Nature of Motion: Salt Lake City and Back

This last week we spent visiting family and friends in Salt Lake City. For a weeklong vacation, even to drive the 800+ miles from Leavenworth to SLC is a hefty undertaking. When you don't have a car, things get interesting. You've got to get creative for these types of across the country get-togethers. Bicycling isn't really an option for traveling such a long distance in a short amount of time. When Liz and I started considering our travel options for this trip, a lot of larger questions started to arise. Would we be compromising any of our beliefs or newfound passion for this lifestyle? Would there be anything wrong with that? What are our options and what do they mean for us, our family, and our society? Compromise is a part of any relationship, and so far the sacrifices have been on our side. We're not evangelical about what we're doing, but we are serious, and this (life) is all an experiment right? We're trying to explore the concepts of mobility that so many of us take for granted. Well let’s go...

How many miles per gallon?

I won’t saturate you with statistics of averages and distances American’s drive or fly for leisure, how efficient the bus is, versus the train or plane. I’m just going to let you know what was going through our heads, and how ended up traveling as we did. How often do you fly? How many miles would you drive to see family, how flexible are you towards arrival and departure times? How much do you want to take? Do you love driving 12-hour stretches or would you rather hand over the wheel to someone else? These were all questions we considered and things I hope you think about when you read on.

Giving up your car shouldn't cut you off from the rest of society. We didn't do it to make us more isolated; we did it to become more involved with our personal mobility, physically, and mentally. For most of us, the ability to travel long distances with such a low individual financial cost is a widely accepted reality, and right. Humans have been traveling long distances for thousands of years, only relatively recently has it become common to make these thousand mile journeys in hours or days instead of weeks or months. One single thing makes this possible, fossil fuel.

We're not trying to boycott this fuel, or take a stand for a local-vore attitude towards mobility. We’re exploring the accepted realities of personal mobility and sustainable transportation, this means that we’re going places, and we like to move. Travelling throughout the Americas, throughout the world, to see beautiful mountains, different communities and cultures is something we’re passionate about. The globalization of our consciousness is a good thing; the more we see of each other the better. We can learn and benefit from our commonalities and shared human nature. But in traipsing around this gorgeous globe, we need to work to be kinder, to the atmosphere and ourselves. Solutions are easier than we think, and they exist now. Simply thinking about these issues, opening a dialogue is the first step.

Disclaimers aside, when it got down to it, we really only had two options, or methods of travel, plane or bus. The train was high up on our list, but it just wasn’t going to work out, as I’ll explain below.

The plane is the first and only option that most people would consider for a distance this great. The seats are comfortable, the trip is short, and it's relatively cheap. We had more then a few reasons for not wanting to fly, however, chief among them is the enormous emission of carbon that airplanes have. A round trip flight from Seattle to Salt Lake deposits more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than an individual from Burma will use in one year. So if we're trying not to be wasteful, this seems like a good option to avoid. Other reasons were that it's not quite as cheap as we'd hope to afford, with a round trip ticket clocking in somewhere around 350 dollars, as well as the fact that we’d just have to take a bus or other transportation to get to the airport.

The next alternative, and most attractive, was to take the train. The train is relaxed, with comfortable, plane like seats, which you're free to get out and walk around while you're under way. There are also "viewing cars” with see through ceilings and walls, giving you a great view of the scenery. You can take a bunch of baggage with you on the train at little to no extra cost. There’s a train station here in Leavenworth, and another in Salt Lake, we should be able to connect the two, right? Well…. to get from Leavenworth to Salt Lake requires first going to Seattle, then south to Sacramento, in all comprising about 38 hours of train time and probably requiring you to spend the night in Seattle. The alternative is to first go to Chicago, and then back to Salt Lake. Hmm. The downsides of taking the train are discouraging. The train takes forever, it doesn't go where you are, and it's expensive, often costing more then a plane ride between the same locations. For a weeklong trip we weren't really able to afford the time and money it would cost to travel by train.

This left us with the last, least attractive mode of public-ish transportation; you guessed it, the bus. The bus has a terrible reputation as being slow, filthy, and uncomfortable. Well let me tell you it lives up to just about all of those expectations, and more. But will say that taking the bus to SLC was considerably better then owning a car for the last 6 months. It wasn't all that bad really, and we both managed to arrive unshanked and without any STI’s. There were some benefits as well. The biggest selling point for us poor climbers is that the bus is the cheapest of the above options, with a round trip ticket punching in at about 175 bucks. While the bus isn't as efficient or comfortable as riding on the train, it's much quicker and it's impact is drastically less then that of the plane. The bus is also romantic, because it reminds us how close we are to being a third world nation we really are, if you shut your eyes you just might be on your way from Mendoza to El Chalten. If you want something to get better, you've got to use it, you've got to support it, so that's what we did. We took the bus.

Waiting for our first bus in Leavenworth.

It's pretty amazing that we can walk about 2 blocks from our house here in Leavenworth, jump on a bus, and 24 hours later end up in Salt Lake City. Additionally, in Salt Lake, we managed to bum a ride from Liz's brother to the bus station, then getting whisked away back to the same corner we started on, pretty convenient. I won't lie, the bus can be cramped, dirty, and populated with folks you normally wouldn’t associate with. But giving up a personal automobile means that you'll be doing a lot more car and bus pooling, meeting folks who, believe it or not, might have more of a similar attitude towards mobility then some of the more affluent and informed members of our society.

While I didn't always enjoy getting slept on by the big Mexican dude, or the chorus of nasty coughs that seemed to never end, the trip was overall a good one, and until I can find the time and money to afford the train, I'm looking forward to taking the bus again. You should too, go ahead, push your comfort bubble, sit next to a stranger (take an airborne), and ride the bus.

The trip itself was a good one, it’s been a few days since we got back but my mind is still spinning from all the traveling. While we were in Salt Lake we enjoyed the company of family and friends, took a little break from the alpine world, and enjoyed some of the cultural comforts of the city. Spending some time in the city that has become for me something of a second home gave me some time to reflect first hand on the urban world, it's efforts towards sustainability and relationship to the mountains. Some of the highlights for me where eating my way through the truly huge Salt Lake Farmers Market, taking a stroll through the Sugarhouse Community Gardens, and enjoying good food in excess from the nearby Whole Foods. I managed to sneak away for a day and climb with a couple friends in nearby Maple Canyon, and we managed to get out with Liz’s brother for an early morning solo up the West Slabs of Mount Olympus. We took a few other drives high up into the mountains for some great views, and overall spent more time in automobiles then we would have imagined. It’s good to be back home and reflect on the summer and the weeks ahead. Here are some pics from the trip, they’ll do a better job than I can.