Kayaking Alone Through Remote Alaska to Save a Forest

If you squint just enough, you can see me. A speck amongst a massive landscape in the middle of nowhere Alaska. In this moment right here, I had never felt this alone, while simultaneously having so much purpose in my life. No way. Yeah, that'll be fun. That's Elsa on the phone. Three years ago, I watched a documentary her and her husband Colin made. It was titled Understory, and it followed her journey sailing around a region called the Tongass in southeast Alaska. They were advocating for this place and exposing corporate greed to help rally the public into wanting to preserve America's largest rainforest. I was beyond inspired after watching it. Not only did this get me amped to advocate for my own backyard in Oregon, this film propelled me into having a deep desire to protect the gorgeous natural beauty the U.S., our home, still has. I've never met Elsa and Colin before, but they invited me up to remote Alaska to see ancient trees that need more voices speaking for them. I'd fly to the closest town a plane could get me, then hop in a kayak to paddle alone to this bay. It would be roughly five days and four nights covering almost 16 nautical miles. The only bit of information I held from Elsa and Colin was that I'd never sea kayaked in my entire life. I decided to keep this secret to myself and began packing the things that would keep me alive. So this was it. An early 90s Aqua Terra sea kayak, weighing almost as much as me. I managed to find just enough space for everything to survive in the bush for the next week. This kayak was loaned to me from this guy named John. He makes waterproof bags built for Alaskan adventures called sagebrush dry bags. It's, you know, it's, we're on an island in the middle of nowhere, so you're kind of doing all kinds of things, you know. This was my first real taste of Alaskan hospitality. On top of that, my home for the night was a sailboat. Offered by John's fringeretta. There's the kayak I didn't want you to see. That's a nice boat, dude. Damn it, John. But this wasn't just any normal sailboat. This was the roulette. The same sailboat Elsa sailed around the Tongass and understory three years prior. Oh yeah, dude, nice. This is very cozy. This is the understory boat, man. This is why I'm here. This is rad. I went to bed feeling incredibly grateful, but definitely anxious to hit the water the next day. Oh ----, here's my home for the next week. This is cool. Here we go. We're doing the thing, y'all. Doing the thing and the thing. This is unreal. I'm seeing white caps in the background. I literally right now see a bald eagle on that fishing boat. That is f***ing crazy to get through this. You guys, I have been obsessing over this trip for the past two months. Just at it in research and it is just crazy to me that it's started. Wow, the beauty begins. Oh, this, y'all, that granola bar has never tasted so good. I'm further than I thought I'd be already, so I might be able to kind of push even further tomorrow. Wow, this is so good. I'm gonna enjoy this. My profession as a musician is one of the coolest jobs in the world. I get to be creative for a living and take what I've created and play live to an audience. I normally don't have this kind of time in the summer as it's peak touring season. A lot of times touring leaves me wanting more, but there's other times I'm left with a cluttered headspace I can't really explain. It wasn't until the second day that I realized how important and simple this trip was for me. I found myself falling into a rhythm of purpose. Each day presented the same tasks. Wake up. Caffeinate the body. Paddle for eight-ish hours. Find camp. Fuel the body. Sleep. And repeat. I became addicted. Paddle to get some weather. I'm just feeling so grateful right now. I'm in Alaska, living on a kayak alone. This is just one hell of an experience. I pulled up and just as the kayak hit the shore heard some scratching and looked up and there was two baby black bear cubs going up the tree. On this fourth and final night, I miscalculated the tide line and was awoken in the middle of the night to sounds of water bubbles by my head. Wow, there's a cell phone camera. I feel like an absolute idiot. Oh man, I thought I calculated it right. I looked it over for a while and I was like, you know what? This tide line was probably from the winter but my tent was floating right there and I woke up with it floating. I went to bed thinking, you know, I might wake up in the water and I might not but I'm going to take my, I'm going to roll the dice. And I rolled the dice. Here's all my stuff. Look at this. This was me rolling the dice. This was me. Here we go. Check this out. I got to show you something. Oh dude, I got to move still. Still coming in. Elsa, Wednesday. Dude, it looks like you're in an awesome spot. Make sure you camp far above high tide line. Big tides in southeast. If you're in the trees, you know you're good. End of quote. I thought I was outsmarting Alaska. I thought I was being smart like, oh, we're good. No, we weren't good. And I was floating. I was floating. Elsa, if you're watching this, I'm sure you're laughing right now. Oh my god. Jeez, man. Look at this ----. All right, let's put our new camp up. I'll sail tomorrow morning. I paddled my final six miles to the extraction point where I would hopefully find Elsa and Colin and meet them for the first time. What's up? Hey, you made it. How's it going, y'all? Oh, it's going good. It's good to see you. Let's just say we were instant homies. Good to see you. What's up? That'll do, right? Yeah. Yeah, we got camp set up and just a beautiful night out here. We're trying to debate how high up on the beach we should put the tents. Griff got swamped last night. We haven't had it happen to us before, so we're hoping tonight's not the first night. We got one thing that we're really stoked on. Freestride? That and beer. One beer per person. One beer per beach. Rations. Cold water. And then that's it. The next morning, we had plans to check out the forest. And to be honest with you, it was a place I avoided on my trip. I let my fear of the unknown control me and mostly just explored the banks. But once we entered, it was a beautiful ecosystem of life. Dude, that is a big tree. Holy cow. Yeah, I mean, it just takes so long to have a forest like this because a tree like this needs a lot of space and a lot of light to grow. Things are growing together and there's definitely like competition, but everything gets its turn, right? Versus like when you clear cut log, everything's trying to grow at the same time and it's all the same age and often it's kind of all the same species. And so there's this really tight like competition that basically smothers out like any sort of flourishing. When this tree falls, there's all these smaller trees that are ready to step up and take that place. Places like this are still here because people fought for them. 30 years ago when I first came out here, it was with my family and they brought a bunch of artists here and people hung out here for a week and made art and then used that art to protect this place. And here you are like a musician. And so like that was that generation. And now you're the next generation. Here in the Tongass, unfortunately, there's still an industry that wants to cut down old growth trees. And that industry will be trying to do that until there's not any old growth left. So that means that the fight is always going to be there. But I just have a deep faith that there will always be people like you and there'll be people like my parents and the people that they brought here to come here, you know, stand in the presence of something that's hundreds and hundreds of years older than them. And just take a minute and be like, what does the land have to say? Everyone has a stake in a place like this. I also grew up here and now I'm local here. So there's a sense of like wanting to protect a place we feel some ownership over being more local. But everyone has a stake in the Tongass. It's public land. Like I just think it's so incredible. You spent a week out here and you haven't seen anybody until you rolled up on our boat. Knowing that there's a place in the world where you can get into a little boat and grab a paddle and just disappear. It's a different sort of experience because yeah, maybe it's like not the biggest waterfall in the world or even the biggest tree in the world. But like it's a place that's so mysterious. This is a place that doesn't have a lot of people speaking for it. One thing that Elsa and I are trying to work on in our lifetime is having the Tongass be a household name. Bears Ears, Yosemite, these places got protected because they became household names. Telling the story is going to be how we get this place on the map. Absolutely. That's what it needs. You guys are awesome folks. I left with a better understanding of what kind of protection the Tongass needs. This isn't just an anti-logging film. I learned that it's about sustainability. We all have wooden houses and love our renewable resource of timber. Elsa and Colin showed me that clear-cutting forest completely decimates an ecosystem where it might take hundreds of years to return to the health that it had. The answer lies in responsible thinning of younger forests and not cutting old growth at all. As old growth is what makes the Tongass the biggest carbon reserve in the U.S. We had plans to link up with a Point Baker local named Don who also attended the QU artist retreat 30 years prior. He's been an advocate for these forests for decades now and offered to give us a ride to a recent clear-cut when he heard about the film we were making. This place is awesome. You know, I came here to learn. I came here to experience this place. The Tongass, it's been a tug-of-war of a place between the government and the locals and those who care about it for a long time and I can see why. I mean, it holds so much life. You can feel it when you're here. The things that happen to these places are made from Washington, D.C., a major metropolitan area run by people that have never been to these places, people that make decisions for these places and it doesn't affect them and this place has never affected them ever. Yet they're making decisions about places like this and the people who live here and the wildlife that doesn't have a voice and never has had a voice, they get the ---- end of the stick. It's our land to be enjoyed. It's our public lands and we're paying taxes on it and they're making money off of our public lands and we're not even getting the logs. We're not even getting the majority of the lumber. Gets put on a freight and gets shipped overseas. Pretty insane. This is all being shipped probably to China. It's one of the last real wild places in the U.S. Let's keep America's biggest carbon reserve wild. How about that? What a wild idea.