I was laid off earlier this year, along with 60%+ of the company, from a job I enjoyed but found chaotic. The day I was laid off, I added sticky notes to my wall with ideas on how to spend my time. Then I got in the car and drove 5 hours north to Mammoth Lakes, CA to go skiing. I realized that I wanted to use the time to be outside and explore personal interests, while I job hunted for a better fit.
I still wanted structure though, so I built my own personal outdoor curriculum: Single Pitch Instructor certification, Wilderness First Responder cert, plus a climate change fellowship with Terra.do.
I also traveled and climbed. For my first major roadtrip I drove from LA to Texas for an AAC Volunteer Summit at Hueco Tanks Rock Ranch. Then I briefly came back to LA before beginning another road trip to Canada. All in my little 2011 Honda CRV. I built out the back of my car into the coziest car camping setup I could build. I feel very at home there, despite my VA plates indicating that I am quite far from home here on the West Coast.
There were a lot of ups and downs along the way, and I’m still a little up and a little down about it even after the fact. Regardless, I learned a lot trying to figure out where I fit in, in life, in climbing, and in my career, all while living out of my car. Big takeaways:
- I prefer to avoid crowds
- I spend a lot of time in front of a computer
I want to immortalize this time in my car by writing down my experiences as some kind of public diary with the target audience of future me.
My trip spanned desert and alpine environments, and I saw (at least) 14 National Parks, 2 National Monuments, 15 National Forests, 2 State Parks, countless wilderness and conservation areas. I truthfully lost count. All this I did in a car that takes 89.
So is it ironic that I did this at a time when I was diving deeper into climate change? What was my carbon footprint on this trip and was it more or less than my usual apartment life? According to carbonfootprint.com my make/model/year emitted 2.1 metric tons of carbon for the 3 months I lived out of my car (~7,500 miles). Usually, my life emits around 13,148 lbs of CO2 according to the EPA calculator and that’s all inclusive, including my driving/traveling. That means that for 3 months, it would’ve been about 3,287 lbs CO2 if I had stayed home.
While I’m a bit down that my impact was so much greater during the summer roadtrip, I think there is value in learning too. It’s hard to figure out the appropriate tradeoffs – how much personal growth and learning is 1 ton of CO2 worth? And who gets to decide? Of course, I remained committed to some of the individual actions I have already incorporated into my life: practicing vegetarianism, recycling, using reusable containers, reducing my consumerism. But the personal journey I went on this summer also made me more keen to get involved on a systemic level, and to make climate a stakeholder in organizational decisions I have the privilege to be part of. I’m doing it imperfectly, but I’m showing up, so I can be optimistic about that.
Road trip 1: LA <> Texas
Road trip 2: LA <> Canada
