For her 40th birthday in March, 2010, artist and naturalist Kate Spencer is celebrating by bicycling across North America as she has wanted to do since high school. She is going to fulfill her postponed dream of sketching her way across the landscape, finding as many species of salamanders and lizards as she can, and traveling under her own power. The journey will take her from California, where she has been living, through her family’s history in the Southeast to the coast of South Carolina. Along the way Kate will raise awareness about the urgent need to stop mountaintop removal coal mining in Appalachia, which destroys salamander habitat, and prevent the worldwide spread of this unimaginably destructive practice.
Streams and Mountaintop Removal Mining
Healthy streams are critical not just for wildlife but for people, since they are the source of all our drinking water. The developing world is watching as the U.S. remains dependent on coal and allows mining companies to blow up entire mountaintops to expose deep coal seams. The debris is shoved into stream valleys, literally burying vast areas of habitat, choking waterways with deathly silt, and coating mountain communities with dust. At the same time jobs are lost in already poor towns as the mine work is done by larger and larger machines. Alternatives to mountaintop removal and to coal power exist, and regulation is not working. Campaigns that have started in the Southeast need nationwide support to get Congress to stop the destruction before it spreads all over the world. Kate spent much of her childhood joyfully poking about in streams and now relies on her love for the wet wild places to help her face the ugliness of industrial mining.
Salamanders
Salamanders are amphibians like frogs, which thrive secretively in mountain springs, streams, and under the forest floor. Their soft, moist skin is so porous that many species breathe through their skin and have no lungs at all. These delicate creatures are beautifully diverse and extremely vulnerable to habitat destruction. In the Appalachian Mountains, many subspecies live only in specific valleys and in certain forest micro-habitats. Kate’s ecology professor at Smith College, Massachusetts, Steve Tilley, is an expert on salamander speciation who says that if Darwin had found Appalachian salamanders instead of Galapagos finches, he would have gotten his entire theory right the first time.
Salamanders are Kate’s first love from toddler-hood, when she found them under stones in her mother’s garden. As a teenager she discovered the diversity of Appalachian mountain salamanders in West Virginia and as a young adult was inspired by the Spotted Salamanders she found in a Maryland swamp to organize her community to stop a proposed shopping mall. Her Dream Ride will give Kate the opportunity to see many new species of salamanders as she passes through different eco-zones. She hopes to protect vulnerable Appalachian populations by raising awareness about mountaintop removal mining.
The Bike
Kate’s vehicle of choice is an Xtracycle, an extended bicycle frame that allows anyone to carry bulky and heavy loads instead of driving a car for daily errands. The Xtracycle FreeRadical is a remarkably versatile modification that anyone can make to an existing bicycle. Kate has lived car-free most of her adult life, both in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. and in Monterey, California, and since 2007 her Xtracycle has revolutionized the ease of carrying groceries, camping gear, lumber, moving boxes, and friends. In 2010 her Xtracycle will carry art supplies along with camping gear and perhaps become a mobile drawing table.
The Ride
Kate will pedal out of Monterey, California on Saturday, March 27, 2010 and head down the Big Sur Coast, where she will celebrate her 40th birthday on March 30. She plans to spend five months exploring the continent, with a low daily mileage of about 40-50 miles per day to spare her creaky knees and allow plenty of time to look for salamanders and sketch the landscape. She’ll be camping, carrying everything she needs, and blogging from the road.
Part I: Cross-country
Desert wildflowers will be blooming when Kate turns away from the Pacific Ocean toward Death Valley and the great parks of southern Utah. The high passes of Southern Colorado will have just opened when she crosses the Great Divide. She is looking forward to the wide open spaces of Kansas and to visiting family in the Northwestern corner of Arkansas. The Ozark Mountains promise a grueling ride but are home to nifty cave salamanders. She’ll cross the Mississippi River at Memphis. Kate’s mother is from Middle Tennessee and they hope to meet up to trace family history and memories in that green, undulating landscape. The Great Smoky Mountains of North Carolina hold memories for Kate’s father’s side, and she will visit more family home-sites as she parallels the Savannah River toward the Atlantic Ocean. The final destination is Edisto Island, South Carolina, where Kate’s father’s family still lives and about which he published a comprehensive history in 2008.
If funds and knees hold up, Kate envisions cycling back to the Smokies from the Atlantic Ocean so she can visit salamander coves and mountaintop removal sites in the Southern Appalachians in Kentucky and West Virginia. This would be an ambitious turn, one that could reveal the most pressing environmental problems and some of the most exciting herpetologizing of the trip. Bicycling so far in the mountains might be unreasonable, and Kate is open to alternatives for this part of the journey, such as joining other activists touring the area by car. Ultimately, whether by bicycle or internal combustion engine, she will wind up at her parents’ house -- her childhood home -- in Arlington, Virginia, near Washington, D.C. If this second mountain phase of the journey does happen she will arrive at the nation’s capital with a dossier of first-hand observations about the environmental and social impacts of coal mining in Appalachia to share with activists and lawmakers.