She escaped the laboratory in pursuit of her love for nature.
Kate holds degrees in biology from MIT and the University of North Carolina, as well as in history of science from Oxford University. She biked the Silk Road together with her best friend, Mel Yule, and has written a book, Lands of Lost Borders, about the adventure. Driven by wanderlust, Kate has traveled to the most intriguing places of the world and even trespassed twice across Tibet. Weaving adventure and deep reflection with the history of science and exploration, Lands of Lost Borders explores the nature of limits and the wildness of a world that, like the self and like the stars, can never be fully mapped.Diverging from her original plan of becoming a scientist and going to Mars, writer and adventurer Kate Harris explores desolate trails in pursuit of nature. Like Rebecca Solnit and Pico Iyer before her, Kate Harris offers a travel narrative at once exuberant and meditative, wry and rapturous.
So she quit the laboratory and hit the Silk Road again with Mel, this time determined to bike it from the beginning to end. And Harris had soared most fully out of bounds right here on Earth, travelling a bygone trading route on her bicycle. Eventually, the truth dawned on her: An explorer, in any day and age, is by definition the kind of person who refuses to live between the lines. To pass the time before she could launch into outer space, Kate set off by bicycle down a short section of the fabled Silk Road with her childhood friend Mel Yule, then settled down to study at Oxford and MIT.
So she vowed to become a scientist and go to Mars. From her small-town home in Ontario, it seemed as if Marco Polo, Magellan, and their like had long ago mapped the whole earth. "Every day on a bike trip is like the one before - but it is also completely different, or perhaps you are different, woken up in new ways by the mile."Īs a teenager, Kate Harris realized that the career she most craved - that of a generalist explorer, equal parts swashbuckler and philosopher - had gone extinct. Winner of The Edna Staebler Award for Creative Non-Fiction
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