OUT OF EDEN WALK

The place my family calls simply the Outer Coast means a lot to me. I’ll take almost any excuse to go on a coast hike along the 650-kilometer coastline where the Pacific Ocean crashes against mainland Southeast Alaska. Yet when Paul Salopek reached out asking if I’d walk it with him, I had to think about it. The “Lost Coast” is a wilderness like few places on the continent: difficult (and expensive) to access, harsh, and almost entirely devoid of human footprints. These places tend to attract extreme adventurer types looking to carve another notch in the walking stick of their travel blogs. And monikers like Lost Coast are the perfect magnet for the hairy-chested vlog-splorer.

Of course, after learning about the Out of Eden Walk and reading some of Paul’s dispatches, it quickly became clear that his motivations lay elsewhere. Moreover, I was sure Paul would find a way to make this section of his walk happen one way or another, and I knew I wanted to be the one to walk it with him. I hoped to show him how this place is unlike any other, and how to chronicle his experience without degrading its integrity.

I’ve walked the Outer Coast many times throughout my life, mostly in one-week sections. I remember back in 2009 preparing for my first coast hike as a 12-year-old. I printed screenshots from Google Earth, aligning them across the living room floor of my home in Gustavus, Alaska, and sticking them together with copious amounts of tape. My dad and I squinted at blurry pixels and cursed the wispy clouds over key landscape features. We compared the imagery to his old topographic maps, featuring rivers that hadn’t existed for 50 years. Some of them still show on today’s U.S. Geological Survey maps.

Each new day on my first coast hikes, I generally had no idea what to expect. In the wet tent at night or on a sunny log on the beach, we would stretch out the accordion map and mark a Sharpie dot where we thought we were. Red for one year, blue for the same section five years later. We didn’t have a GPS or satellite communicator—they existed, but they weren’t really necessary, and I don’t think that has changed. I loved it.

These days on coast hikes, I do load maps and imagery onto my smartphone and use it as a GPS, but I don’t record our track. Some days, I don’t even turn the phone on. I carry a satellite communicator but only turn it on once a day to send a canned “we’re ok” message to my family for their peace of mind. I hate the way these technologies make the world smaller. The Outer Coast is not a place for constant, instantaneous communication with anyone farther than a yell away. I’m happy to be exactly where I am, without knowing exactly where that is.

I’d been planning and preparing for almost three months by the time I finally spotted the little orange speck that was Paul and his paddling partners drifting down the Copper River in their rubber raft to the beach where I waited for them. I’d purchased, portioned, and packed into five boxes everything Paul and I would eat in the next seven weeks.

Four of the boxes had been sent ahead already, to be funneled through a logistical puzzle of friends, bush pilots, and remote lodges to their respective rendezvous points. The fifth, with me, also contained a new pack raft for Paul and some other specialized gear for him, some of which I’d made. I’d also arranged two air charters and two boat rides. Finally, I’d squinted at more blurry imagery of parts of the coast that were new to me, learned little, and reassured Paul—with far more confidence than I actually had—that we’d figure it out.

But I still hadn’t talked to him about one thing that was very important to me. I had to ask Paul to turn off his GPS, which has tracked every step of his journey from Ethiopia since 2013. I’m not sure why I hadn’t brought this up earlier—probably because I didn’t know how best to articulate my reasoning, and I wasn’t sure how he’d take it. There were two reasons I felt compelled to ask Paul to agree to this:

First, humans love following trails.

If there’s a GPS track on a map, someone is going to want to follow it. But my philosophy is the opposite: If you’re going to go out into a wilderness like this, the point is to get a little lost. Just keep the ocean on your right (or left, pick one). Even a half-mile into the woods, you’ll be able to hear the crashing surf. If you’ve got your head down instead, trying to retrace someone’s footsteps, you’ll miss a salmonberry thicket that will instantly teach you to assemble all the profanities you know into creative new combos. (Or following our track, you’d more likely be led right into one.) It’s not that the route itself is any great secret. It’s just that digitally capturing and distributing the experience feels sacreligious. If you asked me, I’d tell you anything you want to know about the route, but it would be a personal conversation—an oral map—not a spatial one.

Second, I’m selfish.

For me, one of the best things about the Outer Coast is being alone: not seeing a single human sign during a week of walking, except what washes ashore or buzzes by overhead (bush pilots often navigate along the coastline). As far as I’m concerned, the fewer people who know this place even exists, the better.

Here lies a conflict, though: In today’s world, every square inch of land is under scrutiny for development or resource extraction, and wild places usually earn legal protection by popular demand. Right now, parts of this coastline enjoy federal wilderness status as parts of Glacier Bay and Wrangell-St. Elias National Parks. Other parts have almost no legal protections, and their inaccessibility and the expense of just getting there—not to mention the logistical and financial challenges of both importing equipment and extracting resources—are the only things standing in the way of mining, timber, fishing, and other industries.

Tourism is one such industry, disadvantaged, luckily, for similar reasons of remoteness and logistical difficulty. If the Outer Coast were to become advertised as a desirable destination, more voices might clamor for its greater protection. On the one hand, this sounds like a good thing, but it would come at the personal cost of more unfamiliar boot prints in the vast stretches of sand now marked only by clawed feet.

The past century shows how the balance of inaccessibility and profit swings. In federally designated wilderness, century-old bulldozers still sit on the road grades they created, machine and arterial alike, now reclaimed by the forest. We saw piles of slash—branches and discarded non-marketable wood debris—from last year’s logging washing into the ocean. Paul and I walked past a strange, three-legged, amphibious boat actively suction-dredging for gold in the surf. The ebb and flow of industry on this coastline feels out of my control, and I’m not sure what, if anything, I can or should do about it. I guess I’ve decided to bet on obscurity, so I asked Paul not to leave a bread crumb trail for others to follow.

Before we started walking, Paul did agree to turn off his GPS. I think he could see it was important to me, and that was enough for him. I hope that after our seven-week traverse of that singular little ribbon of the world, he understands it for himself as well.

Rowan Sharman was born in Southeast Alaska and grew up there. He’s one of the few people who have walked the coast between Cross Sound and the Copper River. He joined Paul Salopek for about 650 kilometers of the Out of Eden Walk. He now lives in Seattle, where he works as a mechanical and field engineer at a lab specializing in ocean science and technology.