num_pages: 288
description: Winner of the Nebraska Center for the Book Award Travel  A Sigurd Olson Nature Writing Award Notable Book  Honoree of the Society of Midland Authors Annual Literary Award for Biography/MemoirNow that President Donald Trump has revived the Keystone XL pipeline that was rejected by former President Obama Trespassing Across America is the book to help us understand the kaleidoscopic significance of the project. Told with sincerity humor and wit Ilgunas's story is both a fascinating account of one mans remarkable journey along the pipeline's potential path and a meditation on climate change the beauty of the natural world and the extremes to which we can push ourselvesboth physically and mentally. It started as a far-fetched ideato hike the entire length of the proposed route of the Keystone XL pipeline. But in the months that followed it grew into something more for Ken Ilgunas. It became an irresistible adventurean opportunity not only to draw attention to global warming but also to explore his personal limits. So in September 2012 he strapped on his backpack stuck out his thumb on the interstate just north of Denver and hitchhiked 1500 miles to the Alberta tar sands. Once there he turned around and began his 1700-mile trek to the XLs endpoint on the Gulf Coast of Texas a journey he would complete entirely on foot walking almost exclusively across private property.Both a travel memoir and a reflection on climate change Trespassing Across America is filled with colorful characters harrowing physical trials and strange encounters with the weather terrain and animals of Americas plains. A tribute to the Great Plains and the people who live there Ilgunass memoir grapples with difficult questions about our place in the What is our personal responsibility as stewards of the land? As members of a rapidly warming planet? As mere individuals up against something as powerful as the fossil fuel industry? Ultimately Trespassing Across America is a call to embrace the belief that a life lived not half wild is a life only half lived.
language: English
title: Trespassing Across America: One Man's Epic, Never-Done-Before (and Sort of Illegal) Hike Across the Heartland
publisher: Blue Rider Press