SITKA, ALASKA
“We were in plenty of danger of being cold and wet and hungry, but not in much danger of dying.”
That is something important to remember about Erin McKittrick and her husband Hig, whose full name is Brettwood Mark Higman, but who is known throughout “A Long Trek Home” – and throughout life – as simply Hig. The couple sits in the studio with their children, two-year old Katmai and baby Lituya. Katmai was conceived in the last month of the trip.
“A Long Trek Home” is a story about life, it’s about the beauty of wild places, the power of solitude. It’s not an adventure about cheating death.
“I think we even had an interview along the way where we were asked to rank ourselves on a one to ten scale for risk-taking and we said four or five. And the interviewer was like, What are you talking about, you guys must be level ten for risk taking! No, not really. Everything we do is pretty safe. We’re cautious, we think it through. We’re out there for a long time, but the dangers are easy to figure out. You analyze them, and don’t do anything that risks getting killed. And most of the time we did a really well with not being in much danger.”
McKittrick and Hig left their apartment in Seattle in the summer of 2007 after Hig finished his graduate degree in Geology. They literally handed the landlord the keys and started walking. The pair, who had taken several weeks-long treks in Alaska before, had spent months planning a route that would enable them to use packrafts as much as possible.
A packraft is exactly what the name suggests, a rugged, five pound inflatable raft that can carry one person and her gear through some fairly big water.
Once they escaped the urban environment of Puget Sound, the packrafts allowed McKittrick and Hig to link together overland hiking with river crossings and short saltwater legs of a few miles all the way up the coast to Alaska. The plan worked beautifully until November, and their planned crossing of Icy Bay, west of Yakutat.
“The worst mistake we made on the whole trip was attempting to packraft across Icy Bay when there was wind-blown packed ice on the far shore. It was dicey, because we had to fight the wind to get back all the way to where we started, because you just couldn’t make it through the ice. Hig – Picture ice blown by the wind and packed up against the shore. Small, little chunks, you can’t walk across it or paddle through it. So there’s no option to just struggle against the wind.”
Even though they were hardened by five months of near-continuous travel, the Icy Bay crossing took McKittrick and Hig to the brink of exhaustion. They eventually made it, but I won’t give away that part of the story, or tell you about how they transitioned into winter travel, turning their packrafts into sledges which they towed behind them on skis.
Instead, let’s skip to the end, to Unimak Island, when McKittrick realized the long trek was over.
“We stepped on the ferry at False Pass and realized that we could go somewhere without consciously taking ourselves there. After a whole year where you have to literally put your foot in front of the other foot, or put your paddle in, or slide your ski forward, the ferry could just go – really fast. And we could just sit there and go somewhere. That was really strange.”
McKittrick concedes that simply talking about the trip is sometimes difficult. Most people do a double-take, and somehow seem to misunderstand that she and Hig walked from Seattle to the Aleutians without stopping, without relying on motorized transport of any kind. For the big picture, she’s got her presentation, and now there’s a movie.
As for everything else, wearing out six pairs of shoes, at least as many ski boots, countless socks, waking up buried in snow, “Maybe people don’t want to know completely what it’s like.”
McKittrick, Hig, Katmai, and Lituya now make their home in Seldovia, near Hig’s parents. They’ve started an environmental non-profit called groundtruthtrekking.org. They plan to make the trip again in twenty years or so.
A film about McKittrick’s and Hig’s journey will be screened tonight (Mon 4-11-11) in Sitka. “Journey on the Wild Coast” was produced by Juneau filmmaker Greg Chaney, who combined his own film interviews with raw footage shot by McKittrick herself. It will be shown at 6 PM in the downtown Coliseum Theater. Tickets are $8. Tomorrow night (Tue 4-12-11) at 7 PM, McKittrick and Hig will give a free reading and presentation from “A Long Trek Home” at Kettleson Memorial Library.
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