ON EXPLORING
Thoreau, a ne'er-do-well Harvard grad who mucked about in the woods rather than seeking a steady job, once wrote, "Do what you love. Know your own bone; gnaw at it, bury it, unearth it, and gnaw at still." Exploring the wildest places on this planet; writing to honor the wonder and perplexity of life on it; and advocating for wilderness conservation in the process - such are the bones I gnaw at, bury, unearth, and gnaw at still.

I have always been drawn to the alien and extreme. As a little kid I dreamed of becoming a Martian colonist, or failing that, a self-declared citizen of Antarctica. My family lived in rural Ontario, where mountains and oceans and places like Mongolia seemed as alien and unattainable as another planet, so I figured heck, I might as well aim for Mars! 

So I devoured books on space travel and polar exploration, on the great land and sea voyages of discovery, on scurvy and frostbite and threadbare striving in wild places. Words served as my portal to the wider universe, and the worlds they brought to vivid and immediate life were incendiary to my imagination. A fierce love for language and for exploration were for me inseparable from the start, each a means of approaching what is wild.

My first bonafide expedition was a month-long Outward Bound course in Utah, made possible by the Morehead-Cain scholarship. After growing up in farm country, where the widest horizon framed a field of corn and the tallest summit was a haystack, the stark and tortured geology of the desert hit me like a revelation. There I was, a gawky scholarship student displaced from the Canadian backwoods, lugging a fifty-pound pack and gaping at a mountain for the first time. It was torture. It was sublime. So began my life beyond treeline.

A decade later I count myself lucky to have swallowed dust on all seven continents. From biking the Silk Road from Istanbul to India, to stalking wild horses in the Gobi desert of Mongolia, to scouring the Chilean Altiplano for evidence of aliens, to collecting groundwater from the McMurdo Dry Valleys of Antarctica, among other adventures, it's been an amazing ride. High latitudes and altitudes are the magnets of all my movements, and I am pulled again and again to immensities of sky, stone, and ice.

So whether exploring through science or writing, on a bike or on foot, solo or with friends, on this planet or beyond, my simple goal is to move, be moved, and move others in turn. Here we so incontrovertibly are, alive on a spinning chunk of rock in a random solar system in a universe reckless, exuberant, and vast. Every age is the age of discovery; every one of us is an explorer; every moment of genuine awareness is a frontier. And the wilderness is all around.

PAST EXPLORATIONS
Alaska, Antarctica, Azerbaijan, Borneo, Bolivia, Chile, China, Georgia (Democratic Republic of), Honduras, Japan, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Kyrgyzstan, India, Nepal, New Zealand, Norway, Mexico, Mongolia, Morocco, South Korea, Svalbard, Tajikistan, Thailand, Tibet, Turkey, Uzbekistan. By mode of bike, hike, ski, crampon, or creature (horse, camel, yak, etc.) All in the name of science, geopolitics, culture, history, and sheer silly sublime adventure.

"For me it is simply instinct, and perhaps this 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