More than just a climbing dirtbag roadtrip.
I was laid off earlier this year, along with 60%+ of the company, from a job I enjoyed but found chaotic. The day of the layoff, I added sticky notes to my wall with ideas on what to do. Then I got in the car and drove 5 hours north to Mammoth Lakes, CA to go skiing. I wanted to use the time to be outside, travel, and climb, while I job hunted for another good fit.
Meanwhile, I still wanted structure and routine. So I built my personal outdoor curriculum: Single Pitch Instructor certification, Wilderness First Responder certification, 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.
Learnings
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
Road trip 1: LA <> Texas
I wanted 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.
I started with a SW USA roadtrip. And then pretty quickly graduated to an international trip to the great white north to climb in Canada.
Road trip 2: LA <> Canada
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. 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 climate 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. That includes: vegetarianism, recycling, using reusable containers, below average consumerism. But this summer’s personal journey also made me keen to get involved on a systemic level. I now 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.