I met Alan deep in Siberia, where we were both building nature trails. At first, I heard his stories in such a piecemeal and could not keep track of them. Was he stung by a scorpion before or after being nearly washed away by a flood in New Zealand? Did he bike through Mexico and walk across America in the same year? Finally, one long afternoon, he sat down to tell me his life’s story. 

Born in California, he spent his early summers in the backwoods of Montana with Marty, “who’s like my second dad,” rafting and hiking through the wilderness. At ten, he went on his first big trip abroad – to Europe. He didn’t remember much. “You’re 10 years old, so you remember things like which countries have the best ice cream.”

He left high school early to study at the local junior college. It didn’t work out so well. “I stopped going there after about 2 months. It was hard for me to sit still in school, I guess.”

So he worked. Soon, he had some money, and Marty was planning a three-month trip to New Zealand and Australia. Alan didn’t have to be invited twice. “The highlight of that was nearly losing all our belongings in a flash flood.” They were camping in a river bed when rain up-river filled the small canyon. “It was pretty exciting: my shoes being washed away, saving my passport with a finger-tip grab, the dark canyon as the water washed down. It was like 6 feet of water all at once.”

They spent the cold night huddled on the steep wall of the canyon. In the morning, they were able to find most – but not all – of their stuff. “I had to walk out in my socks, because my shoes were gone”.

 Woodland Home
The flood didn’t ruin his taste for adventure.  Upon returning home, he read an advertisement for Northwest Youth Corps. “They said you live in a tent in the woods for six weeks and build trails.” This was enough for Alan. “I went and I really enjoyed it. It was the most fun job I could ever imagine having… I liked it so much I ended up doing two more tours that summer.”

He spent the fall exploring the Pacific Northwest. “I remember going to Eastern Oregon and having just a really different week at this place called Steams Mountain, just completely by myself. It was about as far away from anything as you could ever hope to get. I hiked up over Steams Mountain. It rises up really gradually on the western side, and then it drops off abruptly about 5,000 feet. I found a way to go down it and walked across this desert, this big, dry lakebed...”

The tour was cut unfortunately short. “I was in Olympic National Park on the coast of Washington – not the best place to be in December. I was on my way out to use the phone for some reason and slipped on this boardwalk. I had my pack on, which was kind of heavy. I ended up wrecking my knee. I had to hole up in a motel room in Forks, Washington for about three days at Christmas time. So that was my Christmas: sitting there with my wrecked knee in this motel room watching the history channel, ordering takeout pizza and feeling sorry for myself.” Finally, he couldn’t take anymore and drove over a thousand miles to his parents’ home with his unbendable leg propped up in the passenger seat. 

In March, he was back at Pacific Northwest Youth Corps. “That whole summer I was kind of indoctrinated into the world of adult responsibilities,” Alan told me. “I was 20 years old, and I was the boss and the mom and the caretaker and the teacher for kids, some of whom who were just a year younger than me or less. I was responsible for basically keeping these wild, crazy, hormone-addled monkeys in line.”

 When that was over, rather than take it easy, he and a friend decided to bike back to California. “You’re twenty years old. You have energy to burn. Here’s 7 months of ridiculously hard life and physical labor and no sleep, high stress, and then you hop on a bicycle and ride it 1800 miles.” They slept under bridges and snuck into state parks. “We didn’t pay a dime for lodging the whole time.” During that trip, too, he suffered a flood of sorts. “I was sleeping on a picnic table and the sprinklers came on at 1 a.m.”

Once back at his parents’ house, he “slept for about 3 weeks.” Then it was off to New Zealand again for two months of “mostly just a lot of hiking and hitchhiking.” 

After returning from New Zealand, he set off for his biggest adventure yet. “The Pacific Crest Trail is a foot path that goes from the border of Mexico to just over the border of Canada. It’s 2,650 miles long.” It took five months of non-stop walking to complete. “It is really hard at first. But your body gets used to it. Your feet adjust. You just get to where you’re a walking machine and you think nothing of walking 20 or 30 miles every day. It’s rather amazing.”

He returned a changed man. “I think it’s a perspective regarding time and distance… You just get a certain feel for the rhythms of the landscape. I feel like I know my native land that much better for having moved over it slowly over the course of changing seasons. I feel a certain intimacy with the mountains of the Pacific Crest.”

After a brief stop in Colorado for a wilderness medicine class, “I hadn’t gotten the cycling bug out of my system. I also wanted to go some place warm with an ocean.” So he decided to bike through Baja California. “It’s a different world, especially when you’re traveling by bike and you only have a rudimentary grasp of the Spanish language. Turns out that ocean that I was looking for, the highway doesn’t really go anywhere near it. It goes over some punishing hills, and there are some enormous trucks that use that highway along with the lone cyclist.” The hardest part was emerging from the cactus desert each morning with flat tires.

He returned for another abortive attempt at higher education, then to Northwest Youth Corps. The Corps was the same, but he was different. After “the new lessons I’d learned from my Pacific Crest Trail experience, it was just hard to reconcile enjoying the outdoors with the need for being 24 hours a day, 7 days a week responsible and trying to coerce people into behaving a certain way and getting a certain amount done.”

After three years of rarely spending two nights in the same place, “I wanted to settle down.” That fall, Alan took a job in Arizona working with youth and went back to school. It was a disappointment. “It was a kind of methamphetamine nest. There was no way you could help these kids try to better themselves or make them want to do anything except take methamphetamine.”

He switched to a landscaping business in Montana, and then teamed up again with Marty for a rafting expedition through Alaska. This, too, nearly ended in disaster. They were dropped off by bush plane hundreds of kilometers from the nearest house. Only then did they realize they had forgotten oar handles. Marty, ever resourceful, fashioned new handles out of a scavenged bucket, using a knife and a .22. 

After a few months hiking, rafting and feeding tundra mosquitoes, they worked for a few weeks as moose packers. “When the moose gets shot by the hunter, the moose then needs to be cut into pieces and then carried somewhere where they can load it onto an airplane and fly it back to the lodge. My job was the carry the moose. A moose, if you’ve never seen one, is big. The hindquarters of a moose weigh about 150 pounds.”

“After that, I had really taken a liking to Alaska and I thought I wanted to stay and see what the winter was all about there.” So he found a job training sled dogs at a remote ranch. In the spring, he left for Siberia, where I met him. 

For all Alan’s vagabond and often solitary life, he is not a hermit. His “second father” and role-model, Marty, had chosen the woodsman’s life over a wife and kids. Alan thought that was a mistake. “I’ve had a lot of great times by myself,” he said. “But there’s no place I’ve been that wouldn’t have been better with someone else.”