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december 1989 i had the glorious idea of exploring canada. at the time it seemed totaly ok to arrive there in the middle of the winter, with about 200 usd in cash and no place to live. |
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while i was there, i hichhiked around 25000 km from east coast usa to west coast canada, between the border to mexico in the south and mount mckinley in alaska in the north. i met a lot of incredibel hospitality there! |
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in alaska i went up in the mountains to live there for the summer. |
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i became friends with lancer smith... |
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...who taught me much of what i needed out in the bush. |
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i worked for him as a lumberjack. |
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and later i worked for larry redbone as sheppard. this was my work horse, i had to ride after the sheep and bring them home at night. |
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as the snow started to melt, i moved further up the mountains, far from people. |
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i built up an old collapsed miner cabin. my only tools were this saw, an ax and a handdrill. |
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many of the storries i later published were written in this tiny cabin in the mountains. |
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this is the back of a porkypine. i used to 'milk' them, eg put a cloth on their back and pull it off full of needles, and sell the needles later to a craft shop in anchorage. |
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there was one angry porkypine that would come in the cabin at night and claim it as his. |
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so i ate him. |
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the only means of hunting i had was my tomahawk... my tomahawk was a stone on a stick. this picture is just posing with my work ax, i couldn't risk throwing that, it was too important. |
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... but that worked really well! |
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i wanted to be really self sufficient, here i tried to make leather. it didn't work, the skinn just rotted away. |
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i was touring the bush every day. watching, hunting, learning, enjoying... this nature just swallowed me. |
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on long trips i camped out. i just had a summer sleeping bag, and i my whole live i have not frozen so much as on these trips! |
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hygenie in ice water. sometimes it is just as well to be a bit dirty. |
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the scenery i saw was rewarding for a livetime! |
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all these pictures were taken with a pocet camera, and scanned 20 years later. |
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later in the summer i moved down to the coast, where i lived in a tent on the beach. |
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still touring. |
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in homer i worked on a halibut fishing boat. most of the crew of the boats and the workers from the cannery lived here in "tent city". |