Blood Piss & Cheer: Alaska

Blood Piss & Cheer ALASKA hits hard and raw, but it also conveys measures of laughter, joy, and redemptive irony. Kristian Erickson reaches back into the history of his Longmire forebearers half a century before the creation of Mount Rainier National Park. His Longmire great uncles and great grandfather headed north to the Klondike and Nome Gold Rushes beginning in 1898, and from that point on, Alaska became part of the Longmire family's fabric.

Erickson's great uncle, Len Longmire, was Rainier's first mountain guide, who brought his girlfriend Fay Fuller to the top, making her the first woman to ascend Rainier. Kristian himself followed suit in 1976 and proposed to his wife on the same volcanic rocks above the summit crater.

Earlier, at age 14, Erickson had obtained early-admission to the Mountaineers Basic Climbing Course. He later became the editor of The Mountaineer and Chairman of the Outdoor Division. In the footsteps of Pete Schoening, Harvey and Betty Manning, Bob and Ira Spring, and his personal hero Paul Wiseman, Kristian fought to preserve the Pacific Northwest mountain wilderness with the creation of the North Cascades National Park and the Glacier Peak Wilderness.

Mountain climbers occasionally have bloody accidents, and Erickson dedicated himself to becoming a wilderness first-responder. He also became an Emergency Medical Technician (EMT), where his training brought him into the emergency department and operating theater of a major trauma center.

Erickson began his undergraduate education in German, philosophy, and geology an hour from home at Pacific Lutheran University, in the shadow of Rainier, where during the summer he went to Seattle and worked under the tutelage of Jim Whittaker at the original REI store. As a PLU geology assistant, he helped students identify the range of igneous, sedimentary, and metamorphic rocks as well as their interplay among one another. He formed his ideals of a liberal education on the foundation of Martin Luther's 1517 Ninety-Five Theses. German became his favorite language, but he also embraced five others including French, which took him to the University of Geneva in Switzerland.

At the University of Freiburg in the Black Forest region of Germany, Erickson studied metaphysics and phenomenology taught by Professor Bernard Welte (protégé of Martin Heidegger.) There he also explored the Horst and Graben geography of the Rhine Valley. Since his youth in the Pacific Northwest, he had been 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 was transformed into Thurston County's Deschutes Falls Park, which opened to the public in 2017.

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 complex accidents in every region of the state. Alaska, from Ketchikan to Kotzebue and from Unalaska to Utkiavik, is the place where dreamers come to live their dreams, just as Kristian Erickson does today.

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