I don’t know what I was thinking when I agreed to sleep in a tent, outside, in 0 degree weather.

Actually the only thing I was thinking was I need to get out of this place and away from people and that’s how I found myself sleeping in a tent in a -20 degree sleeping bag near a glacier with no one around. I was suppose to be in Albuquerque for training and was so close to getting a mountain bike on dirt trails that when the trip got cancelled as a result of COVID-19, selfishly I was upset because dirt, finally, but as a public health expert (heyyo master’s in pandemic preparedness ironically not a lot of funding for a job when I was looking) realized that the best thing is to stay put and remain as isolated as possible, and pray to God they start testing everyone, soon.

As a result last week was weird, I spent Monday thinking I would be leaving, Tuesday cancelling flights, Wednesday and Thursday on calls, and Friday packing up what I thought I might need from my office in the hospital in anticipation of leaving indefinitely. I imagine everyone kind of had a week like that; a lot of moments where I’m like what is happening. And it’s weird because there is nothing I can do right now except wait for what feels like this cloud to engulf us and see how quickly it will blow over or how long we’ll be trapped in an endless fog. Researching and writing about every pandemic during graduate school has really made me jump to the worse case scenario because I know how it can potentially play out, especially when ineffective leadership and missteps will literally cost our country lives (but that’s for a research paper discussion and not my blog).

With all this going on in my brain I didn’t even realize there would be no fire with winter camping.

I had gone the weekend before on a backcountry nordic ski trip to a hut where there was a wood fire stove where we dried our boots out and a stream nearby to collect water to boil and drink. On that trip I was comfortable the whole time, temperature wise, which I got a few comments on how small my backpack was and honestly felt like I overpacked, I didn’t even get to wear the shorts I brought. One of the guys did carry my sleeping bag in his pack because apparently it’s not ideal to just hook it to the outside of my bag (so many things to learn).

The hut trip was really fun and we skied about 15 miles each day, the first day was prime skiing conditions and the weather was nice too. The second day left a little bit to be desired as new snow had fallen, creating a heavy snowpack, very ideal for creating snowballs, less ideal for sliding through it on toothpicks. The snow would pack up underneath my skis rendering them mostly useless and then I would get frustrated and then just kind of run/walk with awkwardly long sticks to my feet and then I would see a downhill and stop and scrapped the snow off my skis and try to get enough glide to gain momentum to go down. I definitely ate a lot of sour patch kids to get me through that dark time. Overall it was a very enjoyable experience with good company (that’s not sarcasm given the next picture).

Having gone through the hut trip meant I was ready for my next Pawnee Goddess Patch: Winter Camping.

I won’t bore you with too much of the details getting there, we skied in a about 10 miles along a mostly flat riverbed area and then found a camp spot near the glacier and set up before going exploring.

We shared the glacier with some snowmobilers and even a few dog sleds (so Alaskan) before they all left for the day and we seemed to be the only souls for miles.

I dug a hole in the snow so that we had some sort of bench to eat dinner on (because are we not civilized haha).

As we sat there I talked about how my mom tells the story about when she was a kid and she asked her dad what would happen if a nuclear bomb went off and he responded that they would just go sit on the backside of the hill overlooking the river. She joked how as a kid she was slightly mortified but as an adult realized he probably didn’t want to be in a small crawl space with five young children. I concluded by saying this seemed like a good place to sit and take a minute with all the chaos and uncertainty that we had left miles away.

I survived that night with the mantra, you might not ever be comfortable but you won’t die. Being in a -20 degree sleeping bag and almost every piece of puffy clothing I owned I was actually quite comfortable and only found out the next morning I had slept with the back of the sleeping bag covering my face (thought it was a little hard to breath at times but was also quite warm so…). We packed up in the morning and skied by the glacier before running into some friends on bikes. The ski out was nicer than the day before and I slowly peeled off all my puffy layers.

I have spent this week working from home which has come with it’s own challenges (like that I convinced myself I would never need a desk at home) but also endless hot water for tea and real windows in my office.

And in weird ways living in Alaska has helped me prepare for this as I felt like I was having to Facetime and call to maintain a lot of my relationships but conveniently now all my friends who were four hours ahead are also working from home so are more available to talk. And also with my mom working from home, just means I can Facetime and see Tenzen more.

I’m sure like a lot of people (me) right now have a lot of anxiety and it can be hard not to get consumed by it all. I worry about the people I know who are sick or will become sick, I worry about how it will ravish our healthcare system, I worry about my parents, my communities, the small businesses that will be impacted. I know these are normal feelings and acknowledging them is okay, but also dwelling and being consumed by them is not–yes yoga has been helping. Alaska is a weird place to experience this, I feel the distance with my family more than ever, but also realize if I was closer I still wouldn’t be allowed to have contact. In a lot of way getting outside here seems like a completely selfish pursuit at the moment but so few other people are around that it’s maybe safer than going to the grocery story–almost a weird guilt that I can still do most things while others are having their lives upended in irreparable ways.

I know I’m beyond privilege/blessed to have the ability to work from home while still being able to access the outdoors and have some semblance of life. The fatbike race that was suppose to happen this weekend got cancelled which even though there weren’t that many participants I really thing the biggest thing we can all do right now is restrict our movement until more tests get deployed to test for asymptomatic and mild symptomatic people– realistically until we have that data we have no idea what we are actually up against. If you’ve made this far I will make my one political plug and that is to call your congressional delegates and demand mandatory testing for every individual — they want to send everyone a check, great, attach a test to it. Typhoid Mary is thought to have infected 3,000 people with typhoid and she presented as asymptomatic, she was isolated by judicial order for 23 years…

I am headed in the backcountry again this weekend– who knew a pandemic would ignite my love for winter camping but really I think it’s more being able to turn off the email, news cycles, and case counts. Mostly, I’m trying to act as if I was contagious and don’t want to infect others; because while there are some great ‘Kate’ nicknames: Kissing Kate, Rattlesnake Kate, Big Nose Kate, #singlek8 –no these aren’t all my nicknames but would rather not end up with Corona K8 added to the list and be an asymptomatic individuals that is transmitting the virus.