Blood Piss & Cheer ALASKA, Seldom does a man get to live his dream. is a memoir that reaches back into the history of Kristian Erickson's Longmire Family heritage before the earliest days of Mount Rainier National Park. His great grandmother named Paradise, and his great uncle, Len Longmire, was Rainier's first mountain guide. From the beginning, Erickson was dedicated to helping other wilderness explorers and climbers. He trained as an emergency first-responder and went on to become an EMT, where he worked in hospital and trauma-center settings. Hailing from Issaquah, Washington, Erickson began his undergraduate education in German, philosophy, and geology at Pacific Lutheran University, this institution chosen because of its ties to the Reformation and its proximity to Mount Rainier. Summers during college he worked at REI under the tutelage of Jim Whittaker. Later he studied phenomenology and metaphysics in Freiburg, Germany, taught by Professor Bernard Welte (prot??of Martin Heidegger). German remains his favorite language today, but it bumps into stiff competition from French and Spanish. He has studied five others including Yup'ik, the language of Western Alaska, and Shqip, the language of Albania. At the University of Freiburg he explored the Horst and Graben geology of the Rhine Valley. Back in the Pacific Northwest, he was enchanted by the columnar and pillow basalts west of Rainier, and especially of those in the Bald Hills on his aunt and uncle's farm, which later became Thurston County's Deschutes Falls Park. As a PLU lab assistant, he could help students identify the range of igneous, sedimentary, and metamorphic rocks, and their interplay among each other. He also understood that chemically acid rock would usually be granite, but he didn't know that most other college kids thought that acid rock was music. Kristian's role in in the Mountaineers began when at age 14 he obtained early-admission to the Basic Climbing Course. He learned the ropes literally and figuratively and later became the editor of The Mountaineer and the Chairman of the Outdoor Division. In the footsteps of Harvey and Betty Manning, Bob and Ira Spring, Clint Kelly, and hero Paul Wiseman, Kristian fought to preserve the Pacific Northwest mountain wilderness with the creation of the North Cascades National Park and numbers of designated Wildernesses. Climbing in Washington State's Cascades and Olympic Mountains was Erickson's prelude to fulfilling his dream to follow his Gold Rush pioneer forebearers to Alaska. He became a licensed State of Alaska casualty adjuster, and his EMT training enabled him to address gruesome and bloody accident claims in every region of the state. Some accounts in the book, such as the namesake chapter "Piss Omelet" in Bethel, are funny, while others are deeply sad. From Ketchikan to Kotzebue and from Unalaska to Utkiagvik, Alaska is a place for dreamers to dream big, and Kristain Erickson continues to live his dream in Alaska today. John Muir warned that young men shouldn't see Alaska first, because when they've experienced Alaska, they won't be satisfied anywhere else. Erickson was still young when he moved to Alaska where another of his heroes, Alaska Governor Jay Hammond (1922-2005), related the story of a cold, wet, and cranky Midwesterner on a goat hunt in the area that would become Wood-Tikchik State Park. The fellow complained, "Alaska is the last place on earth that I'd ever want to live." Hammond answered, "I feel exactly the same way, and with any luck, it's going to be." Erickson met with Hammond and told him that those were his own sentiments about Alaska, The Great Land, too.
| Author: Kristian H Erickson |
| Publisher: Tasty Lutefisk Publishing |
| Publication Date: Feb 06, 2024 |
| Number of Pages: NA pages |
| Language: English |
| Binding: Paperback |
| ISBN-10: 1735813524 |
| ISBN-13: 9781735813523 |
