AdventuresNW
Matt points his phone towards the stars over the mountains in the southern sky. “You’ve got to line it up with the satellite,” he says. “That seems to work best.” Apparently, iPhone 14 and newer have built-in satellite messaging. I ask him what he’s up to and he tells me he has a buddy back home who is sending him the weather forecast. Seems like a good call.
And yet, I wonder. We’re three days into a backcountry ski trip to the Wendy Thompson Hut outside Pemberton, British Columbia. When I arrived at the hut, I used a satellite messenger to notify the important people in my life that I made it safely to my destination, but since then, I chose to limit communication with the outside world. The result has been a rather peaceful mental disconnect.
My mountaineering clients always ask me what the weather is supposed to do. Reality suggests that weather—and many other aspects of life—are out of our control. Knowing it isn’t going to change it. Obviously, you can plan around the weather, but only so much, and there is an argument to be made that more information isn’t always better. You don’t always need to be “up to speed,” and others don’t need to know exactly what you are doing, thinking, or feeling at any given moment. More information and communication are often of little benefit and sometimes can be harmful.
Nothing provokes more anxiety than feeling like we need to know something that we simply can’t know. Our escape to wild, quiet places is, in some ways, an escape from the uncertainty of a complex world that offers few answers to our most meaningful questions. For a brief moment in time, we can set down the burden of knowing and simply be present with the world as it is, without expectation. But with Globalstar, Iridium, and Starlink, it’s becoming more and more difficult.
In 1818, the British sailor Jon Ross discovered the indigenous community of Etah on the Northwest coast of Greenland, which at that point was the most northerly human settlement on earth. Interestingly, at the time, the 200 or so Inughuit residents of Etah were so isolated from the rest of humanity, that they believed that they were the only people in the entire world. Such a paradigm was almost as unfathomable then as it is now, and yet, the Inughuit seemed to do just fine.
You would, too.
John Minier is the owner and lead guide at Baker Mountain Guides. Originally from Alaska, he has a deep appreciation for wild and mountainous places. Since 2004, he has worked across the western U.S. as a rock guide, alpine guide, ski guide, and avalanche instructor.
