CARROT QUINN

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September 15, 2009September 15, 2009 / carrot quinn

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Alaska, I love my friends

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✨I made a zine yall!✨Long Distance Hiking Zine issue 1 is a 40 page, 20k word collection of some of my favorite hiking writing I've ever done- and it comes with TEN smol prints from the hikes contained therein!!!⛰ I'm selling this zine to recoup the $$$ I spent on the air taxi out of the Brooks Range, and also because having something u can hold in yr hands is really nice sometimes, even tho I know we all live in vans or whatever and don't like having a lot of stuff. Here's the caveat- I'm only printing 200 of these (each zine will be signed and individually numbered) and I'm only taking orders until midnight PST on July 15! And then that's it! (I'll update here if they sell out before then 🙂) The zine is $25 including shipping (no internation shipping plz, I'm sorry) and to order, u can pay me via paypal at carrotquinn4@gmail.com or click the link in my profile. (I've removed the option for venmo because the app is giving me issues). Make sure to include your shipping address in the notes section of your payment, and I'll ship them all via media mail by the evening of the 16th!🤠

The next day we hiked to the top of Mt Marathon in Seward. I had forgotten that this was a hard hike, and we didn't bring any snacks and only a little water. Seward was having a heat wave- eighty whole degrees! And I had never seen these mountains in such full, unbridaled sun. The last time I did this hike it was foggy and the view from the top had been muted- this time we could see all the way to the end of Resurrection bay and a small bit of the open ocean and it was literally the best view I have seen in my entire life, and I felt drunk on it. We were hungry, but we found some trail mix someone had dumped in the dirt on the summit and we brushed off the almonds and ate them. I tried to gather the discarded MnMs but they were too warm from the sun and they melted into the earth when I touched them. The golden raisins were beyond salvageable. We'd taken the hiker's trail to the summit, and now we took the race route down (there is a race to the top of this mtn every year). It was a neverending scree field, and so we "screed", all the way back down to tiny Seward way below, little rows of houses on an alluvial fan next to the glacier-fed bay.

@muffyjdavis on our hike in Resurrection bay to Caines head 😍

After hanging at her cabin in the interior for a few days, Tara drove Bunny and I 6 hours south to Anchorage (my friends are the nicest ppl?!) and Bunny flew back to Oregon to hang there until our Noatak trip starts- and I picked @muffyjdavis up at the airport!! (She and Bunny literally got on and off the same plane.) Muffy had never been to Alaska, nor had she ever been backpacking, altho she's currently prepping for a monthlong trip in August. We climbed a mtn in the fog w Tara and then decided to hike the Resurrection Pass trail, from Hope to Cooper Landing. The Kenai Peninsula, a generally cool and rainy place, was having a heat wave, and we spent two days in blissed out sunshine in resplendant alpine meadows on some beautiful tread, wherein Muffy got a hundred mosquito bites and declared that she loved being dirty and sleeping on the ground. Afterward we hitched to Seward and got a ride in an RV (!!), an experience that would repeat itself multiple times during what would turn out to be the best hitching luck of my life (literally bc Muffy is so hot) (until our hitching luck ran out at the end, but that's another story). In Seward we hiked along Resurrection bay to Caines head, and everything smelled like the sea.

After Bunny and I got off the Brooks Range traverse we visited my friend Tara at her cabin on a river in the Alaskan interior. Tara has been one of my dearest friends since 2008 when we found each others' blogs (back when blogs were still a thing) and were like "omg another queer Alaskan writer, who are u". Tara consistently remains one of the most brilliant, inspiring and interesting people I have ever had the privilege of knowing. Tara grew up on a remote subsistence trapline in Alaska, in a cabin made of spruce poles, where the mail came every 6 months by plane; when I met her in 2008 she was living in a van and traveling around the lower 48 stripping, snaring rabbits, doing witchy stuff and making herbal medicine. (Her blog, which now exists as a beautiful sort of archive of this time, is hobostripper.com.) More recently Tara divides her time between her small off grid cabin in Alaska and traveling for sex work activism- she's legit created new legislation that changes the way sex work is criminalized in Alaska, helping in small ways to keep sex workers safe. Tara is close to the environment she has known all her life (the rivers and boreal forest of the Alaskan interior) in a way that is so special and rare in the western world, and visiting her at her cabin is a beautiful and humbling experience. First you must cross a large river- by boat in the summer, on foot across the ice in the winter- and then walk a bit through the woods to a one room cabin that has no running water but does have a woodstove and a single propane burner, and a bit of electricity (enough for a lightbulb and to charge a computer) from a solar panel. Food is stored in a bucket in the "cold hole"- a hole dug into the permafrost outside and covered with a piece of wood. Salmon that Tara dried are stacked on a shelf (photo 1), jars of animal fat gifted from neighbors in the nearby village are lined up on the counter. The dog, Maggie, chews a salmon skin on the floor as well as a moose bone dredged up from the slough. The mosquitoes are THICK. Bunny and Tara talked about guns (they both love guns) and we burned mosquito coils and made dried salmon curry.

u can also find me on my public facebook page

u can also find me on my public facebook page

Thru-Hiking Will Break Your Heart: the book

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