Van Life During Climate Change Life
A few things before I get into what it’s been like living in a van in a time of rapid climate change:
1. At the top of my first blog entry, I wrote that future entries would be shorter. This one won’t be, but hopefully, it’s important and interesting enough for you to read.
2. I want to make it clear that human-caused climate change is not up for debate. It’s real and it’s happening right now in front of our eyes. It’s our responsibility to acknowledge it, demand more of our political, environmental, and energy industry leaders, and do what we can to mitigate it since it’s too late to reverse it. At this stage, it feels like a waste of time and energy to try to change the minds of climate change deniers, who insist the climate has always changed without acknowledging that in this instance, it has happened in a matter of a few generations instead of centuries.
3. It’s also important to acknowledge that I am a white woman who has the privilege of traveling the country in a van with her mountain bike, which brings up another facet of climate change. A warming planet doesn’t have the same impact on me as it’s already having on indigenous peoples, communities of color, and those living in poverty around the world.
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It’s mid-July as we drive through Montana toward Big Sky Resort for the second round of the Big Mountain Enduro race series. The first thing I notice is the smoke that obscures the mountains and shrouds the entire landscape around our van in an eerie haze. I think about how dystopian it feels as I switch the air pouring out of the vents from outdoor to indoor.
“How can people live in this?” I wonder out loud.
Because the smoke enveloping the mountains and valleys is going to be hanging around for a while. That’s the way it is these days, except this year, the smoke showed up earlier than the year before. I know because I asked the barista at a coffee hut outside Missoula about it. We talked as U.S. Forestry Service fire crews fueled up their rigs at the gas station across the street. She told me they usually don’t see smoke this heavy until mid-August. A fellow mountain biker we met in Big Sky, who was born and raised in Bozeman, made a similar observation.
“And it’s not going to get any better,” he told us.
That’s how summers out west look now. Beautiful mountains and meadows dry as a bone and veiled in clouds of smoke that vary in thickness depending on how many wildfires are burning across the region. The land now regularly turns into a tinderbox. Signs at Big Sky Resort and highway message boards won’t let you forget it. Our mountain biker acquaintance goes on telling us the last time there was this little rain in Montana was in 1988 when 51 separate fires combined into a wall of flames that destroyed nearly 800,000 acres, or 36 percent, of Yellowstone National Park. Including lands outside it, the fires burned 1.2 million acres of forest (1).
“It’s worrying, but no one in positions of power seems to care,” he concludes.
In Bozeman, they do at least seem to care about the lack of rain. Just a few days before we got there, city commissioners declared a stage two drought, which, according to the Bozeman Daily Chronicle, means residents are prohibited from watering their lawns and plants during certain days and times. The restrictions come with surcharge rates between 10 and 47 percent. The goal is to reduce water use by 20 percent and current projections show the city could deplete up to 75 percent of its reservoir supply by the end of the 2021 irrigation season (2).
On a grander scale, in a July 23rd report in The New York Times, Jim Robbins, who is based out of Helena, writes that Montana’s fly fishing tourism and the rainbow and brown trout that drive it are under threat. A combination of “higher temperatures early in the year, worryingly low river levels, fish die-offs and pressure from the crush of anglers yearning to recapture a year lost to the pandemic have swirled into a growing crisis (3).” The state has responded by imposing restrictions and closures for some of its top trout streams and a coalition of businesses, fly fishing guides and environmentalists is warning that the severe drought may not be a temporary problem, which could collapse Montana’s fisheries.
And it’s not just Montana. We’ve been on the road for three months and while our goal was always to avoid areas with prolonged rain, we didn’t expect to see so little of it. Before coming to Big Sky, we spent about a month in the Pacific Northwest dividing our time between Washington and Oregon. I was excited to rip the famed PNW loam, but it quickly became clear that a lot of trails hadn’t seen a substantial amount of rain for a while. Much of what we rode in Oregon was a dust bowl, especially Post Canyon in Hood River.
We were also in the area during the June heat wave when days of temperatures well above a hundred degrees Fahrenheit killed several hundred people in Oregon, Washington, and Canada’s British Columbia. Many residents in those places are accustomed to temperate summers, which means they don’t have air conditioning, so they had no way of fighting off the record-breaking temperatures of above 110 F that settled across the region (4). Dan’s friend, who is both a mountain biker and an EMS worker, said he spent that weekend trying to save people whose body temperatures rose into the hundreds by taking everything out of their freezers and jamming it in their armpits and groins to cool them down. Then, he spent the days after the heat wave responding to calls about people who had died without anyone there to help them. The region’s sea creatures didn’t fare much better. Mussels, clams, sea stars, barnacles, and snails were cooked alive by the millions (5).
As for us, since we planned to spend most of our time van life-ing in what we believed would be the cooler temperatures of the Rocky Mountains, we didn’t install air conditioning in our Sprinter, so we thought we were being clever by escaping to the snow line of Mount Baker. Instead, we were met with temperatures in the 90s as we ran through the remnants of snow in our shorts. A study published in early July concluded the PNW heat wave would have been “virtually impossible” without human-caused climate change. The researchers estimated the temperatures were a one-in-a-thousand-year event, but if current greenhouse gas emissions continue, events so extreme could start taking place every five to 10 years by the 2040s (6). I’ll be in my 50s then.
The realities of climate change have been unavoidable as we’ve made our way to nearly 10 states in the last three months. On our way out of Washington, momski and I drove through Mt. Rainier National Park where we saw our first glacier, or what’s left of it after a century of humans pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. The same heat wave that killed people and baked mussels alive also led to a huge amount of snowmelt over a short period of time. A spokesperson for the park told a Spokane newspaper the snowpack had been above average until the heat wave, but plummeted to below average after just a few days of extreme temperatures (7). The impact of that, he said, will be long-lasting. Rainier’s glaciers are normally covered in snow late into the summer, which protects them from melting by insulating the ice underneath. With less snow, Rainier will continue to lose its glacial ice, which has been happening at an accelerated rate for the last hundred years. According to the spokesperson, Nisqually Glacier, which is the one momski and I got to see, has lost nearly 40 percent of its surface area in the past 120 years and all of Rainier’s 29 named glaciers have lost a third of their coverage and 45 percent of their thickness since 1900.
When we were in Oregon, momski and I visited the sightseeing spots along Historic Highway 30, which winds its way through Oregon’s Columbia River Gorge, where we saw evidence of the 2017 Eagle Creek Fire. It was started by a 15-year-old boy who ignited fireworks during a burn ban. The fire burned for three months and scorched 50,000 acres before it was contained. It also threatened historic structures like Multnomah Falls Lodge, which was built in 1925. The tallest waterfall in the state and the squat building at its feet get an estimated 1 to 1.5 million visitors a year.
As we hiked to the top of the ridge where Multnomah Falls starts its 620-foot plunge, the trees revealed how close the flames had come. The revered destination was saved thanks to fire crews who spent an entire night wetting down the lodge’s roof and everything within about 30 to 40 yards as the fire raged around them (8). The trails surrounding the waterfall were closed until November 2018 because of the hazards posed by loose rocks and trees and it cost nearly $1 million to restore the lodge (9). It took longer still to reopen other trails and attractions along the gorge. In fact, some of them didn’t reopen until just this past January, which means for three and a half years, hundreds of people worked thousands of hours to clear and rebuild trails and replace bridges and other structures so the entirety of the area could reopen to visitors (10).
As we speak, another part of Oregon is getting ravaged by the Bootleg Fire, which was just getting going when we arrived in the Portland area in early July. So far, the fire has devoured nearly 414,000 acres of the Fremont-Winema National Forest in the southern portion of the state about an hour north of Klamath Falls, which is where Dan was born and raised until sixth grade. As of August 5, it was about 85 percent contained after destroying more than 160 homes and nearly 250 other structures (11). In a July 19th article in The New York Times, Henry Fountain reports the Bootleg Fire was started by a lightning strike after months of drought and it became “so big and hot that it’s affecting winds and otherwise disrupting the atmosphere (12).” The rapid changes in winds and other conditions “have caused flames to spread rapidly in the forest canopy, ignited whole stands of trees at once, and blown embers long distances, rapidly igniting spot fires elsewhere.” The fire has also overrun firebreaks further confounding firefighting efforts.
The Bootleg Fire is one of the be the biggest blaze of the fire season so far, but there are more than 90 other large incident fires currently burning across the western U.S. (13). At more than 20, Idaho has the greatest number of them, which was evident by the perpetually smokey skies over Victor, which is where we spent the last week visiting friends. Last month, all the smoke these types of fires are producing made it as far as New York City where people woke up to a red sun in the sky. My friend, who lives in Brooklyn, described it as weird after I shared an article from The New York Times about it in my Instagram stories. The smoke also prompted New York state to issue an air quality health advisory because the concentration of microscopic particulate pollution, called PM2.5, was nine times above exposure recommendations from the World Health Organization (14).
If that’s the havoc these fires can wreak on the air quality nearly 3,000 miles away, imagine the impact they’re having on the air that’s going into the lungs of people who live nearby. We know that PM2.5 poses the greatest problems because the particles are so small they bypass the body’s natural defenses and can get deep into the lungs and bloodstream (15). Long-term exposure to this kind of pollution can lead to decreased lung function, aggravated asthma, chronic respiratory disease in children, chronic bronchitis, irregular heartbeat, and premature death in people with heart or lung disease. As droughts and wildfires intensify across the entire western portion of the country, millions of people become exposed to these particulates for what could be weeks at a time year after year.
As we continue our journey, I expect we’ll keep running into instances of climate change playing out right in front of us. In September, we head to Utah for the final race of the BME series at Brian Head. Right now, the water levels at Lake Powell, which is the second-largest reservoir in the country, and the southern portion of the Great Salt Lake have reached historic lows amid the extreme drought conditions, which are being experienced by 95 percent of the western U.S. (16). After that, we plan to head to California where overnight the Dixie Fire surpassed the Bootleg Fire in size and went from being the state’s sixth-largest wildfire ever to the third-largest. It’s now burned nearly 433,000 acres and most of the town of Greenville (17). Flames incinerated much of the Gold Rush-era Nevada community of about 1,000 including wooden buildings downtown that were more than a century old. A spokesman told the Associated Press the winds are changing directions on fire crews every few hours, which the Plumas National Forest supervisor described as “truly frightening fire behavior.” On top of that, an incident management operations section chief said firefighters are having guns pulled on them by people who don’t want to evacuate. Greenville is about 90 miles from the town of Paradise, which was largely destroyed in 2018 by a fire that killed 85 people and was sparked by Pacific Gas & Electric equipment. While the cause of the current Dixie Fire is under investigation, the company has said it may have started when a tree fell on one of the utility’s power lines (18).
So what does the climate change we’ve seen over the course of our travels mean for mountain bikers? For starters, poor air quality keeps you inside instead of outside riding your bike. It can turn healthy riders into riders with breathing issues or exacerbate health issues for riders like myself who struggle to control their asthma. Wildfires can also destroy your favorite trail and keep it closed for months or years if you’re lucky enough for it to get cleared and rebuilt. If you’re traveling, you may never get a chance to experience iconic riding spots like Moab’s Whole Enchilada, which was closed in mid-June when an abandoned campfire sparked the Pack Creek Fire in the La Sal Mountains (19). And even if everything around the trail isn’t on fire, those views you came for are increasingly likely to be hidden behind a curtain of smoke in the summer, which is when most people get a chance to get away for a mountain biking trip. This year, wildfires and extreme heat have also impacted race events. The organizers of Race Cascadia had to postpone their season opener in Hood River to October because of the June heat wave I discussed earlier in this post. The same month, the organizers of the Revolution Enduro series had to cancel their event in Eagle, Colorado because of a wildfire.
Before certain parts of this country become uninhabitable because of extreme temperatures and drought, wildfires and the smoke they produce, or torrential rain and flooding that also comes with a rapidly changing climate, they will become unrideable, unhikeable, and unvisitable.
Cheers, Zu
P.S. I realize that some of the wildfires discussed in this entry were started by reckless humans, but this fact remains: annual droughts have created conditions where fires start more easily, grow out of control more quickly, and behave differently, which makes them more difficult to contain. And on that note, don’t be a reckless human being. Follow burn ban orders and put out your campfires. Life is at stake.