Bellingham trail builder recounts experience in remote Mount Baker Wilderness and reflects on Earth’s climate pressures
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I’ve been thinking a lot about Mars lately.
To my great disappointment, I was born too late to be an 1800s cowboy and too early to be a 2100s astronaut. I’ve compromised by becoming a trail builder in Northwest Washington. It’s a good job and lets me engage in my cowboy fantasies by sleeping out under the stars and coming home tanned from working in the sun. I often joke that my retirement plan is to sign up as a trail builder for Elon Musk’s Mars colonies. After all, how hard could it be? The two things that make my job difficult are running water and hikers, and Mars doesn’t have either of those.
But recently I had a taste of just what living on Mars would be like which made me re-think all my space-cowboy fantasies.
I was leading a three-day crew on Ptarmigan Ridge, one of the approaches to Mount Baker. The austerity of the landscape was its beauty. Well above tree line, the only plants that grew there were small and scrappy. The sun was constant. One the first day, we realized the exposure would be a big problem. We moved like astronauts in spacesuits made of hiking gear to protect us from the radiation.
The next challenge was water. The main water source was a tarn, a perfect harbor for waterborne illnesses. We viewed it skeptically and opted instead to gather our water from trickles coming out of the melting snowbanks. These tiny streams often dried up unexpectedly overnight. Now, the sun was trying to kill us, and water was a precious commodity.
On our second afternoon I floated on my sleeping pad on the surface of the probably toxic tarn. Staring at a landscape of scattered rocks and finger-sized plants fighting for survival, I thought about how this would be viewed as a miracle of terraforming if we were on Mars. This trip had been the most challenging of my summer season. But it was vacation mode for a Martian colony.
Then the air became toxic. In the morning the wildfire smoke rolled in, and we added kN95 masks to our astronaut suits. Now, with long pants, work gloves, hooded sun shirts, sunglasses, hard hats, and masks, some of my crew were completely covered from head to toe. I truly began to feel as though I was commanding a space colony as I managed the many competing concerns of the crew. Some people wanted to evac due to medical concerns with the smoke. Some thought they couldn’t hike out during the heat of the day. I tried to balance everyone’s needs and concerns as the smoke grew thicker, the day grew later, and the sun beat down on us.
It sounds dire. But at the end of the day safety was just a four-hour walk across a ridge and back to our cars. In contrast, two astronauts were orbiting in the sky above me trapped in the International Space Station. They went up for an eight-day mission in June 2024 and there were no plans to rescue them until February 2025. Seeing as how commercial space flight couldn’t yet be trusted to send astronauts to orbit safely, I don’t have high hopes for my “retire on Mars as a trail builder” plan.
Retiring on Mars isn’t a realistic option — and neither is relocating if our planet burns to a crisp. My taste of Mars life was still safe and sound on Earth. The air was breathable, if slightly toxic. The water was drinkable, if unreliable. I survived the sun’s radiation without even a sunburn. And my boss brought my weary crew fresh watermelon and evacuation to safety. A good personal anecdote, but hardly the stuff of space catastrophes, real or imagined.
As I hiked out, my ears rang with the oft-repeated phrase “There’s No Planet B.” This trip served as a reminder to me that life on Earth at this moment is luxurious in comparison to the alternatives. And the consequences of failing to address the climate crisis will be dire. For me, that trip was a dramatic story to tell my friends when they asked, “So, how was work?” But it was nothing compared to the realities faced by those suffering daily under climate change.
And even that is nothing compared to the improbable task of moving to Mars.
I want to continue to experience places like Ptarmigan Ridge as an experiment in austerity rather than an oasis in a post-apocalyptic world. I want to continue to play cowboy and sleep under the stars, knowing that I will never have to live as a refugee among them. Washington is my beautiful wet, cloudy, tree-covered home. And I never want to have to live anywhere else.
—By Kesia Lee
Kesia “Lee” Lee is a lifelong Pacific Northwesterner currently building trails in the woods around Mount Baker. Her work documents the many landscapes that people call sacred and worth protecting. Through photography and writing, she hopes to inspire folks to take climate action out of love for the land around them.