Exploring National Parks Threatened by Climate Change

Q. What moment did the idea to take your kids out for this book hit you? 

A. I had been research­ing and writ­ing sto­ries about the impacts of cli­mate change on national parks and wilder­ness, and increas­ingly under­stand­ing that much of this fall­out will occur within my kids’ life­times. But in September 2009, I returned to Glacier National Park to back­pack for six days and met briefly with a lead­ing fed­eral sci­en­tist there, Dan Fagre, whom I had inter­viewed two years ear­lier for a story about the park’s glac­i­ers. At that time, his mod­els fore­casted the glac­i­ers in the park all dis­ap­pear­ing by 2030. When I spoke with him again in 2009, he said they had revised that pre­vi­ous fore­cast because warm­ing and glacial reces­sion had sped up faster than antic­i­pated: The pro­jected year for no more glac­i­ers in Glacier National Park was now 2020. I thought, Wow, my kids will be just 19 and 17 then. This is not far off in the future — it’s right around the corner.

I started think­ing more and more in the fall of 2009 that we should get the kids to these places that mean so much to my wife and me as soon as we can. It wasn’t as if glac­i­ers were going to dis­ap­pear the next year. But it’s easy to get caught up in life and not achieve the goals you set, not see the places you want to see. I’ve long believed that you have to just have to get out and do things because you never know what’s in store for the future.

Q. A lot of peo­ple would love to do some­thing like this, but they couldn’t ever dream of pulling it off. How’d you do it? What were the biggest logis­ti­cal hurdles?

A. Part of the answer is that this is what I do for work. But I did this even years ago, before I made a liv­ing at it. Planning 11 major trips in a year’s time is def­i­nitely a lot of work. I researched where to go, reserved per­mits, arranged travel (some trips involved flights and lodg­ing), packed and sorted and dried out and repacked gear numer­ous times, wrote hun­dreds of emails to out­fit­ters and other peo­ple in the know, and fig­ured out where to shoe­horn each trip into the cal­en­dar. We made six of the 11 trips between late June and late August 2010; we weren’t at home very much that sum­mer, and that alone can get tir­ing. In the busy lives that most peo­ple lead, to do things like this you have to plan months in advance and put dates on the cal­en­dar, or it’ll never happen.

But that said, we don’t look back on that year and think about the has­sle of trip plan­ning and travel. We think back on all the amaz­ing expe­ri­ences we had and the places we saw. At one point dur­ing our last trip for this book, canoe­ing in the Ten Thousand Islands of Everglades National Park, right after my son, who had turned 10 by then, and I had sat in our canoe watch­ing a dol­phin swim laps around a small bay for about 20 min­utes, he said to me, totally unprompted: “You know, Dad, think­ing back on this past year, and all the trips we’ve done, I think it might be my best year ever.”

My kids gleaned a rare kind of per­spec­tive from this expe­ri­ence that I believe will guide them for the rest of their lives.

Q. Were you wor­ried for your kids? How did you deal with issues of safety?

A. I think it’s nat­ural for any par­ent to worry more than nec­es­sary and it’s prob­a­bly impos­si­ble to cure your­self of wor­ry­ing. Penny and I had long, seri­ous con­ver­sa­tions about the wis­dom of tak­ing young kids back­pack­ing in griz­zly coun­try; or sea kayak­ing in waters patrolled by orcas, where cap­siz­ing could mean dying of hypother­mia within 15 min­utes; pad­dling among alli­ga­tors in the Everglades; or rock climb­ing, among other con­cerns. We’ve had the mis­for­tune of see­ing peo­ple die in back­coun­try acci­dents, so we know how dan­ger­ous the wilder­ness can be.

But frankly, I’m more wor­ried about my kids grow­ing up with­out a love of the out­doors than I am about their safety in the back­coun­try. I take the same approach when they’re with me in the wilder­ness as I always have on my own trips. I want to know as much as I can about the envi­ron­ment we’re enter­ing and how to man­age its poten­tial haz­ards. I explain this stuff to them; they’re remark­ably good about avoid­ing dan­gers, although I still keep a close eye on them. I think that, sta­tis­ti­cally, they’re at greater risk on the drive to the park than they are on the trail.

Q. Which place was your favorite? How about for Nate, Alex, and Penny?

A. We’d all rank sea kayak­ing in Glacier Bay, Alaska, among our favorites. Incredible scenery with glaciated moun­tains ris­ing thou­sands of feet straight up out of the sea, glac­i­ers calv­ing bus-sized blocks of ice with explo­sive cracks, and wildlife like you can’t see in many places: brown bears, sea lions, seals, bald eagles, an abun­dance of bird life. We all loved back­pack­ing in the Grand Canyon because it’s so spec­tac­u­lar; the Everglades for the exotic birds, alli­ga­tors (though Penny was pet­ri­fied of them), gor­geous sun­sets, and wilder­ness beach camp­ing; as well as cross-country ski­ing to frozen water­falls and ther­mal fea­tures in Yellowstone. I’m a big fan of Glacier National Park, where my kids saw their first moun­tain goat up close. Penny really liked back­pack­ing in the North Cascades, a place where the two of us have a lot of per­sonal his­tory. Our kids con­sid­ered back­pack­ing the Olympic coast one of their favorites, for the fas­ci­nat­ing sea life found in the tide pools, and, of course, because they played on the beach every day.

Click here to read the rest of this arti­cle at Grist.org.