Tag: female outdoors blog

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A Week to Revisit

Hello my beautiful readers! Thank you for coming to this site today and every Friday to read my posts. This week I’m reposting an old favorite titled Things I’ve Learned From the Trees. I’ve never reposted a blog before, so I’ll be transparent as to why I’m doing it now.

This week I traveled to Colorado to visit friends and family and ski until my legs fell off. And during this week I gave myself permission to fully break from all the obligations I manage on a weekly basis and just rest. This break meant that when 10pm Thursday night rolled around my ski bags were packed and my blog had been left unattended. In placing family over productivity something had to get cut and this week it was the blog. But more than that, I have come to value my writing practice, and the small community we are growing here, too much to fire off a lazy post. So for now I’ll leave you with a repost that I love and an image that I took while skiing with my parents this week. Next week I’ll be back with a new post and I hope you’ll be here to read it.

Things I’ve Learned From the Trees

When the world seems a dismal place, I like to think about what we can learn from the trees. The value of silently observing the world as it changes around you. The deep quiet of solitude, loneliness, the simple act of standing witness to the passage of time. Being committed to just one thing: growth. Living in a way that does good for the world; and knowing that even the sentinels of the forest are not without their flaws. For even the most resplendent tree casts a shadow upon the ground that keeps the ferns from growing.That it is impossible to live a life that is devoid of harming others, but, tandemly, simply because something is impossible doesn’t preclude it from being worthy of our attention, our efforts.

After all, it was impossible for man to reach beyond our little blue dot and sail to the mood. It was impossible right up to the moment that we decided to test our hypothesis of impossibility. In doing so we move the bar just that much further, set a new impossible, a vast horizon on which we can build and destroy dreams so grand, that from here, their greatness makes them all but invisible.

When I look at the world and see all the greed and indifference, the shame and confusion, I think of the trees. The old giants.

I like to imagine a stand of soaring pine trees which no man has ever seen. Trees that took root before this great democratic experiment, before you, before me, before anyone you’ve ever had the slightest possibility of knowing came into being. When I look at the trees, not the tame, domesticated blooms that adorn our city street and front lawns, but the wild ineffable misers who live out their lives – which are so inexpressibly different from our own –  away from the prying eyes of humans. When I think of these trees – it feels like the greatest form of hubris that we should endeavor to write our stories on their skin. 

These trees don’t strive to have their names written in the pages of our history books. Instead, they are the pages of our history books, the pages of nearly every human story, the true and the tabloid, the sweeping epic and the stereo installation manual. And if tomorrow, we are called upon by some desire within ourselves to cut these giants down; to bring their soaring-ever-reaching limbs crashing down to earth, they will not complain, but simply acquiesce to our desires and we will have lost something grand and powerful, and very nearly the closest thing we have on this planet to the divine. We will have lost a teacher.

For the trees know we are small confused mammals with minds that are smaller still. They accept us and our hubris, our carelessness, our ceaseless errors, knowing that these flaws are simply part of our DNA, and they forgive us. And in their silence they hold space for us to learn. To grow not as they do, but in our own way.

The trees teach us that there is an awesome power in growth, in being huge, fat, bursting in our liveliness, and that it does not do to make oneself small. Conversely, they also show us that the notions of who is better and best does nothing but divide us, and that living only to take is not only cruel, but so beyond pointless that only a silly little animal like a human would spend their one fleeting, glorious life in pursuit of this pyrrhic victory. 

I like to look to the trees, and know that one day, all of it, all of you, will be gone, as surely and completely as the silence that stood in your place before you arrived. And then what? Just the trees and the dirt will remain, until one day, they too are swallowed up by the gaping maw of space. And we are, all of us, returned to the star dust from which we came.

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What You’re Not Seeing

8:03 a.m. Saturday

The first tenuous glow of morning light creeps into the bedroom. Lighting the walls from darkest blue to grey. Revealing the small tidy bedroom I share with Keith, where at the foot of the bed sits: nothing. There are no ice axes propped against the closet, nor backpacks packed and sitting ready to be scooped up at the first blare of an early alarm clock. The emptiness is a promise of calm. Outside a cool, rainy day is blooming into being while I luxuriate in the idea of having nowhere to be. Nothing on the agenda other than the chores that help adult life chug slowly forward.


“In the age of internet over-sharing I have fallen prey to the idea that we must constantly be documenting and sharing in an effort to convince internet strangers that I lead an epic life.”

I have been slow to appreciate these weekends spent indoors. Guilty of the self imposed need to fling myself forward at full speed, never ceasing until illness, injury, or burnout bring me careening to an inelegant forced halt. It has taken time to embrace days spent caring for, or rather about, the less share-worthy aspects of life. In the age of internet over-sharing I have fallen prey to the idea that we must constantly be documenting and sharing in an effort to convince internet strangers that I lead an epic life.

Yet I am growing, learning that there is a sort of gentle joy to be found in moderation and silence. That in caring for things beyond the outdoors I can collect more happiness in my daily life. A novel contrast to the previous two years where preparing for and completing my thru hike of the PCT consumed so much of my attention. To have reached Canada and be released from that singular consuming goal feels like being moved to the passenger seat. Where, without the need to keep my eyes on the road I am free to look around at all of the things I have been missing.

This morning I will drink coffee in bed while reading. I will make breakfast for Keith and myself taking the available time to cook the kinds of foods you can’t eat on the trail. A cheesy omelet with sauteed peppers. Chocolate chip pancakes with strawberry jam on top. While I cook I listen to Vanessa and Casper of Harry Potter and the Sacred Text discussing expectations. I delete Instagram off my phone, thus removing any expectation I might place on myself to share, tell, post my life for the benefits of others. Thus removing my own expectations to be good at social media.

11:47 a.m Sunday

I am sprinting after a rubber ball in the rain. My lungs are burning and I know my legs will be inconsolably sore tomorrow after having abandoned any attempt to take it easy as I learn this new game. Gaelic Football, a confusing mess of a sport akin to soccer, basketball, and rugby all rolled into one. But fun, undeniably fun. The delight I take in team sports is being rekindled after such a long absence. Saying yes to thru hiking meant saying no to a great many other things. Because you just can’t have it all. At least not all at the same time. The longer I live on this twirling blue rock the less I am even inclined to try.

Monday 8:17am

 During the bus ride to work I am scrolling through the newly re-installed Instagram. Comparing hashtags and looking at the success of my last few posts. I am debating captions and filters when a little voice in my head reminds me that I don’t have to do this. The outdoor industry as it is portrayed on the internet is not a club I necessarily want to be a part of any more. As I slide past the billionth picture of a thin, conventionally attractive, white person standing with their back to the camera as they look at a mountain peak with a caption about following your dreams I almost throw my phone out the damn window. Luckily they seal bus windows to prevent these exact morning existential rage meltdowns.

The further I scroll the more the images look the same. Each post about sending it. Crushing it. Conquering a climb. Being stoked. Living the dream. Epic to the max. Type 2  suffer-fest fun. Beautiful people in beautiful places saying nothing much at all.

On the internet the outdoors is for escapism, not activism. Full of people who quickly become defensive at any political comment or critique that the community could do with a little diversifying. I cannot begin to recount the number of times I have heard a fellow white person say “I’m not here to discuss politics, I’m here to escape it!” And while we are all entitled to take space away from the quagmire of political vitriol, I find that those who are the safest in our society are those who can best afford to check out and get out. Both emotionally and financially.

And here I have a choice. And so do you.

I can continue to post image after image of the beautiful images I have been privileged enough to visit, toss in an inspirational caption about freedom, maybe a questionable quote from Edward Abbey. I can continue to portray the outdoors community as white, able, thin, and wealthy, continue to consume media from accounts and brands who do the same. Or, I can make a different choice. The reality of which, isn’t much of a choice. Because hard choices come when you have something to lose. Sure, I want people to read what I write and I want them to like the pictures I take but it’s not the end of the world if they don’t. I’d rather be honest and unpopular than promote an ideal I don’t think is helpful.


“…if you don’t know something, you can’t love it. And you won’t bother saving something you don’t love.”

As a lifelong member of the outdoors community I can say we could do with a little growth. And the first thing I’d like to see us do, as a community is to be more transparent about what it means to get outdoors. There will always be the athletes doing first ascents in wild places where no person has ever been. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t also room for walking 100 feet down a trail and sitting on a warm rock in the sun. Or going on your first overnight trip. Or your first hike period. You don’t have to be outside at every opportunity, fair weather hikers are still hikers. It all counts. We should celebrate it all. 

By opening up the definition of what it means to be an outdoors person we will be rewarded with a more diverse community of folks who know that they have a place in the outdoors, who love these wild spaces. Because if you don’t know something, you can’t love it. And you won’t bother saving something you don’t love. And folks, this planet needs our love, needs saving. So let’s lower the standards of admission into the outdoors and let everybody in.

Diversifty our feed – 10 rad accounts to follow

Brown People Camping
Unlikely Hikers
Natives Outdoors
Shooglet
Pattie Gonia
Queer Appalachia
Melanin Basecamp
Carrot Quinn
Nicole Antoinette

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Here We Are

The Mountain

The ground below me feels perilously steep. A long white chute of snow dropping away towards the valley floor. I step, and step again and the snow beneath my boots shifts a little and my whole body tenses. Far below me Keith is watching my painfully slow process. His mountaineering confidence and skill allows him to move quickly and easily across the same terrain I am clinging to like a frightened cat. Moments before, as he plopped on his butt and prepared to glissade out of sight he offered these parting words. “Remember” he said, “if you do have to self arrest lift your feet. If you dig your feet in while wearing crampons you’ll probably break your leg.” Casual, good pep talk.

I step, and step again. Repeating to myself “French step, French step, French step.” I am not even doing a proper French step–a mountaineering move in which you cross one leg over the other as you zig zag across a face–but the phrase focuses my mind. French step. French step. Ignore the dozens of ski tourers shuffling up the face around me. French step. French step. Ignore the couple having a shouting argument, the woman at the bottom of the hill too scared to go on, her boyfriend above me too ignorant of her fear to do anything helpful. French step. French step. The hill levels out and I stare around in wonder. It is so beautiful here.

The City

It’s Monday and I’m sitting at a red light watching cars stream past my driver side window where, through a combination of rain water and grit clinging to the glass, they melt into undistinguished blobs of light and motion before passing out of view. Above me, warm lights shine down from so many apartment buildings, glowing indicators of their invisible inhabitants. A reflection of a building, a city, a world full of so many people. Seen from the reverse I suppose I am just another invisible city dweller as indicated by my car’s headlights. In the span of a breath I feel my entire life collapse around me and I am left wondering how I came to be here. In this life, in this city, sitting in this body at this traffic light on this night. The light turns green.


“…is happiness a choice or a gift or a circumstance.”

As I drive through the rain blackened streets I perform a series of invisible yet impressive mental gymnastics. I think about the temp job I am working. I try and parce my feelings from each other but like a tangled ball of twine I cannot figure out what each string connects; what everything leads back to. I wonder if I am happy; is happiness a choice or a gift or a circumstance. I think about money and student debt and about the small apartment that Keith and I share. The choices of comfort and the resultant financial responsibility. I think about an alternate life, one in which I didn’t go to college, didn’t incur this wet blanket of student debt just to squeeze myself into the trap of specificity. I wonder if this other self would be happier. Or maybe I’m am simply dousing an imagined life in nostalgia, staring through rose colored glasses at a path not taken.

Or maybe it’s all irrelevant because I did go to college and graduated with all the accompanying debts and privileges and options and trappings. And now here I am in this life, in this city and the only option is to move forward. It’s the only option that is ever available to any of us.

The Plan

Before I found myself standing in a snow chute trying to French step my way off a mountain I felt the pull to escape the city. Our plans began as they so often do, as half formed ideas on a Thursday night which, by the miracle of the internet would be fully formed by Friday night only to be rethought on Saturday morning and finally acted upon.


 “A brilliant last hurrah in celebration of a day before the world turned to black and we were forced to scurry into our tent like the small burrowing mammals that we are.”

On Saturday we left my car in an empty parking lot in Mount Rainier National Park and climbed up the shoulders of the giant sleeping beast. Above us was only a grey bowl of clouds and in the distance we could hear small avalanches sliding off the Nisqually Glacier.

We climb up up up towards the clouds into a land of white until all of a sudden the sky dropped away and the world was flooded with a pastel dreamscape sunset. A brilliant last hurrah in celebration of a day before the world turned to black and we were forced to scurry into our tent like the small burrowing mammals that we are. Bundled in the misty interior of the tent we laughed and ate half frozen snacks, taking unflattering selfies because one day I’ll want to look back and be able to remember this. Because one day I may no longer be able to. Sitting inside the tent felt like a return to normal, a shedding of all the trappings of society until we could simply be. Away from the myriad people and needs of a city. It felt like being back on the PCT, like tentative normalcy.

The Process of Starting

It’s been a little over two months since Keith and I finished hiking the Pacific Crest Trail. In that time I feel like I have arrived at the start of what can whimsically be called the next chapter of my life. I worry that it’s going to look surprisingly like the last chapter. Weeks spent working in a large city, apathetically trading hours of my day for money. While on weekends we flee to the mountains to press the reset button on contentment. I wonder if it will be enough.

At 30 I have somehow found myself at a crossroads between the two world views with which I was raised. When I was a child I was told to follow my dreams, to pursue passion and to live a life of intensity. At the same time I was taught that the American dream way my responsibility and right to pursue. The house, career, car, and children were the epitome of normal, of expectation. So was the high flying life of dirtbagging adventure. However, it doesn’t take an overly skilled observer to see that these lives are at odds with each other. Be risky and responsible, daring and dutiful, adventuresome and adherent. And I did it, I did what was expected of me.

I have spent time dedicating myself to my career. Spent weekends in the office and burned the midnight oil. Then, I spent a glorious sun-drenched summer following my passion for the outdoors and living a life or irresponsible freedom. In the end I found neither to be sustainable. I have checked the boxes, been a good worker bee and an inspirational traveler. Put my nose to the grindstone and wandered in the woods and after all of that I am left with nothing more than questions.

I find myself in the muddy middle ground of life after an epic adventure. At the start of the narrative that so few bother to tell. Where expectations give way to honest desires and the realization that I am not entirely sure what those desires are. But I think change first comes from the willingness to open oneself up to possibilities. To look around and imagine that things might be different than it is even possible to know. So while I stand on the banks of a future I cannot see I will allow myself the grace to be happy with hitting the reset button of contentment each week as I escape into the mountains. I don’t know if it will always be enough. But for now it is. It’s enough.