness, and sense of welcome. I felt at home in every place I visited; the reason why is the nature of folk music, and the way that it intentionally forges community in every fiber of what it does.
During my first stop in Charlottesville, Virginia, I met with a local musician named Matthew O’Donnell, who began in Celtic folk spaces in Florida, then found himself returning to the roots of folk music as a “bard of traditional music” in Virginia. I then met with the Church Sisters in Blacksburg; the owners of the Floyd Country Store in Floyd; workers at the Birthplace of Country Music Museum in Bristol; Ed Snodderly, the owner of the Down Home, in Johnson City; bluegrass radio host Ivy Sheppard; youth fiddlers at the Annual Youth Fiddlers’ Convention in Abingdon; Carl Johnson in Eastern Tennessee; and performers at the Station Inn in Nashville.
Along the way, many musicians cited Appalachia as one of, actually, two primary folk hubs in the United States, the other one centralized along the central coast of California and extending up into the Pacific Northwest. So, with my remaining fellowship funding, I went to the West Coast in August to continue interviewing folk musicians within that localized sphere. I attended the Good Ol’ Fashioned Bluegrass Festival in Tres Pinos, CAl, where I interviewed a number of young musicians, as well as Tom Diamant, a local radio host and big name in folk music. Against the backdrop of the Gabilan Mountains, I got to witness the multigenerational legacy of bluegrass music in Central and Northern California. I then drove up to Berkeley, where I sat down with the folk legends Suzy and Eric Thompson, who welcomed me into their beautiful home to chat about bluegrass on the West Coast. I then interviewed Jacqui Aubert in Ashland and a collective of Celtic musicians on the Oregon coast.
All in all, every single conversation I had—and every town I was welcomed into with open arms—reinforced the power of folk music to connect, to fight, and to transform. A common vein in many of my conversations was the organizing power of folk and bluegrass; after all, the genres are seen as those of the people—and therefore serve as mechanisms for the people to speak up for what they believe in.
I am so grateful to the Chase Coggins Memorial Fund for making this experience possible, and I am excited to preserve these stories for decades to come in the Music Library’s archives—and to share them with the wider Yale public this fall through my interactive exhibit. Through my journey, I not only accomplished my goals, but made lifelong friends who I am excited to keep learning from as I grow as both a musician and as a person.
Sacred Peaks and Climbs:
This summer I sought out to explore the wilderness of the mountains in China — backpacking and climbing in the Sichuan region. Known for its otherworldly mountainous landscape frequented in ancient Chinese brush painting and poetry and its religious significance in Buddhism/Taoism/Confucianism, I wanted to see for myself the mountain tops glazed in wispy clouds that I’d read about and painted myself as a kid taking art classes with a Chinese teacher. The places I picked to explore were rather ambitious, situated at the edges of the Tibetan plateau with prominence of thousands of meters. As my trip neared, it became evident that monsoon season and weather would be a concern — at such high altitudes, the mountains I’d planned to explore were extremely dangerous if there was even a chance of a storm. Thus, I adjusted my itinerary to allow for maximum flexibility — having a home base in Chengdu, with easy day-access to nearby mountains, and also adding a Japan segment on the way to China to guarantee I’d get at least some Asia backpacking in if the weather didn’t cooperate. I will start with China, since that was my original destination, and then I will loop back to talk about my travels in Japan prior.
I started with one week just outside of Dalian, a city in northeast China at the tip of a peninsula, doing hikes along the ocean and in the small mountains nearby, most of which were unnamed. This week was mainly for getting acclimatized to Chinese culture again, after 9 years of not having been to China and the first time being there without my parents – paying using WeChat pay, learning how to navigate public transportation on my own, which I would need in later weeks when getting to trails and mountains.
I then made a pitstop in Chongqing, a very modern city with numerous skyscrapers but unique in that it is built into the cliffside and right at the convergence of two major rivers, the Jialing and Yangtze Rivers. This leads to steep walks that feel like hikes from just exploring the city, and a place that is impossible to navigate via a map, as it is so three dimensional – at one skyscraper, you walk in one side on the ground floor, take the elevator up to the 28th floor, and walk out the other side to a completely normal, huge guangchang (plaza), as if that were the ground level. It was a fun, mountainous city, a great precursor to Chengdu, my next destination, and the many mountains I planned to climb there. In Chengdu, I met up with my climbing partner, a friend from Yale, and there we stayed for almost two weeks, at my great aunt’s extra apartment outside of the city. While the original plan was to mainly camp and backpack in the mountains, the forecast predicted a rain at some point every single day up until the last two days we were there. Thus, having the apartment as a home base was nice, where we could stay safe but get outdoors easily as soon as the weather cleared up. It was located northwest of the city center, a great location for easily getting into the mountains of the Tibetan Plateau that sprawl all to the north and west of Chengdu. The neighborhood we lived in was extremely local – we saw a total of three other foreigners the entire time we were staying there – and thus it was fun to experience living like a Chinese local, buying groceries every single day, getting baozi (bao buns) every morning from the same shop and jianbing (an egg-crepe burrito-like street food) every evening from the same guy, whom we got to know.
During our time in Chengdu, we took many day trips by train to hike at Qingcheng Shan, Emei Shan, and Dujiangyan Scenic Area.
Mount Qingcheng is a sacred Taoist mountain, considered one of the birthplaces of Taoism. This was the first place we hiked, and it was our introduction to Chinese hiking – infinite stairs going up the mountainside. Along the way and even at the peak, there are full restaurants with hot meals and numerous small vendors selling street food, cucumbers, watermelon, or Chinese red bull (which we tried; it tasted amazing in the hot and humid weather). Halfway up, there was a Taoist temple built directly into the cliffside, called Chaoyang Cave. It was deep and cavernous, built into the natural cave, and inside were many enshrining statues, and we were not allowed to take photos, which became common for many sacred temples we encountered. More flights of steep stairs later, we reached the top, which had another large multistory Taoist temple called Shaoqing Palace. Lion statues and burning incense set a beautiful atmosphere amidst the foggy scenery, with an amazing view of the surrounding mountains. We had lunch at the top, then, as it was fairly crowded, descended the hundreds of stairs back down. As we took the train back to the city, we were rewarded with a magnificent view of the mountain peaks we were just in that had been covered when we started, since the previous rain had finally stopped.
Emei Shan is one of the four sacred Buddhist mountains of China, the tallest of the four at over 3,000 meters. This adventure involved a three hour train ride, a 2 mile walk to the trailhead (which was a cool temple), then another 14 miles including about 3,000 meters of elevation gain – the prominence of this mountain is insane. The trail again consisted of endless stairs (at many points this hike felt more like a workout then a hike), but along the way were dozens of Buddhist temples and Buddha statues, other religious statues carved into the rock of the mountainside, and a monkey habitat area for the Tibetan Macaque species. One particular temple, Wannian Temple, is known for its connection to the poet Li Bai, who stayed there and wrote poems, including “峨眉山月歌” (Emei Mountain Moon Song). Several other temples are notable for their connections with Buddhist, Taoist, and Confucian leaders, all of whom visited the sacred mountain and stayed at these places. The star of the mountain, though, and what makes it such a sacred place is the Golden Summit, where there is a massive gilded Buddhist statue and temple. The statue, called the Ten-faced Puxian Stupa, is of a bodhisattva named Samantabhadra, an “enlightened being” in Buddhism who has delayed entering nirvana in order to help others achieve enlightenment, and it is almost 50 meters tall and weighs 660 tons. Unfortunately, it started raining while we were hiking, so the views were not as incredible as they could have been being that high up, but it was still a beautiful, very exhausting, journey. While in Chengdu, we also went climbing at the local climbing gyms. We climbed with the local Chinese people and got to know some of them, exchanging Wechat contacts, and talked to them about the outdoor climbing scene in China – which they called “wild climbing,” representative of how much of the Chinese population views rock climbing. It was fun getting to know them and hearing about how they were trying to increase participation in the sport in China, especially by creating programs, training teams, and competitions geared towards kids. We kept in contact with the group we met for the duration of our stay, hoping to find a weather window to go climb outdoors with them, but unfortunately the daily bits of rain kept the rock wet enough the entire time, and we were not able to do any outdoor climbing. Hearing from our friends about the outdoor climbing in the area made us really want to return in the future during the fall season, which is the best time of year to climb there. Finally, we returned to Dalian, where we did some wild camping and (a minimal amount of) outdoor bouldering on the beach. We found that it was extremely difficult to find places where it was legal to do either of these things – beaches are heavily regulated, closing at nightfall, and bouldering in places not established as climbing areas is dangerous as the rock could easily break and crumble beneath you. We learned that Dalian is not really an outdoorsy city, with the exception of swimming in the ocean, but it was a fun adventure seeking out places to camp on the beach, looking for sea urchins and sea cucumbers in the tidal pools, and pulling onto some rocks whenever we could safely.
Now, we rewind back to Japan. I met up with a high school friend in Japan on my way to China, and there, we did 4 days of hiking on the Old Nakasendo Trail, an ancient samurai trail connecting historic Japanese cities and towns, as well as 5 days in the Japanese Alps.
On the Nakasendo, we stayed at small ryokans, eating traditional Japanese breakfasts and dinners, passing by lots of temples and shrines, walking many miles in the rain, and going through many historical small towns nestled into the mountains. A highlight of the section of trail we did, starting from Nakatsugawa and walking all the way to Narai, was Torii Pass, the highest point of the trail amidst beautiful green and wet forest, with a huge shrine marking the hilltop within the trees. Much of the trail was extremely quiet and peaceful (like Japan in general), and we didn’t see many people except in the towns.
We then took the train to Matsumoto, a city at the edge of the Japanese Alps, where we stayed overnight and prepared for 5 days backpacking in the mountains. The next morning, we took a 5am bus to Kamikochi, the starting area for multi-day treks, almost a small town itself. It was a bit early in the season for the Alps, and the highest altitude peaks were still closed due to snow and ice, but we got high enough up to really experience Japanese alpine climbing – hiking through some snowy trail conditions, getting hot chicken katsu Japanese curry in the huts to finish off a long day of hiking, and talking to the local Japanese hikers staying in the huts. We camped outside for 4 nights, including two nights of intense downpour, but it was beautiful every morning seeing the fog lift as the sun glazed through the mist in the mountain valley.
Reflections:
Both China and Japan have breathtaking mountains – experiencing them feels like going back in time to the ancient days written about by Li Bai and other poets, into the landscapes of old brush paintings. At the same time, in both China and Japan, accessible wilderness doesn’t truly exist (at least not like in the US).
In China, a country full of insanely beautiful landscapes, those landscapes fall on one side of a fairly hard line dividing 1) easy access, culturally significant, and hence unfortunately now overcrowded mountains or 2) more rugged, hard to reach, equally culturally significant and hence very closely monitored/restricted mountains. The first group is beautiful but doesn’t feel like wilderness, but there are advantages to the development that makes it feel that way. The trails are all cleared and paved with stones, stairs are built into the mountainside, every 5 minutes there are people along the stone path selling food and water, roads lead to the top carrying busloads of tourists directly to the Golden Buddha overlooking the mountain, etc. China does a great job of opening up these sites so as many tourists as possible can experience them, but they are perhaps no longer the same places of solitude and natural exploration that Li Bai wrote about in his poetry. The second group is beautiful too, but much harder to access on your own — scant blog posts online are all the resources you have to go off of, and it’s very hard to imagine what will actually be there - accommodations, places to get food, campsites - without actually being there. The legality of camping or backpacking in certain areas is questionable. For some areas, the only way to access it seems to be to book a guided tour, and those even stretch the rules of legality. The same idea applies to climbing — still being relatively new and developing as an activity in China, “official” outdoor crags are hard to find, and unofficial ones require knowing (and deeply trusting) locals. Of course, my climbing experiences were greatly muddled by the weather, and so other climbing areas during other times of year may be different and well developed. Overall in China, there is a deep sense of control over crafting what wilderness is accessible and how it is accessed and experienced, which has both advantages and disadvantages – it allows greater populations to safely and easily get to the outdoors, but also makes it so that the outdoors feels no longer like the wilderness.
Japan, similarly, has some of the best alpine climbing in the world and a culture for the outdoors that is not as well known as it should be. They, too, have done a great job making it easy to access – buses can take you directly from major cities to campsites in the mountains (Kamikochi is almost like a small town at the foot of the mountains), huts are built and stocked all the way to the peak. Hiking in the Japanese alps felt very different from China’s wilderness and more similar to Europe’s. On the Old Nakasendo trail, too, I learned that the government pays local businesses in the towns along the trail to maintain a historical feel, and along with its preservation of the many temples and shrines along the path I think this epitomizes Japan’s attempts to really preserve and open up these experiences to as many people as possible, which is a similarity with China. Another interesting note is Japan’s luggage transport service, which will transfer your bags for you and deliver them to your next destination every day as you make the trek, encouraging people to participate in these trails.
Overall, I think China and Japan both have blended the outdoors experience with a cultural and historical experience in a unique way. Exploring the mountains in East Asia allowed me to connect with the outdoors with a sense that I was also connecting with people of the past, which was a very fun adventure. I loved my time there this summer and am thankful for the Chase Coggins Memorial Fund for giving me the opportunity to do so much exploration in one trip. I would love to return there in the future and see what other corners of the outdoors I can uncover there in a different season, and continue to seek out the wilderness everywhere I go.
Introduction
I arrived in Karachi on June 7th, and met with Mrs. Lari that day. The plan had been to create a living architectural archive of a slum in Clifton that was undergoing construction. However, there were two significant complications. First, that I was unable to find any film in Karachi. Through conversations with friends and colleagues, I learned that there is currently an overall film shortage in the country. All of the film available to buy is expired. There are also very few accessible places in the entire country that develop film. The most feasible option was a developing studio in Lahore. As a result, my plan to create an art book comprised of film I shot was not possible. Because of this, I worked as a general intern in the Heritage Foundation’s studio. This included a lot of data preparation and pulling, as well as assisting on her proposal to the city government to create a zero-carbon street. The site for the proposed project is on Khayaban-e-Iqbal, one of the city’s major commercial streets. A large part of ensuring zero-carbon is creating green surfaces. So, I worked to design various methodologies that can serve as green architectural intervention (primarily green walls and facades), and are adaptable to many different building-specific contexts. As an additional side project, I examined the chulah interventions which Mrs. Lari and her team have pioneered. Chulah is the word for oven, or stove, in Urdu. The Heritage Foundation’s chulah project in rural Sindh focuses on providing sustainable, low-cost cookstoves that address several pressing issues faced by local communities. These chulahs are designed to reduce indoor air pollution by minimizing smoke, which is a major health hazard, particularly for women and children who spend the most time in the kitchen. By using less firewood than traditional cooking methods, the stoves are more energy-efficient and cost-effective, alleviating the pressure on local wood resources. Made from locally available materials like clay and mud, the stoves are not only affordable but also environmentally sustainable, helping to combat deforestation. Moreover, the chulahs significantly reduce the time and effort women spend gathering firewood, thus improving their health and overall well-being while empowering them in their daily lives. The simple, scalable design of the stoves makes them accessible to even the poorest families, ensuring that this solution can be replicated across rural areas. This replicability is key; the Heritage Foundation attempts to step away from a colonial-aid pattern, in which an external Western organization or group of philanthropists provide a one-time donation which creates a dependent relationship. Instead, acknowledging first that although the members of the Heritage Foundation team are Pakistani, they do not belong to the indigenous groups they are working with, and second that in order for long term community empowerment there must be a level of self sufficiency, the projects operate on a zero-donor model. The goal is that the Heritage Foundation’s knowledge and resources quickly become obsolete. This is done by monetizing knowledge. As a simplified process, a member of the Heritage Foundation goes to a village and teaches the construction methodology (of chulahs or other built interventions). As the necessary materials are all locally found, there is very little initial cost. Members from this village then go to neighboring villages and act as consultants. They charge a small fee for teaching others what they have been taught, which not only provides significant income, but also incentivizes the spread of this knowledge. It is through this very organic system that there are now over 80,000 villages which have implemented the Heritage Foundation’s vernacular and disaster-relief oriented architectural interventions. With the chulahs in particular, there’s a really important aspect of individual female empowerment. In a context where women are often restricted by the patriarchal wadera (feudal) system, the chulahs allow them to assert ownership over their physical space, providing a sense of agency that is both subtle and profound. Women not only benefit from the chulah’s efficiency and health advantages, but also engage in the process of building and decorating these stoves, passing down skills through a maternal lineage of knowledge-sharing. The act of ornamentation—adding sculptural and cultural elements to the chulahs—becomes a form of cultural and feminist expression, allowing women to reflect their personal and collective identities. This process fosters economic empowerment, as women can sell their knowledge and craftsmanship, while also developing valuable skills and gaining confidence. Furthermore, the chulah project promotes community-building, as women work together to create and decorate stoves, forming solidarity networks and increasing their visibility and influence within their communities. The chulahs offer women a pathway to reclaim agency and freedom, not just in their domestic space but also in their broader social and cultural contexts. I’m now at an exciting point in my life, gaining specialized knowledge and experience. I plan on applying for my M.Arch in two to three years from now, and in between look for employment in a larger architecture firm in New York. It was an invaluable experience to witness how the Heritage Foundation’s offices work. Architecture is a broadly-defined tool that can be used to address a number of social, political, and economic issues. As I navigate the post-graduate career field, especially in an American context, I’m reminded that too often fields like architecture become limited in their scope and focused on large and expensive projects. This summer was also a lesson in flexibility. My work focuses going in were very different from what I actually ended up doing whilst in Karachi. No matter how well-researched a proposal or plan may be, the situation on the ground may change and plans will have to be changed too. This is especially true in a country such as Pakistan, but is always something that one needs to consider. Having to constantly adapt and be flexible is truly a skill, and one I really had to grow whilst in Karachi.
B. Photos
I am including a selection of photos of the chulahs, to demonstrate the variety in ornamentation. All of these chulahas are in use.
Stuck is perhaps too strong a word for what I am, because in this cabin there is a solid roof, passable curtains (important in the white darkness up here) and many antlers discarded by elk and moose.
I am stuck here because further north, where we intend to land on a strip of tundra long and flat enough for a Cessna 206, the ground is entombed in 15 inches of snow. We checked the satellite imagery this morning, Jared and I, like he does every morning. Jared is short and kind and somewhat nervous, easily sidetracked. He works for the National Park Service in their Fairbanks Headquarters, a large beige rectangle surrounded by oversized pickup trucks with federal plates. Jared picked me up from the airport in one of these this morning, and we both had to hoist ourselves up into the cab. Everyone drives trucks here, which feels silly this time in the year, but not so silly at other times. I am reminded that photography, biology, and other forms of perception all take place in the same three months throughout interior Alaska. Ever see a picture of the tundra in winter? The background of this page is a good teaser.
Anyway, the Park Service building. It is rectangular and beige and those who work there become rectangular and beige, too. After Jared and I went to Fred Meyer and returned with many pounds of cheese and salami and other dense food and deposited it in yellow drybags on the warehouse floor, we went to Katy’s office. Katy handles logistics for Arctic Network Inventory and Monitoring. When we walked in, she was straddling her stool as if it were a merry go round horse, and clacking away on a Park website that was last updated in 1997. Her desk is in the middle of the room, because she is in charge of the people who come and go. She pointed to the office beyond her desk; “did you know they have their own Keurig in there? Those frat boys.” I did not know that. I did not know whose office that was. I looked in and Nick had his feet up, coffee mug in hand, his pistol sandwiched between his hip and the arm of his desk chair. Nick is skinny and has a large mustache which is a bit over the top, and Katy is right that he is something of a frat boy. Katy called Chris in, her boss’s boss. Chris has a large reddish beard which angles out from his chest, and never speaks louder than a whisper. Katy needed Chris to approve Transportation Authorizations for our plane tickets. Chris did not join the Park Service to approve Transportation Authorizations, so he clenches his jaw just a little bit. He wears a shirt that reads “Public Land Owner,” which is ironic, because he decides who comes and goes on millions of acres of federally-owned land in Alaska’s interior region. He knows his shirt is funny. Katy says “I still don’t get it” when Jared says nice shirt. She does not get it. Jared probably doesn’t, either, but he wants to impress Chris. Chris says nothing, and smiles with his eyes. After I eat two York Peppermint Patties from the bowl on Katy’s desk to avoid the conversation about TAs, Jared and I leave. We learned nothing from the conversation except that Nick has a Keurig in his office which he shares with someone else who is in some sort of mandatory training about information management. We go upstairs to Jared’s office, which is stuffed with monitors and printed pictures of birds and orange waterproof cases containing satellite phones. There is a box of Kodak photo paper in the corner that I am drawn to but decide against opening. We tried on flight helmets, and Jared confirmed that I do not have to do any mandatory training. To confirm this, he exchanged 10 lengthy Slack messages with someone who works down the hall. Such is the nature of the National Park Service.
Instead of windows to the outside, the offices in the Fairbanks Park HQ have smoked glass panels into the hallway. They are mostly shared by two people, who seem to be friends. Sarah has an office across from her dad, down the hall from Jared’s on the second floor. Sarah brought us several flight helmets to try on. The other day, she defended her masters thesis at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. When I met Sarah, she was flirting with Justin, who just finished undergrad at UAF and has a desk down the hall, but no office yet. Justin is a gym bro, and he is wearing flip flops made of string. Justin also tried on several flight helmets, and we determined that he has the biggest head, mine is second, and Jared’s is smallest. We do not know how big Jeremy’s head is, but he has his own flight helmet because he is the boss. Jeremy, Justin, Jared. Sarah says I should get a hat that says “the fourth J,” because in the field it will just be the four of us. By the time the jokes finished, it was 3 o'clock and I was getting cranky. Jared drove me to the cabin in the ridiculous truck which almost could not fit down the driveway. The sun was approximately in the middle of the sky, where it still is now at 9:20pm Alaska Standard Time. On the porch this evening, landlord Jim told me about the Country. That’s what people call the rural parts of Alaska, and where John McPhee got the title for his book about Alaska, Coming Into the Country. The book is well written, Jim says, but enforces a romantic colonial frontier ideology. Jim has lived in Alaska since 1979, most of the time in the Country, and his son graduated from Yale in 2012 then moved right back to the Country.
Fairbanks is part of Alaska’s ‘continuation corridor’; more than 70% of the state’s population lives along overland routes that connect to Canada and the lower 48, and lifestyles match. I ate dinner with John, a Yale friend who works for the Department of Fish and Wildlife in Barrow (he too is on his way north to look at birds), and we ate Thai food in an outdoor mall. On the way we passed a beauty salon in an abandoned gas station, which made no effort to conceal its past.
Part 2: May 28.
I stepped in a bog this morning, about 20 yards off the shoulder of the Dalton Highway at milepost 210, and then I stepped in it four more times before I found solid ground. The tundra grass looked an awful lot like something more substantial, but the water in my boots told me otherwise.
I got antsy in Fairbanks, saw some Muskoxen at the Large Animal Research Station, then drove up into the Arctic. It’s nice up here. Some of it looks like home at a hundred times the size. There are helicopters overhead flying toward the Ambler Mining District; 21st century prospecting happens from the air. The Boreal Lodge is a singlewide trailer sided with lumber that was milled here in the town of Wiseman. Heidi, who runs the place, also works for the Park Service at the Interagency Visitor Center in Coldfoot, just down the road. The visitor center is right across from the fuel depot, truck stop, and helicopter base, a smattering of large diesel tanks and more singlewides. Heidi grew up in Wiseman, and I suspect she is German (last name, temperament) and she says her father was a hunting guide before the Haul Road. She remembers the Caribou herds back then, before they were hunted out. The miners are headed 212 miles due west, along the southern edge of the Brooks Range, looking for gold and zinc and other underground stuff. Soon, they’ll be able to drive there. I’m here to see what’s up in the Ambler Road corridor before the bulldozers roll through it.
I walked through some of the land that might become road. The tiny puddles in the heather freeze from the bottom up, opposite anywhere else, and melt from the top down. The lichen is its own forest, like so many little clusters of nerves matted between alder bushes. Under the thin mat of roots the ground is frozen hard, and on the ridge tops it is stiff under boots. Thousands of years of permafrost are under there, calving hillsides as they weaken. I saw a gray wolf today, loping off the highway to the west, into the road corridor, round ears tucked and fur puffed in the sun. It was long and tall and alone, ranging hundreds of miles looking for weaker mammals. The decay is stubborn here; an airstrip far below the ridge, between dirt highway and pipeline, is washing into the braided river on the far edge. There are large puddles along its yellow clay length. There are old cars here, trucks mostly, from the prosperous days. Along remote highways, you can tell when the boom happened by what year all the broke down trucks in the front yards were made. Here, no surprise, it lines up with the Haul Road construction. The locals got jobs, bought trucks, and then it dried up. You can see the same along the North Cascades Highway on the west side; look for the late 60s/early 70s Chevys and Fords next time you drive over. The same will happen along the Ambler Route, I think. The locals will get jobs, buy new trucks, and then the world will know Ambler and the Kobuk River and the Caribou herd will be wiped out just like last time, and the trucks will rust beside new houses. If the road does not come, the people who want it will continue to feel trapped, and so they will be. The Dalton Highway is known to locals as the Haul Road, after its first name, the Alyeska Pipeline Haul Road. It runs north from Fairbanks, over the continental divide at Atigun Pass in the Brooks Range, and down the north slope to the oil fields at Deadhorse and the Arctic Ocean. Construction finished in 1974. It was built to move supplies for the pipeline and the oil fields on the Arctic Ocean, and for a few years, it was only open to industrial traffic; the communities along the route remained connected to the world only by air. The road is the setting of the TV show Ice Road Truckers, and it is mostly unpaved. When the road opened to the public (it was built with public money, proponents claimed, so it was only fair) the hunters arrived en masse. The Haul Road runs north-south. The Ambler Road will run perpendicular, from milepost 160 (just south of Coldfoot) west to the headwaters of the Ambler River. The Haul Road travels in the direction of the valleys, jumping between them every now and then but for the most part running alongside the Koyukuk and other rivers that run down from the continental crest in the Brooks Range. The Ambler Road would cut perpendicular to thousands of streams that run from the mountains into the Kobuk River, and cut across the Kobuk itself. It is a much bigger deal to cross laterally below mountains than travel up and down with the drainages. The road will cost $1.5 Billion, and the state of Alaska will pay for it. The rent charged to the mining companies that use it for hauling will recoup about half of the cost of construction. Every stream on the route will be dredged for its gravel so that the road will not sink back into the tundra bog. In the visitor center, there is a little chart about imports and exports in the Arctic. It lists four of each. Apparently, the Alaskan Arctic imports: Food, Clothing, Fuel, and Commodities. It exports: Minerals, Petroleum, Scenery, and Tourism. Someone had fun making the graph, which shows the state of Alaska with four radiating arrows going in, and four out, in different colors. It is displayed next to a model of the earth around the sun at different times in the year, or: why does the midnight sun and 24hr dark happen? There is also a totally preserved wooly mammoth tusk that someone pulled out of a river bank a few years ago. It’s wrapped in plastic wrap because it has to dry slowly or it’ll turn to dust. Thousands of years in the clay river bank, and if they take it out of its 6 foot long condom it’ll disintegrate. It’s late, but the sky is still bright Arctic blue. The birds are singing - I guess they’re just as confused as I am. It rained today, and the forest was a brilliant green. Coming down the slope to the car, I realized there is no red in this landscape. It is all blue and green and brown, so much brown. It is just barely spring, riverbanks cased in ice and buds not yet open on bushes. On the other end of the Ambler Road route, where I’ll be counting birds, the snow has melted. The weather station hit 0” today and, after a few days to let the ground firm up and dry out, we should be cleared to fly on Wednesday morning.
Part 3: June 13.
We stayed 8 days in Kotzebue, still waiting for the snow to melt on the airstrip. We ran every day, twice on some days, and read many books. The Park Service bunkhouse duplex was stuffy and the town is scraped bare by the extremes. The mornings were foggy and still and when the wind picked up after our morning jog it was cold and it came from the west. It whipped in from the Chukchi Sea and beyond that from the Siberian uplands. The bunkhouse looked out on metal-sided Conex containers, or else dirt streets lined with clapboard buildings and yards full to the edges with cannibalized snow machines and four wheelers and broke-down cars. At the south end of town, on an artificial extension of the thin peninsula on which all rests, the airport cuts from the inland marsh to the sea, perpendicular to the town. A fleet of Cessna Caravans take off and land all day, 9-seater cargo planes with puffy wheels and cream-colored hulls. Kotzebue is the Northwest Arctic region’s hub and these planes serve the roadless villages along the rivers, making the “diaper run,” the twice-daily supply run that connects the network of arctic villages to one another and to the world.
One day in Kotzebue I walked down to Shore Drive, the waterfront street held back by concrete, steel, and rock against the sea ice, and sat for a long time among the granite boulders of the breakwater. The water was hard and black. Chunks of ice as big as the town’s buildings flowed from the rivers, the Kobuk and Noatak and Ambler and Kelly, out into the bay. Seagulls rode the ice and peered over the edge, looking for the herring that ran opposite the flow, back up into the deltas, in groups of ten thousand and more. Other shorebirds circled overhead: Jagers and Glaucous Gulls and Kittiwakes. Down the sidewalk along the water, a crowd gathered with fishing poles and 5-gallon buckets, snagging three-hook jigs through the schools and catching the fish through the flesh of their backs. The buckets filled quickly and some of the older folks were drunk. It was the first warm day of the year. I joined in the fishing and a smiley man named Sonny lent me his rod while he went to the store for a gatorade. Some of the people who fished that day live in Ambler and came down the river for the day to fish herring for pickling. When their buckets were full Beatrice called the Kotzebue Taxi Service and hoisted her bucket of fish into the van and went down to the dock where they had left the boat. I stuck around a while and caught many herring and asked Maggie how the pickling is done. When her bucket was full she left too, and I walked back to the bunkhouse smelling of fish.
The next morning the Kelly Bench airstrip had melted and the air was hot. Jarod the pilot said “no such thing as a smooth day in the air when it’s hot!” and then “it’s always a smooth landing when I’m flying” when I asked how his morning flights had gone. Jarod popped a Zyn in his lip, just behind his soul patch, before he hoisted himself into the cockpit. He winked; “don’t tell my wife.” A banner hung above the door to the hangar: “Golden Eagle Outfitters Air Taxi - Trust Us With Your Life, Not Your Daughter or Wife.”
The flight was bumpy and hot and the plane small, packed tight with gear in steel drums and drybags. We turned up the Noatak River Delta, then up the Kelly, flying low between the ridges. Below us, ground patterned by flowing water and shifting permafrost. Mounds and dips formed by freezing groundwater and melting soil, ponds beaded along streams and the geometric polygons of underground ice wedges shaped the tan bunchgrasses. Wide oxbows and bends in waterways running on nearly-flat ground make the country mostly impassable except by air. In the act of congress that designated most of Alaska’s federal public land, bush planes are the exception to motorized travel restrictions.
We slept through the first afternoon sun with the doors to our tents rolled open, sweating and feverish, and woke at 1am for the first survey. Jeremy had trouble sleeping for several days and in the mornings would sit with his baseball cap cocked on his head while he drank instant coffee and stared at the wall of the cooktent. We worked as a pair and didn’t talk much, but I lent him a bottle of melatonin and that seemed to help. After all these years, he didn’t seem adjusted to any kind of rhythm out there. While he looked down at the GPS that directed us along a survey transect and paused to listen for birdsong, I looked around at the clear runoff streams on all sides, at the animal trails through snow patches, and up the valley to the continental divide, the crest between north- and south-flowing arctic water.
A hard rain rips at the faded orange tent. It sounds like velcro tearing. It’s hot inside but my feet are cold. Another night impossibly long against the lack of darkness. The wind blows like the sky has been slashed open and is deflating, filling the emptiness below with more air than it can hold. In a place already scoured there is nowhere to hide from the wind, the rain falls out of the bottom of thick fog and it feels as if one’s clothes may never dry. The purple flowers on the grass airstrip are saturated with wet color and are more numerous than yesterday. The tundra is “greening up,” cottongrass blooming little white poofs in their flattened ancient toupees of dead grass. Some tussocks are tall, 18 inches or more, and the buds on shrubby willows are just now shooting. It is late June.
When we survey, I walk behind Jeremy by 5 or so paces. I look down to avoid crushing the pink and purple and blue flowers, or else I look across the valley at the rugged mountains illuminated by the drama of the horizon; Jeremy looks down at the GPS, or else at the bushes for birds. Sometimes he stumbles on the tussock marsh ground, but he rarely falls. As we walk there is the sound of the grass, wet but dead from winter, ripping. We do our best to stay on top of the tussocks, on the visible ground-plain, but the clumps of Arctic Cotton Grass are narrow and unstable. Sometimes a boot slips and we resign to the troughs for a few steps, finding firmer if wetter footing in the marsh layer. These tussocks are old growth, marsh plants made of conglomerated grass stalks like palm trees, a forest of lumps in the tundra bog. Even at full flood, the surface of the plants is above water; they are adept bog-dwellers. We came across a skull on a ridge one morning, bleached and cracked and nested in the low Rhododendrons. It had long yellow front teeth, eyes on top of its head, and had been dead a long time. Jeremy wondered briefly if it was a raptor of some kind. His mind was all on birds.
It is not yet 3am when we start the count. To the north, the sun is still sinking towards a high ridge, boiling in the clouds over the continental divide. As the morning gets on, the temperature drops precipitously. The light does not change. At 3:14 the process slows, reverses, and the sun imperceptibly begins to rise. It is always cloudy over that ridge to the north, so it does not warm until nearly 6, by which time the survey is nearly half done. We walk back to camp as the sun climbs the hill to the west, 3/24 of a rotation from the notch to the north that marks solar midnight. That is an easy way to tell time here, if you know where north is; one fourth of the sky is 6 hours, south is noon. This is nearly true everywhere, but the knowledge is useful here because the sun, or at least its glow, is always visible.
Part 4: June 26.
One day it was very sunny, so I washed my hair and my wool undershirt in the snowmelt creek and tied the shirt to the top of my tent by the sleeves to dry and to cool the tent. It rained that night and the next two days, and my shirt was soggy and crucified until the sun and dry wind picked up on the third day.
There are rocks along Kuruk Creek, the south-bound tributary of the Kelly River nearest our camp, that are neatly split in two by the freeze-thaw cycle. The halves are laying as they fell, cleaved by hundreds or thousands of years of ice and sun. After a few days, my hands went the same way. Blood vessels warmed and cooled as the temperature dropped into the 20s at 5am and climbed into the 50s and 60s as the sun came across the north ridge and high into the southern sky, and blood leaked from the damaged vessels into the tissue on the back of my hands. Sun and windburn raked the puffy skin into an angry rash inflamed by stuffy tent air and the inside of my gloves. Jared the field tech (not the pilot) calls it ‘bird rash,’ because researchers on arctic bird surveys usually get it. I wore gloves at first, but found it hard with them on to write out the compass bearing, direction, and species codes as fast as Jeremy could locate and identify the singing birds.
If it is a land that can break rock without moving it, can blister skin without touching it, where flesh does not linger long on bone and skulls bleach and crack right where their owner died, it is still a delicate land. On a ridge up the valley from camp, past the 1982 USGS survey marker, there are two rusting steel barrels painted army green. They predate the survey marker and the National Preserve designation. And, because they were discarded more than 50 years ago, they cannot be removed. Such is the rule on federal land: if it’s been there long enough, it’s a part of the landscape and protected accordingly. So, the trashed fuel barrels of a bygone petroleum prospecting expedition have joined the caribou skulls, willow shrubs, and fossils as federal property. Dave Swanson, a soil and vegetation ecologist with the Park Service, was born around the time the barrels were emptied and tossed. “I better retire soon,” he told me, “before there’s litter from my early career that I’m not allowed to pick up.”
We saw 50 kinds of birds. Golden Plovers, Jagers, and Whimbrels made nests on the strip near our camp, and Harriers dove around us to fend us off their clutches. We saw Short Eared Owls and Rough Legged Hawks hunting for Lemming in the little trenches the rodents make in their little running. We counted sparrows and warblers and Bluethroats and other little singing birds in the shrubby creek bottoms and the barren ridges. We did not see the Gray-Headed Chickadee, which is presumed to be extinct in Alaska but is common in Europe and is known as the Siberian Tit over there. We did not see any Tits at all, nor Blue Footed Boobies or Boobies of any kind. The morning we flew out was calm and sunny, and Jarod brought his bigger plane to fly us out in one trip rather than the 3 it took to drop us off. It was his first time landing the 1953 De Havilland Otter on the Kelly Bench strip, and it barely made takeoff before the end of the strip, loaded as it was with our camp and bodies. The Anchorage airport is named for Ted Stevens, an Alaska senator who died in a plane crash in the same kind of plane right after he was indicted on 7 felony counts of failing to disclose ‘gifts’ from oil companies.
We shuffled gear in Kotzebue, dried out tents, and sat around the hangar in the sun. I walked into the water for a swim where a tall snowbank stood a few weeks ago, and it was not as cold as I thought it would be.
After picking up my rental bike in Oslo, I took the train to Bergen. As my first European railroad experience, this train put Amtrak to shame. The seats were clean, windows large and abundant, and the tracks smooth as rollerblades on a freshly laid layer of asphalt. We passed by flooded rivers and overflowing lakes. Norway, a place known for its rainy climate, had just been subjected to torrential flooding. In addition to damage to buildings, the flooding knocked down bridges, disrupting train routes connecting the western portion of the country to inland cities including Oslo. Though we made it out of Oslo unscathed, this train route disruption altered my travel plans back to Oslo at the end of the trip. My methods of transportation changed to include a taxi and a bus before getting on a functioning train.
My taxi driver was a particularly informative man. In his words, it is the rain in Norway that keeps the air fresh. Though August is typically an especially rainy time of year, I had an especially lovely weather window with partly sunny skies and bluebird days 90% of the time. He made sure that I knew this was not normal. He added that In the wintertime, the snow comes later than it used to: December rather than November in recent years. (He always leaves in the winter, though anyway – too cold.) He said this change affected ski tourism but the skrei (cod) fishing ecotourism did not seem to be hurting in the same way.
Cod and salmon have provided a consistent protein source for inhabitants of this region for 11,000 years. Salmon reside in river systems while cod live near the coast and in fjords. Glaciers carved the landscape in Norway resulting in an elaborate dispersion of fjords along the coast. A parasite, Gyrodactylus salaris, has wreaked havoc on the Atlantic Salmon population in Norway since the 1970’s. In five years, 98% of the Atlantic Salmon population was eradicated. The parasite attaches to the skin of a fish and causes ulcers that make the fish susceptible to diseases. Salmon in rivers that feed the Baltic Sea in Russia are resistant to this parasite. Salmon in North Atlantic waters are not. The parasite does not survive in saltwater so salmon migration to oceans and back to rivers does not enable spread. Scientists worry about transfer between rivers via predators including birds and warn fishermen to clean and gut their fish where they are caught and to bury scraps.
Attempts to eradicate G. salaris in Norway have failed. Efforts to eliminate this flesheater utilize rotenone. This pesticide kills all fish in a river by destroying mitochondria within cells. Indigenous peoples caught fish using this compound as plants in the legume family contain rotenone. Fish can be restocked into the river within weeks due to rotenone’s half-life. Kill-offs in rivers were unable to eradicate G. salaris.
With current climate projections, Norwegian glaciers are likely to be extinct by 2100. According to Regine Hock at the University of Oslo, Norwegian glaciers have not yet reached their peak melting point, meaning in the coming years we can expect more glacial runoff until we have reached the peak melting point, after which runoff will decrease. This poses two problems. In the near future, increased runoff will contribute to more destructive flooding, as I saw at the beginning of my trip. After the peak melting point is reached and runoff decreases, Norway will have to find alternative energy sources as glacial runoff feeds hydropower plants around the country. In 2020, 98% of Norway’s electricity came from renewable sources. Of that, over 90% came from hydropower. As the country has an abundance of oil and natural gas reserves, it will be important to actively invest in more renewable sources if Norway wants to maintain its low GHG emissions. In fact, the government is already investing in offshore wind projects.
A quick note about tunnels
There is a 4 km tunnel on Norway’s western coast. On google maps it looks like a quick jaunt. With a layer of topographical lines added on Caltopo, the purpose of the tunnel becomes clear - it cuts through one 2,000m side of a fjord. But zoom in a little to find there is indeed an altitude gain of 350m between the entrance to the tunnel and the daylight awaiting at the exit on the other side.
This tunnel happens to be on the publicized national bike route. The federally funded website warns that tunnels may be “unpleasant for some”. Some may find biking uphill for 4km on a casual bike ride unpleasant. Those who travel this route are likely bikepacking, carrying their belongings on bags strapped to their bikes and backs, so add a minimum of 40lbs to that bike frame and quads burn a bit more and the front wheel wobbles a bit wider with each pedal stroke.
This two-lane tunnel is dimly lit by artificially yellowed LEDs. I am a quarter of the way through when the first car enters the tunnel behind me, announced immediately by a roaring echo. I move up to the doll-sized sidewalk on the side of the tunnel so as to lessen the risk of getting run over. My lungs burn, legs scream, and a bead of sweat drips from my nose to handlebars. My handlebars wobble, dancing on the edge of the half-meter-wide walkway. The car’s rumble resembles a bus, then an 18 wheeler, an F1 car, a Southwest Airlines Boeing 737 jet engine, an F18 Super Hornet. I look towards the next section of patchy yellow light. As the Saturn V rocket passes, it pushes a cooling, exhaust-saturated breeze across my face. I squint into the tail lights, cough, and totter off the raised cement edge onto the asphalt. Seven more cars passed me before I found the light on the other side of the tunnel. Let’s just say this tunnel was extremely unpleasant for me.
