A Long Trek Home: 4,000 Miles by Shoe, Pack Raft and Ski

We’d managed to give away most of what we owned, reducing our possessions to two full backpacks and a few boxes in my mother’s basement. The empty rooms of our rented Seattle house were bright, clean and spacious-looking, reminding me more of the promise of moving in three years earlier than of the chaos of our lives here.

Slowly, people started to appear on our lawn. Wearing raincoats or hiding beneath umbrellas, they milled around in the drizzle, while my husband, Hig, and I distractedly greeted people from various corners of our lives. My aunt had brought a giant “WALKING TO ALASKA” banner. We tried to make coherent conversation, knowing we had nothing to talk about besides this trip, and that we had little left to say. We’d been talking of nothing else for months. Meanwhile, we kept an eye out for the landlord. Returning the key was the last thing on our list, the last thread tying us to our former lives.

We stepped onto the sidewalk. It was the same step I took every day. But this time, it wasn’t an hourlong errand run but a yearlong journey. This time, we weren’t coming back.

~

The plan was to walk the arc of the North Pacific—4,000 miles from that Seattle doorstep to the farthest piece of land we could reach. The plan was to walk through forests and tundra, to paddle tiny 5-pound pack rafts down rivers and across bays, and to ski the snowy depths of winter. The plan was to leave Seattle and reach the Aleutian Islands under our own power, never stepping into or onto any form of motorized transport.

Hig and I had been wandering through the wilderness together for seven years already. As children, we’d both grown up hiking and backpacking. As adults, we’d traveled over 3,000 miles through remote trail-less wilderness in Alaska, on trips of up to two months at a stretch. We’d steadily improved our gear. We’d become more and more comfortable in the wilderness. We’d been planning this journey for a year, carefully puzzling over maps to determine whether each of those 4,000 miles could be done.

Even compared to other epic adventures, our plan was unusual. Typically, long-distance journeys have some consistency in terrain and conditions, whether in deserts, on the ocean or in snowy polar realms. Not this one. The northern rim of the Pacific Ocean is typified by steep climate gradients, dramatic mountains and intricate coastlines: rainforests, glaciers and vast sweeps of tundra. Across the span of a yearlong journey, we could expect both the best and the worst the weather had to offer, with temperatures ranging from 90 to -30 degrees Fahrenheit...