I’ve been thinking a lot about Mars lately.
To my great disappointment, I was born too late to be an 1800’s cowboy and too early to be a 2100’s astronaut. I’ve compromised by becoming a trail builder in Northwest Washington. It’s a good job and lets me engage in my cowboy fantasies by sleeping out under the stars and coming home tanned from working in the sun. I often joke that my retirement plan is to sign up as a trail builder for Elon Musk’s Mars colonies. After all, how hard could it be? The two things that make my job difficult are running water and hikers, and Mars doesn’t have either of those.
But recently I had a taste of just what living on Mars would be like which made me re-think all of my space-cowboy fantasies.
I was leading a 3-day crew on Ptarmigan Ridge, one of the approaches to Mt. Baker. The austerity of the landscape was its beauty. Well above tree line, the only plants that grew there were small and scrappy. Rocks of all sizes were the only things to look at. And the sun was constant. It beat down on us perpetually. One the first day, we realized the exposure would be a big problem. We chose to split our workday into a sunrise and sunset shift, with a nap in the middle. We moved like astronauts in spacesuits made of hiking gear to protect us from the radiation, exploring our new Mars-like home.
The next challenge was water. Our camp was in a large bowl with a shallow lake at the bottom. The lake had no outflow, making it technically a tarn, and a perfect harbor for waterborne illnesses. We viewed it skeptically as a water source and opted instead to gather our water from trickles coming out of the melting snowbanks. These tiny streams often dried up unexpectedly overnight. Now, the sun was trying to kill us, and water was a precious commodity.
On our second afternoon I floated on my sleeping pad on the surface of the probably toxic tarn. Staring at a landscape of scattered rocks and finger-sized plants fighting for survival, I thought about how this would be viewed as a miracle of terraforming if we were on Mars. This trip had been the most challenging of my summer season. But it was vacation mode for a Martian colony.
Then the air became toxic. In the morning the wildfire smoke rolled in, and I estimated that the Air Quality Index was creeping towards 200 – firmly in the red zone on color coded maps. We added kN95 masks to our astronaut suits. Now, with long pants, work gloves, hooded sun shirts, sunglasses, hard hats, and masks, some of my crew were completely covered from head to toe. I truly began to feel as though I was commanding a space colony. I had an inReach device to talk to the office staff, but messages could have hour-long delays. I had to manage the many competing concerns of the crew. Some people wanted to evac due to medical concerns with the smoke. Some thought they couldn’t physically manage an evac during the heat of the day. I tried to balance everyone’s needs and concerns as the smoke grew thicker, the day grew later, and the sun beat down on us.
It sounds dire. But at the end of the day safety was just a four-hour walk across a ridge and back to our cars. In contrast, while I was managing this low-stakes crisis, two astronauts were orbiting in the sky above me trapped in the International Space Station. They went up for an eight-day mission in June 2024 and as of that summer there were no plans to rescue them until February 2025. Their flight to the ISS was aboard a Boeing spacecraft which experienced a technical failure and couldn’t bring them back. Their rescue was scheduled with a Space X flight but it was having its own technical difficulties. Seeing as how commercial space flight can’t yet be trusted to send astronauts to orbit safely, I don’t have high hopes for my “retire on Mars as a trail builder” plan.
Retiring on Mars isn’t a realistic option – and neither is relocating if our planet burns to a crisp. My taste of Mars life was still safe and sound on Earth. The air was breathable, if slightly toxic. The water was drinkable, if unreliable. I survived the sun’s radiation without even a sunburn. And my boss brought my weary crew fresh watermelon and evacuation to safety. A good personal anecdote, but hardly the stuff of space catastrophes, real or imagined.
As I hiked out with a 50 lbs pack, through wildfire smoke, listening to the Forest Service weather update, my ears rang with the oft-repeated phrase “There’s No Planet B”. This trip served as a reminder to me that life on Earth at this moment is luxurious in comparison to the alternatives. And the consequences of failing to address the climate crisis will be dire. For me, that trip was a dramatic story to tell my friends when they casually asked, “So, how was work?”. But it was nothing compared to the realities faced by those suffering daily under climate change.
And even that is nothing compared to the improbable task of moving to Mars.
I want to continue to experience places like Ptarmigan Ridge as an experiment in austerity rather than an oasis in a post-apocalyptic world. I want to continue to play cowboy and sleep under the stars, knowing that I will never have to live as a refugee among them. I want to know that there are still moss-covered forests so full of moisture you feel as though you are drowning on dry land. I want us to take the threats of the climate crisis seriously, before it is too late. Washinton is my beautiful wet, cloudy, tree-covered home. And I never want to have to live anywhere else.
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