interviewed on National Geographic and CBC radio

As a little kid I wanted to be an explorer when I grew up. National Geographic, that hallowed institution famous for its yellow-framed magazines, with photos and stories from unimaginable lands and cultures, played a huge role in framing my wildest dreams about exploring this planet. So when the National Geographic Weekend radio show, hosted by the legendary Boyd Matson, contacted me about being featured for the Cycling Silk expedition, I was pretty much on the moon with excitement. A dream come true! The show aired on January 9th, 2012, but I've only now figured out how to excerpt and feature the interview. Check out my National Geographic debut below:

Kate Harris on National Geographic Weekend radio with Boyd Matson. 

In other exciting news, I was also featured recently on the CBC! Which as a similarly hallowed institution, certainly in this country, is enough to make any Canuck worth their maple syrup feel chuffed. The fabulous Mark Forsythe of the CBC's BC Almanac interviewed me about the Cycling Silk expedition and my plans to write a book about it, a show that aired on November 29th, 2011. You can listen to that interview here:

Kate Harris on CBC Radio with Mark Forsythe.

In other news I'm working on the Cycling Silk book like it's my joy, my dream—and my job. My boss overseeing this particular gig (ahem, yours truly) is absolutely ruthless, demanding overtime hours with no pay on nights and even weekends, in working conditions eerily similar to those described by Shackleton in his infamous (though possibly miscredited) advertisement seeking volunteers for a polar journey: "[woman] wanted for hazardous journey. Low wages, bitter cold, long hours of complete darkness. Safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in event of success." So however doubtful a safe return is, I'm aiming at success in the same way that Shackleton aimed his team at Antarctica—though unlike his crew, I'm hoping to avoid getting stuck fast in sea ice in the process. Whatever happens, it promises to be a wild ride in words...

"The craft or art of writing is a clumsy attempt to find symbols for the wordlessness. In utter loneliness a writer tries to explain the inexplicable. And sometimes if he is very fortunate and the time is right, a very little of what he is trying to do trickles through - not ever much. And if he is a writer wise enough to know it can’t be done, then he is not a writer at all. A good writer always works at the impossible.”
-John Steinbeck, from a Paris Review interview 

returned from the Silk Road

Finally home after 10 months, 10 countries, and 10,000 km of pedaling the most rugged, sublime tracks the Silk Road has to offer, and exploring wilderness conservation across borders on the way. Now I'm gearing up for the next adventure: writing a book about it. Which promises to be even more grueling than biking the Silk Road, but thankfully it'll involve fewer saddle sores! More details to come, meanwhile wishing you happy trails...

I suffer as always from the fear of putting down the first line. It is amazing the terrors, the magics, the prayers, the straitening shyness that assail one. It is as though the words were not only indelible but that they spread out like dye in water and color everything around them. A strange and mystic business, writing.
-John Steinbeck 

biking beyond borders

For the next year, starting tomorrow, I'm biking the Silk Road with my dear pal Mel Yule. The journey will take a year, starting in Istanbul, Turkey and finishing in northern India, and exploring conservation across borders along the way. The full details of the Cycling Silk expedition are available on the official expedition website, and I promise this is the last time this blog will echo that one. But I wanted to post the same overview of the Cycling Silk expedition. After all, why the Silk Road? Why bikes? Why conservation across borders?

For thousands of years and today still, the Silk Road has been a dynamic flux of people, products, and ideas from East to West and back again. The "Silk Road" is not one but many roads linking Europe to Asia, and together comprising a trade route that meanders through deserts, palaces, revolutions, mountains, temples, ruins, and legend. But the Silk Road that most enchants me exists on the outskirts of itself, the spaces in between the fabled cities, where the road frays into trails leading to borderlands: mountains on the fringe of the humanly habitable; alpine desert ecosystems oblivious to the arbitrary lines that sever them on maps; the territory of nomads, snow leopards, dust storms and dreams.

In this increasingly fragmented, bordered, and tamed world, the Silk Road serves as a case study for the importance of wilderness conservation and connectivity across divides. Some of the planet's most valuable and vulnerable ecosystems are found in Silk Road deserts and mountains, many of which straddle political borders. But the greatest challenges our planet faces today transcend political borders, whether climate change, poverty, peace and security, water issues, and habitat and biodiversity loss. These are tightly interlinked issues, and to tackle them with any success and sustainability, we absolutely need to think beyond borders.

So building on our educational backgrounds in the natural and social sciences, as well as our chronic passion for wild places, Mel and I have launched on this year-long field research project to study these issues as they relate to transboundary conservation across Silk Road borders, from Turkey to Kashmir. Experienced cross-continental cyclists both, having ridden coast-to-coast across the USA and through Xinjiang and Tibet in western China, we are once again opting to travel on two wheels in order to explore isolated deserts and mountains otherwise difficult to access, and to reveal the Silk Road as a landscape of continuity, despite the borders that seemingly dissect it.

On the way, we spending extended time exploring the remote, diverse, and rugged landscapes that are or are proposed to be transboundary protected areas. At each, we are interviewing people involved, from locals to conservationists to government officials, in order to learn how borders make and break their world. Through this website during the expedition, and through video, photography, and writing projects after the expedition, our goal is to throw the contours of the Silk Road’s wild and complicated borderlands into sharp relief, and in the process, encourage people to think beyond boundaries.

At this point we’ve earned the appropriate degrees, studied the available maps, and made contacts in wilderness conservation along the entire route. We’ve saved some cash, acquired sturdy bikes thanks to the generosity of Seven Cycles, and shucked our lives of superfluities, from house keys to more than one set of clothes. And tomorrow morning, the two of us catch a ferry out of Istanbul and pedal into the land of lost borders.

So begins our new life as students to austerity and exultation, pilgrims to rock, ice, and sky. Ahead is a year of roaming the Silk Road’s beckoning swerve, wherever it leads, from winter to summer to winter again: past fattening cities and shrinking villages, through deserts and over mountains, along trails edged with dunes and glaciers, across borders real as a fence and false as any human certainty. After living and learning the Silk Road and its seasons, slowly, and deeply, over the course of a year from the back of a bike, we plan to make a documentary film - and I plan to write a book - about the Silk Road's wild borderlands in a way that gives them intense life in hearts and minds. For we believe this is wilderness conservation’s most crucial project: making people fall in love with wild places, making deserts and mountains more than merely backdrop.

We hope you'll join us for the ride - at least vicariously, through the Cycling Silk blog and the Facebook page! See you down the Silk Road....

If I were Tomaž Šalamun, 
I’d ride wild on an invisible bicycle,
like a metaphor sprung from a poem’s cage,
still not certain of its freedom,
but making do with movement, wind and sun.
-Adam Zagajewski

what is a mountain? an obstacle; a transcendence; above all, an effect (salman rushdie)

Bivvy camp at about 19,000 feet on the way up Pinnacle Peak in the Indian Himalaya.

I'm soaring high on mountains and life here in mad, endearing, tastebud-searing India. Just back from the first all-women's expedition to Pinnacle Peak (6955m) in the Indian Himalaya, an adventure that two dear, intrepid pals - Alison Criscitiello and Rebecca Haspel - and I dreamed up in order to follow in the hob-nailed footsteps of Fanny Bullock Workman, an early explorer in these parts.

More substantial update on that epic later, because now it's back to the trail! This time in the Spiti valley, on a trek with Harish Kapadia, Bernadette McDonald, and other literary mountain pilgrims. After the trek we're all heading to the Mussoorie Writers' Festival, October 5-8, which has a "Mountain Literature" theme this year. At the festival, "Distinguished authors and climbers from India, Nepal, U.S.A., U.K., Canada, Australia and other countries will discuss and read from their books, exploring how they transpose high altitude adventures and experiences into words, using language to convey the extreme beauty and challenge of mountains. Over a period of four days, more than twenty-five authors will converge on Mussoorie for readings, panel discussions, workshops and social events. Invitees include noted poets, novelists, filmmakers, travel authors and memoirists, as well as editors and agents."

So if you're in India, come check it out, meet me there! I'll be presenting some new writing about wilderness and mountains that I'm super excited to share. If you can't make it to Mussoorie, I'll also be giving a public lecture at the Himalayan Club in Mumbai on October 10th, part of an entire day of talks by mountain writers. Details here.

For the simplicity that lies this side of complexity I wouldn’t give a fig; for the simplicity that lies the other side of complexity, I’d give my life.
-Oliver Wendell Holmes

the cost of a thing is the amount of life exchanged for it (Thoreau)

In northern India.

Between ski traversing the Hardangervidda in Norway, squinting at North Korea from the DMZ boundary in South Korea, stalking lions and zebra and elephants (oh my) in Kenya, roadtripping across Canada and hanging out in the wild west with best pals, and now mountain adventuring in India, so far the year 2010 has been a pretty tough go. But hey, somebody has to do it. Many of these adventures will eventually surface in some form of writing, but for now, and in response to emails, I want to comment on the lifestyle of a starving writer slash explorer slash wilderness pilgrim.

When people discover how I spend my days these days, their reaction is usually something like, “you must be filthy rich or crazy.” While I’m often filthy, I’m infinitely remote from rich. For proof consider my steady diet of salsa and peanut butter. Money, at least by my idiosyncratic economics, is worthy of pursuit only to the extent that it enables rich and transformative experience. Anything more – acquiring wealth for the sake of wealth – risks becoming its own form of impoverishment. I admire Thoreau’s system of accounting, which defines the cost of something as the “amount of what I call life which is required to be exchanged for it.” And as a dear friend pointed out, this doesn’t simply mean the amount of your life, but life in general, and the planet on which all life depends.

So my answer to “how do you afford the adventurous life?” is simply this: I live simply. Chaotically, but simply. My life fits into a backpack, with some spillover onto bookshelves and bike racks. I’ve pared down all my expenses to the point of no rent, no cell phone, no car, and no monthly bills. With an unfaltering appetite for monotonous food, coupled with a fondness for tent living and couch surfing (facilitated by generous friends and family who actually own couches), I manage to squeak by on meager income – and explore the world.

That income mostly comes from the environmental reporting I do for the International Institute for Sustainable Development. As part of this NGO's Earth Negotiations Bulletin (ENB) team, I get launched around the world to cover UN meetings and environmental conferences. Then I extend my work travels into "side trips," which are less tangential tourism and more field research expeditions. These excursions inspire and inform the writing I most love to do, namely the kind that explores the origin and expression of my various astonishments: natural wonders, far-flung facts, poetry written and lived, wildness in all its guises. Or as Annie Dillard puts it, “tales of grandeur, tales of risk.” In short, the kind of writing that guarantees, even in a world where almost nothing is guaranteed, that I will never ever not in a million dog years get rich.

But what is richness, if not this abundance of time and space to wander and dream, to read and write? This unstructured but examined life, purely curiosity driven but magnetized by mountains and other wildernesses, has provided my most intense schooling. Like Dylan Thomas: "My education was the liberty I had to read indiscriminately, and all the time, with my eyes hanging out." (That said, I owe so much of what I’m doing and who I am now to many years spent in an academic setting, educational opportunities for which I'm inexpressibly grateful. So to all the young kids out there: if you want to see the world, study hearty. It’s your ticket!)

As Ellen Meloy, one of my favorite writers, frames it, "this business of becoming conscious, of being a writer, is ultimately about asking yourself, How alive am I willing to be?" In answer I say fiercely alive. It’s a precarious existence, this business of becoming a writer, and by writer I really mean an explorer in the most fundamental sense: one who ventures into unfamiliar territory, whether physical or creative or metaphysical or emotional, and returns to tell the tale. It’s an impecunious existence too, depending on your system of accounting, and it certainly isn’t for everyone. But as Evelyn Underhill wrote, “He goes because he must, as Galahad went towards the Grail: knowing that for those who can live it, this alone is life.”

Indeed. That said, if anyone out there has leads on potential salsa or peanut butter sponsors, please get in touch.

For me it is simply instinct, and perhaps that is all that a person can try to put into each of her days: attention to the radiance, a rise to the full chase of beauty. -Ellen Meloy