Boof against the odds, an interview with Katie Hilleke
February 28, 2008
Katie hiking into the Middle Fork Kings Canyon, California
Asheville, North Carolina- Last June and July, Katie Hilleke along with friends Stacey Heer and Robin Betz, went on a nation-wide kayaking tour called Boof Against The Odds, from North Carolina to Alaska, to raise money for cancer research. The tour was a response to the overwhelming support Katie received from the kayaking community when she was fighting colon cancer and a way for her to give back to those still fighting to overcome the disease. Through a pledge drive, they took in donations for every river mile they paddled. 100 percent of the money they raised was split between the Lance Armstrong Foundation and First Descents, a kayaking camp for young adults living with cancer. As an introduction to LifeMoreNatural.com’s Athletes With a Cause program, which will launch later this week, we interviewed Katie about her experience. (See Katie’s story: How Kayaking Saved My Life)
LifeMoreNatural: How did you come up with the idea to earn money per river mile you paddled?
Katie Hilleke: After being diagnosed with cancer, I decided that I wanted to do something to fight back. I really wanted to fight back through kayaking. I also wanted to somehow pay forward, as much as I could, the money and support that the kayaking community raised to help me pay for my medical bills. My roommates: Robin Betz, Stacy Heer, and Molly Malone helped me figure out a way to do all of that. We decided to start by doing something simple. I decided to go kayaking out west as soon as I was well, and paddle as much as possible. Having people pledge to donate money per mile of river I completed was a way for me to fight cancer in my kayak. I believe that preparing for this kayaking trip helped me recover faster.
LMN: What was the response from people?
Sustainable Energy, Huslia Style by Becky Warren
February 27, 2008
Huslia, Alaska- I left Fairbanks in the darkness of a perfectly crisp, 40 degree-below morning in early February, bound for the small interior Alaska village of Huslia. I was in search of a place where I could really cool off. With temps of 55 degrees below zero, Huslia was slightly disappointing. Walking around between homes, tribal hall, and school, an increasingly high Arctic sun blazing down on all of my layers of clothes, I still had to work on cooling down. This place really was dealing with an energy crisis.
(see also: Alaska’s Villages Face Critical Energy Transition)
From Fairbanks we flew 300 miles west, intermittently following the Interior’s main vein, the Yukon River, before jaunting north along the Koyukuk River about 130 miles. As the sun rose over the spruce-spotted blanket of white, a frozen land of s-curving rivers, scrubby trees, and small mountains that stretches on as far as the eye can strain gradually emerged. Some would call it barren. It isn’t what I would call tantalizing beauty, but it never fails to take my breath away. As always when I travel across the great wilderness that we presently call Alaska, I was filled that red Arctic morning with a primordial connection, and with awe at the people who live in this unpaved world.
It’s just a lake, right? story and photos by Mike Koehmstedt
February 26, 2008
Tazlina Lake, Alaska- I had been flying into remote rivers with bush pilot Billy Stephenson for some time, so he had developed an eye for what we may be interested in. He was flying some skiers into the Chugach Mountains in April of 2005 when he spotted the Klanelneechena Canyon. We went on a scouting mission in July and flew in to run it in August of that same year.
“There’s a reason she’s a virgin!” Billy said just before he flew away and left us at the put-in.
It was a classic high-valley put-in, surrounded by rugged mountains and glaciers. The river started out tiny, about 250 cubic feet per second and gained another 100 or so by the time we entered the canyon. The canyon was 300 to 400 feet deep and inescabable, about six miles in long and with continuous Class IV-V whitewater. Paddling down into it was very committing because of how remote it was.
Death Valley-Full of Life! story by Alex Vanderhoff, photos by Amber Broch
February 22, 2008
Death Valley, Calif.- It seems like an unlikely place to make an annual destination, but with Reno’s large cycling community and a late spring season many residents make a trip to Death Valley every year during the winter for some early season riding.
This was my first time visiting the park. Four of us traveled there with our road bikes to spend some time in the warm weather and enjoy the scenery from a bike. There are two main campgrounds with facilities and we camped at the slightly more primitive one, called Stovepipe Wells (sans the golf course that Furnace Creek boasts). The campground was crowded but friendly. Many families seem to travel to Death Valley, and there were tons of motor homes, which made us feel even better about enjoying conversation around a fire and meals from the dutch oven, rather than “the luxury” of watching TV indoors and dining on microwave frozen pizzas!
We arrived on Friday afternoon and rode downhill from the campground that sits at 5ft above sea level towards Death Valley’s low point of 280ft below sea level. Yellow and purple flowers were blooming, and riding back the setting sun cast beautiful shadows over the desert landscape. The views are awesome in the valley—the peaks of the Sierras with snow still on top, the colorful foothills layered with brown, yellow, red and black rock, and the huge sand dunes.
A journey through the Redwoods, story by Jason Motyka and Damon Goodman, photos by Seth Naman
February 22, 2008
Click here to watch slideshow.
Redwood National Park, Calif.- Trying to plan a drunken weekend outdoors seems to be getting harder and harder to do these days. Luckily I have many friends who have a similar idea of how to have a good time. Just two days before presidents day weekend my buddy Damon and I got to talking about what we could possibly do to entertain ourselves over this past President’s day weekend. Thoughts of skiing, surfing, and Mt. biking all came up but in the end we decided the crowds would all be too great over this three-day holiday. That’s when Damon mentioned the idea of a three day two night rafting trip in Redwood National Park in Northern California.
This creek sees one or maybe two trips a year and right now the water levels just happen to be at ideal levels. On top of that the weather was looking like blue skies all weekend something that does not happen very much behind the Redwood curtain in February. The stars had aligned for the Redwood Creek mission and it was on. The next two days were spent making arrangements from gear to food and after a 5 hour drive from Reno in a packed to the brim Chevy Tahoe we arrived at the put-in at the Redwood Valley.
How Kayaking Saved My Life… by Katie Hilleke, photos by Robin Betz
February 20, 2008
Katie and her yellow lab Sadie
(This is a story from Katie’s Web site, Simple Life Adventures, which she posted about a year ago–we’ll hear more about her ordeal in the coming week)
Asheville, North Carolina- Okay, I am going to tell the whole story. Were there any symptoms prior to Honduras? That is what I have been asked over and over by the medical profession. There were. But hindsight is 20/20. I remember feeling abdominal cramps often, especially towards the end of the school year, and they were painful. But I can’t remember when they started exactly, maybe even a year ago or so. But they didn’t start out painful, it just gradually got worse over time. It happened so gradually that I never thought to go to the doctor. I didn’t have time because I was planning for Honduras.
Oh Honduras, there was a lot of heart in that plan. The mission was to practice my Spanish, do some kayaking and have an adventure. In that sense, mission accomplished. On the other side, the mission was to be part of a successful all women’s expedition to a third world country and run the hair! Unfortunately for Stacy and I, our part of the mission self destructed in 5 days.
Our adventure into Honduras basically went like this: The night before we left, my brother Tommy and I set up a Z-drag in the back yard and a backpack carrying system for my kayak. I was so FIRED UP and nervous. I was nervous about the language, about getting around, running into guerrillas (not the animal type) and basically just getting in over our heads. I was not worried about colon cancer. Read more
Going Green, North Carolina Style
February 19, 2008
Click here or on image to watch slide-show.
Asheville, North Carolina- I know what you’re thinking, “Green is so cliché these days. Everybody wants to be green. I’m sick of hearing about the latest fad.” I agree, green has become a fad, unfortunately. But after spending this past weekend in Asheville, North Carolina, “going green” has taken on a whole new meaning.If you’re going to go green in Asheville, the first thing you have to do is huck yourself down a Class V whitewater run and over a 25-foot waterfall named Gorilla. After that you can begin to make a claim to being green, but unless you’re heading back to a biofuel heated home, you’ll still be hard pressed to get anybody to buy it.
My weekend in Asheville was an eye-opening, and butt-puckering, experience. In North Carolina, going green starts with the Green River Narrows, one of the world’s best known measuring sticks of Class V, steep, rocky kayaking. Though I ran it twice while out East, I still didn’t quite earn my green stripes for fear of the 800 lb. gorilla. I did run the next biggest drop on the river, Sunshine Falls, completely blind, on accident and right onto a rock, (it helps to have a buddy push you past the “must catch” eddy above the falls). Considering that one of my hostesses, Katie Hilleke, one of the area’s best female boaters and Green River veteran ran Gorilla upside down on Sunday, I’m pretty happy with my decision.
Is it nature though?
February 15, 2008
Reno, Nev.- Last fall, I took my Journalism 203 students down to Manzanita Lake, a man-made lake and surrounding park on the University of Nevada, Reno’s southern edge. The park is complete with a fountain, the Reno skyline in the background, ducks and geese coming and going and a pair of imported swans. Manzanita Lake is far from natural, but I asked them, is it nature?
The point of the exercise was to get them thinking about the role of human beings in nature and to think about how we’ve restructured all that is natural. Most of our thoughts about this restructuring falls into a category of destructiveness, what we’ve done to ruin nature. Personally, I overlook cities when I’m thinking about nature. I try my best to get out of cities at every chance and run to the mountains. But there is no denying the increasing role of cities, their growth and perhaps there importance in conserving wild lands from the outward growth of suburbia.
Over the last couple of decades many urban centers are beginning to clean up and beautify their towns by adding features like Manzanita Lake or the Reno Whitewater Park. These “renaturalization” projects are bringing nature back to our cities, places that for hundreds of years have stood as symbols of humanity’s power over our environments. But can these settings fittingly be called nature? Is it possible to call something that is man-made natural?
New report reveals destructive nature of salmon farming
February 13, 2008
Pacific Region- A global study of the impacts of farmed salmon on wild stocks released yesterday suggests that salmon farming has reduced survival of wild salmon and trout in many populations and countries. Combining regional data scientists have found a reduction in survival or abundance of wild populations of more than 50 percent per generation on average, associated with salmon farming.
“In most paired comparisons, salmon farming reduced the likelihood that the wild fish would survive or return to their natal spawning grounds,” the report states. “In many cases, survival and returns dropped by over 50 percent per generation. If all the wild populations migrated past farms averaging a 15,000-tonne annual yield, survival rates dropped by 73 percent on average—a sobering result given that production in many of these regions exceeds 20,000 tonnes per year, and shows no signs of abating.”
Zippy and Hyde by M.A.C.
February 12, 2008
New York, NY- Every squirrel in my father’s universe is named Zippy and I grew up with squirrel cut-outs the shutters of our family home. Zippy is practically a family mascot at this point. I come from a relatively rural area on the East Coast, as does my father. The nearest pseudo-city (my state is too small for “real” cities, like NYC) is about an hour and a half away from where I currently reside. I was living there this time, last year when I began to see Darwin in action. In frightening way, I learned that city squirrels are the doppelgangers of Zippy — the Hyde to Zippy’s Jekyll.I lived by myself in “the big city” so as a young woman, I was sensitive to the fact that I needed to keep my eyes open and my wits about me (or try, anyway). I was taking my trash out to the courtyard of my little apartment building one night when adaptation was illuminated.I had to walk down a small staircase to get out the back door of my building, and out to the courtyard where my landlord kept the dumpsters. This night, it was late and I was a little edgy. The back staircase was seedier than the front stairway which was open and clean — and visible. The back stairs led to the back door, and down to the non-laundry side of the basement (that wasn’t used for much besides being my landlord’s dirty storage.)
