This Man Hiked the Entire Route of the Keystone XL Pipeline
From Canada to Texas, Ken Ilgunas encountered environmental devastation, climate-change denial, and the kindness of strangers.
Within a week of his inauguration, President Trump signed an executive memorandum reviving the Keystone XL pipeline that President Obama had previously blocked. But Trump’s support is no guarantee that it will be built, says Ken Ilgunas, a young writer who hiked all 1,900 miles of the proposed pipeline, which would carry oil from the tar sands of Alberta to Texas. [See a map of the Keystone XL pipeline.]
Ilgunas’s book, Trespassing Across America: One Man's Epic, Never-Done-Before (and Sort of Illegal) Hike Across the Heartland, tells the story of his nearly five-month journey down the pipeline’s contested path. Speaking from his home in North Carolina, Ilgunas explained why conservatives and liberals united against the pipeline in
