Two for the coast

A husband-wife team from Seattle is nearing the completion of a 4,000-mile odyssey that ranks among the most impressive human-powered explorations of the northern Pacific Coast.

As of last week, Erin McKittrick and Bretwood Higman had covered about 3,500 miles of hiking, pack-rafting across bays and rivers and cross-country skiing, usually without trails of any sort, along the wild north coast of the Pacific since leaving Seattle on June 9.

They’ve seen the four seasons on the route, and they awoke recently to the dawn of their second spring in a tent perched on snow near Lake Ilimana, Alaska.

“I don’t think will be giving up our skis for a while,” McKittrick reported in her journey blog.

All the way up the Wild Coast, as they call it, they’ve tangled with Mother Nature. She has thrown just about everything imaginable at the duo — near impenetrable tangles of devil’s club and cedar forest in British Columbia; treacherous, hidden cliffs beneath tangles of Southeast Alaska vegetation; raft-threatening icebergs driven by winds across Alaska’s Icy Bay; penetrating cold and whiteout snowstorms, even a wet-sand sandstorm on the wind-pounded northeast edge of the Gulf of Alaska.

Through it all, McKittrick and Higman have kept moving forward one step, or paddle stroke, at a time.

“We’re not great athletes,” McKittrick told a full house at a January presentation during a brief break in Anchorage.

The 27-year-old Seattle native and her husband, 30, are simply persistent to the point of doggedness and thoughtful to the point of inspired.

So far, there hasn’t arisen a riddle they couldn’t solve or a problem they couldn’t suffer through.

McKittrick and Higman, who was reared in Alaska, have spent much of their adult lives as students at Carleton College in Northfield, Minn. Carleton has been an international leader in pushing for environmentally conscious development, and the two adventurers share the institution’s passion for sustainable use of the planet’s resources.

McKittrick holds a master’s degree in molecular and cellular biology. Higman is graduate student in geology who, before launching on the Wild Coast trek, had been studying tsunamis in Kamchatka, Nicaragua, Sri Lanka, Indonesia and Thailand.

Although the couple had already logged thousands of miles of exploration in Alaska, they set out on their Wild Coast journey with a mission “to explore, study, and communicate the key environmental issues facing this coast.”

The issues they’re targeting in their contacts and Web site include clearcutting of the rainforests, the decline of wild salmon, pollution caused by mineral extraction and global warming.

“We’ve chosen these issues because they’re broadly important to the region we’ll be traveling, because we feel the perspective we’ll gain from this trip will help to shed light on them and because they’re issues where people can still have a large impact on what happens,” McKittrick said.

Despite its length, the trip is a low-budget affair. They’re carrying all their gear and replenishing food where possible at villages along the way, with no food drops. To help fund the trip, they’ve had equipment sponsors and solicited donations on their Web site.

But it’s never been easy and sometimes it’s seemed impossible.

They negotiated through shifting pack ice in the notoriously swirling tides out of Anchorage through Knik Arm in their portable packrafts — the lightest and seemingly frailest of boats.

Higman describes their thin-ice crossing of the Copper River Delta as “sketchy,” and McKittrick says a detour from Valdez into the interior to follow the Matanuska River back to saltwater forced them, at one point, to their hands and knees to crawl across glare ice.

But they are now roughly 90 percent through a grand adventure by foot and paddle that isn’t supposed to end before they reach Unimak Island at the start of the Aleutian Islands this summer.

Epic doesn’t begin to describe this undertaking. Audacious might be better.

“I like the word visionary,” said Alaska Pacific University professor Roman Dial, an adventurer who has hiked the length of the Brooks Range, among other things. “What they’re doing really is visionary. What they’re doing is not something anyone else has ever done.”

Perhaps, no one has even tried. There are no records of anyone setting out on a journey like this before. To find someone who might have given it a go, reach back to the Paleoarctic peoples of prehistory.

Alaska Natives who came later were quick to recognize the easiest way to travel the coast is in a good boat. That has been the preferred mode of travel for thousands of years.

Paddling a sea kayak north from Seattle to Haines would be challenge enough, but boaters lose a certain amount of intimacy with the land. McKittrick and Higman said they wanted to maintain that contact by traveling through the landscape as much as possible step-by-step.

As they journey through the lands at the heart of controversy, they are communicating on-the-ground information and captivating details about encounters with wildlife and the elements through photos, videos, stories and podcasts posted on their Web site, “Ground Truth Trekking.”

“Long-distance trips allow us to see the wilderness in its larger context,” they say.

That step-by-step approach will wear out half a dozen pairs of shoes, McKittrick said.

Moving forward is what it is all about.

“Approaching the Copper River Delta, we were sorting out our options, and none of them looked good,” Higman said.

“We were already on rations, and it’s never good being on rations,” McKittrick added.

Looking for open water for river crossings and hoping to avoid deep snow, they went as far out onto the coastal beaches as they could — before being pinned down in a raging windstorm. No problem. They got their two-pound pyramid tent up, gathered beach grass with which to line it for warmth and waited out the storm.

As it was dying, they resumed doing what they’d done almost every day for months — walking.

They expect to have trekked farther than a coast-to-coast trip across America by the time they reach the end of the journey in the Aleutian Islands.