>> Corey VanWoert: Welcome, and thank you all for coming. My name is Corey VanWoert and
I'm here to welcome Andrew Skurka to the Microsoft Research Visiting Speaker Series. Andrew
is here to discuss his 4700 mile, six month Alaska Yukon expedition. Andrew is an accomplished
adventurer, athlete, speaker, guide and writer. The 32-year-old is most well-known for his solo
long-distance backpacking trips, most notably, the Alaska Yukon expedition that he's here to
talk about today. The 6875 mile, seven month Great Western Loop, the 7775 mile eleven
month sea to sea route and totally has backpacked and skied and pack rafting 30,000 plus miles
through many of the world's most prized backcountry and wilderness areas. He's been named
Adventure of the Year by both Outside and National Geographic, as well as Person of the Year
by Backpacker Magazine. I had the personal privilege of going on an incredible 7-day and 95mile backpack through Yosemite's high country with Andrew last year. I learned so much from
him and my adventures haven't been the same since. Please join me in giving Andrew a warm
welcome. [applause]
>> Andrew Skurka: Good afternoon. Thank you all for coming out today. This is a really great
turnout. We weren't sure what to expect. I'm glad it turned into a nice event. Before I get
started I want to thank Corey for arranging this event and making it all happen. I happened to
be here related to some other things. I was guiding some trips in the Olympics and I'm afraid it
was a great excuse to get out of my motel room this afternoon because I'd been drying all of
the gear that I used out there. And you walk into my motel room and it just smells like this dirty
shoe. [laughter]. Like there is no other way to describe it. So I don't know how you guys doing
out here. I'm coming in from Colorado and there we would have just seen six days of straight
sunshine. Instead we didn't see anything but clouds and rain. The other person I want to thank
here is Amy. Amy's also been instrumental. Where is Amy? Is she still in the back? There she
is, instrumental in putting this on today. This presentation usually runs for 50 to 55 minutes
depending on if I get carried away telling stories or not. I understand you guys are probably
pretty busy people and if you have some reason to leave in the middle of the presentation,
that's fine. I appreciate you coming this afternoon. At the end, I'm happy to sign books if I
haven't done so already, so just stick around. I'd be happy to stick around also until the last
person leaves. We'll do a Q&A at the very end. So the reason we're all here today is for me to
talk about and you to hear about this trip right here. It was the Alaska Yukon expedition. It was
a little less than 4700 miles. It took me a little bit less than six months. But I think it wouldn't
be right to just start this whole presentation here in Kotzebue, Alaska in the middle of March in
2010, so I think it's appropriate to start the presentation going back a little bit and telling you
the story about how I even got to Kotzebue. I grew up in a pretty conventional family. I'm from
southeastern Massachusetts. My mother is a teacher; my dad is a banker and they instilled in
my sisters and me sort of that American dream and the expectation was that we would go to
the best school that we could. We would get our degrees. We get jobs. We would get
married. We’d buy homes. We’d have kids and we would retire at 65. And I had sort of bought
into that track while I was in high school and even my first year or two of college, but I ended
up working for two summers out at a high ridge adventure summer camp in the Blue Ridge
Mountains in western North Carolina and every single day I was caving, mountain biking, rafting
and trail riding in the morning before the kids got up and every other week or so we would
have one of our famous shaving cream fights. And I, those two summers at camp were, I think
they're fair to describe as being the most corrupting experiences of my entire life. I no longer
was interested in being under fluorescent lights and wearing a shirt and tie into an office every
day. Instead I wanted to basically take advantage of the years I had in my early 20s when I was
old enough to make my own decisions but young enough where I didn't have any other
responsibilities that come with being an adult. And I started long-distance backpacking. For me
this was just the natural marriage of my newfound passion for the outdoors but also my
background as an endurance athlete since I ran cross-country and track in both high school and
college. So I did the Appalachian Trail when I was still in school and after I graduated -- I
graduated from Duke 2003, I, so my graduation present to myself was the sea to sea route. It
was 7800 miles long; it took me 11 months. I started up in Gaspé Québec in August of 2004
and finished [indiscernible] on the Olympic Peninsula in July 2005 and ended up spending
intentionally spent the winter out on the trail. I'll talk about it little bit later but I'm a
meticulous planner. In fact, this is probably the only adventure, slideshow out there that
includes Microsoft Excel spreadsheets in it [laughter]. So I'm a meticulous planner. But I made
a slight miscalculation in when I was planning this trip and I was about a month ahead of
schedule and I had hoped to spend the winter months of 2004, 2005 in kind of the
southernmost part of this trip, but I was about a month ahead. I ended up spending January,
February and March in the states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota [laughter]. I ended up
snowshoeing 1400 miles that winter. A year and a half later I took on my second big trip. This
was the Great Western Loop. It was 6875 miles. It took me 208 days, which is an average of 33
miles per day. I linked together the Pacific Crest Trail, the Continental Divide Trail, The Pacific
Northwest Trail. So this is now the end of 2007 I finished this up. I had been out of school for
over four years. I never had a real job and I had kind of made adventuring into at least into a
sustainable lifestyle. You can imagine what my parents think about this [laughter]. So I'm sure
you might be curious as well. And so this next slide here, it's a video of my mother. I think it
captures her sentiments really well about her concerns and thoughts about what I'm up to.
[audio begins]
>>: But yes, he's leaving on Sunday. He'll be gone for seven months.
>>: And how do you feel about that?
>>: Truthful?
>>: Yeah.
>>: Concerned. I hope that he -- I know that he's enthused about it. I know that he’s
extremely well-prepared, but he is my son and I just want him to do it safely.
>>: Do you think it's going to be a good experience for him?
>>: I hope it is.
>>: Would you ever want to do something like this yourself?
>>: Definitely not. [laughter]. [video ends]
>> Andrew Skurka: She still feels that way [laughter]. So I think my mom, though, raises -- it's
an interesting question. Why do I want to do these trips? Why am I willing to put myself in
harm’s way? Why am I willing to spend so much time alone? Why am I willing to make my life
unnecessarily difficult? And I think for me the best answer I can give comes down to this idea
of relationships and that in life the most important things that we have our relationships. And I
think there are three that are really important. There is the relationship of self, relationship
with others, and relationship with nature. And on these trips, these solo trips, two of those
relationships are enhanced in a way that no other experience in my life has and specifically on
these trips I'm out there for months at a time and I'm traveling through these beautiful
landscapes under my own power using my own heart, my own lungs, my muscles, and I think as
a result they become a little bit more part of me. I'm experiencing those landscapes on my
terms and I feel like I earned those views a lot more than if I had just pulled up in a car. These
trips, too, are opportunities to sort of explore the inner self. These trips have given me an
opportunity to test my own physical and mental limits, to understand, to basically how far I can
push and what I'm capable of doing. And I think if maybe I were to try to sort of summarize the
answer, what I'm trying to say is that on these trips I feel like I'm maybe experiencing life to its
fullest. I feel like I'm really seizing the opportunity I have on this earth for 60 or 70 or 80 years
to experience as much as I possibly can. And if you haven't really bought into that answer, the
other thing I would say is spending six months hiking, pack rafting, skiing around Alaska, it's at
least a lot better than sitting on your couch or your sofa having to watch this [laughter]. I guess
you're not a Republican [laughter]. So after the Great Western Loop I had hiked something like
23,000 miles all on established long-distance hiking trails and I felt like I was at this crossroads
with my hiking where I had kind of found the limits of how fast, how light, how far I could go
and in 2008 I started doing these smaller trips trying to sort of break the mold of being this
conventional thrill hiker, a conventional long-distance backpacker, so I started by going to
Iceland, walked across the island in about three weeks. I went to the high Sierra in California
and did the Sierra High Route which is a rugged 200 mile off trail alternate to the John Muir
Trail. I went to the Colorado Plateau and walked from Arches to the Grand Canyon over the
course of about a month, about 800 miles in length. And then for the first time I went up to
Alaska. I walked away from these smaller experiences with a couple of key skills and one of
them was the ability to travel off trail. I could look at a map. If I had paid attention to the
features that I'd seen I could kind of track my progress and from that point I could get to
wherever I wanted to using that map and a single magnetic compass and that liberated me
from following man-made trails and it opened up new route opportunities that no guidebook
authored, no trail crew, no other hikers had ever done before. Another skill I learned over the
course of these smaller trips was how to ski and living in Colorado this was a pretty natural
thing for me to pick up, but it certainly made winter travel a lot more fun and a lot faster than
the snowshoeing that I had done during my sea to sea trip. And then finally I learned how to
pack raft. Pack raft is a 5 pound inflatable boat. You can roll it up and it compresses to
something about this big. The paddle breaks down into four pieces and the pack raft allows me
to get across bodies of water that I normally couldn't get across, so glacial fjords, big lakes, big
rivers. Another thing that it does is that I can use the landscape to my advantage more. I can
use gravity. So if there is a river that's moving in my desired direction of travel then I can blow
up my boat, jump in and float down the river instead of bushwhacking along the shoreline. Has
anyone seen a pack raft before or heard of them? A few people, okay. So to give you the feel
of what these are like in the water I have a video. Most of these clips are taken, they are all in
the Alaskan Yukon. There are some from the inside passage. There are some from the Copper
River and there are some from the Arctic. [video begins]
>> Andrew Skurka: When you don't want to hike or when you can't hike you've got to put in
your boat. [music] Ever want to be in a beautiful cruise ship from a pack raft? [video ends]
>> Andrew Skurka: That looks like fun, huh? When I was up in Alaska into 2009, one of my
goals in those trips up there was to definitely scout out the possibility of doing a long-distance
trip up in Alaska, maybe not a long-distance trip. Maybe a little bit more of a long-distance
adventure, where I would do something on par in terms of mileage and duration with the great
Western Loop or the sea to sea route or something else that was far more adventurous than
anything I had ever done before. It didn't take long for me to realize that any big trip up there
in my mind had to include traverses of both the Brooks Range and the Alaska Range. The
Brooks Range runs across the northern part of the state. It's about a thousand miles long. It's
sort of the geographic divide between the Arctic and the interior. The Alaska Range is probably
the most majestic range in the entire state. It's the one with Mount McKinley, a little over
20,000 feet. It's just a big, big mountain landscape. I started looking at ways I could connect
these two mountain ranges. I saw that on the west side I could use the Iditarod Trail. It's, you
probably know it as a dog sledding trail but more importantly it's a snow machine trail between
native villages. I was able to stitch together a route through the Yukon of Canada and then
finally I added this lower portion along the Lost Coast and through the inside passage to sort of
close up this loop. The whole thing ended up being a little bit short of 4700 miles. It took me
about six months to finish which is about a marathon a day and over the course of those 176
days and I only took seven days off and three of those days were due to getting stuck in the
field by inclement letter and just sort of sitting in my shelter waiting for the conditions to
improve. Unlike some of the previous trips that I've done where I was hiking from start to
finish, on this trip it was a little bit more multi sports. I only hiked about a half of it. Another
quarter of it was on skis and the final quarter was in my raft. I decided to start the trip up in the
Northwest Arctic. It's an interesting starting point given that the warmer weather would have
been down in the southern part of the state and I'm starting in the middle of March. My
thought in starting up there was that I would be able to get across the interior and along the
coast before that all melted out. And once that area melts out there tends to be a lot of
standing water, really uneven footing, these huge clumps of grass that we call tussocks, really
unfavorable travel, so it's better to get across that landscape when it's either, basically when it's
covered in snow and ice. As soon as I skied out of Kotzebue the tone of the trip was just set. I
found myself in this giant white vast expanse. I would see a snowmobiler or two a day going
between the villages, but for the most part it was just me out in this landscape where I just did
not feel comfortable from the get-go. But also this trip wasn't really ever about feeling
comfortable. I knew that this was going to be part of the experience. In addition to just the
landscape on those first couple of days being really intimidating, the conditions on the first
couple of days on the trip were really tough. It was an unseasonably cold spell when I arrived in
Kotzebue and the first three days of the trip the average low temperatures were 29 degrees
below 0, 24 degrees below 0 and 21 degrees below 0. And you can see from the photos that
this is just a completely exposed place where there's no protection from the wind, so
oftentimes I would also be battling a 10, 15 even 20 mile an hour crosswind, headwind,
tailwind. It's the only place, the only situation I've ever had to ski or hike while wearing an
insulated parka and insulated pants. It has to be really cold before you need that much warmth
around you. After about a week the conditions started improving. Spring started arriving.
They call it the white spring because it really doesn't get that warm, but it just becomes a little
bit more tolerable and the days also become a lot longer. And I noticed that as the conditions
did improve my mindset, or my mind kind of shifted away from like what I was doing at the
moment and trying to -- because no longer did I feel like I've was one stupid mistake away from
death, so I quickly started thinking about all of the challenges ahead of me. And these
challenges were, these were challenges that were like hundreds of miles or thousands of miles
away and yet I was already sort of totally wrapped up in them and so I was really nervous even
a week into the trip about my plans to ski across the Alaska Range during the months of April
and May. I was really nervous about my plans to walk along the Lost Coast during the summer,
which is just everything about the Lost Coast is big. It's big bays, big bears, big tides, big
glaciers, big rivers, big mosquitoes everything. And then maybe most of all even just a week
into this trip I was already really nervous about my plans over the last one third of the trip
where I would go about 1700 miles across the Arctic and I knew that this, those 1700 miles
would probably force me to step up my game even more and that they would probably
completely redefine my perception of wilderness. So here I am, a week into this trip already
completely overwhelmed by all of these challenges ahead of me and one of the things that I
found most comforting to do was just to keep this very simple physics formula that I've learned
in high school, distance equals rate times time. I convinced myself, was able to convince myself
that if I could just average some given distance, say a marathon a day, I knew that the distance
of this trip, 4700 miles that it would take me just a certain amount of time to get back to
Kotzebue and the math on this trip would work out. And I just have confidence that whenever I
encounter those really challenging moments I would accurately make decisions. I would
accurately assess risk. I would be resourceful and I would find a way through. One of the
interesting parts about skiing along the coast and through the interior were the native villages
that I was going through and I think it's kind of fair to describe these native villages as being a
state of, maybe identity crisis is the right word for it, where there is some semblance of who
they used to be, so they still hold onto some of their cultural traditions. They still do a lot of
sustenance hunting and fishing, but they definitely have found the tools and toys of the modern
man and it's really kind of bizarre to go into these native villages that are geographically
isolated. There's no road in or road out and you would, there would be trampolines and ATVs
and cars and big screen TVs and Wi-Fi and also an incredible amount of processed food. The
problem with living like a white man in these villages is that it's just expensive. A gallon of
gasoline was regularly going for seven or eight dollars a gallon. This box of Uncle Ben's rice
here in the corner was going for $10.85. Think about that one for a second. Ramen noodles
are even expensive up in these villages. And the conclusion I came to after spending a month
skiing through these villages was that these kids will probably have to make a decision at some
point in their life. The lifestyle they know now was enabled by cheap energy. It was also
enabled by fairly generous social programs and if either of those things come to an end or both
of those things, they're going to have to make a choice, either move to the big cities where it's
economically practical to live or relearn all of the skills that their ancestors had that allowed
their ancestors to be geographically isolated. It remains to be seen, but I would suspect that far
fewer of these villages will exist in another 25 or 50 years than do today. I reached the Alaska
Range after about a month and I was excited to get to the Alaska Range. As you recall, this is
one of the original inspirations for the entire trip. In that sense the Alaska Range didn't let
down. It was literally some of the most fantastic, most majestic landscapes that I'd ever seen
before. I remember this one particular stretch when I was on the north side of Denali National
Park and I was writing home on my satellite phone messages to my mother and the message on
Monday said something like, the best day of skiing ever. And then the message on Tuesday said
best day of skiing ever, even better than yesterday. And it was just sort of this string of just -it's what you want to be doing on a trip like this. But skiing across the Alaska Range was also
physically one of the most difficult parts of the entire trip and as a result of being so physically
challenged it was also really mentally challenging as well. This is a mountain environment and
in the springtime the big event that happens is the snow starts melting, but the snow doesn't
melt evenly. It melts differently on a north facing slope versus a south facing slope or 2000
vertical feet versus 5000 feet or in a windblown area versus a forested area or even from eight
o'clock in the morning to two o'clock in the afternoon. The snow is constantly changing
composition, changing coverage, and it just gets really mentally taxing to be observing and
making these past observations as to what the snow was like somewhere else and then trying
to extrapolate that on a slope aspect and an elevation and a time of day for a route that's
coming up. The other big event, or the other thing that was happening because the snow was
melting or the rivers are opening up and all of my ice bridges were disappearing and this was
the beginning of wet feet. I kept my feet dry for the first 38 days and then in the remaining
almost, so almost 138 days my feet were only dry for about 20 of them. And four of those days
were when I spent a day in town. So maceration of the feet was basically an issue from here on
in and I learned a lot of tricks to learn how to deal with that. This next slide is a video that I
think does a pretty good job in capturing sort of my mixed experiences in the Alaska Range.
[video begins] [music]
>> Andrew Skurka: So I am 12,070 miles into this trip and I skied probably about 1200 of them.
I feel like when I'm out here like Mother Nature and I are kind of like in a tango, sort of this
mutual playful relationship; sometimes the gloves come off. It is a complete whiteout. I'm
going to do a quick demonstration on how the snowpack around here rocks from the bottom.
You can see there's a cross into the evening right now, but if I draw a circle with my tracking
poll, watch it collapse. Look at when I step it just completely collapses. I could put my skis on
but I would just sink right down to the bottom. It would just be easier to post pole and avoid
getting my skis all tangled up in this willow. This is a really special place. In all likelihood this is
probably one of those stories that I'll tell and retell. Adios Eastern Alaskan Range. [video ends]
>> Andrew Skurka: So the video, Amy, yes?
>> Amy Draves: I have a question from someone online and I've been wondering myself is
who's taking the videos?
>> Andrew Skurka: Good question. Some of the videos were taken by a National Geographic
crew. National geographic sent out a photographer for about a month out of the six. So some
of this is his video or his assistant’s video and then a lot of it is also mine where I would just put
it on a rock or some other way put it on a tree root and ski past it or walk past it a couple of
times. In fact, one of the last clips in there where I take off, I ski up to the creek and I take off
my skis and then start walking across the creek, I actually had to do that three times to get that
video [laughter], all with your entertainment in mind. So since we have a little extra -- is there a
chance that we can dull the lights in front little bit? The projector wasn't, the projector isn't
popping is much as I would hope, but I'll let them work in the back and that. So I think the
video does a pretty good job in sort of -- there were these two experiences in the Alaska Range.
Basically, when it's good it's really good and when it's bad it's really bad. And one of the big
challenges that I had in the course of this trip was trying to moderate these extreme highs and
lows, because I would have these experiences, these big highs, these big lows and those would
translate into my mindset as well. In this next video that I'm going to show you will see that I
haven't quite managed how to manage these extreme highs and lows as I have both of them in
a period of two minutes. [laughter]
>>: Speaking of extreme highs and lows.
>> Andrew Skurka: Yes. Very good.
>>: Put the lights down.
>> Andrew Skurka: So I think the lights can go off, or at least…
>> Amy Draves: It seems we have about 150 people online. They won't be able to see Andrew
if we turn off the lights.
>>: How about just for the videos.
>> Andrew Skurka: Actually, let's just go there. That's probably about perfect. Okay. So here's
this video where I have one of these extreme highs and lows both in a period of two minutes.
[video begins]
>> Andrew Skurka: Whoo-hoooo! Look at this view. You have Mount McKinley emerging from
the clouds, Straightaway Glacier down below me. I'm at 4000 feet. The sun is out. The snow is
fantastic. It’s wind packed and still solid. I've earned this. I thought a day ago, actually maybe - a day ago, that I was hosed and in fact I proved it was hosed and I put my head down and just
kept on going and here I am. I get this moment right here. I still might be hosed. I haven't
made it to Wonder Lake yet but if I'm hosed I went down in style and this is primo. It doesn't
get any better than this. I’ve got this huge glacier, highest peak in North America behind me.
The sun is out. Actually just went behind a cloud, but I'll take it. And good snow and good
skiing, love it, absolutely love it. This is -- I've worked hard to get here man. Oh. I worked
really hard. It's crazy; like you can see my emotions go up and down. This trip has been just
one extreme to the next. The more I deal with like weak crusty snow in Taiga Forest and it's
awful and then I get up high and I'm on this glorious tundra and skiing and it's beautiful and
then the snow starts to rot in the afternoon and I drop down in elevation and I just get
hammered post hole, like what did I post hole yesterday? Like 10 miles I think I post holed up
to my knees. And then you get moments like this and it's just like wow! [video ends]
>> Andrew Skurka: So this, yeah, that experience wasn't that rare. A lot of this trip was again
sort of discovering those mental limits that come with pushing yourself really hard physically.
Spring finally, or summer finally arrived the end of May, beginning of June and at this point my
task is to walk along the Lost Coast. For the most part the Lost Coast is just miles and miles of
easy beach walking and it was also really scenic. Off to my east would be one of a number of
mountain ranges like the Chugach Range and the Mount Fairweather Range and the Mount
Mount St. Elias Range which are all snowcapped and still holding huge glaciers. But the Lost
Coast despite having these really long easy stretches, is punctuated by moments of terror. So
let me show you a video clip of one such moment of terror. [video begins] [video ends]
>> Andrew Skurka: And this was one of the rivers that I had to figure out how to get across
because I'm walking along the coast and it is barreling down from the mountains upstream of
me down into the water. The two scariest, or that scariest part of the Lost Coast though, that
light thing is going to get annoying. The scariest part of the Lost Coast though was usually the
open ocean bay crossings. There are a couple of open ocean bays. This is the satellite image of
Icy Bay and Icy Bay is about 6 miles across from here to here and I'd been walking along this
coast and need to basically start walking along that coast again too. There are a couple of
things that happen in Icy Bay that make it really dangerous to someone who's in an inflatable
boat. One is that the wind will come in from the southwest and if that happens it brings big
swells really high up into the bay. In which case I might have to go, come up way into here in
order to get across where the swells wouldn't be as big. Unfortunately, if you go up that high,
typically the wind will sometimes blow out of the Northeast and it will take the icebergs that
are bouncing off those glaciers and push them really far out into the bay and I've had friends
who have gotten stuck for a week waiting for the bay to either be free of swells or free of
icebergs or both. Thankfully for me when I arrived at Icy Bay the conditions were actually okay.
The surf was a little choppy. I definitely swamped my boat when I tried to break through the
surf, but as soon as I got out there I was good to go. It took me about 2 1/2 or 3 hours to get
across and it was sort of an anti-climactic finish. I remember reaching the other shore and
going, you were nervous about that? But I think it was an important transition for me to make.
What I learned to do since I started, since I left Kotzebue is instead of using force to get the job
done, I started to use finesse out there. I was starting to become much more flexible. When I
would wake up in the morning, instead of saying like I had on all my previous trips, I'm going to
type 35 miles today. Instead I'd wake up in the morning and say I'd like to hike 25 miles today
and then if nature had other plans I would just sit back and be patient and wait for the
conditions to improve. And then when they finally did I would jump on that window to get as
many miles in as I possibly could. As I was walking along the Lost Coast I found myself in really
good bear habitat due to all the salmon streams. And for the most part I would describe my
bear encounters along the Lost Coast and then again up further north in the Brooks Range as
being, maybe I'll describe them as encouraging, in the sense that the bears acted exactly as
they should have. So typically I would see the bear from a distance, or I would hear it and I
would be able to have enough time to get out my bear spray. Usually the bear as soon as it saw
me or as soon as it heard me or as soon as it smelled me it ran away as fast as it possibly could
so long as I hadn't pinned it down. This bear here, this was in Gates of the Arctic National Park
and he was a little bit more resistant to run away. We kind of did this like Clint Eastwood style
draw where I had my bear spray and he was, well obviously he had other things going for him
[laughter] and he was trying to get upstream and I was trying to get downstream and we sort of
did this, we sort of did this kind of thing around each other [laughter]. And it's really stressful
regardless if the encounter goes down well to encounter a bear like that and kind of know that
your life is a little bit on a thread, and so usually after all of these encounters I would have to
just kind of laugh and laugh it off and just sort of this acknowledgment and of just how real
things were out there. I want to show a video now of some of my closer bear encounters and
at the very end I tell the stories of two of my closest encounters, the second of which is now
pretty well known and I think you'll all get a pretty good kick out of. [video begins]
>> Andrew Skurka: Hey bear! I need to go that way. Don't go that way. Another very nerveracking bear encounter. It was kind of like huh, you know, you should stop for a second.
You've got a good vantage point. I wonder if there are any bears grazing on the hillside here.
And I was like this and I came around this way and there was literally a bear charging at me
from right there, right there. Is it possible to have two close calls with grizzly bears within like
30 minutes? Because I just had a second one, and he came running, he must've come running
across here because his footprints, that's my trekking pole right there. I threw it at him. I
threw my trekking pole at him. And those are his footprints right there. Look, he's running.
He's still running. Anyway, he came running across. I threw my trekking pole at him, yelled at
him and he ran up here. And he was actually so scared, I scared the shit out of him, look
[laughter] I scared the shit out of a grizzly bear. He had been eating these berries. He had, he
was so scared he shit himself [laughter]. I love that. I scared the shit out of a grizzly bear
[laughter] literally. Anyway. He's gone. He almost scared the shit out of me. I have to go
check my pants too. He was freaking close. He was too close. That's way too close. [video
ends] [laughter]
>> Andrew Skurka: One of the first times I ever showed this video was, there was a father and
young son sitting in the front row and when I started dropping the s-bomb like that the boy
tugged at his dad's shirt and whispered something, and I'm sure the boy said something like,
dad, he said the s-word. So afterwards I apologized and to the father I said I kind of forgot.
That's the first time I've shown this. I kind of forgot how often I said it in the video. And the
father said look, don't worry at all. I told my son if he ever scares the poop out of a grizzly bear
he can save the s-word too. [laughter]. So I make it safely through the Lost Coast. I need to get
up through the inside passage and jump over into the interior of Canada and the headwaters of
the Yukon River. And to make that jump I used the Chilkoot Trail. The Chilkoot Trail, you are
probably familiar with it from the Klondike gold rush of 1898. Nowadays it's a national historic
Trail or national recreation Trail, one or the other, and it actually gets quite a bit of
summertime traffic because of all the tourism in Skagway. And because of all those tourists,
they built bridges across the big rivers. They have boardwalks across the swamps. There were
rangers out there. There were designated campsites. There were flags across the snow field at
the top of the pass to make sure I didn't get lost and the best part of all about the Chilkoot Trail
is that I had to get a permit and part of that permit process was enduring a 5 minute long
lecture of the dangers of the Chilkoot Trail. [laughter]. So this route remarkably had very few
miles of on trail hiking. I counted up at the end only 34.2 miles which is less than 1 percent was
actually on a man-made hiking trail. The rest of this route was mostly organic. I was 2111 miles
of off-road travel either on my skis or on foot, which is 64 miles short of the Appalachian Trail.
So imagine starting in Georgia, walking north to within 64 miles short of Katahdin and stopping
there without the Appalachian Trail ever being there. It's a considerable distance for just
traveling across the land. Then another almost 1300 miles was in my pack raft again where
there are no man-made signs or places telling me where to go. Obviously, to travel that many
miles off trail, navigating is a hugely important skill, but there are a lot of levels of navigation. I
mean, all of you could probably go out there with a good set of maps and a compass and with a
half-hour of instruction know kind of the basics of those things. But to be able to plan this trip
and plan a viable route without ever having been to these areas and then navigating it almost
flawlessly through them requires sort of another level of navigation. And the big thing with me
being able to look at topographic maps and predict without ever having been to a place what
was going to be there when I got there just based on my understanding of that landscape based
on previous experiences. It was basically pattern recognition. So I was looking at my
topographic maps of the Alaska Range and trying to identify slopes that might be avalanche
prone. When I was looking at my maps of the Brooks Range I was trying to find passes that
were going to go instead of passes that might be blocked by impossible cliff bands. When I was
looking at my maps of areas that I might try to pack raft I was trying to figure out how big a
river might be based on the size of its watershed and how much precipitation falls in that
particular area. And then maybe the greatest skill of all in being able to predict where a good
route is going to be is understanding vegetation and how vegetation is affected by slope aspect
and drainage and elevation. And I would do my best to avoid vegetation like this, really thick,
nasty, tough understory. I would do my best to avoid the brush zone, which is just sort of thick
and tangly and even once I got into the Arctic I would try really hard to avoid these things called
tussocks so there's no trees to speak of in this entire picture and probably for another 50 miles
south and you can see my trekking pole here laying across these tussocks and these tussocks
tend to grow in very wet areas. It sort of an adaptation to allow other grasses and other things
to grow on top of the tussocks, so it's sort of this ball. And the only way I can compare it,
imagine like filling up a basketball court with like completely, like a bunch of basketballs and
then laying down like a carpet of grass over them and then trying to walk on that carpet. It's
incredibly difficult and there's no way to get through them besides just stumbling. The only
thing I've seen get through them with grace is the caribou and literally they prance and it is the
most humbling thing I've seen. Generally, up in Alaska in the Yukon there are a couple of areas
of really good travel. One area is right below the world of rock and ice. There are places that
have a little bit of tundra, places that were englaciated not too long ago, had a chance to come
back, where you have thin topsoil. I would also try to follow the floodplains of big rivers, again,
where there's good drainage because big floods would have put down a good layer of gravel,
allowed some good drainage and a minimum amount of vegetation to build up. And then the
last thing that I would try to do when I was looking at my map, since I would try to get into the
mindset of an animal and me thinking about if I were a bear, if I were a caribou, if I were a
moose where would I be coming from and where would I be going to. And the game trails up
there are just so good. This is a bear trail along the Lost Coast. This is a caribou and a moose
trail up in Gates of the Arctic national Park. I probably wasn't the first human to walk on these
trails, but probably fewer than 10 or 20. I'm certain, humans certainly do not maintain them.
They're that good because animals have been walking these trails for at least tens of years but
probably more like hundreds, maybe even thousands of years. This next video should give you
a pretty good feel for what it was like to be traveling off trail up in the Alaska and the Yukon.
[video begins] [music]
>> Andrew Skurka: So I'm trying to dry out my feet and warm them up a little bit; they are a
pretty macerated. Hey bear! This is a tussock patch. The tussocks are a plant adaptation to
avoid soggy ground where they just can't grow, so this is a tussock and you see that it's on a
flexible head. This is one of those sections that looks really good on a map, like really good and
then you get up there and you're like this is really bad. This is Albatross. This is Xanadu with
the Grayling Wall and this is Ariel which we'll be going over shortly. You can see why we ascend
Ariel instead of dropping into the Aliniac [phonetic] drainage. [video ends]
>> Andrew Skurka: So planning my route beforehand was probably the most important task
that I had. It was the one that demanded the most attention. There were a number of tricks
that I had to do that. Obviously, I was looking at my topographic maps. My topographic maps
oftentimes reflect the current on the ground reality. A lot of my maps were drawn a long time
ago, almost around the time of Alaska statehood. This map here is near the Lost Coast. Just for
scale, this is one square mile. The map is set to a scale 1 to 62500 and the map was drawn in
1954, I think. And if you look at a modern satellite image, you'll see that the this lobe of the
Brady glacier has receded by about three fourths of a mile and North Trick Lake and South Trick
Lake are now just one Trick Lake and this area which was gravel back in 1954 is now bright
green. All those conditions changed the way I approached this section. It was useful to have
just a little bit more updated understanding of what I was going to encounter when I got there.
I also talked to a number of individuals who had experience with these places I was traveling
through, people like Roman Dialier, Aaron Higg [phonetic] Peter Vaco, [phonetic] people who
could offer me some insight as to what I should expect when I get there. And with all this data
that I was collecting before I left, I started dropping most of it into an Excel spreadsheet and
this Excel spreadsheet is something that I have sort of refined hike after hike after hike. And in
this spreadsheet I figured out the distances between key landmarks; based on those distances I
was able to figure out how long it would be between resupply points, making some
assumptions about how many miles per day I would be able to cover between those resupply
points. That started to give me an itinerary and so I figured if I started in Kotzebue around 13 th
of March I would be in Nikolai around 15th of April and I would be in Slan [phonetic] around the
14th of May. Based on that itinerary now I had conditions for which I could prepare my gear
and supplies. So I had five seasons worth of gear, starting with the Arctic winter and then just
the normal winter, then spring, summer and fall. For five months my trip was purely abstract.
It sat basically in a bunch of files on this computer and in the final month the trip started
becoming real. I started acquiring the things that I would need to make this trip happen. So I
temporarily moved back to my parents’ house in Massachusetts to help get all of this thing, this
whole thing ready. My dad and I went out to Costco and Sam's Club and purchased an
exorbitant amount of food. I took over several rooms of my mother's house spreading out my
gear in the living room or in the, this would be in the living room. Spread out my gear for each
season. She went off to work one day. I took over her kitchen, spreading out all of my maps.
Each of these maps refers to a resupply point. I would be shipping these things to myself along
the way. I also had all of my water bottles, my insect repellent, my firestarter, my socks. And
the idea of doing all of this work before I left was that if I could just sort of keep myself moving
out there and moving forward and moving efficiently, that I would have a better chance of
finishing, so this trip really did come down to the formula distance equals rate times time. And
what I've learned is that it's actually not so important to move fast, but just to move more in
order to maintain those big distances every day. So if I could roll into a town and go to the post
office and pick up packages that had been sent to me via general delivery, that was a lot more
efficient than running around town trying to find enough food and trying to find 4 feet of duct
tape and then running around and trying to, you know, printing out my maps at the library or
wherever it might be. So the final one third of the trip begins when I reach Dawson in the
Yukon. I knew when I was there in Dawson that the next one third was going to be different
than the first two thirds. I had already been pushed really hard. I pushed myself really hard,
but I knew just looking at the maps and talking to people about these landscapes that I was
going to be traveling through that it was going to be different up there. To make matters
worse, Dawson is also this, I think describing it as a vortex is probably accurate. It's a really fun
tourist town during the summer. There are bars with live music. There are all of the services
that you need. There were showgirls. There's a canoe race finishing on the Yukon and all the
racers were having a good time there in town. And one of the rules I maintain over the course
of this trip was I could only take 24 hour breaks, so if I pulled into a town at five o'clock in the
evening, I had to be gone by five o'clock the next day. In Dawson I extended it to like a 36 hour
rule. [laughter]. But I remember on my way out of town like just not really wanting to get this
stretch started because I was nervous about everything ahead. I was walking out of town and
I'm carrying two week’s worth of food so it's like say almost 30 pounds of food. I'm carrying 20
pounds of gear and supplies and I'm like just sort of hunched over walking out of town and I'm
like almost out of town I passed the last bar and there's a band out on the patio. I make eye
contact for some reason with the lead singer and the lead singer, he's kind of like introducing
the song and he just kind of stops talking to everyone and looks at me and says, wait a minute.
Backpacker, where are you going? You can't leave right now. We're going to have a great time
tonight. [laughter]. And I'm like ahhh, leave me alone. [laughter]. So the next two weeks
ended up being in retrospect some of the finest pack rafting and hiking I've ever done. I started
by going through the Tombstone Mountains. I dropped down to the Blackstone River, blew up
my pack raft, floated the Blackstone for a day and a half. The weather was really good and
there was the opportunity for this amazing portage route over to a totally different River called
the Heart River. This portage route was 12 miles along the spine of this ridge, 2500 vertical feet
above the valley floor on this glorious day. I dropped down to the Heart River and the
conditions are still good. I pull up my pack raft, kick my feet up, drying my feet and after
another day and a half I reached the mouth of Aberdeen Canyon, which is a classics rapid. And
so for the remaining five days I walked the crest of the Richardson Mountains up to the
Dempster highway. You can see when I reached the Dempster highway that I had lost a lot of
weight and had grown this big bushy beard. [laughter]. And I hitchhiked down into Fort
McPherson to resupply. And when I was down in Fort McPherson I called up a friend and a
mentor my Roman Dial and my original excuse in calling Roman was to ask him how to start
fires with willow because that was the only combustible material that far north. But really what
I wanted to talk to Roman about was how, how at unease I was during this final, the last two
weeks. I just never felt comfortable. I felt like I had my guard up. I felt like I had to be vigilant
about every single thing that I did. I kind of felt like I was back to the early days of the trip
where I was kind of one stupid mistake away from death, when I was in a place where there
was no safety net for me in the event that I did something wrong. And Roman, his response
was really simple. He said Skurka, you're not on the Appalachian Trail now. You're now in big
wilderness and in big wilderness you and no other human will ever be comfortable. I'm like,
okay. So with Roman’s reality check I started heading north again into this big wilderness
starting to understand what Roman was talking about. This was a place that is completely
untamed. It's completely wild. It hasn't changed ever. Man has never really gone up there and
put it under his control and here I was on my own with just a backpack trying to do it, trying to
get across it. As I started moving north, as I started moving north, the bugs started getting
really bad. And instead of just telling you how bad they were I will just show you a video. So
some of these clips start early like down along the Yukon River. There's one along the Lost
Coast early on, and then they go up into the North and you can see they have just become
fierce when I get up into the Arctic. [video begins]
>> Andrew Skurka: This will forever be known as the Black Flag camp. At least they're not
mosquitoes. I don't think I'm going to be making camp here. I thought I had seen bugs, but I
hadn't seen Arctic bugs. Boy, they are bad tonight; aren't they? Good stuff, huh? I wish the
wind were blowing just a little bit and that would help a lot. But it's the whine, the weeeeeee;
that's what it is. It's like a high hum. That's what really gets you and I'm like, it gets in your
head and whether it's real or whether it's unimagined doesn't matter. It's like it's always there
right now. When I go to bed it's there. When I wake up it's there. In the middle of the night it's
there. Throughout the day of hiking it's there. I'm in my boat and there aren't any bugs around
because there's this good breeze on the river and it's there. [video ends]
>> Andrew Skurka: So the bugs were really bad on this stretch. The grizzly bears were also a
little aggressive, but the thing that I remember most from this part of the trip was just how
magical it was. From Fort McPherson to the next road crossing the Dalton Highway I went 657
miles and went 24 days without crossing a road, without seeing another human being. This was
about as wild as this landscape got. And just everyday I was in these drainages that didn't really
have names. I was going up over these passes that only caribou would go up and over. I would
look out on the landscapes like this at night and just wonder where the next closest human
being was and one final picture from this stretch of the trip which I think kind of does this
whole landscape justice. This is an absolutely huge place. And some of you might actually
remember this particular photo. Does anyone know where this photo, anyone recognizes
photo? What are you guys using Google or something? [laughter]. So I know we're reaching
that critical 2:30 cutoff, so I have five more minutes of video and pictures and we'll be done if
you guys want to stick around. So let me, there's a video here and it's probably the most
magical moment in the entire trip. You have to understand the context. I have been beat
down by mosquitoes and bears and big floods, but most of all just being sort of stumbled by
this landscape, and I come upon the porcupine caribou migration trail and I have this very sort
of existential moment. [video begins]
>> Andrew Skurka: So I'm out here in northern Yukon and I am following the trail of the caribou
basically. I plotted this route off my maps and thought I knew where I was going to go, but I
always kind of figure that when I get out here I just sort of, you know, follow their trails and -man, I came up and over this ridge and there's just this like, I don't know how well you're going
to be able to see it, but just dozens and dozens of tracks following the base of this mountain.
You've got to think like this species has been doing this for thousands of years and they’ve got it
figured out. They know exactly where to go. This is the best travel that I've seen and I can't
help but like I have such an appreciation for that. It's just incredible; like I feel like I'm kind of
tapping into the energy of their migration. It's like I've got that mentality where it's just like
move, eat, sleep, move, eat, sleep. It's like, it's the same thing over and over. You've got a
destination in mind and you know like the seasons are changing. You've got to move. You've
got to move. And eating and sleeping, those are just your tools. They're just enablers, but it's
all about the moving. [video ends]
>> Andrew Skurka: So what does it say about a landscape where that can happen? A place
where -- it never happened to me before, a place where I stopped feeling human for a little
while and felt like I was just another wild animal traversing this landscape. Sure, I had Gore-Tex
and chocolate and coffee, but we were all battling the same exact things and frankly just trying
to make it until tomorrow was I thought a pretty noble goal. One more video to wrap up this
whole idea of big wilderness again where I'm sort in a emotionally distraught moment in my
shelter after a few days of rain trying to kind of, trying to think about what this experience had
all been about. [video begins]
>> Andrew Skurka: Big wilderness has a different, has a different feel to it and I've been in big
wilderness now for the last three weeks. True wilderness isn't a place where you really have
wahoo moments or a place where you seek refuge to get away from things. Big wilderness is a
place where you come to get humbled. It really is. It's a place where you for one of the few
times in your life, you are put back in your place and realize that you are just another animal on
this planet and that you are as vulnerable and as exposed to nature as the creatures around
you, that you're no different. You're not special, that there are bigger powers at play than you
can ever understand or imagine. [video ends]
>> Andrew Skurka: When I start off this whole presentation, I try to give an explanation about
why I do these trips. I talked about how on these trips I feel like my relationships with nature
and with self are enhanced in a way that, in a way that no other experience has ever done for
me. And if I pointed to a few moments that that was happening it would be some of those
videos were clearly I am discovering a lot more about myself and a lot more about my
connection with the landscapes then if I hadn't gone out there. So I arrived back in Kotzebue
Alaska. It was the beginning of September. I've done enough of these trips to know that you
don't do them to finish. There's that old cliché that it's not the destination; it's the journey.
And Kotzebue once again proved that because it was the most anti-climatic finish of any trip I'd
ever done. There is no welcoming party there for me; no friends or family to cheer me in the
last mile or two. I pull into town at like eight or nine o'clock at night. No one in town knew
what I had done. No one in town knew who I was. The motel that night was full, so I ended up
having to camp on the beach and the, there was only a 24-hour community store open at that
hour so my celebratory meal was a can of Coca-Cola and a bag of Doritos. [laughter]. Nice job,
dude. [laughter]. But I think, I don't want to say that Kotzebue wasn't important over the
course of this trip. Kotzebue was the measure of success for me on this trip. It gave me, it
basically gave me a motivating excuse to have the experience that I've been able to share with
you guys this afternoon. Thank you. [applause]. Thank you. I'd be happy to stick around for
some Q&A. If you have a meeting to run off to by all means. There are, just a quick sort of
administrative announcement. There are some copies of my book available for sale in the back.
The book is called The Ultimate Hiker's Gear Guide. It's made by National Geographic.
Microsoft is subsidizing it by 50 percent today, so it's ten dollars and maybe some change in
there. I'm not sure how that works. It's basically a gear selection book, so it talks about all the
different product categories that you would come across, shelters, clothing, sleep systems,
water purification, and then it tells you pros and cons of different categories and then I also
interject my own personal opinion of this, of these picks, basically what has proven to work for
me in order to kind of help you cut through all of the subjective information. The book also
focuses on skills as well, which are just as important as the gear that you take out with you. So
why don't we, start, have some questions? Are there a few questions? Yes, there in the back,
Amy.
>> Amy Draves: I've got lots on mind. One is about getting sick or injured out in the wilderness.
>> Andrew Skurka: So I got sick once. I must have gotten some food poisoning and ended up
throwing up basically a day’s worth of food and water, recovered and was okay. And then the
only injury I got was due to walking on, you know, on like a 5 degree angle on the beach and I,
to solve that I took my knife and cut out a shim out of my shoe which basically leveled my
ankles back up and that and a lot of ibuprofen did the trick, vitamin i. Yes?
>>: First of all, thanks very much for coming here and giving this presentation. I really enjoyed
it
>> Andrew Skurka: You bet. Thanks for having me.
>>: I have a question, what type of electronics did you carry with you and how did you care for
that and specifically what about emergency rescue type of equipment i.e. satellite?
>> Andrew Skurka: Yeah, so what kind of electronics I carried. So in the backcountry, anything
with batteries is, you should be suspicious of in general. My camera, fine. It worked for that.
The other big piece of electronics was a satellite phone. I don't normally carry it on all of my
trips, but in a place like Alaska it's really nice to be able to pick up that phone get some really
good communication as opposed to some of the other devices that are out there nowadays
where they are essentially satellite text messengers. So those are basically the only two
electronic devices I had with me. I still like to navigate using paper maps and a magnetic
compass. I'm not sure really, when I would get into town I would just head to the library or
borrow a personal computer in order to punch out a blog post or something like that.
>>: So do you run out of food and if you did, what do you do?
>> Andrew Skurka: I never ran out of food. Of course, running out of food is always like this
sort of gray area with what's actually enough food. I never ran out of food. Thankfully, the one
stretch that was the longest between two resupply points was that 24 day stretch, and I had a
cache of food flown in and left on a gravel bar for me. And it's kind of a funny story, but I'll
make it really quick. So I had been communicating with the pilot for, I probably contacted him
like three or four months before I even started my trip, and I'm sure he gets calls like this all the
time. Hey, I'm planning this big 4700 mile expedition around the state and I need you to drop
me off some food in the Brooks Range. I'm going to be going these big distances, and this guy
basically says. I'll tell you what. Call me when you are like six weeks out from where you would
need me to drop the food and I'll get it to you. In other words, I'm never going to hear from
you again. So I call him six months ahead, six weeks ahead and my mother ships him a bunch of
food. He drops it on this gravel bar but he dropped it on an airstrip that was off of my detail
maps. So I'm using maps of 1 to 250,000 which is like 1 inch equals 4 miles in real life, and he
drops it on this gravel bar in the middle of the Brooks Range. There's this great video and I
don't have time to show it, but where I, I literally have a bag, a half a bag of instant potatoes
left and I come up on a barrel that is full of like, it's like 30 pounds of chocolate. [laughter].
And I mean if you ever want to see a happy backpacker, you can watch that video. Maybe one
or two more. Yes?
>>: Were you able to get food on the way instead of just taking food?
>> Andrew Skurka: You can forage along the way, but I don't think it's going to be an efficient
use of time. The amount of time required to sort of harvest that, there's no way that you can
do the miles that I needed to do in order to finish before the winter arrived. It's kind of a
different kind of trip. Yes?
>>: How was your mental, just your mind at that stretch where you are 20 days plus without
people? Like what is that like?
>> Andrew Skurka: What is it like? I think…
>>: Are you quiet? Is your mind quiet or are you just going nonstop?
>> Andrew Skurka: Yes, it's like constantly running. I think for me my reaction, I was really
anxious and I was like borderline scared. Like I just, there's nothing helping you in the event
that something goes wrong, whether you do it or whether it's sort of an external factor, so if
there's a huge rainstorm, there's no like warming cabin to get into. If I made a navigational
mistake which by that point it was probably not a worry, but even just a bad route and I got
cliffed out. There's no one there to help me out. There's no trail signs pointing me where to
go. So it's just really nerve-racking and I think that you see how worn thin I am in that
[indiscernible] video where I just look sleep deprived and I'm just sort of out of, I'm incapable of
holding up my guard and keeping on my game face. It just, it just totally broke.
>>: Why did you make the original decision to go up, like on your first really long hike?
>> Andrew Skurka: Why did I make the original decision? Yes, starting with even my earliest
hikes why did I decide to go alone. I think on endeavors like this if you have a hiking partner
that you can rely on, awesome. Definitely there's a little bit of safety in numbers thing and you
can share some of the responsibilities, but I don't have that type of individual at hand, so it's,
my odds of success are higher when I go alone rather than trying to force a relationship on a
trip that has all sorts of other issues. And there are also some other, some added advantages
to going alone, like some of those moments that I had there, some of the moments that I had in
town with locals wouldn't have happened if I was traveling with another person because I kind
of would have that social company, that social outlet. Maybe one more question.
>>: Do you ever do any just regular hiking or… [laughter]
>> Andrew Skurka: Funny you say that. Let me get to this. My regular trips nowadays, there
are actually two varieties. One is with sort of my fiancé and friends where it yeah, it's a casual
trip. We go out and it's a totally different experience than this where more luxuries, we are
going to bring a bottle of whiskey and we're going to have a good time out there. The other
casual trips I go on are the guided trips that I offer, so that's actually why I'm in town. I've been
guiding two trips out in the Olympics. So I offer three-day trips and I offer seven-day trips and
they are all learning intensive experiences. The three-day trip is sort of like you learn to
backpack experience where over the course of three days my goal is to make you a much more
competent, much more confident backpacker with both what you need to carry on your back,
but more importantly just the skills that you need. And then the seven-day trips I offer have a
much more adventurous component to them. That is what Cory took last year. And then for
me these are kind of like casual trips. These are the trips that really kind of make me fall in love
with backpacking again because they're fun and they're not so stressful. You know. One final
question. Anybody have one? Yeah?
>>: If you would do that trip, exactly that trip again, would it be harder or easier?
>> Andrew Skurka: If I were to do that exact trip over again, oh man. I don't know if I could set
myself up for that. It would be easier in the sense that I would know what to expect a little bit
more, but it might be harder in the sense I would question why I am investing so much time and
energy into having an experience that for the most part I've already had. So that's why I tend to
be more of a, with these trips I tend to be more of a been there, done that attitude where I
probably will never do the Appalachian Trail again or the Great Western Loop for the Alaska
expedition because there are so many other great experiences out there for me to have.
>>: Are you running out of really long trails?
>> Andrew Skurka: Am I running out of really long trails? Had you seen a map of Canada
recently? Yeah. [laughter]. All right. Well thank you guys very much. Thank you, Amy. Thank
you Corey. [applause]