Post by hikerjer on Jun 7, 2018 19:42:36 GMT -8
Trespassing Across America: One Man's Epic, Never-Done-Before (and Sort of Illegal) Hike Across the Heartland. This is a great book. Ya, know sometimes you just get lucky. I found this for ten cents at a garage sale and picked it up because it looked mildly interesting and you can hardly go wrong for a dime. What a find. Part hiking/backpacking journal, part environmental manifesto and part philosophical treatise, I thoroughly enjoyed this book. After spending time working in Alaska's North Slope oil fields, Ilgunas was so disillusioned and disgusted by the environmental degradation, the destruction of any social fabric and the absolute purposeless of the lives of the men and women working there that he decided to further investigate that sort of economic development and life style by walking the length of the then proposed Keystone XL pipeline - this before it was approved by the current doofus in the White House - from the tar sands of Alberta to the refineries on the Texas Gulf Coast. During his 1700 mile hike through two provinces and six states, he walked primarily, but not always, across the mostly private land of the Great Plains. Both a beautiful portrait of the prairies and stunning condemnation of the consumeristic petroleum based society we have developed into, Ilgunas remains witty, insightful and surprisingly sympathetic to those who depend on the pipeline for their living, even if that livelihood is only temporary. He manages to befriend both proponents and opponents of the project and is slow to condemn those he meets but remains true to his environmental principles while acknowledging the irony of being personally dependent on that very petroleum based economy he detests. It's an easy read and well worth your time.
Ilgunas has written several other books that I've never even heard of but you can bet I've got them on my list. I can't believe that I hadn't even heard of this guy.
