Personal Climate Crisis: A Letter to My Family After a Road Trip Through the American West (7/3–7/13, 2021)

Note: While very recent extreme weather events made more likely by climate change have continued non-stop since we got back from our own excursion (1-in-1,000 year flooding in China, Tennessee and Newark abetted by back-to-back Category 4 hurricanes and deadly flooding in Germany & Benelux; massive wildfires in Greece, Turkey, Italy, Siberia and continuing in California; historic drought declared for states serviced by the Colorado River, etc.), this report was something I experienced first hand and that felt right to share from that standpoint.

Hola Familia!

Marnie and I are back from our trip around the West, which was both incredibly beautiful and terribly sad and anxiety inducing. We had planned a “low carbon” vacation that combined rail travel and hybrid car (Prius) road-tripping to see Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Utah and Nevada and hitting Redwood National Park in California, the Hoh Rainforest in Washington, Glacier National Park in Montana, Yellowstone and Grand Teton Parks in Wyoming and after traveling through Utah/Nevada, Yosemite Park in the Sierras (California).

So right off the bat, our planned Amtrak Rail adventure to Portland, Oregon from San Luis Obispo was cancelled due to the Lava fire having burned some of the train trestles in N. California/Oregon border. We cancelled Washington State as part of our itinerary and re-routed with a Prius rental in Oakland, CA (left our car with in-laws in Bay area) to then drive up the coast of California to Redwoods National Park and then on to Bend, Oregon. First day of driving was fantastic, but we arrive our first night in Garberville, CA to fire engines putting out a fire across from our hotel. Driving to Oregon the next day, literally hugged some redwoods in the park….amazing, can’t imagine a world without these trees….they are magical and embody all that is right with the earth. Oregon was HOT…driving through areas that seemed desperate for water, though Bend was pretty great and well kept up due to a lot of watering outside of the natural rain cycle!

Onward to Idaho, stayed in Coeur D’Alene (my first time), which was a pretty beautiful area. But the drought had been affecting water consumption and our wonderful B&B in the mountains outside the city had issues with their on-site well. I couldn’t flush my toilet the first night and Marnie and I couldn’t use the tub or shower….water had been too depleted during the day. The next day we were able to shower/flush toilet, but clearly there were issues with the water table even in this seemingly green and forested area.

We passed a burning tourist bus on the way out of Idaho headed to Glacier National in Montana, which presaged the smoky skies that would haunt our Wyoming and Utah visits. While Glacier was fantastic and stunning, we were constantly seeing scars on the land of recent wildfires and thousand upon thousands of dead/burned trees. And the glaciers are rapidly disappearing, from over 150 a century ago, down to 35 in the early 00s to about two dozen today. The projections are that there will be no real glaciers in Glacier National Park next decade. I don’t know how to express how sad this makes me.

But our skies were clear and beautiful as we launched southward towards Yellowstone, a GINORMOUS park covering some 2 million Acres of land and again, sooooo gorgeous and also so scarred by many wildfires. And the skies were now affected by wildfires raging in Idaho/Montana…..this only got worse as we headed south through the park and towards the Grand Tetons in Wyoming. There the fires had scorched an area at the entrance (south of Yellowstone) that looked like something out of the apocalyptic film THE ROAD. It was heartbreaking, particularly because, by this point, we literally could NOT see the Grand Tetons in Grand Teton National Park due to the haze/smoke that filled the air and our lungs.

Jackson, Wyoming….a pretty amazing town, though also radically gentrified by influx of wealthy part-time home owners and vacation travelers since I was last there 40 years ago (learned to ski there!) was also hard to fully embrace due to the constant presence of smoke and haze. For some reason, my hands smelled of smoke as we drove out of town towards Park City.

And Park City, again, still affected by smoke and haze. Took a swim in the pool and had a lovely dinner with friends (investors in my last film), who also talked about the fires and air quality that they had been dealing with the last weeks……in fact, the friend confided to me that she had difficulty sleeping through the nights due to what she saw/perceived was happening to the planet around us. There’s a word for this — Solastagia (hyper-link should be added). I was having some middle of the night anxiety attacks due to what I was seeing everyday so I could immediately relate to what she said.

Which brings us to the final park on our visit, the amazing Yosemite Park in the Sierras just North of my favorite ski resort Mammoth Mountain. What a place…home to El Capitan and Half-Dome and countless natural wonders. But the day we drove into Lee Vining to spend the night before entering the park, we skirted a fresh wildfire that had sparked due to lightening….we literally drove around it as it burned in a thunderstorm….it was awe-inspiring and terrifying at the same time. The skies were smoky and filled our lungs….nothing we hadn’t experienced over the last week already though, sadly. But entering Yosemite at dawn the next morning, we were happy to find our entrance had blue skies, though we immediately passed through several areas that had been severely impacted by wildfire. Again, all the beauty that we saw was side-by-side this destruction. And I’m not saying that fire doesn’t serve a purpose in an ecosystem, because it absolutely does…but the fires that are burning in the American West this last decade (and Siberia, Australia, Alaska, Portugal, Greece, etc.) are not of the natural scope….they are super charged by the bone-dry earth/vegetation and trees decimated by bark beetle infestations due to longer term drought, all of which are exacerbated and enabled by anthropogenic climate change.

We saw El Capitan (recently featured in Oscar-winning doc FREE SOLO) and the stunning Yosemite Valley, but trying to see Half-Dome was a no-go due to it being enshrouded in the smoke from one of the countless nearby fires. We sighed and drove out of the park, feeling both privileged to have borne witness to so much of the natural wonder and beauty of the American West and at the same time feeling utter despair at the price that nature has paid these last few years for our unrelenting exploitation of everything and anything, but above all, the never-ending increase in globe-warming carbon emissions that have led to our present and are locking in the near and mid-term future.

Sorry for the loooooooong winded email, but I wanted to get my thoughts out in an email before they faded from the immediacy of the moment. We are so happy that we were able to make this trip and so sad that we saw some of the things we saw. But there’s no turning away from the reality and pretending to just see what you want to see, you have to see it all. So I’m sharing this with you so that you can see it through our eyes. It’s a beautiful planet and we need to do all we can individually and collectively to try and limit its destruction for ourselves and all of the life that inhabits it. We are connected and we cannot live without it.

Much love,

Barrett (and Marnie) xoxo