Tag: Alaska

Lucky Dog: An Ode to the World’s Best Labradork

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“Don’t worry about the future; or worry, but know that worrying is as effective as trying to solve an algebra equation by chewing bubblegum. The real troubles in your life are apt to be things that never crossed your worried mind; the kind that blindside you at 4 p.m. on some idle Tuesday.”

—Baz Luhrmann

Things took a turn for the worse for me on my last day on the Last Frontier. My beloved black lab, Lucky, was hit by a car and killed instantly just hours before we were supposed to head home, and as you can probably imagine, it hit me pretty hard.

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There’s No Place Like Home: My (Temporary) Retreat from the Land of Odds

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I am the only child of doting parents who reacted with the same enthusiasm to my less-than-stellar high school track performances—“But you didn’t get lapped this time!” they’d exclaim, “You’re much faster than the girl with the knee brace!”—as they might if I became an astrophysicist, and if you asked them, they’d probably tell you I’m smart enough for that, too. It probably doesn’t come as a surprise, then, that I didn’t really experience feelings of doubt about my station in life until the summer before I moved to Alaska.

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Peaks and Pee Funnels: My Month of Mountaineering, Part 2

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Another climber once asked if I knew the definition of mountaineering. I could have said a million things, I guess, but nothing came to mind. “What is it?” I asked.

“Moving slowly uphill while not feeling very well,” he replied.

Such moments of clarity tell me two things about climbers as a group: first, our chosen activity and its inherent unpleasantness, at least on paper, indicate a slight imbalance in our collective brain function. Second, and perhaps more importantly, we are aware of the first fact, and we have a sense of humor about ourselves.

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Peaks and Pee Funnels: My Month of Mountaineering, Part 1

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I woke up at 3:42 a.m. on May 5 and quietly unzipped the vestibule of my tent. It was calm, clear, and cold in the Talkeetnas for the first time in five days. In eighteen minutes it would be time to start melting snow for water, for today it looked like we would finally get a window to climb. For now, though, my two tentmates were snuggled in their sleeping bags like so many giant, cozy caterpillars. I suddenly felt a wave of affection for these people with whom I’d weathered the seemingly endless snowstorm. Despite our cramped quarters, our mutual excitement over the increasingly remote possibility of climbing had been enough to pass the time, and our spirits had remained high.

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On being nice to spiders, gun control, and other hot topics.

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Don't read this book to your children, unless you want them to turn out like me.
Don’t read this book to your children, unless you want them to turn out like me.

When I was a kid, my dad used to read me this book called Be Nice to Spiders, which I’m told was one of his own childhood favorites. The book is about a spider named Helen who goes to the zoo and spins webs to catch flies, so all the zoo animals are happy, because everyone hates flies. Perhaps as a result of this story, I do not kill spiders when I find them in my house. Most of the time I just let them be, since I figure spiders are less annoying than those slow, stupid winter flies that buzz around and refuse to ever fully die. Sometimes if there’s a really big one I do the glass-and-paper trick where you trap the spider and take it outside. I never kill them. This practice, among other things, is what led to my nickname in college, Boulder Barbie. My best friend still calls me that, although she might change her mind once she sees this post.

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