Kari Brandt: The Road to Diamond Peak Patrol

get ready to experience the pulse of the outdoor community as we dive into the stories of people's journeys into the outdoor world

hello we are 10 episodes in now i would like to thank everybody that's been tuning in I am really enjoying hearing these stories i hope everyone else is also, so, episode this week's awesome talking with a ski patroller coming up on ski season coming up super excited for this one but please go give my pages like shares follows and especially if you're enjoying this and also if you could go give my podcast review on either spotify or itunes I would really appreciate it thank you very much and let's jump right into it.

Hello and welcome to the outdoor pulse i am your host mitch dean and today we have on kari brandt she is the ski patrol director and safety coordinator at diamond peak in tahoe correct yes awesome well great to have you on how's it going doing pretty good yeah thanks for having me yeah so we're gonna jump right into it kinda um just gonna start off with kind of how you got into the outdoors what the initial draw was for you yeah so i um was born and raised in southern california but not the stereotypical southern california most people think of and i grew up in a really small town in the mountains halfway between big bear and lake arrowhead called green valley lake there's about 250 residents 7 000 foot level we lived almost a half hour away from a grocery store we had a 45 minute bus ride to middle school so a little more remote than what people think southern california is um and my my mom had lived there since she was in sixth grade and my dad grew up with a weekend cabin there um so we didn't really have a choice but to be in nature as kids because of growing up in that environment and so in terms of like recreation and sport skiing was our first sport i was on skis at two years old and my sister was on skis at 18 months it's crazy yeah and we had this little ski resort in our hometown called ski green valley and my god parents owned it and we could walk there from the house it was like a little over a half mile from our house and ski home if they didn't plow the roads um and my parents were the volunteer ski patrollers there so before i started school essentially that was daycare like i'd take naps under like desks in the office or in the patrol room and just grew up on skis and that's actually as a kid i hated skiing i wasn't a big fan because it was something that i always had to do with my parents um and then once i realized it was something i could do with friends then i really enjoyed it because then i was like oh sweet i can get away from my parents and ski with my friends instead um yeah so we were just like immersed in it we weren't allowed to watch tv growing up we were allowed an hour each on weekends um so if we wanted to watch a movie we'd combine our hours and watch a movie together and so we grew up just like playing in the woods outside um as kids so um it definitely got me to enjoy nature and like being outside as much as possible yeah definitely having the outdoors that close is a big advantage i kind of wish i would have grown up in the mountains i grew up in the midwest i had small woods behind my house but not the same thing as growing up with mountains in your backyard yeah totally like there's wild spaces everywhere but it's i definitely see how privileged and lucky i am to have been able to be raised in that environment yeah so you grew up uh obviously around all that so after you kind of hit like high school and all that did the love of skiing and other sports kind of grow from there yeah so i started ski racing at seven years old and ski raced all through high school once i hit high school i quit it's was called far west um racing um i just enjoyed being on the snow at that point i wasn't super cutthroat competitive my sister was a super competitive ski racer phenomenal ski racer i liked to have fun a little more and then through high school i was i ran cross country and track and again in the mountains so i trail ran before i knew trail running was different than road running because it was just that was just normal that's what we trained on um and so yeah i continued skiing and then i went to college on a running scholarship in san bernardino and san bernardino's at the base of the mountains there so it was really um a cultural immersion for me because i went from being the majority in my community and then all of a sudden i was at a school where i was the minority so it was a really really awesome experience like i loved being able to learn all these different cultures and interact with people who were different than me um and it was at my university where i started i worked at the university's pool through the rec center and my boss there was also the guy who started our outdoors program and he came up to me that summer and he's like you're gonna lead a surf trip and i was like well one i don't surf and two i don't leave outdoors trips and he's like well you're gonna do it and i'm like no i'm not qualified like i'm not gonna do it he's like well i'm the boss and i'm saying you're gonna do it you're you're going on this trip on this day um so it was someone who saw something and me who really got me to take that next step into more working in that environment

yeah so it was uh it took someone seeing those qualities and meetings it's cool being a part of kind of like the beginning of like an outdoor program for a college like that too because i know that at ohio state where i went um the outdoor programs they had there plus the mountaineers a club that they had it's the outdoor community there is just huge and if it wasn't for that i don't think i would have gotten into the outdoors as much and having that kind of access through college programs and things like that is super helpful for people i feel like yeah absolutely and because like so our school was all volunteer trip leaders too so we were able to keep costs down so these students who would have never had access to trips like that could all of a sudden afford trips to yosemite and trips to the grand canyon and to really like experience those things that they never had access to before i feel like with the outdoors with a lot of those people like you said that we're going on those trips that never would have been able to i feel like a lot of the realizing that there's opportunities to get outside for cheap and be able to go experience nature is kind of like if you don't know about it then you're never gonna really search it out so once you're able to experience it for the first time you kind of have your eyes open to the possibilities of different things that you can do yeah absolutely and like that i think guiding for them i i was a volunteer trip leader for six years for them um because i did multiple degrees at the same school and for my master's degree my project um ended up i got a masters in stem education so science technology engineering mathematics education but my focus was science and environmental education and i focused towards like the outdoor leadership realm and was able to create this outdoor leadership training program that took as we realized being a school where we were at we didn't have a lot of students that grew up in the outdoors like i did and so i was able to create a training program that could take someone who had never been camping before in their life and at the end of the quarter they were leading camping trips and to see the growth of the people in those programs within 10 weeks in their confidence and their capabilities and outdoors where they never thought they'd be capable was so rewarding yeah um that's always an awesome thing is watching someone grow into something that they love so they start they go out and get on that first trip and then next thing you know they're like full full on into it like learning everything they can and just it becomes a part of their life and it's a cool thing to see that every part of the outdoor i feel like so getting someone into something just watching that light kind of pop on in their head um of like wow this is awesome yeah this is what everyone's talking about yeah yeah um so you helped a lot with a lot of the program stuff then and starting everything there then so yeah like i i was fortunate enough like the program started in 2005 um and then i came in in the i think it was like summer of 2007 is when i started as a trip leader um and then was able to be with the program for six years i don't know if it's a bragging right or not but i was the longest student employee of the rec center in our school and i may still have that record but um it was through those like opportunities of working through the rec center that really helped my professional development so i could go into the real world and be a professional in a field i actually didn't study like my bachelor's is in math and i'm a ski patroller so like it was like through life experience through my college that gave me the skills to get me to where i'm at yeah and uh so you guys started off obviously with not many programs probably but by the time you finish with that what did it kind of expand it to kind of yeah so we've since it started we've only had two different um managers of that program so there was the one that started it and he left right after he got me into the program and then a man named our mark oswood took it over and he's still there and we used to run like one trip a weekend or maybe like a trip saturday trip sunday and now they're running like three four trips every weekend they've expanded where they're going like even since i've left it's it's continued to grow um into this really really cool program um so mark's been able to like take it and run with it and it's been like the right leaders that have been in place to start it and then continue that growth gotcha yeah that's awesome and uh what did they kind of expand out from like what kind of like uh trainings they had for like different so like obviously mountain biking or stuff like that what did you guys kind of start with yeah we we started with like surf programs because one of the girls shannon who was there starting it was a big surfer so reduced her saturdays so we do surfing she was a snowboarder also so do snowboard trips and then camping trips and we haven't are they i haven't been involved this group for a while um but they haven't gone into mountain biking yet but like they'll do canyoneering trips um they do like service trips too so they'll travel to different places to do like community service in different areas um and then like more backpacking trips and and mark the the guy who runs it is just super creative and in how you like trip plans and and makes those programs um and then they're going we record our system when i was there and now they're moving to a semester system so now they're going to look at that outdoor leadership training that i had created oh god that was

man that was a while ago so it's like um maybe six seven years ago um i'm gonna look at it and revise it and you know try to keep it keep it current and with the needs of the program so yeah yeah that's awesome so after college so you said that you stayed there through a master's and everything too yeah i got a teaching credential did a master's program and actually like probably the thing that made me realize that i wanted to have a career in the outdoors um was the summer before i started my master's program um so 2011 i went and worked a season in yosemite and um it was actually my boss mark we were there on a winter trip and i saw a snowshoe guide and i was like oh that'd be really cool to work here and he looked at me he's like so apply and i'm like oh yeah i guess that's all it takes and he's like you know they have lifeguards i've been lifeguarding for eight years so i worked as a lifeguard in curry village for that summer and it was the most life-changing summer i've ever had in my life the community that exists in yosemite valley is never never land it's unlike anywhere i've ever experienced you live in a tent cabin with two other people like you have a wood floor canvas sides a heater three beds three dressers and a light bulb and two plugs and two bear boxes outside and you have community bathrooms and kitchens laundry facilities um and so i always say like it's the place that brought me there the first time but it was the people i kept going back um so after that first summer i knew i didn't lifeguarding is one thing lifeguarding in a national park that has a river like 100 yards away from the pool you're sitting at is a way different experience so i realized i was like i want to come back but not in that capacity and i learned that they had hiking and backpacking guides um and so i made it my goal to become a hiking backpacking guide for the yosemite mountaineering school and of course you need your woofer to go into that level and so i enrolled in a woofer in flagstaff and with the flagstaff field institute it was through knowles and um it kind of changed the trajectory of the rest of my life um because i absolutely fell in love with emergency and wilderness medicine and and so halfway through my woofer course i actually applied for the emt program at our local community college so the same year i started my master's program i went to a community college for the first time so i was in masters degree classes during you know most of my time and then the one day a week i was sitting with a bunch of 18 year olds that wanted to be firefighters um in an emt class and i was sitting there saying i want to be a ski patroller um and that's why i sat in there so i just figured it was a job that could pay me through college and maybe like support my seasonal lifestyle for a few years before i grow up um and find a real job or whatever big kid job you're supposed to find quote unquote supposed to find yeah um so yeah and then i got my woofer i became a guide in yosemite so not only was i living in one of the most beautiful places in the world and living in the most enriching community you can find with a job i absolutely loved and was really fulfilling and then when i was in school i started ski patrolling that year so that was um this season's the start of my ninth ninth season on patrol that's awesome yeah yeah and i had like a really quick progression um within it so my rookie season like i was the typical like go get it rookie yeah i'll go i'll go i'll go trying to prove myself every day um and i figured i'd just be kind of a front line for a few years and move on and then my second season on patrol my my boss really saw something in me and i was we didn't have a second in charge but i was the one that was in charge when he was gone and he really took me under his wing and helped me to develop as a patroller and educated me a lot and got me involved in this organization called the association of professional patrollers and so it's a certifying agency for paid ski patrollers whereas the national ski patrol is really focused towards volunteers mostly they do have like a paid aspect to it but it's mostly volunteers and so um that was a way for me to kind of like network and get education outside of the small ski resort i was at because i started as a ski resort called snow valley which is like i always say it's like the small guys next door to big bear gotcha so uh it gave me a little like idea of what the grander scheme of ski patrol was beyond like the little ski hill that i was at gotcha yeah uh yosemite living that just sounds like awesome though like going back to that a little bit that had to be just an amazing experience it's never never land i i'm a climber and i need to get into multi-pitch um and that my goal is to climb there and just get to experience the community that's there because it's i've heard such great things i had red river gorge in my backyard back in cincinnati so that was my home craig down in uh kentucky so um but yeah it's always been a goal of mine to get out there so have not got there yet yeah it's i mean i always tell everyone if you can even work a season there it'll it'll change your life like the community there accepts you for being you like it really helped me to come into my own skin as a person because for the first time in my life i was celebrated just for being me and like the more you pretend to be someone else other than yourself the harder time you have um and so there's just like a really diverse community there too and people like when i first moved there i was so intimidated like i had i was super fortunate in how i learned to climb i learned at tacheets um in ottawa uh which is like yosemite quality granite without the polish and it's just like it's a phenomenal rock in southern california multi-pitch trad and awesome climbing so that's what introduced me to climbing but i hadn't started leading yet like i didn't have any gear other than shoes harness helmet chalk bag and so when i moved in i'm like oh my god there's gonna be all these hardcore people am i going to be able to keep up like i'm not going to be able to keep up hiking or running or climbing or anything and then i realize the people who live there are the most down-to-earth loving accepting people you can ever meet and there's a bunch of badasses that live there and it's so common to just like be sitting around on someone's porch and someone's talking about this badass adventure they just went on and it's like normal talk but they're also like i i got into like more long distance trail running um when i was there and like some solo ultras in the mountains um living there and so like the climbers that were doing the nose in a day and like climbing out cap on the regular were like just as psyched about my running objectives as i was psyched about their climbing objectives um because it was just like people getting out and getting rad yeah or if you drink beard by the river all day they were super psyched too like no the outdoor community i found is i mean i feel like it's everywhere this way they're just a bunch of weirdo ragtag just kind of everyone's kind of just kind of there for the you know we're all there for the same reasons and everyone's out there just having a good time and it's it's so cool i mean i guess the close experience i have to just the random people being around is down at miguel's down at red river gorge it has that same kind of climbering community where you're next to people that are just crushing it and you're down there for the first time as a gumby like i don't know what i'm doing but i'm you're hearing the stories from people sitting right next to you and it's it's inspiring kind of and the whole outdoor community is so welcoming and helpful i think compared to some other communities and they're more than people are more than happy to help you learn a new skill do a new thing and encourage you in your path so yeah absolutely and i think it just like you know for people getting into it i think it takes the courage just to like ask or start the conversations with people like i'm pretty fortunate i thrive on random conversations so i love just like sitting in parking lots at crags or at trailheads and i just talk to everyone who's around me yeah which i've noticed with coven people are more likely to talk back because everyone wants a little more social interaction these days so that's true i look a little less weird talking to everybody because they're like oh yay someone's talking to me um but yeah like if you just reach out like when i first moved there i didn't know a single person who lived in the valley like i moved there knowing nobody and moved into this tent with two other people and i remember walking by the tent that was two tenths down from me every day and they had scrunched their beds up to one side of their tent and then they had their crash pads and then all their trap gear hanging above it and all these ropes and i'd be like oh my gosh they're like real yosemite climbers and i was so intimidated to just stop and talk to them um but then one of them broke broke his ankle and so he would sit outside their tent quite a bit because he wasn't going on a bunch of adventures so he he became approachable to me i'm like oh i could like talk to the guy with the broken ankle and so i like ended up becoming friends with him and then meeting the guys he lived with and i realized they actually didn't climb that often they just had all their gear in there

and they like obviously like the guys who lived in that tent became they're still my best friend yeah yeah but like it just took me kind of like making that initial contact and actually just talking to somebody to find these meaningful relationships that i'd never found with any of them like one of them sam him and i call each other soul friends um because like we were never like soul mates it was not like that direction but like once we started connecting we realized we were like destined to be friends yeah and so it was like my soul friend and um and then the community just like grew from there and like that's they're my family like they're my friends and family and they always will be even though now we're kind of all spread out some are still in the park and others are all like out doing their thing yeah that's awesome so uh in order so going to the yosemite thing you ended up through all that you got your woofer you got your emt and all that which obviously built the building blocks towards uh everything that you're doing now with working as a ski patrol so what was your next steps after um uh into the outdoor community uh after yosemite where where did you kind of go after that yeah i kind of like so my last season in yosemite i started like trail running a lot and doing some long solo days in the mountains um that summer i did like a 36 mile run going from the valley up to the top of mount clark and back and then i ran the high camp loop which is like a 48 mile loop um in the park self-supported um so i kind of like got that passion for self-exploration um that was always like kind of in my back the back of my head um when i left and then the winter after my last season so i did four total in yosemite um i became the ski patrol director so i became the director in my third season of patrol um yeah i learned a lot in a really short period of time and i won't say that that first year as a manager was pretty for anybody um i was really overwhelmed like it was a lot because i didn't even know what my job was supposed to be and then i went from being co-workers with all these people to their boss in just a few seasons um but i also knew that that's where i wanted kind of my career path to go um so i spent three years there and that winter i ended up like meeting a guy i started dating this hot shot um firefighter and um and so that's kind of like what made me not go back to yosemite um because i was always kind of one to run away from relationships because i thought i just never had time for him and i was determined not to do it this time so i stayed in southern california i worked a summer at um what's called children's forest a visitor center in our the mountains where i grew up and it wasn't a super fulfilling job um and then i had a really like unique opportunity um to start working at this adventure theme park that was starting up um so there's an old theme park called santa's village uh in lake arrowhead so i'm sure people who grew up around there that are listening to this would be like oh i remember santa's village um it opened a month before disneyland um and was the first franchise theme park in the united states and then in 1998 it closed and then a local family from our community bought the property in hopes to make a mountain bike park and an adventure theme park all themed around santa still um and so i was able to join in on that and get a job with them a few months before they opened um and i put together their emergency medical system their security department their risk management their employee safety workers comp and then i also um did a lot of the environmental reporting um for the state um so it was a super unique opportunity to create all of that stuff like before i was 30. yeah um so i kind of like dove head into that and i was working a lot and um i tried to do another full season at snow valley and things didn't work work out my boss and i didn't really see eye to eye so i went full time at the sky park at cines village is what it's called um and to be honest like so the relationship i was in um it was an abusive relationship but i just stayed in it and i was determined and um it's kind of something i kind of go through my head is you know like i can go out and do a 50 mile run and i know how to suffer and i know how to push through that and so i think i think that like mentality and ability i like to call it to embrace the suck like made me willing and determined to like stay in this abusive relationship and try to make it better and try to make it work and so all of my focus during that time was on work and honestly daily survival um because like it was hard to wake up every day um and hard to get out of bed every day because like life sucked um so i wasn't climbing i wasn't running as much i picked up mountain biking because i worked at a bike park um so that was awesome that was fun um but i i lost a lot of who i was i'd i'd run a lot but like not not the distances i wasn't training anymore um i was just surviving for a few years um and ended up marrying him um lasted i left him a year and six days after um after our wedding because i had i met a patroller from southern oregon who started to just ask me like normal questions of like what's marriage like and why does someone get married and i started talking about a relationship and he was just like hey kari like that's not normal and um he was the first person that i told about any of the physical abuse that happened there and he was super supportive and it was like the right person who came into my life because he was in my community like i never left that patrol community i worked part-time in big bear just to stay current in it i stayed involved with the association of professional controllers and and so is the right person kind of bringing those red flags to my attention that i wasn't willing to admit before and um you know he was never like you need to do this he's just like i think you know what you need to do and i'm here to support you whatever you decide um and so you know he helped me to see the strength i had on myself the entire time um to leave and so i finally left that relationship and my sister and brother-in-law were so gracious to let me move into their house um with their one and a half year old daughter my niece who is a little badass and like her energy being around that was exactly what i needed to and to have my sister's always been my best friend in my life and been my number one support and she understands me better probably than i understand myself a lot of times and so to be with them to kind of process and realize what what i had just gone through for almost five years of my life um and there was still parts of the outdoors there but i i had isolated myself it wasn't connected with the friendships that i had had um and so leaving that and actually so before i left that too another thing that gave me help me find strength in myself and find my identity again as i started training for a marathon um and that was about like a year before i left it was like right after our wedding that um i started training and connected with um a coach who coached at a junior college that would host races for my high school team so he knew me as a high school cross country runner he randomly came to my job and i sold him a ticket um i was helping in admissions that morning and i saw his id and i'm like kevin barta and in his head he's like well duh of course that's what my id says that's my name and then i was like hey it's kari brant and we talked about running and he offered to coach me um and my training went way better than i had ever trained in my entire life like i was running faster than when i was in college um and everything lined up and he he saw things in me i think this is a theme in my life other people see things in me and tell me i can do things and then i'm like okay i guess i'll try and he did that with me and i was able to run like a 254 marathon um so sub three and like i was so proud i pr in the 5k at 30 years old by like 56 seconds like i ran in 1803 5k at 30 years old and my pr in college was in 1859 so like he helped me to rediscover a passion that i had lost because i was giving myself to this person who was awful to me and so like you know finding my strength and then knowing i had running again and then having mountain biking really like that that was the thing i was doing and i never stopped skiing because i'll never stop skiing

but like it it was knowing that that community and those resources and activities were there and then with coping and processing through like my relationship and my ptsd like the outdoors and long distance running to be honest is like the thing that has taught me with the most of like how to find strength to to process everything in life that's happened i feel like long distance running like you were saying before you're talking about like just embracing the suck i've never long distance ran but it sounds like one of those things that just would be to me just sounds terrible i mean that's never been something that i've ever even wanted to try to do yeah and i didn't used to think like in high school so the first time i ran 10 miles i was 13 years old and at that time i'm like that's the furthest i'm ever gonna run in my life like there's no way i can ever run longer than 10 miles because that was the hardest thing i've ever done um and then when i got to college i after college i was like oh i think i want to run a marathon and like my debut marathon wasn't bad i ran a 317 so it wasn't too bad and and but i was like no way am i ever going to do an ultra like i'm stopping at the marathon there's no way and then 2014 in yosemite i started to be like huh i wonder what i can do and i i had run a 50k ultra because i'm like okay i ran 26 miles what's adding like another five miles because when you sign up for a 50k you expect it to be 31 miles but you learn in the ultra community sometimes they tack on a few free miles at the end of it just because you know and so i was like okay well that's it and then in my woofer i met a long distance runner jason from flagstaff and flagstaff is kind of a mecca well not kind of it is a mecca for ultra running and long distance running and um so he would do these like long solo days in the canyon and he told me he's like yeah i don't really like racing but i love how much distance and how much i can see in one day and so that stayed in the back of my head for a few years until 2014 when i finally was just like just try it like go and see and see if you can do it so the first time i did that 48 mile loop it was like i don't know if i can finish it but like i'll give it a shot and that was my mantra with my last marathon training cycle was like you won't know if you don't try yeah and so i'd start these runs with like my pieces and i'd try and then i'd accomplish things taking that first step yeah and like i tell people you know like because people will come to me and and be like oh yeah like i'm so proud of myself i ran a mile yesterday but it's nothing compared to what you do and i'm like no that's awesome like if you're proud of yourself for running a mile like that's just as big of an accomplishment as me going out and running 30 miles like that's great like if you feel empowered because you went out and you moved your body and you did something that makes you feel good like that's just as important as any distance yeah and i feel like just getting out in nature in general and like you said trail running that's different than running on concrete you're out there in nature actually and i feel like it just adds an extra um aspect to everything just being out in nature and having that extra kind of like endorphin hit and just from the natural environment around you yeah totally and and people are like oh you must get runner's high and the more you run honestly the less you get runners high like i don't get it too often that's what the beer is for after but um but you know like it's it's really like i i had a trail run a few weeks ago that just like i was not feeling it it just sucked the entire time like um i my kind of one of my themes for this summer i go through different mantras um throughout and one of my themes for this summer came from a local trail runner up here in the tahoe area he lives in thai city adam kimball he just broke the tahoe rim trail record he ran 171 miles in 36 hours um yeah that was terrible yeah and so um he he did a podcast and one of the statements he had was nothing's guaranteed um and so like when you're running those distances really nothing's guaranteed like if you feel good it's not guaranteed that you're gonna feel good for a long time but if you're feeling bad that also means you're not necessarily going to feel bad for the entire time um and so i started this one trail run and i was like nothing's guaranteed it's gonna get better it's okay that you still feel bad and finally i got 10 miles into i don't know how long the loop was gonna be because it was gonna do some cross-country travel and i just knew i'd be out all day and i got 10 miles in and i still wasn't feeling it and i was like i just need to turn around and and kind of what i determined is like a bad trail run is still a great day of walking in the woods yeah like at the end of the day you can just walk and you go for a hike and you get to be outside and like i had my dog with me that day and we just like kind of enjoyed our day in the mountains and yeah and so like it can be like that experience over objective um yeah but yeah you can have like you can have some really amazing days in the mountains and um you know cover cover ground and see things like that that a lot of people take multiple days so like yeah it becomes really rewarding and then you can sleep in your bed at night best part yeah so um have you ever thought about doing like an iron man um so i've yeah i've thought about doing kind of like multi-sport things but like my running's been pretty successful and so i i haven't really wanted to go that route and then like training for one sport is one thing but then training for three essentially like takes a lot more time oh yeah um and so yeah like at this point no uh but with like really long distance things like i'm i'm turning 33 next month or this month and so like i still have a lot of years to be in my prime for that like ultra and long distance stuff um and so like but i also only have a few years for like the marathon thing and so you know this this season so far i've done like four ultras and then just solo like there hasn't been races so they've just been solo days in the mountains and then i'm doing like a a group one on saturday just um so i'll end up having done like an ultra distance five times this summer and um and so next summer i think i want to do another trail summer and um you know this year was like the year the fkt are you familiar with fkt like that term so it's called fastest known time okay um so there's a website fastest known time that um kind of keeps a log of all the fastest times on these different routes and since all the races were canceled this summer with covid then a lot of the ultra runners started going towards those fastest known times and so i was able to accomplish three one of them just got broken last week um by another local female um she did the run and then i beat her and then she beat me and i don't know if i want to like go back out and try to like start that battle but um so yeah it's been just super fun to like challenge myself and see what i can do out there so i'll probably do like another trail summer next summer and then the summer after that do another marathon training cycle because i'd really like to see if i can like break 245 in the marathon and so i'll go back to rhodes for a little bit but that'll be my last like shot at peaking in the marathon and then i've got another good 15 20 years to peak in ultra distance so that's weird how that works with like going from marathon to altar distance you get more time with it yeah i feel like most people try me include it i feel like it's natural to think that it would be the other way around yeah but as you get older your endurance gets better um and so like with the marathon like it's it's still speed you know so like my my um my last one so running that 254 i think it's like a 632 average mile so you're running like a 632 for 26.2 miles um so that speed component and um definitely makes you peak a little younger so you have like till mid to late 30s to peak that speed but yeah physiologically um as humans your endurance like doesn't peak until into your 40s that's awesome yeah it's exciting i'm not even in my prime yeah you have that to look forward to yeah um so moving on a little bit from the ultra distance since you're talking about that and how you were kind of brought back into who you were and how that journey kind of brought you kind of to where you are now so you got back into ultra distance and you left the one uh ski resort and went to the bike park so after that what was kind of the how did you end up where you are now yeah that's a bit of a ways away from where you were before totally yeah and so i knew that i needed to get away from southern california for a few reasons one like don't get me wrong where i grew up it's a little like it's an island in the sky like they're beautiful mountains there's some beautiful wilderness areas yeah but like they're not this year in nevada and the sierra nevada like has my heart that's like that's my my first true love is this year in about a mountain range and so i knew i needed to get out of southern california and so i just started job searching um and i knew i wanted to get back into the ski industry so i had applied all over i applied in idaho um up in washington all over the sierra nevada applied in mammoth um just knowing i needed kind of a new start like i got out of this abusive relationship i had accomplished i looked at my list of things that i made my first week at sky park and i had checked off like all but one or two boxes from this page-long like grid of things i wanted to accomplish so i felt like i did my job there and so with diamond peak i had never skied there before i applied there um but a friend i knew through the association of professional patrollers devin had worked there for 19 years and he's the assistant patrol director at mount rose and i texted him to see if like he was hiring anybody and then he's like well diamond peak's hiring a patrol director and so i kept i looked every week since he told me that for the job posting and it wasn't seeing it wasn't seeing it i had gotten a lot of no's from other places um which was kind of starting to get me down and then finally diamond peak posted the job and it was only open for a week and so i put in my application um and then they called me i had a job interview and then the next day i had a job offer and it's awesome um yeah so it was super awesome it happened quick and that was like last september so a year ago september um and you know like my my boss there i thought it was super sweet because he kept showing me pictures of diamond peak if you've never seen the view from diamond peak look it up we have the best view in all of tahoe's ski area that lake on the bottom yeah i looked it up after you said that and i remember looking at i'm like i need to actually go ski there now yeah we have the most incredible view and so he kept sending me pictures of that view um but he's also used to you know seasonal workers and things like that and so i told him how much that meant to me that he like kept sending me pictures of like this is your new office and then he confessed that he was just worried i was gonna bail and not show up

but it set a really good precedence like they got back to me really fast like they had a job offer and like a little over 24 hours from my interview and they were really attentive in the process and so i moved up here a year ago october 1st is when i started so i lived a month in incline village um and then ended up finding a spot in truckee which is like 30 minutes north of tahoe and and truckee is phenomenal um it's just like the access here is incredible um and so yeah i love where i live and then my workplace is the the most encouraging workplace i've had since i worked at the outdoors program in college yeah it's really cool and you know as a female in my industry especially as a female leader in my industry it's not common to see that and it's it hasn't always been an easy um path as a female patroller and a female leader in the ski industry and my boss and our management team on the mountain operations side are all 100 supportive like it's the first time that i don't feel like the only woman in the room like i am the only woman in the room on our mountain ops team but i have an equal voice for the first time in my career and yeah it's really really awesome um and then with diamond peak 2 our mountain ops managers we have some incredibly experienced managers so like our slopes manager has built more super parks than any one in the world and he works at dino peak and he could go anywhere he wants he could work anywhere but he chooses to be there and that's the entire management team there we have this incredible experience team who chooses to be at this resort and so it creates this really positive encouraging amazing work environment and then my boss always promotes like my personal growth and a work-life balance it gets hard in the ski industry to find that work-life balance a lot and like they all give me a hard time if i don't take my days off or if i stay at work too late um they're like just go home do it tomorrow whatever like yeah they're really encouraging for that and then um my boss is encouraging i'm starting i had started a instagram about three um three years ago called women of patrol to promote female patrollers because i through networking with a lot of them um there's often times that there's one female or two females on a ski patrol staff and so i wanted to show that it is a job that women do and women do well um and then i just became the president of the association of professional patrollers this summer and my boss is fully supportive of that and my growth in the industry and so it's just created like the combination of having this really amazing workplace and feeling supported and then living in this community that is just awesome with incredible access like i i i finally like claimed my life back like it's the best fresh start that i could have and obviously i still like in processing a lot and i still have flashbacks and i still have ptsd from from what i came from but without kind of those components of having access to the outdoors like finding my strengths again and having support is what's really helped me to to be able to grow and like know that i i'm a whole person still gotcha yeah um and then you're speaking from uh coming from like a female in the um ski patrol world i actually just recently did an interview with a female that is in the hot shot world um and uh she was with the zigzag she said one of the she brought up a very interesting point about like some of those male-centric having a female voice there can kind of bring down the egos there's a little bit more you guys are a little bit more uh this is generalizing a little bit but generally a little bit more in tune with uh emotions of other people and like realizing like when things can actually be done versus if you're maybe pushing yourselves a little bit too hard where guys might just say we will do it anyways even though you probably shouldn't be so and she which i thought was a very interesting way of looking at it uh coming from a female in a mainly male dominated kind of sphere yeah absolutely and and you know you see it a lot i think the the most clear example is like with toboggan handling when i learned i had a bunch of dudes teach me and you know they were like oh yeah well you just like lift it up and i'm like yeah but i can't like i i just physically can't like i'm strong and i'm competent but like i'm five foot four like at 125 pounds like i just when i have a 300 pound person in this wagon i just can't and so i figured out a lot on my own like the finesse of it and how to use the toboggan to my advantage and um and so that was one of the things that inspired me to start women of patrol too is doing women's clinics so then instead of all all of us women teaching ourselves that fans we can share that and i have guys come to me and they're like can you teach me how you pull a toboggan because like they realize they're working harder and not smarter yeah and then i think as a female manager i noticed it especially in my last job my crew we had a super tight ems crew and i recently visited and there was they they ran a really heavy call actually on the day that i was there and i realized the value of being a female manager because the second they saw me these guys that are tough guys and have been in it like they're feel comfortable to have me and just cry yeah and that's what they need to do and with my crew last year we got in the habit of debriefing every single day so sometimes we wouldn't run a single trauma all day and we debrief and share what we've learned and sometimes it's random facts that they found on the internet because they knew at the end of the day i was gonna ask them what they learned yeah um but then because it was normal to talk then on those really heavy days then these men who would never share like hey this is affecting me in this way we're all of a sudden sharing that yeah so it can create an environment that's like really conducive to like breaking that down that like masculinity of just suck it up and go every day and letting these men also be in touch with how it's affecting them yeah and yeah that's very similar to kind of how she brought it in because uh like you said there's those hard days and as a hotshot she was like there's these hard days where it's like you just kind of need to you know um it's it's hard it's not it's not the easiest jobs that you guys do which is why i think it's awesome that i never thought i'd be able to talk to the people that i've already been able to talk to doing this even though i haven't been doing it that long but just hearing the stories and and it's opened up my own mind also to kind of all that and it's awesome i think yeah yeah absolutely so um with what you're doing now at the um your current job um what what are kind of your next steps and like what's like uh for you personally what uh your personal goals um ski as much as possible yeah last season i pride myself from december 1st through march 15th i only spent six days not in ski boots um so yeah ski as much as possible always um in terms of like career like i have goals within my patrol i really want to help to continue to develop our training program but i also really want to bring in the leadership side of my experience and start doing leadership training with my patrol staff to help them grow as individuals so whether they want to continue patrolling or whether they want to go into fire or if they want to go into nursing or wherever they want to go they have these tools that they can take to to any job um and just like continue to like learn and and grow at diamond peak and then i just filed this weekend on articles of incorporation for women of patrol and then i'll work on my 501c3 status and so i'm starting a nonprofit around it and so my goal with that if in the first year if i can raise enough money to offer one scholarship to one female patroller for either avalanche education or dog school or some sort of um aspect of ski patrolling if i can provide one scholarship then like i'll feel really fulfilled and um and i'd like that to be an organization where we can do women's clinics and i'd love to because sometimes it's really intimidating for a female to go to this patrol director who's been there for 30 years and just ask like how do i become a ski patroller and so like hosting clinics for people to come and learn about ski patrol and what we do and experience it um and do some partnership with she jumps i don't know if you're familiar with she jumps um i am not um their logo is like the giraffacorn so it's the giraffe unicorn logo and she jumps was formed by uh lindsay dyer who's a pro skier and um claire smallwood she's out of new mexico and they have this junior ski patrol program um which takes little girls and has them shadow female ski patrols patrollers and like learn different parts of the job and then they do a lot of like outdoor education for for girls and so i'd love to do some partnership with them um and then also build some education stuff that patrols all over can take to local elementary schools middle schools high schools to kind of bridge the gap between the kids that are using the mountains and the patrollers because a lot of times we're looked at as cops and like that's our least favorite part of our job like we hate pulling passes we don't want to but it's for everyone else's safety that we have to and so if we can change that relationship um you know then i think that would be really beneficial um so that's like my passion project um in the ski patrol world um and then i'm also a avid snowblader um and so i think things are cool the snow blades are interesting i've done them once and they're definitely different than normal skis yeah they were my passion in middle school i was i was definitely a soul snowblader um so my friend and i are like starting this lifestyle snowblade lifestyle company called blade for life um but life is spelt lyfe of course um so yeah i mean just like get out and have fun like at the end of the day skiing doesn't have to be super serious i think like ego gets in the way of like oh you gotta ski the gnarly slime and you gotta like do all this stuff and like it's really ridiculous because you're strapping wood to your feet and sliding down a hill like it should just be fun like it doesn't have to be so serious and so we you know mess around on our blades from time to time and just a good time on the mountains yeah um so what about a personal trip do you have like a place that you ever want to get to like a personal like uh i don't know just like a dream trip for skiing yeah i mean i i went to japan um actually for my honeymoon um and it was the most incredible thing like trip in the world the snow is fantastic the people are even more fantastic the beginning is amazing good powder days over there because i've heard the powder over there is just different yeah every day every day and it was just like such an incredible experience so i would love to go back there um and do probably either a solo trip or go with the right person i'll say um and um so like skiing really that's like the main tick list and then i also really want to get out to sweden and norway because my mom's family all lives out there and i haven't visited them since i was in eighth grade um and the last time we visited was in the wintertime so it's dark and cold and gross all the time so that's like my dream summer trip is to like actually go when the sun is up instead of when it's down all the time yeah when it's not perpetual winter yeah exactly yeah my dad always jokes we went for two weeks and he's like yeah we went for one night

how long is the sun actually up there because i know sweden it's a little bit further north than like britain it looks like on a map but i know it's like pretty significantly higher so yeah like where my cousin is in trondheim norway he'll send us pictures like in the middle of the night and you still just see a sliver of sun above the above the horizon on like their longest day yeah yeah that's crazy yeah so i think that's it for uh question wise i you covered a lot in your journey to where you're at is amazing so is there anything else that you'd want to uh end with i mean i know that you you were talking about your uh women of uh what what's the name of the organization again

women of patrol women of patrol awesome and yeah like you said you just want to be able to uh get enough to have uh kind of like a scholarship for someone so i'll definitely uh try and uh push that also for you because oh yeah i gotta get my 501c3 status first and then you know then we'll be taking donations so um and i have a really awesome local graphic designer md and working on our logo right now so it's pretty exciting yeah things are moving but yeah i think the biggest thing that like i wanna that i try to like encourage in people is like we all have strengths in us whether whether you see them or not and like the journey starts with one step and it just takes a step in the right direction to start your momentum and yeah yeah and just the whole um in order to be in the to be lucky you have to be in the right place so i mean it's not just lo i i i don't personally believe in i mean yeah there's a partial thing of luck but if you keep doing the same thing for long enough going down that same path you're gonna end up making it so yeah yeah i love that kind of mentality and that mindset so yeah but thank you for coming on very happy to have you it's an awesome story so yeah thank you very much and thanks for having me yeah no problem and i will see everyone else on the next episode thank you very much

Snow, Fish, and Fire- Amanda Monthei

get ready to experience the pulse of the outdoor community as we dive into the stories of people's journeys into the outdoor world

hello and welcome to the outdoor pulse i'm your host mitch dean today we have amanda monthei she is a former hotshot and we are going to dig into her story and how she got into the outdoor world. How's it going? it's going well how are you doing? great going awesome excited to hear your story and how you kind of got into the outdoor world and your journey because it sounds like an awesome one. yeah it's been pretty great i feel like i need to offer a disclaimer for how i look right now because i just got off an airplane like an hour ago doing that for the viewers. yeah you're talking to a bunch of outdoor people we're all used to being in different conditions. pretty haggard. yeah so no one's gonna care but um so we're gonna jump kind of right into it and just initially talk about how you got into the outdoor world and what your initial kind of draw was um and what kind of initially caught your eye about getting out into the woods or exploring so yeah well i i would say like i was thinking about this and i feel like it started in college but i can kind of trace it back pretty far beyond like backwards from there um like i did i did high school ski team in in uh in high school cross country um and i think like kind of learning how to be uncomfortable outside in the midwest you know running in the fall in the midwest when it's like snowing and ski racing in the winter when it's like pure ice or it's raining or you know it's negative 15 degrees like everyone's kind of like am i gonna get frostbite today i think that all kind of like i think everything that i've done since then has stemmed from uh sort of the access that i had when i was a kid to uh those outdoor sports and you know i wasn't like a huge fan of team sports i like tried the basketball thing and i was like i don't know and um so yeah i was like i was really happy like i said to have that access because i came from a pretty small rural school that didn't have a lot of sports programs so the fact that we had a ski team was like pretty remarkable and uh when i went to college i chose to go to college a college where i could ski i went to northern michigan university where uh the skiing was a little better than heading down state as we call it in michigan um i grew up in the lower peninsula of michigan and you know the options were go up north go to northern go to michigan tech or go down to the city go to lansing go to ann arbor and you know those are those were better schools probably but i ended up going to northern because i was like pretty dead set on skiing uh and that i think that pretty much framed the rest of my uh outdoor what i've kind of been able to do in my outdoor career because you know within a week of showing up at northern i was like climbing for the first time i tried mountain biking you know my friends were all the the people i sort of fell into you know the my friends my first friendships there were really like rooted in the outdoors um so and it all kind of just continued from there you know like uh going on climbing trips with friends joining the climbing club um i was on the ski team like the intramural ski team and so yeah i mean all the relationships i developed early on in college were all rooted in the outdoors and now a lot of those people are doing insane things out like you know our athletes or you know biking mountain biking professionally or um working in some capacity in the outdoor industry and doing a really good job in their own sort of niche and so it's kind of fun to like watch where everyone's gone and uh and kind of like base uh kind of follow those those connections back to like the very beginning where we were all just like you know acquiring as much climbing gear as we could like the even no matter how shitty it was you know well not climbing gear but ski gear biking all that kind of stuff and just like you know borrowing gear from each other and uh you know it was it's it's pretty cool to see where everyone's ended up going on those bare bones trips where you had just enough gear to make it work just like yeah exactly um yeah putting together all of our gear like okay i think we can i think we have enough of a trad rack that we can you know we can we can do this route uh but it was it was a great community to be involved in and i like i don't climb anymore but i really like base or i really um the foundation of a lot of my outdoor sort of ambitions since college have i feel like we're really developed and climbing you know because it was like the first time that i felt like i'm deeply uncomfortable doing something because i've always skied and so skiing doesn't feel uncomfortable to me anymore it doesn't feel like i am you know it feels like i'm kind of at a point where i'm not challenging myself as much anymore but climbing was this thing that was like this is really scary i kind of feel like i might die like it's like this like you know you kind of learn to like live with this sort of base level of stress um while you're doing something and i think that really framed the rest of what i have pursued in the outdoor industry yeah climbing especially working up to that first whipper and actually take oh yeah yeah i have so much to like i have so much um to i guess like i just remember one of the guys that i climbed with a lot he um i got to the top of like you know one of the hardest routes that i'd done and he was like don't clip in just fall and trust me and he like made me take a whipper and uh and it was like you know just doing things like that and challenging yourself and having people around that you trust and that you can challenge yourself with and like kind of force you out of your comfort zone was huge and i wouldn't have i wouldn't have done that if i hadn't like happened to fall into those friendships when i was a freshman so yeah and uh what school did you go to again real quick it was northern michigan university marquette okay gotcha and then what year did you graduate from there 2013 2013. awesome yeah so after you kind of got into the outdoor community that seems like your big initial step of meeting people and really getting into it so after you graduated where did you kind of go after that and what were your next steps leading into your next journey in life yeah yeah i well i got out of college and my objective had always been to get out west to find a way to get out west um but i have you know i have a big family not a big family but um i have a lot of family and i have three little or four little sisters who were all at that time you know under 12 years old they're all they're all really young um and so i was really worried about leaving and not being able to see them as much so i kind of stuck around home for a couple years after i graduated did some um it was like kind of a good time to develop my freelance writing you know i i was like at that time kind of learning to fly fish um i was realizing that that i had a real strong niche in the fly fishing world because there weren't a lot of women writing about it and so i kind of um started writing about fly fishing and got into a different a few different magazines uh that way and i had actually previously in 2012 interned with the ski journal in the fly fish journal in bellingham where i now live um and that was my first taste about west and then from there it was like how can i get back out here yeah because i was only here for like five months um so you know through that internship i realized that uh there weren't a lot of women writing about fly fishing and i kind of tried to get into that niche a little bit more and worked for a couple different magazines just doing freelance stuff and i also kind of developed a lot of my writing ability through working as like a sports reporter for a couple local newspapers just going and covering basketball games and wrestling matches and you know community events sometimes news i did some new stuff as well and it was uh that was as much as i like look back on it and at the time i was like i'm so bummed to be in michigan still even though i'm with my family and i wanted to do that i look back on that time as being pretty formative because it gave me the space to sort of develop my writing a little bit more and not get distracted by you know the excitement of being out west and pursuing all the hobbies because that's what i do um so yeah just being in michigan and fly fishing and writing helped a lot for like two to three years yeah and michigan i feel like it's almost an underrated state for outdoor sports and like kind of the under the radar i i think it has the most ski resorts or like ski places of like any state almost oh i haven't heard that i know they have a lot up there they're not big but they have a lot of them so but it's also a beautiful state i i was able to get up there a decent amount i went to ohio state actually so um we were always kind of close and i was in the climbing and michigan's always one of those underrated places to travel to to go do stuff like backpacking and things like that and just getting outside so it's amazing and in marquette especially mark the upper peninsula is it's like a miniature version of any state out west because you have pretty decent like downhill mountain biking even um you know you wouldn't expect it but it's rocky up there and there's some pretty you can get into some pretty gnarly stuff in the marquette area and then we have climbing i mean they're not it's not multi-pitch or like crazy tread climbing but um it was enough to sort of like peak my interest in it and then you have surfing and like superior um you can do almost anything in michigan that you can do out west you can just it's just on a smaller scale obviously and i think that's what builds i mean i really this is like a bit of a theory that i have but i feel like that builds a lot more passion in the people that come out of michigan um just just only looking at like the people that i know who have become uh professional athletes and stuff uh that went to school in marquette and like i don't know there's just like there's just something about having only uh these you know tiny ski hills or having only you know a couple pitches of 510 rock in the entire state that really just like i don't know it really like instills something in you i don't know what it is but it makes you it makes you really appreciate it when you come out west i i feel this i feel like that's just like a general statement on all people that get into outdoor sports from the midwest because you have so little to work with sometimes i came from cincinnati where i skied on a bump called perfect north slopes and i got out west for the first time and after skiing on ice my whole life it's like there's there's more out there than just ice like yeah so yeah it and you just appreciate it just that little bit more that someone born into it uh kind of can't experience because they were they've lived it their whole life absolutely yeah i am a i'm a strong advocate for like growing up ski racing on ice and then going to the mountains and like skiing power for the first time when i was like 26 i was like whoa what have i been missing this is ridiculous it'd be amazing to grow up in that you know so after you moved back home for a few years you did your writing and uh you were working kind of with that what kind of drew you out west for the first time what was the first big uh pool to get you to finally make that move i was fighting fire actually i had a couple girlfriends in college who fought fire and i was always sort of uh interested in in their jobs and their instagram posts you know they had like crazy photos of you know huge smoke columns and helicopter rides and all these crazy images that i was like a little infatuated with i was like okay if i'm this interested in this i should at least consider it and maybe look into it as a potential because i didn't have much else going on at that time i was just freelance writing so i took a few classes and i got a job in 2016 in idaho on an engine on a fire engine and um i you know that was like my out that was my that was my gateway so and uh and my parents weren't you know it was like an easy way to be like i'm going out west to fight fire so it's it's fine like it's not like super selfish and uh and so they were cool with it and well more or less of course my mom was like really after all of the like adrenaline fueled you know [ __ ] that you've done you this is your next step okay yeah um so moved out worked on an engine realized i didn't really like engines too much it was um it was just like not really enough work especially in northern idaho it doesn't really burn very often uh and it didn't really burn that summer so i got on a hand crew in salmon idaho the next summer did some fly fishing there got on a really a couple of really cool fires in that area because it was close to the frank church wilderness and like the middle fork of the salmon so that like opened my eyes to idaho being an amazing place that i'm probably gonna have to move to at some point um yeah just like fighting fire on these like beautiful blue ribbon rivers and i don't know i just am obsessed with that area now the frank church is like has a holds a very dear part of my heart but i ended up you know we still didn't get a ton of work i was like okay i really want to get on a crew that's going to be working on a lot of fires so i applied for some hot shot crews and i got on with a crew in portland or near portland uh based at the base of mount hood really and i worked with them for the last two summers i didn't work in fire this summer though i um you know i loved hot shotting and it was amazing and i like probably would want to do it for another couple years but it was getting to the point where i was moving so much and i was going from bellingham to portland um ten times a year because you know i had friends up here that i wanted to see and i s you know so on my days off i would have three days off and i would drive the seven hours from mount hood to bellingham and it was it was exhausting um and so decided to take the summer off to sort of reassess and see if i could maybe make a go of things without uh working full-time on a crew so yeah that's that's where i'm at now gotcha so uh talking about getting into hot shotting and the firefighting if you want to dive into that a little bit and just talk about your experience during the firefighting and all of that that would be awesome yeah it was um it was great like i said i got on the on a hot shot crew because i was really interested in seeing more fire um whereas on a lot of cruise you end up going out three or four times a season um on shot crews you can expect to go out like seven eight times a season and then you're kind of working pretty much from june to october and constantly sort of engaged in something whether it's like um actively working a fire fighting fire or kind of like staging and being in places where there's potential for fire or doing prescribed fire prescribed burns um training you know it was it was like a good level of engagement for me and i really liked it it was just it was just not conducive with like maintaining relationships or like maintaining sanity and like i miss it so much though and i you know i'm jobs are coming up here in the next week or so i'm probably going to apply to some for next summer because i i do miss it but we'll see what i end up actually doing yeah so for most people i feel like listening to this probably do know the hot shot is but if you just want to explain the difference between a hot shot crew and another crew real quick just for people that don't understand exactly what you're talking about right now yeah well it's they often are called elite hand crews and i hate the word elite it sounds it's like really like i don't know pompous or something but it really is like it comes down to the kind of assignments that you are often tasked with working um it comes down to qualifications and training and uh you know often people hotchat crew collectively has 75 to 100 years of fire experience on it um and often you have you have people that are dialed and your leadership is is really really strong and they've been in the fire world for 10 15 20 years um and so that all kind of of course i was just like low the lowest you could get rookie and then uh you know a second year crew member so you know i wasn't anything i didn't have an insane amount of qualifications but um it was enough to get on the crew and then you're just surrounded by people people that really know what they're doing and can handle almost any situation that's kind of thrown at them so whether that's uh you know a tough assignment where we are doing like a huge burnout you know for example burnouts or something are one of the most uh i guess one of the assignments that we're most commonly used for is where we're kind of fighting fire with fire we're uh we're using fire to sort of take the fuel away from the main fire uh and those fight those those assignments and then you know digging direct line where you're right on the fire and you're sort of like digging a trench where you know hopefully the fire isn't able to cross it it's usually just a ground fire not something that's in the trees um so yeah we're often tasked with just working um some of the harder assignments some of the assignments that might be more complex might be in tougher terrain um might be you know something that maybe sketched a different another crew out a little bit or maybe they weren't as qualified to handle it it's often a qualifications thing it's usually not like a sketchy thing um it's often like you know we need a we need people with this qualification in order to get this assignment done and you know sometimes other crews don't have those that sort of breadth of experience so uh yeah i mean that's the base of it you're just working all summer often you're kind of just chasing fire seasons the southwest burns first so you're often spending june and a little bit of july maybe even may in um in arizona and new mexico and then i spent every july in utah that i worked in fire so utah's next and then it kind of moves into like the traditional northwest season where you're in oregon in washington for august and september and then california if you're on in october that's usually where you end up getting sent so it's really just like one after the other you really don't have time for anything else in the summer it's really um consuming i guess you could say it's like you're you're on for 14 days you get two days off um and that can last four months straight where you're only getting two three days off a month and you're just working really hard so it was a good level of work i really enjoyed it um in it and it kind of fostered a lot of writing projects that i'm really proud of and um and that i'm still working on as well and it actually kind of developed into an interest to like to pursue fire journalism a little bit because it's something that's often not really there's just not a lot of people writing exclusively from the perspective of somebody that's actually been on the ground um and i'd like to kind of get into more of like a science journal like a science environmental journalism realm where i'm writing exclusively about wildfire and sort of disseminating information to people who maybe don't have a firm understanding of what it looks like on the ground gotcha so what was one of the harder uh experiences while being a hot shot like one of the harder assignments you were on i would say immediately when you said that i had one night one night come to mind and there's a lot of nights like this but this one was the worst you know we were we were burning off of a road we were doing a burnout late at night it was like 10 30 and we had been waiting all day to do it and prepping for it you know where you're you're going out and you're kind of getting rid of any of like the low branches or or or brush along the side of a road that you're going to burn so we prepped all day and at like you know eight we started a burnout and everything was looking really good the the wind was um we had good wind direction the wind was pushing into the fire and so it wasn't you know pushing all the smoke back at us and then at about 10 o'clock um maybe it was like the inversion or something but um but it just the wind switched and we suddenly had you know a huge fire that we had started pushing the road and we were all on the road and i've never sucked so much smoke in my life and we were about maybe three quarters of a mile from the buggies our crew carriers and we just had to basically sprint back to the buggies with our with all of our gear i was the lead lighter on that so i was like the very last person off and i was just like i don't know like just i've never had that bad a smoke exposure i don't think and i i had a headache for days after that and i was like all snotty and my eyes were running and i'd ash like i had like you know my uh my backpack had gotten burnt with ash and um the next day we came back out and the fire had crossed the road that we had spent all day prepping and burning so then then we took another i think it took us three days to get the other side of the road wrapped up so it went from like being a really good night we were like sweet this is all going really well to like now we have three more days of work to wrap up our our fire on this on this uh failed burnout thankfully nothing was at risk it was kind of just like a a critical like sort of corner area where we needed to like wrap up this corner and then when it got out we just had you know another 700 acres to go and figure out so um with the packs how heavy is a normal pack for a hot shot when you're going into a situation like that um i was pretty proud of mine i only had i think mine was like 39 pounds regularly 40 pounds depending how much water i was carrying um that changes when you add uh last year i was i was on a saw a little bit last year and then you add so you add like some of the saw stuff you know tools to fix the saw and you add a little bit if you're uh you had a lot actually if you're an emt um our emts carry first aid kits uh pretty and pretty like a 10 person first aid kit essentially which can be up to like 10 12 pounds so you know emts can carry up to like 52 to 53 pounds uh my pack was generally in like that 40 to 45 range 45 is pretty much the general generally what you're carrying but uh you we carry like five quarts of water with us at all times and we try to keep those we try to keep those full you know i can go through five quarts of water and a half a day of of hard work but we often carry big things of water with us uh and that's like not a fun assignment to get or not a fun task to have when you are already carrying 45 pounds and then carrying like another 40 pounds of water um and then chainsaws and tools but um yeah the saws are you know 20 pounds and then one of the and then the saw partner has to carry the fuel in the oil which is like 25 pounds of um yeah fuel and oil gotcha so uh what was the most surprising part about being a hot shot to you like something that like getting into it you weren't expecting really but kind of caught you off guard i guess i could have probably assumed this but you know you get into it and you're expecting the work to be hard and you're expecting to like you know be fully engaged all summer and to not really have a lot of time off um that was all expected and kind of part of the par for the course um i didn't for some reason anticipate how difficult it would be to um sort of develop relationships with everybody when you're like as a rookie i remember just feeling like uh the first couple months i think all the other rookies on the crew can probably end on any hot shot who really can probably attest to this but you just feel like you're an idiot and nobody likes you and there's no way you're ever going to make it as a hotshot because the first two months of being a hot shot are just like a cluster and you just feel like you're failing left and right and you're doing so many push-ups punishment push-ups because you do stupid [ __ ] and uh and then you work out of that and everyone you know you start you know you go out on hard assignments with each other and you're basically living with each other every day for five months straight and even on your days off you can you end up hanging out with each other and so by the end of the summer you're you're really tight and you've developed some really strong relationships but i think like those interpersonal connections that you have to first develop and then maintain through a summer of like being with 20 people the same 20 people all summer and not getting into fights and you know i i didn't get into any any crazy fights but it's certainly like something that happens not not like fight fights but um where you have to do a little bit of conflict management as the summer rolls on and everyone gets really tired and mad and they want to be at home with their families and you throw in like a little bit of hunger and sleep deprivation and things get can get rowdy so obviously you have to sleep near where you're working do you guys is it more of a camping or do you guys have like you said that you're in the buggies do you guys have like a staging area usually that you go back to each night or yeah it's uh essentially fire camp uh we call it fire camp it's the sort of incident base and that's where we get our briefings like our daily assignments we'll come from there that uh from fire camp and that's where we'll get our food it's where we sleep um if we're really lucky we get to spike out which is where we get to camp closer to the line a lot of the time fire camp is an hour or two from the line because you're on forest roads and buggies go slow and it takes a while to get out to the line so um sometimes if you luck out you get to sort of just go camping with your crew and go camp on a ridgeline somewhere or find a you know find something closer to the line itself uh and that's always pretty fun except that it often requires you to eat mres or some other weird food concoction that they come up with but it's much better because in camp you know you're dealing with a lot of people there's floodlights there's generators it's kind of tough to sleep sometimes car horns oh my god car alarms sprinkler systems that's a funny a funny thing that always happens because we stay in like fairgrounds or soccer fields or uh places that often have sprinkler systems and they wake us up and like at like three in the morning uh we're all just getting drenched i've that's happened a couple times but um yeah so it's much more it's much more preferable to be out and closer to the line and kind of doing your own thing gotcha so moving on a little bit from that aspect of it what was i guess your favorite part about being a hot shot then and what kind of drawing you back to possibly applying again like what is the draw to you i think it's it's hard but i would say definitely the camaraderie you know you develop really really strong relationships with all these people and you're just like like i was saying earlier you're working hard with a big group of people that uh you become something like family with after a certain point um miss that i miss uh i do miss just constantly being sort of engaged in something and like it's it's you know you don't have time to do anything but work and sleep and eat and i love that i i really like thrive on environments where i'm i'm just digging line all day i like kind of love that i'm a little 80d and i feel like that really like calms my uh my crazy sort of sometimes chaotic mind uh just sitting there and doing a monotonous task since i say monotonous but really it's it it's it it's usually like a spectrum it can be very monotonous it can also be like this is crazy like we're running a gun and doing crazy stuff but um but yeah there's something about manual labor that just like it's really uh it's really conducive with writing i feel like i feel like i have to have a mix of both in order to be to do my best writing i have to sort of have a mix of both i have to be able to go out and get all my like physical energy out somehow yeah so moving on to the fact that most hot shot crews are obviously it's a little bit male centric and being a female in that world if you wouldn't mind talking a little bit about uh you know being a female and kind of a male dominated sphere of the hot shot world that would be awesome well i had a privilege i had the privilege to be on a crew that was you know that was really progressive and they hired a lot of women and um i was really grateful for that because i think being like the token female on a crew would have been really hard and there's a lot of women that that fill that role on a lot of crews across the country where there's only one woman and they're kind of like you know the girl on the crew and i really appreciated having four women on the crew because it felt like we were all we weren't just women on the crew we were like crew members we were part of that we were part of the crew i think i mean i think any women will tell you that that is hopefully how she feels on their on her crew um i i hope but at a certain point you know if you're doing the work and if you're um and if you're training hard and if they recognize that you are you know fit enough and that you've done your work to be there and that you you know have a good head on your shoulders like they respect you just like anybody else um on my crew at least and there's definitely a variance of experience in that realm i think for a lot of women you know but i i was grateful to be on a crew that yeah like as long as you were keeping up as long as you were doing what you needed to do as long as you were uh volunteering for you know volunteering for things and and proving that you wanted to be there they they treated me like everybody else which was great um so yeah i was really i was grateful for that but i think in general you know there's there's only i don't really have any qualms with being a woman in fire i think the one thing i can say is you know a lot of the time the guys will be like let me fix that for you and it's or you know like let me do that for you and it's like oftentimes i'm i get on my little high horse and i'm like no i want to do it i want to learn how to do it myself or uh you know if i don't do it myself this time then what am i going to learn so whether that's fixing saws or um you know whatever it is uh doing something like lifting something heavy you know it's just like let me at least try let me do it and let me see if i can do it um you know the only way that you guys learned how to do it was by trying it so uh so yeah i think that's you know that's like one very little qualm that i've recognized in the fire world that um that i often like had a little bit of like a i definitely said i definitely had him got my high horse about that a little bit sometimes like yeah but other than that you know i don't know i what were you gonna say oh i was just gonna say that's an awesome like thing to kind of go after because there's not many females that would even want to even be up for the task of trying to get onto a hot shot crew or even think that they even have a chance of even being on one so kind of going out there and showing that you belong is an awesome thing to kind of show and uh kind of to be like a little bit of a role model to other like girls out there and show that you guys can do just the same thing as all these guys out there on the crew yeah yeah and i think you know in speaking with a couple uh women who have done this job for a long time and who were doing it back in like the 70s i've done a couple stories on women who were fighting fire in the 70s on hotshot crews were some of the first women to do so and i think it's often overlooked what women bring to the table too you know like where we what we might lack in brute strength or like the ability to lift heavy logs we make up for in other areas whether that's um you know these sort of soft skills that everyone always talks about like maybe i can't lift a 45 pound log while holding it while you know i have a 45 pound pack on um but i think there are sort of like those interpersonal skills i think there's uh maybe an added about a added amount of like maybe empathy for uh everybody's condition you know i think i think women leadership especially in fire kind of recognizes that you're doing hard work and you're doing it you haven't seen your family in a long time and you're often sleep-deprived or hungry or exhausted or in some way maybe not working at your highest level and to recognize and to sort of work around that and to not expect um you know ex hi have high expectations but maybe set your crew up for success by um kind of providing a little bit of that empathetic like maybe we shouldn't be doing this specific assignment today maybe we shouldn't be uh burning off this line that's really super steep or that is like really high consequence um you know we're on day 14 maybe we need to um maybe we need to reassess and take things a little easier or whatever it might be but i feel like i feel like women kind of bring these soft skills and and certain things to the line that are often overlooked as being beneficial when in reality you kind of those are really really necessary and that those those things can contribute to better decision making and maybe a little less ego and things like that that's an over-generalization like women can have ego too and women can be very unsympathetic but uh yeah i think that's a general sort of a generalization of women in fire yeah i i get where you're coming from with all that then obviously yeah it depends from person to person you know we're all different but in general i i would agree that i can see exactly how that would you know guys can have a little bit more of egos and think yeah we can definitely do that today in reality it's like nah yeah and i think it's consistent across anything outside it's consistent in biking it's consistent in climbing it's consistent in mountaineering in avalanche training uh or in um you know in backcountry skiing i think those sort of human elements we call them are a critical thing that every person in the outdoor industry should look at and consider and um you know consider bringing a woman along gotcha so do you have anything else that you want to kind of talk about with the hot shop before i move on to your skiing and fly fishing and other parts of the outdoor world that you are into uh no i would just say you know it's like hot shotting has brought more value to my outdoor experience into my life in general than anything else i've done and i've been really grateful to have that and to be able to have had those experiences um whether or not i continue doing that in the future but i've been really grateful to have that sort of on the ground experience and um and see the sort of the west in a different way i guess it's been pretty awesome yeah so moving on to the next do you want to start with skiing or do you want to go into fly fishing first we can do fly fishing first how can the fly fishing first sound good yeah why not so when when you got into fly fishing uh when was that exactly i would say like 2011 maybe 2010. yeah i had an ex-boyfriend who was really into it and i was like fine i guess i'll fly fish and i like kind of hated it for like three years um but then i got that internship at the fly fish journal and kind of recognized um i like really enjoyed the culture like the fly fishing culture once i kind of got into it a little bit more and of course when i came out west too i was like oh oh i see now i get wife i mean michigan fly fishing is amazing and actually that's that's where i learned everything i know about fly fishing so i can't i can't say anything bad about it i love it but um yeah coming out west for the first couple times and fishing in montana and fishing in idaho i was like oh i get it okay fishing is cool so getting into fly fishing you got in was that right after college for you then or was that like right before you end it it was like during college yeah like 2000 2011 i think yeah like the summer of my maybe junior year i kind of got into it a little bit more gotcha so what are some of your favorite parts about fly fishing and what were some of the harder steps of like getting into the intricacies of it and kind of like your initial journey into learning it because you said that you got that internship at the fly fishing journal and i'm sure that forced you to have to learn a lot of the you know intricacies of everything totally yeah i i would say the most difficult part was learning from i'm like i learned a lot from the boyfriend who taught me how to fly fish and i like am immensely grateful to him for teaching me how to like you know double haul and spay cast um but it was difficult because it was it was a lot of what i was saying earlier where i um you know he was like tying my flies on for me and kind of doing all my knots for me and setting my rod up for me and i didn't learn anything about setting up my own stuff uh when i was you know in those first couple years and so um in like 2013 or 14 when i started kind of fishing on my own i was like i was kind of starting out from ground zero i was like i don't know anything i don't know how to set up a rod i don't know what what fly to put on i don't know uh you know how to fish this specific area um and so it was a lot of just like kind of starting out uh from the beginning and it was empowering though to learn it on my own finally and that was ultimately what made me stay in it was that i had i was forced to sort of learn it on my own terms but yeah other than that i would say uh the technicality of it is certainly intimidating at first um so i was really grateful to have somebody that knew what they were doing and was a guide and was kind of able to help me out in that way and show me what sections or what what what kind of looks fishy and uh what sections of like our home rivers were best and all of these various techniques and stuff um but from there i since then it's been hard to living in bellingham it's really hard to actually fish a lot because the fishing over here is kind of tough it's the west side of the cascades it's kind of all steelhead and salmon water and so it's fun to fish for steelhead and salmon but you're just not getting that reward very often you know like you need it's like a a blend you know you need to have you need to be catching fish every now and then in order to like continue wanting to do it yeah and i've found that that's been a bit of like a plateau for me lately is uh being on on rivers that are like super fishy but just pretty tough to catch those fish um and i don't travel super often to fly fish anymore so um i'd like to change that i mean that's really been a direct result of being in fire for the last four summers is not being able to fish as much so what makes a difference between like uh so you said that uh the the rivers are fishy but it's harder to catch the fish what makes it that way specifically well the fish are a little pickier you know um there are fewer fish vastly fewer fish and they're bigger fish um and so they got big because they're picky and because they um they know they you know they are pretty smart fish and i mean on on my home rivers on the next and the skagit rivers uh you know those are traditionally those traditionally had huge runs of salmon and steelhead and now those runs are depleted by insane percentages that i don't even know off the top of my head but a lot um like on the nook sack last year i think they had like seven steelhead returned to the hatchery on uh on the knucksack so numbers are insanely low and you don't even want to fish for those fish because there's you know a lot of them are wild fish that have i mean you just you don't want to you don't want to hurt those fish you know there's so few of them that it's like you start to wonder if it's worth it um and so yeah i mean so so these fish these rivers are are they're beautiful steelhead rivers they're beautiful they have they have beautiful fish it's just that the fish are so few and far between that you're it's it's tough it's tough to catch them and when you do catch them you almost you just like feel bad you're like oh i'm sorry that i'm doing this to you like you're such a beautiful fish and you've been through so much and i don't want to hurt you is it just the overfishing or is it a mix of that with like dams or other things like that or what's causing the uh decline more than anything else yeah it's like an overfishing hatchery

uh bad like uh decreasing habitat dams um a whole blend of things and yeah i wish i could get into the more intricate my friend bridget my friend bridget works at a couple different is like super into the fishy the fish world and i wish that she could be here right now to to tag in and talk about that yeah no i was just wondering if you knew it like i i'm sure it's a mix of a bunch of things along with a lot of like that kind of stuff and you know things disappearing usually it's not just one thing it's usually a mix of a lot of things going on at the same time that causes this decline in populations that we see in these um populations yeah exactly what's been some of your favorite places to fish so far with fly fishing and what's been your favorite kind of like experience in fly fishing i guess um well i'm actually going out on a steelhead trip on wednesday this week or thursday this week and that's my favorite trip that i do every year i do it i've done it the last five years now it's like my only actual fishing tradition and i go down to the grand ronde river which is in southwest or southeast washington like the exact opposite corner of where i'm at right now actually uh and i go down there and i link up with um these women that i met on the river a couple years ago and they're like in their 70s and they're like super cool and they're they've been fly fishing for like as long as i've been alive and uh and i happened to meet them on the river after my first summer fighting fire i like somebody told me to go to the grand run to fish for steelhead and i was like okay i don't i don't know anything about this but i'm gonna go try it out and i was in the parking lot at a campground making dinner and i was like [ __ ] i don't have a can opener and so i went over to this lady's trailer and i asked her for a can opener and she was like what are you eating and it was like canned chicken and rice and she was like what why are you eating that like come eat some chili and uh and so i met them they took me in they fed me really well and i was like okay i'm coming back next year and i've come back every year since then and i've written about them actually um and we can't wait my friend like i said my friend bridget and i are going there on thursday and we are so excited that's awesome so is steelhead your favorite fish to fly fish for or do you have a favorite fish to kind of go after i i mean steelhead are just so difficult they're just complicated fish so i would say my favorite are um i love fishing for browns i love fishing for like browns rainbows or cutthroat on dry flies that's like i'm such a sucker for that you know fish eating uh a fly off the surface like there's nothing quite as fun as that in the fly fishing realm for me anyway um steelhead when you do hook up i've only ever caught one steelhead i'm hoping to change that this week really hoping but when you do actually hook up with a steelhead it's amazing it's like an amazing experience and they're really strong fish and they're beautiful and they're you know just like colorful and it's they're amazing and uh so those are really fun and of course what makes them most more amazing is that it takes so damn long to catch one um i've been fishing for him for years and i've only caught up i've only caught one so it's like such an elusive fish so that makes it really enjoyable but when i just want to get my kicks you know i go out and catch cutthroat on dry flies i love that [ __ ] gotcha so what's the for you personally what's your favorite thing about fly fishing like what's the draw um what's the is there like a feeling or is it just like the environments that you get to go to or i think the draw is i think it's kind of just the culture you know no matter who you end up meeting in the fly fishing world they're they're usually pretty rad and uh and then you just it's such a small world that you just keep running into people along the way and um it's fun to like go to a new river and be like you know reach out to one of your friends on instagram and be like hey you want to fish with me i'm down on the provo or i'm on the shoots or um you know whatever is that really loud i can barely hear it you're good and i'll be able to get that with post so oh okay cool um my roommate's renovating his van downstairs right now so i was hoping that he wouldn't be using the saw but we'll see um anyway i think uh i think it's the the culture of it i think um especially having worked to the fly fish journal and written for them it's it's something that i kind of keep an eye out for now is like all these like quirky little elements of of the fly fishing world all the peop the quirky people you meet like these 70 something year old women who just like feed me prime rib and like homemade brandy on the river every year like it's i just like i love how quirky everybody is and how it's kind of just this weird nerdy world and everyone everyone's such an i mean yeah everyone's nerdy in this world it's kind of weird because i feel like that's like most uh sports and like kind of like the outdoor world like when you really get into it everyone's kind of like once you really get into it you realize how weird and like intricate like the whole community is because i'm a climber and i go down to the red all the time red river gorge down in kentucky i don't know if you ever got to climb there but i did yes beautiful beautiful area um i never really got into tread climbing because i had that amazing sport climbing right in my backyard like two to four hours either if i was in columbus or cincinnati but you i met so many awesome people down there and it's it's getting a little bit more like busy at miguel's but yeah i remember the days when it was just like 100 people crammed under this small little and you meet these people that are this guy i remember the craziest one was this guy quit his job over in spain was doing a climbing trip across the u.s and this was one of his final stops so i love it we exchanged alcohols and just sat there and drank and talked about climbing all night and those are the i feel like that's such a prominent part about like so many parts of the outdoor community and it's one of those awesome things that i feel like everyone should get to experience but totally but uh yeah so did you ever go to horseshoe canyon i did not i need to i need that was where we always did our climbing trips my first two my first two spring breaks in college were at horseshoe canyon a lot of my outdoor isn't it the experience of canyon the horseshoe canyon isn't that the ranch where they have like the 24-hour horseshoe hell yes yeah okay okay that's right i've always wanted to kind of do the horseshoe hell just to see what it because it would be terrible but awesome but it's such a cool area and we met so many awesome people there and same with the red river gorge i did the same thing like in 2000 i think 12 or 11 i went to the red river gorge and oh yeah did you see anything else i did yeah okay good yeah yeah yeah girls is i mean i feel like you have to if that that's where you're going for just there's so many other spots i've camped other places down there but miguel's is like the the hub of where everyone's at so exactly and uh so getting into fly fishing though uh for people who are possibly thinking about getting into it what would you uh suggest uh like first steps to kind of entering that world honestly i think uh well first of all you can get a kit a fly fishing kit for like 200 bucks um i think like getting over the idea that it sort of requires all this gear is a big part of it um it doesn't require as much as you think and if you're just fishing in the summer you don't need waders you can just go out and you can you can go out in your sandals um it's a good excuse to go out and explore maybe sections of river that you've never seen before it's um and and you can do it for 150 200 bucks and i think a lot of people over uh don't understand or don't um i guess don't yeah i guess don't understand that it's it's that cheap to get into so not letting that be an inhibiting factor i guess and then i think like i like anything i think if you just like start learning about it and you start talking about it with people and the more you talk about it the more you're developing an understanding of the of the community of the culture of the intricacies of it um even if you feel like you're out of your element when you're talking about it i think like that's something i i would recommend for anything when you're getting into it is just like talking to people about it because you learn so much uh you you just if you can connect over it even if you're brand new if you can connect over a shared passion of something whether it's fly fishing or climbing or surfing it's always really fun to hear what other people's experiences are like and it kind of broadens your worldview and at least from my experience in the outdoor community everyone's so so more than willing to help with information and like helping you get into it and they're more than willing to especially in the climbing world hey i don't have any gear and you're just like hey come with us i got rope i got gear and we'll get you on a wall and exactly getting that person out there and then watching them go from wide-eyed to like a year later having their whole rack because they fell in love with it after that first time is a great great thing and that's so common in the outdoor community i think yeah that's not seen in some other sports like you don't see that in like you know this team sports like soccer and things like that i feel like um yeah and it's it's something because i grew up playing soccer and getting into the outdoor community that's definitely something that i see is a big difference in like the the willingness to kind of like really help somebody not just like help someone but like really help them yeah yeah cause it just takes once and i think that's another thing to get over is like don't feel bad about asking your friends to go out with them because they're probably psyched to get you interested in interested and introduced to something that they're passionate about like i love teaching people how to fly fish um and it's never a chore it's never an issue like i i really try to like make it clear that i would love to take you take people out so yeah don't feel like you're you know stepping on any toes or that you're being annoying by asking people to go out with them because they probably are pretty psyched on teaching you with your skiing though you said that you started skiing up in uh michigan and how old were you when you started skiing was that kind of like the outdoor sport that was your youngest uh kind of exposure to getting out and being in the elements yeah i was i my dad introduced me to it when i was like three or four so i like don't remember a time when i wasn't skiing which is amazing i'm really like i feel really privileged to have that experience um and it just turned into like going to ski club on thursdays my elementary school in middle school had a ski club and we just like ate that [ __ ] up we loved it and uh and then we would uh we would mostly just go and we got really into like riding the park because that's pretty much all you can do in the midwest is park skiing and racing so i kind of did like my racing during the week and then on the weekends i'd go and ride the park with my friends and so i was just i don't i wasn't home like after my life after i got my license in high school i was like not home at all i was always riding i was always skiing um and so your home what was your home uh hill or mountain whatever you want to call it up there in michigan because i know it's called perfect north slopes down cincinnati but it's a it's a bump in the land yeah ours was nubs knob uh 600 feet of elevation pretty great pretty great um it was actually like i think it's one of the better places in the midwest to ski i would say i mean i might be biased because i grew up right riding there but i i hold i am holding to that i think it is one of the better places just culture wise too it's like a local spot um it's not corporate it's like everyone you know every everybody knows everybody and i don't know i just i love the culture there i've loved going back there i love going back and you know seeing seeing some familiar familiar faces even to this day um and then just like riding the same trail as i did my entire childhood and uh yeah it's always fun it's always like a fun little nostalgia so with uh i was gonna see since you were skiing up and uh i'm trying to remember the name of it have you ever gotten to ski at mount mount bohemia i think it's i have yeah that was my college sort of stomping grounds i guess i don't know we went to market mountain most of the time because that was right in town um but bohemia on the weekends and potter days if there were any in the middle of the week we would definitely skip class for that but it was like a two and a half hour drive um in the winter anyway it's about two and a half hours because of the crappy roads but bohemia is amazing i've looked into it i've always wanted to make a trip to mount bohemia to ski because it just looks awesome like for like a midwest spot it has the feel of like yeah it just looks like and from what i've heard it has the feel of like almost being out west and it's so quirky it's the weirdest place ever like for a while they only had yurts they didn't have any like buildings and then like they built like a sauna and they built like a pool there's like a giant hot tub there now it's pretty funny um and the people that are there i mean it's just like straight up it's so amazing um and you're in the middle of nowhere like there's nothing there are no amenities and i feel like people that travel there are often very surprised how far out of the way it is like it's like a good seven hours from the nearest airport to get there in the winter yeah that's why i never was it going there is the equivalent it would have been a hard trip for me to make and i was i had to choose between that and going on my yearly trip out west in college because you know poor college student you have to make your choice between what yes you do and where about your times so well if you ever make it yeah get it get up there it's like very worth it it's such a funny place um you'll have a great time i guarantee it uh yeah i don't know it's it's the weirdest place i've ever been but i love it up there it's awesome so you started off skiing at places like that and then obviously in college you just said that so and did you con did you continue pretty seriously like i know it was just like the skeet uh racing like uh the intramural but uh what was it still pretty serious for you with the racing and everything no no it's just just kind of just a fun i oh my gosh i only did it my freshman year because i it was it was kind of spendy you know we had to pay for hotels and tickets everywhere and um it was it was very spendy and what i ended up doing was being a college freshman and just like getting too drunk to race effectively and missing gates and being too hungover to race and any number of things and i you know i just was normal it was it was like an excuse to party um and i had a blast i will say it was very fun i just didn't get a lot of really good ski racing no i know from uh the ski club and the ski team at ohio state it was uh alcoholics that skied every now and then yeah we're more of a drinking team than a racing team whatever that yeah yeah but i think it's still uh you know i met a lot of people through that that um you know i'm still friends with and uh i think it gave me like the foundations i'm just glad i ski race because i feel like it really gave me a strong foundation for um skiing out west and just having like you know good form and you know feeling strong and feeling confident i guess yeah so after you got out west how long was it before you finally got your first taste of like back country skiing because i know that's one thing i'm looking forward to really getting into and getting the experience because i've i've skied like the steep steeper stuff in bounds but i'm looking forward to actually being able to get out to those areas that are a little bit harder to get to take some work and yeah my season after my first fire fire season out here so uh 2016 2017 i got a mountain collective pass i felt like i was just rolling in the dough i was like oh my gosh i get to get a pass out west and i'm gonna like travel around um and i was able to use that to go ski a bunch of different areas and kind of get a taste of where i wanted to in sort of land um i didn't end up landing in any of them i ended up in bellingham but nonetheless i uh i spent a month in canada skiing like rebel stoke and like louise and whistler and uh and just like farting around up there and it was really funny i went up there with some girlfriends for a week so it wasn't a month it was like it was like three weeks but i went up there for a week with some friends from seattle and then as when i was up there i ran into some college friends in uh rocking no where was that golden i think i don't know anyway somewhere near rebel stoke i ran into some college friends and they were like living in their campers and just skiing rebel stoke and uh kind of farting around in that area and so i just like tagged on with them and like slept on one of my friend's bench seats and their camper next to like the table and uh and stayed for another week and a half and they kind of they all had their sleds up there and so we got into some backcountry that was my first time skiing the backcountry um it was like really mellow you know really mellow zone they kind of gave me like i hadn't taken an avi class at that point so they kind of gave me they gave me a book to read and they're like okay read this while we drive to the mountain and uh and so i did some i did some light reading and they gave me like a little a little refresher and um gave me a beacon to borrow and basically gave me yeah intro to backcountry skiing in like a really mellow zone uh low avalanche danger day uh near rebel stoke that we that was sled accessed and uh i did so bad i remember just falling all over the place like the the i don't know i don't know if it was maybe the skis that i had but they were definitely not wide enough and um i was just i was just going like head over heels all day like i kept just like tumbling i couldn't get used to deep snow and it was kind of wet snow too so i was just like out of my element and then from there i went to visit some friends in missoula and bozeman and i went and skied bridger on a day when they had like three feet of snow it was like a monday so there weren't any there weren't that many people up there and i think that was my first time skiing powder and actually being like oh this is why people ski powder because the first time i skied in revelstoke i was like uh i don't like this and then epidural was like light like beautiful it wasn't the wet snow like the first time it was beautiful and it was like so deep and my friend knew where she was going and so we went out and uh and skied uh my it was like kind of my first time skiing powder and it was amazing and that kind of like got me getting hooked and then i went and spent a month and a half working at alta because that was also in the past and so i went and visited a friend at alta from college of course and she convinced me to just stay there and get a job working as a barista and so i got a job and slinging coffees and uh got a free pass out of it for the last month and a half of the season and it was like time in my life so much fun and then i ended up in bellingham the next uh the following winter because i took a job with the ski journal and then what uh kind of skiing is there up in that area of the country that you're in this i'm at but i'm up or i'm near mount baker and it's not baker okay yeah it's uh i love it up here it's definitely the most like when i first showed up i was like oh my gosh because i had not really skied that much powder that's like all we get here and it's kind of cascade concrete you could call it a little it's a little sticky a little wet but um you know we still get our rare like champagne beautiful pow days but also you know getting used to that initially it was tough and then you know learning the sort of ins and outs of work of traveling the backcountry and getting my avi training and kind of working more into the backcountry realm because the back entry access at baker is really good um that i'll i just kind of continue transitioning into that and i think i think i like baker the most out of any place i've ever skied and it's kind of why i'm still here it's very challenging to rain when you first show up after being from the midwest and kind of skiing a lot of areas that aren't super cliffy you know like alta is like pretty wide open there's not a lot in the way of tree well potential or cliff bands to avoid and baker is just like if you don't know where you're going there's a good chance you're going to get clipped out and have to hike out which i've done like three different times now but i feel like i've got a better idea of where i'm at at baker now after three seasons i i hope i don't ever get clipped out again um yeah it's just really challenging it's like it really humbles you when you first show up after thinking you're i don't know thinking that your one season of skiing at west was enough to prepare you you're like oh gosh this is way out of my element yeah i'm looking forward to my first full season in the mountains i got passes to a basin and loveland right in the mountains so nice plenty of plenty of big train and good time waiting for me and i know um a basin's already said that they're not i don't i think they're going to limit the number of passes that they're selling but they're not going to have a uh what's it called like a um reservation reservations yeah yeah i won't have to worry about that there and they they made the new they got the new lift which it goes the same speed has the same number of uh the pali lift the palo beachy so oh nice i've not skied at a basin yet all my skiing so far has been at uh aspen uh copper and steamboat so far here in colorado so have you gotten to colorado at all for any skiing there or has it all been in alta or up in where you're at now i went on my very first ski trip ever at west when i was 14 with by a friend of mine and they we drove all the way from michigan and we went to breckenridge and it was a blast uh definitely to this day like a good uh it was kind of like the reason that i wanted to move out west was that trip you know i was like oh okay i get it now mountains it was my first time seeing mountains i was like just blown away um and then i went to aspen that winter that i um had the pass i went to aspen antellia right actually i went and skied um one day at telluride and then a couple days at aspen and visited some friends what what part of because aspen's a collection of like four different you got snowmass you got aspen you got aspen highlands and then you got buttermilk snowmass and aspen it's like right in the town about i mean like you're right in town he's the one right in the town snowmass is the one that's slightly out and yeah and you have to take like a gondola i think over there and snowmass is like the big like i think the acreage air is mass like huge and then yeah aspen has the glades in the back yeah and i skied highlands when i was there highlands just has the steeps you got highlands bowl that you have to hike to the top of which is beautiful i think it's a 12 8 which was i remember it was my first time being like you know what i've never been this high before i'm just gonna peek out and i'm i just want to get to that height just to say that i was on a peak out here yeah i made myself hike to the top of it with it was brutal

i bet especially coming from the west man i still have my midwest lungs and now i live at sea level so i'm i'm hopeless uh after being out here for a couple months i go into the mountains every weekend so i feel like i'm finally like after being next to people that came from the midwest and seeing how i like how i'm faring compared to them during hikes and they're like having headaches and having to stop for water all the time and it was really affecting uh my one friend over the weekend but i mean just seeing the difference and i remember when i first moved out here how terrible my first like couple trips out into the mountains were and it's like take some time to build up that blood so and i like lost all of it i lived at elevation for a couple seasons and then now i've i've been at sea level for like three years two years now three and a half or two and a half years um yeah so my lungs are i went to tahoe and did them uh and did like a run in tahoe last fall and i was just losing it and tahoe's not even that high like i am a baby at elevation um what uh so i know for me at least for skiing same with climbing the reason why i love those sports is uh just the exposure and getting those views at the top of the mountain they're at the top of a cliff uh what what is it about skiing for you that kind of keeps you coming back

um i think it's just that's an interesting question that i hadn't considered before um because for me i know it's it's that you when when you get to the top and you just have that serene landscape just covered in white and it's just this amazing white view i i it has to be a part of my life like yeah after experiencing it once i my first trip was my freshman year and i remember after that i'm like this has to be a part of my life like every year yeah so it's such a blend because you know i think about like skiing at baker how amazing the snow is how awesome it is to like the culture up there is really strong and so you know you'll be skiing under the chairlift like first run and like you'll have people like hooting and hollering above you and you know when you're on the chairlift you're like hooting and hollering at everybody um and i love that sort of community feeling at baker and how it's pretty far out there and so it's tough to it's tough to get to and there's not a ton of it it ends up being a really heavily sort of like local scene i guess and so you just run into friends all day you just like tagging on with groups of friends uh throughout the day and no matter what you can just go and like find i mean they just get so many good storms up here and the powder is amazing the feeling of powder is amazing doing it with your friends is just like makes it all the better yeah and then the end of the day you know you're absolutely like drenched because you always get drenched at baker it's always like on the cusp of raining but you're just like drenched and you're tired and your legs are sore and drinking a beer in the lodge um with a big group of like throw to get like a throw together group of friends that just happened to be at the lodge at the same time as you like i don't know i love that i love the feeling um the views are obviously awesome too and i love backcountry skiing i love the challenge of of going out and doing like longer progressively longer missions throughout the winter and just getting stronger and um skiing new i think another thing at baker's skiing new and challenging lines like there's always kind of something more something bigger that you can kind of push yourself on so it's always kind of like a stepping stone there's always more and i love that about baker um on like you know low avalanche days there's always kind of like some big missions you can go out and do and there's more than enough there's just so much terrain and so many options there it's awesome awesome um then just ending on like two questions real quick do you have a dream trip uh or a dream kind of excursion or dream place that you want to get to for any of these activities that you do oh boy okay i've always wanted to go to iceland for fishing to fly fish they have huge brown sea run browns um and iceland just in general seems really cool i can get down with the hot spring vibe i just feel like i would fit in there well um skiing

i should think more about this i don't know i think um a dream not a dream trip but a dream that i have in skiing is to maybe try to do a free free ride world tour event at some point just kind of like see how it goes and kind of push myself in in that way um whether that's like in canada or somewhere in the states um i think lately i've been like daydreaming a lot about surfing i like surfing a lot so right now i'm daydreaming about going up to like tofino to surf because it's so close to me but so far because the border is closed how long have you been surfing for only like two years three years i'm terrible at surfing yeah i don't make any presumptions about how good i am surfing because i'm not but i love it and it's like probably the first hobby i've gotten into that has been relatively easy to progress in because it was fun from the very beginning like fly fishing was kind of tough to get into because it's not super fun when you don't know what you're doing i don't remember learning how to ski so that doesn't apply but in mountain biking wasn't super i was like at first i was like i don't really know if i need to get into this this seems expensive and kind of bro um now i love it but but surfing was like right from the get-go i was like i was like i don't even care how destroyed i'm getting in the waves i this is really enjoyable somehow so yeah i'm kind of like trying to get as many surf trips in as i can while i'm still living on the coast because i don't know how long i'll be living on the coast for yeah so is that like your only like uh i guess ocean sport so to say yeah i don't have any water sports really um yeah yeah i think when i get older i'll probably get into sea kayaking but i think i'm too young i don't know i've got too many other things going on right now for that too many hobbies yeah and then mountain biking you've just been kind of doing this dabbling yeah dabbling since college yeah since moving to bellingham really because spelling i i recently moved into this house and it's like two minutes from galbraith which is like a an insane biking trail system and then of course there's tons of other trails in this area really close by uh so it's been kind of like a requisite part of living here is like you kind of kind of get into into biking and i've been i've been really enjoying it i don't know i'm close to the trails it's been fun and then uh just as a final question i'm going back to the hot shot and uh wyoming firefighting uh just to end with a question of if there's anybody looking to kind of get into it what kind of advice would you give to them and what are the first steps that they should take into getting into that line of work that kind of line of uh outdoor uh that outdoor community specifically um get some manual labor experience get some medical experience whether that's like a wilderness first responder or an emt um and start applying places in call places i think same with anything talking to people is huge and that's the only reason probably that i got my job on the crew that i get the hot checker that i got on was because i called them and i sort of developed a relationship with the hiring manager over the phone you know we we kind of developed a we had a little bit more i think i had a little more stake in the game just because you know i was able to talk with him and we got along well over the phone and i think that's really important for any of these jobs because you're spending a lot of time with these people and they want to make sure that you're going to um be able to you know be nice to everybody and that you're going to be enjoyable to be around so talking is is huge and they're applying uh applications temporary jobs are going up in the next week so jobs.gov is the is where you would get hired for a federal fire position say that one more time you actually kind of cut out just as you were saying that usajobs. is uh is the place the hiring platform uh for federal fire jobs so that was i i only worked in federal federal fire uh you can also find jobs on state crews like washington dnr oregon department of forestry or something like that but i preferred i liked working for the feds it was a yeah it was i liked it a lot gotcha cool and then do you have anything else that you kind of want to end on and say i do not we touched everything yeah we got us we we covered all the bases good awesome well it was great getting to hear your story and how you kind of got into all the different niches that you are in the outdoor community which is kind of a little bit of everything it feels like i know all of it i have too many things going on too many hobbies i really need to start cutting things out not a bad thing it's a good thing so but yeah i was really happy to have you on so thank you very much and uh thank you all for tuning in and i will see everyone else on the next episode so thank you for having me yeah no problem

Lawyer to Adventurer- Adventure Milo

get ready to experience the pulse of the outdoor community as we dive into the stories of people's journeys into the outdoor world

hello welcome to the outdoor pulse just some quick updates before we dive into this interview today i will be opening up a new page on my website that will be dedicated to non-profits and charities that my guests either are a part of or support and you guys will be able to go on there and go support those causes if you so please so that's the big change on my website and we have some really cool episodes coming up here in the future so stay tuned and i will keep you guys up to date thank you and let's dive right in

hello and welcome to the outdoor pulse i am your host mitch dean and today we are having on miwosh pierowala i say that right close enough awesome adventure milo is the adventure milo the easy way to pronounce it and he is uh he was a lawyer in new york and decided uh one day that he wanted to enjoy life more and get out and explore and see the world so we're going to jump into his story and kind of see how he got to where he is now so how's it going it's going pretty good uh i do want to make the announcement that on january 24th this year 2020 we opened doors to the first ever climbing and outdoor education school in the country of iraq in the country's history i was able to create this project without any experience i had never been to iraq i have no military experience either and with a team of the first mountaineers in iraq we were able to bring this stream to fruition but uh that's the end right yes you're watching like a quentin tarantino movie now you're interested where this all came from yeah uh i used to follow the rules of society i used to expect uh and actually feel entitled that as long as i went to school and put my work in i was able to earn the reward of a sustainable life and income you know benefits insurance that kind of thing later it didn't work out i think our generation grew up in a world where we watched our parents be laid off from companies that they worked 15 over 20 years at and our time is not valued when i entered the workforce in 2006 i discovered a world entering a recession by 2008 forget it everybody knows what happened over there i went to law school for that reason because uh like i said i graduated college and i couldn't find work so i thought to myself well i guess more years of school wouldn't hurt with the idea that i'm going to listen to my elders yeah right because what your parents tell you they want you to have a good job in the future and i think the three top jobs at least from europe where i'm from are you know you either want to be an attorney a doctor or a priest a priest no longer kind of holds but the other two were good my brothers went to medical school and i had to be different so i said you know what i'm going to invest these next years into law school because everybody's telling me if you become a lawyer you are going to be respected by your community you are going to have money and you are going to have success and happiness as a result of that unfortunately when i entered the workforce as an attorney i discovered everything i hated about working to become an attorney in school which was basically sitting at a desk for the majority of my day and reading really old english cases was now going to be my future except for i no longer had professors that gave me bad grades i had bosses that had anger management problems and that got incredibly angry and uh and basically made my life a living health so um after several years of searching for myself and i can tell you that i genuinely search for myself because you know i didn't become a lawyer and say oh i give up i don't like this you know i actually uh i worked with the constitutional court of south africa so i traveled to south africa for that i worked for the royal courts of justice in london that's in the uk for anybody that doesn't know that but i worked for the royal courts of justice in london i also worked in new york city uh in new jersey ultimately for a major firm in uh in manhattan and i went searching i went searching for happiness in this career that's supposed to have it and at one point in my life i realized i was working 95 hours per week let me break that down for you twelve and a half hours monday through friday and then ten and a half hours on saturday and ten and a half hours on sunday no break and then you jump back into monday and you start again that was my work week that happened for a year and a half i was barely making enough money in order to er to pay off my loans i had no health insurance i had no job security and i just had several different bosses who screamed at me and the other however many attorneys were working on the case with me and i realized that i was living my nightmare you know and this is kind of the way that everybody feels that i talk to right now uh not just in america but in many other places around the world you feel like you're trapped in a position and you need to be there because you have to pay for things like for your loans for your rent for uh your insurance for whatever else and i couldn't believe it uh in order to deal with this i as escaped through substances i found myself doing incredibly dangerous things now we're doing an outdoor podcast here right yeah as you can see there's a lot of outdoor stuff over here so i wasn't i was not a person who went out on a big bender and just like you know showed up on monday completely hung over that also happened what i'm talking about is crazy things like being completely drunk and literally walking the edge of a skyscraper while looking up or going to a bachelor party at atlantic city and this there was like a big storm coming and there was these giant like sewage pipes that went out into the ocean and as we were driving by i was like wow look at those waves crashing over those pipes well not more than two hours later i was literally walking out onto the end of those pipes with the crack waves crashing over in my dress shoes and suit and i thought this was all perfectly normal because the reality was i hated my life so much there was no purpose to it that when i thought about the next day i just didn't care i didn't want to wake up i didn't want that evening to end because i was free of that that place that i had to be imprisoned yeah it was crazy and the thing that i say to people is you know there was this like everybody says aha moment right the closest thing that i have to that is um i was at work and as i mentioned before i was working with a number of other attorneys both men and women but this particular day i sat down next to a group of people um and when i looked down the line i saw a guy first that was five years older than me then 10 years older than after that like 20 years older and after that like a super old attorney and i literally saw my future man i mean as close as you could possibly get to it i saw myself moving through what was going to come to me because i already knew what the attorney life looked like it meant you were going to be living in an office with a beautiful car and whatever all that other jazz but you're practically living in the office and i saw that this these people sitting next to me were literally me in the future and i saw how the older i got the more my hair would fall out of my head because i'm stressed out the i i looked at my desk and what i saw was sugar and caffeine candy and red bull or coffee or whatever it was and um i noticed that the more that i would be working and staring at the screen and front of me the more my head would droop luckily though my stomach was growing into a nice little pillow to catch me on my way down right and uh and i realized that the the more i looked at these people the more i also saw that anger had eaten them up from inside they were irritable impatient and intolerant they just wanted to get the f out of there and i looked at it and i was like that's it that's a hundred percent what is going to be waiting for me in the future and the longer i'm there the more bitter i will become and the more my life will have escaped from my hands and uh through a series of insane events i was able to get to the point where i cracked now i think that i'm not any more exceptional than any other human being that i've met in fact i'm actually quite average i think but what i had done is i had put myself into such a high stress environment into such i dug myself so deep into this hole right i almost made it out the other side because the intensity with which i worked towards this dream that was talked about like a fantasy like a fairy tale when i was younger i snapped like reality didn't matter to me anymore i effectively died you know through my substance abuse and through my actions i was effectively suicidal but what ended up happening is i literally something i it was almost like an audible snap in my brain because what i realized was my life is over like i could see my future and my future sucks and i don't want to live it it's that simple if i get hit by a car i didn't like when i was crossing streets in new york i didn't even look both ways i would just walk out you know it was insane and i realized that my life was effectively over i was now trapped in the bed that i made right and the other thing that i realized is there was this thing that echoed in my head this kind of like weird proverb that i heard which was like what's the best what's the best time to plant the tree mitch what's the best time to plant the tree that's time to plant the trees during the wet season well that's the way the proper building or where they're saying goes is the best way the best to plant the tree is 20 years ago 20 years ago yeah forgot about that one and i realized that if i waited to accomplish my dreams who knows where i would be in the future but i thought if i started 10 years ago if instead of going to law school in college if i decided to go and train as a mountain guide i would most likely already be on top of mount everest what is what is the insane like how far could i be if i started in high school yeah and it just seemed crazy to me to wait another day man you know like i thought to myself no like if i start today i was able to accomplish an impossible feat i became an attorney in new york city and i was a math major and an economics major my grades were very very average lower than average but yet i had i had gotten here so the things that i did not want to do i had achieved right so now think about this incredible dream that i have like because ever since i was a kid and this is where i got to kind of bring this in when i was a kid i wanted to be indiana jones i wanted to be luke skywalker i wanted to be conan the barbarian i wanted to go to places that have been that were undiscovered alien worlds i wanted to meet mystical creatures and i wanted to be i wanted to be exploring and whenever i express those intentions to adults they were like man that's a fantasy it's a fairy tale don't like stop thinking about that think practically milo you know think practically what is going to be the job that's going to keep you happy and sustained and get you a family and all that and so i was like talked out of it right when i was a kid yeah uh what was the age uh how old were you when that that visible and that audible snap uh oh

29 years old 29 years old 29 years old full academic debt i took on loans for my entire schooling both undergrad and law school and i was nearing 30. so in my mind like my time had passed right yeah so now here i was at 29 years old saying to myself no man you got to start now you got a lot of caption up to do because there's athletes out there like petzl athletes archeryx athletes north face athletes who are younger than you who've already accomplished incredible things yeah and so i thought to myself this is insanity if i wait one more day i am actively destroying any opportunity for the future for me to achieve my dreams and i thought to myself what if i start today what if i plant that tree today where will i be 10 years from now let me tell you mitch it's been 10 years about i started in uh september 20th 2012 is when i officially quit my job and started to pursue this full-time and i can tell you that within those eight years i have just achieved more than i could possibly have imagined i did not have the capacity to imagine where i would go in 2017 i filmed a virtual reality documentary up to mount everest base camp i believe i was the first person to ever do that um i started the first virtual reality uh humanitarian program out of new york city where i allow people to put on virtual reality goggles and uh using a cell phone i filmed virtual reality content and i was able to take paralyzed people who who were unable to even lift themselves out of bed with their own strength but with these goggles they could feel like they're climbing alpine mountain or crawling around in caves or flying in a drone or riding a bicycle or even something as simple as riding the subway yeah and then i went to romania and i started an orphanage and i went to poland and i started a fundraising operation there i started mentoring children across the world about what sort of opportunities lay in their future and then i started my own nonprofit which is a global upgrade incorporated i did that last year actually and in in each of these i was brought to opportunities again i could never have imagined i never realized that i was going to be the first person to ever start a climbing school in iraq by the way a country that our country started a war with a country that our country is bombing actively if you're a white guy in iraq and speaking english you're in danger right that's what we've been taught we're not friendly with the nation and yet here i am somehow finding myself in the middle of all this and the reality is the the only thing that's changed is i started to accept responsibility for all of my mistakes because at one point somebody told me milo you're crazy first of all my entire community abandoned me my family abandoned me my friends abandoned me they they they it was it was a horrible time in my life because when i quit being an attorney everybody around me said why would you do that everybody wants to be an attorney especially in new york you've got it milo you have what we want man congratulations but they were going by what they thought an attorney life was laid yeah they didn't recognize the challenges and the things that have been taken away from us through general through like this generation behind closed doors they don't know what's going on exactly they've not lived the life of somebody that that spent 21 years in school in order to build a career in one of the most hardest places to build a career in the world they thought here milo made it and now for some reason he is literally throwing away all of that investment and he's putting on a backpack and he's going outside and doing something that people without a high school diploma can do what a nut case don't talk to my kids don't even talk to me i don't want to hear about this because you're crazy basically somebody from our family my friend turned into a roaming nomadic hobo right yeah and so that's the reality that i faced because the successes that i had in the beginning were literally as simple as getting a piece of gear from a company because i couldn't afford it tent stakes a shirt you know shoes which by the way i think cost like something like 47 cents to produce in china so if you're not getting those from a company i don't know what to tell you man they're not they're practically you know for them but anyway um so when when i did that i was abandoned right and so that's not a position that you want to be in because in the beginning it every single arrow every single indicator every single sign that i went past in this journey in the beginning said turn back you're gonna you know danger ahead and so this is where the story kind of starts to filter people out because i'm telling you that if you dedicate yourself to your craft and your passion patience is literally the only thing you need because the longer you spend hammering away at that the more time you take this giant amorphous block of granite and you've got a tiny little chisel and you're working on it after several years people start asking you questions about what you're doing because you just have the answers yeah i can tell you how to fit a backpack i could tell you which hiking shoes are the best i could tell you which way to get up uh you know whatever mountains here on the east coast and some mountains on the west coast which are the best trails the most scenic ones so that's how it starts but then you're constantly doing these things and this these projects that i have that are you know incredibly successful are not something that even had a defined end goal in the beginning it was just like a couple guys from iraq contacted me and said hey we just want to build a climbing program that's it we just want to be able to teach kids okay well now we have set the tallest climbing route in iraq in history we started the first volunteer mountain rescue team in the country we built the first mountain shelter in the country we translated the first ins climbing instruction manual in the country we opened the first climbing store in sulaimania in the region uh we built the first climbing wall in the region we uh we did so many things i don't even like they're not even 71st yeah that's that's just beautiful for a country that doesn't have anything like that and yeah at least from i'm not that far into the outdoor community i've done some 14ers here and there i've gotten out into the mountains but i just know from my own personal experience how much the outdoor can outdoors can impact your mentality and like yeah kind of switch around like to a more positive state and just being outside in nature is just a happy place uh like i know that we were talking about before it's that place where you can kind of go and um you know and and offering that to people some in a place where you know most people wouldn't even think about or have a second thought about like most people just kind of brush it under the bus you know and you're out there building something putting up all these firsts in this country that a lot of people in a country that they don't care about which is kind of crazy and just an amazing thing that's an amazing accomplishment so but you know when you follow a path that is traditional right like so let's say you become a lawyer or a doctor all right um when somebody asks you what are you doing you know what to say yeah like if you're in your third year of law school you can say uh there and they say what's next for you you can say well first i graduate then i pass the bar exam then i apply for work or start my own company in a couple of years i got a bunch of clients you could literally that is what happens but if you decide to create your own career and you don't know what it is if somebody asks you what are you doing what am i doing hey man maybe you know more than me because it sounds like you might even know which direction to go you just don't know but that's the beauty of it because i didn't know where i was gonna go i wanted to be an ambassador for an american company and go climb some rocks in america and be able to make enough money so that i could put gas in my van so yeah and so dialing it back just a little bit so before you decided to make that move into the outdoor world uh were you climbing and doing stuff before while you were uh lawyers still or was that more of an after like did you get into the outdoor stuff after the click or was it before the click that the seeds were kind of planet just you never really acted on them so that's a very good question because i don't want to sound like some sort of inaccessible like yeah entity right like the one of my pet peeves in college was when you had speakers come in and they would talk to you and they would be like hey guys i graduated magna [ __ ] laude at my school i had straight a's valedictorian i was uh captain of the varsity you know whatever team and i'm just like man who are you like i'm not anywhere near you you're who are you talking to are you talking to the two people in this entire school that are gonna maybe get close to that like no no i had no experience i had i had gone skiing to like regular mountains on the east coast which anybody on the west coast if you skied on the east coast i apologize i grew up skiing on the east coast i skied on a bump in indiana

exactly anyway uh so and and uh while i was in law school i was part of a group called taramar adventures so i was an organizer for adventure around philadelphia so we would go and do things like horseback riding um we'd go rock climbing with guides but to the extent that i had actual training like practically zero uh the i maybe had gone camping five or six times in my life at that point so in order for me to kind of get into this career when i quit that was really the first time like i think 2012 probably actually was probably the first time i actually took it seriously that i needed to do something where i needed to become an expert so the first thing that i did is i took a nulls course which is the national our outdoor leadership school yes and um i will tell you the reason i did that is because i knew that no matter what i do outdoors no matter where i go i need to have the fundamental skills to be able to uh navigate the outdoors and stay safe and uh within that uh with the knolls course i i became a certified wilderness emt uh before anybody says milo where'd you get all that money uh what i'll tell you is that i was incredibly active in um in asking for it so the first thing that i did when i quit there's no lie i wrote a personalized email to over 500 people in the outdoor industry like easily over 500 personalized email asking them for advice and an opportunity and i can tell you right now that 497 of those came back as rejections and or unanswered but uh three of those emails i still remember came through with some opportunities and so i entered this entire thing without experience without connections and without money and when i wrote to knowles and i explained my situation and i explained my intentions and i explained my ambitions i was lucky enough to receive one of their i believe it was a scholarship or discount so through the work that i demonstrated to them i was able to get into one of their courses because i didn't have enough money and afterwards i was very active in the community i actually gave a lecture at one of at the wilderness risk management conference that they put on every year uh i was selected as a distinguished alumnus and uh the reason i'm talking about this is because i didn't have opportunity guys like i didn't it may seem that way because now i'm looking back and i'm talking about you know all this big game but the reality is i went to my first outdoor retailer in 2015 outdoor retailer is the i believe it's the largest outdoor sports show on the in the eastern hemisphere and i remember being there and i remember looking around and being like man there's like a thousand other people over here that are like me just young people looking for a ambassadorship or some free gear just to get their career started and i was like i'm drowning because these people live in the grand tetons or near yosemite or all this and they actively have that lifestyle i'm some guy that's crawling out of an office unfit without any knowledge or even understanding of what's going on outdoors but you know what happened i came back the next year and there was less of those people the people that i recognized there were still a thousand new people right but the people that came back that year less of them and then the next year i came back way less and now when i come back the amount of people i met that first year that were people there that were there the first time with me i could literally count on one hand because patience rewards those people who exercise it yeah and it doesn't matter if you're the fast if you're killian jornit it doesn't matter if you're um uh you know any one of the bigger guys i'm like all escaping my mind right now right but like you know alex hannel like it doesn't matter if you are an exceptionally talented athlete because those guys won the genetic lottery or whatever it is or you know or they're just so incredibly passionate that that you're not listening to this podcast you're probably going out out there you're attacking yosemite or surfing big waves if that's what you're doing what i'm talking about is people who do create careers in in this in this industry and the reality is the more time you spend the more conversations you have the more projects you bring to these people that are rejected the more they actively see you pursuing this career path seriously and i can tell you that there is a whole number of people in the industry who i am eternally grateful for for their patience because they dealt with me eric larson thank you you're awesome man thanks for putting up with me um he was one of the first trips that i did for myself i did polar expedition training with him in 2014. that's awesome and um him and ryan waters and then i got the chance to meet ryan waters at his expedition camp uh at uh mount everest base camp and i did a virtual reality tour of his camp so that was cool but the reality is the more you spend there the more time you spend there the more these people realize they're just not going to get rid of you yeah and so you know you get friendly with them a little bit and you start telling them about stuff that you're successful in and like time that time investment creates you and just like what i said before the more you exercise this the more people recognize you as a person who may know a thing or two about what you're doing the more years you pack on the more these opportunities grow and you start to see things that you didn't see before because you know what you look what to look for you understand what sort of things brands are looking for it's not just a pretty picture it's the story behind it it's the way that you do this it's are you on time are you you know responsible are you uh effective in what you do do you make big promises and you you follow through i have these incredible projects right now i can tell you that i have not received more than five thousand dollars in sponsorship total ever the total amount of sponsorship that i ever received is less than five thousand dollars and i have all of these incredible accomplishments under my belt because now i can say i am effective at following through on the things that i promise and this is what people are interested in and if they're not interested doesn't matter because i figured out how to have a sustainable life without that type of investment so that produces negotiating power because now i go up to companies and i and i say hey i'm doing this next major project do you want to be a part of it or do you not and if they say oh we don't have the budget for this this year milo uh you know this isn't really what we're doing you just say thanks no problem you know i'm just gonna go to the next guys because all the sponsors that i've worked with in my past are incredibly happy and i started with nothing but it doesn't mean that you should also undervalue what you bring into the outdoor industry either um so mitch and i met through the base camp outdoor jobs and more facebook group that's it i think there are several critically important conversations taking place on that platform right now one of them is a person who is collecting statistics on the amount of money that people are paid freelancers are paid in their positions in the outdoor industry which means you can take a look at those numbers and when you go up to somebody and say hey i'd love to work with you and they say hey yeah we give you a jacket for that you could be like no no because other people are demonstrably getting more yeah you know so you kind of figure it out and of course yes the first few jobs you do have to be free because these people can't take a risk on somebody they don't know with zero evidence that you're effective right exactly so you you have to bring that you have to develop that on your own and um i was going to rewind it but if you want to keep going with this for a minute you can go ahead i was going to dial it back to uh your first big your was knowles your first experience really in like the outdoor uh world community and actually getting out there and having a big experience like that yeah yeah you know so i i chose uh the i chose the knolls course that took place at their headquarters in lander wyoming under wyoming yeah and lander wyoming happens to be an incredibly beautiful uh outdoor preservation area or near you know out lots of outdoor stuff to do over there the wind river ranges out there so if you guys get a chance definitely visit and uh but that was really the first authentic outdoor experience uh for me where i was actually thought skills and and let loose out there and they were very serious about it you know because the reality is when you go outdoors when you see these great videos and photos and everything even when you watch like meru or you know vertical limit or all these things you see these heroes you know that they're like they had a great time and the danger isn't really something you can appreciate but when i took the outdoor course uh at knolls the wilderness emt training um they were basically they made it extremely clear that if you're like two miles down a trail and you twist your ankle that puts you in a high risk situation you may not be able to make it back to your car you can catch hypothermia you can crawl maybe a mile but there's so many different things that can go wrong and so for the first time i began to appreciate how dangerous it is outside yeah but that's the reality right because if you take the view that i'm gonna go to school i'm gonna go to college i'm gonna get a job and if i get decent grades i am now entitled to an income and you take an entire generation and you feed that to them what happens is you find yourself in the position that we are all in as a community right now where we expect something based on our personal uh decisions meanwhile somebody else who is in a significantly more powerful role takes the absence of your participation in society and takes advantage of that and takes everything for themselves and you stop stop participating in the decisions that create your career because you expect for other people to grant you those things well i'll tell you right now i don't walk around and ask for permission i look for opportunities and if there's an opportunity to create something man that is where the fire is there's an opportunity to create a school for climbing in iraq don't you want to be there looking back now i'm just like yeah i mean i guess i totally expected for this to happen sort of but in the beginning it's like me and a bunch of people i've never met i can barely communicate with them online because english is a little you know yeah questionable and uh yeah wow we're gonna create a climbing school have i ever participated in a climbing school no do i know how to start no but i got a bunch of people who are ready for it and um something i learned from george bosh who is the founder of the himalayan stove project himalayan stoveproject.org go check it out 2017 they received the citation of merit from the uh explorers club dinner george bosh told me and this is a common quote but he's the one that told it to me he said every uh journey of a thousand miles starts with one step and so when i started this entire career in the outdoors when i started the project in iraq when i started the project in romania when i started the project in new york with virtual reality i had no idea how to get anywhere but i could tell you what to do next i first i got for a virtual reality first i gotta get a camera then i gotta start producing content then i gotta learn how to process that content into videos at a time that literally this did not exist right i know the steps the next step and if anybody asks me well what's your long-term vision the long-term vision is like well i mean you know it's like a compass right like i know which direction to go in but i don't know what to expect and i don't know when the things are that we are going to achieve when those are coming and that's what i meant before as a doctor as a lawyer as a engineer if somebody asks you where do you expect to be in two years you can say i know exactly where i'm going to be in two years my debt is going to be paid off this much i want to be this much closer i'm going to be earning this degree i'm going to be earning this next certification perfect what about you milo you know what are you going to do uh be alive hopefully you know like because some of this stuff i'm doing is dangerous but really i don't know projects are like a month at a time now you know so like i'm talking about all of these successes but there's way way more failures there's a lot more ambitious projects that fell through the cracks that didn't work out where my partner stabbed me in the back worked against me you know like where i was fooled by snake oil salesmen and as you progress you learn who is reliable who are the people who are you know who who help you out and by participating in the community you also become the community you carry the culture in you you're not an outlier you're just part of this like amorphous blob of human beings who all come together one time a year and otherwise crawl into their respective holes that are really difficult to get to in the world literally so it's kind of crazy but i mentioned the the base camp group before yeah and again i i you know i want to underline how important it is for us to participate in conversation because whether you believe it's society whether you believe it's deliberate or not our collective actions have resulted in a completely uh blind ability like where we're blind to like what the industry offers as far as jobs we don't really understand you know you can have somebody who's earning a ton in one part the area but you have people who are doing the same stuff for free as a volunteer in a different area and you don't know that the more we communicate as an industry the more of a voice we have for happens to our for what happens to our outdoors as well and so i just wanted to thank uh ali and jenna uh during this broadcast for for continuing this this really difficult uh uh venue or you know for for creating this platform for us to have these discussions uh and for people like you and me to connect as well and yeah their their platform is amazing they do a great job moderating it too and keeping it set just information in there and very you know information center people can ask questions uh jobs can be posted and it's just i mean it's a beautiful community that they've built and it continues to grow which is amazing to watch and i've only been a part of that group for less than a year now so i joined it before i moved out here but i i'm in a very similar position as you but like you 10 years ago because i decided to quit my job that i got after college that i had my degree for and everything and i took a job in anything just to get out to denver and be closer to the outdoor community in the outdoor world and i've been out here for four months now so and just taking that first step so i i can relate to that i wasn't it wasn't any like crazy job like a you know new york attorney or anything like that but still i had a bunch of family who's like what are you doing so i i can totally relate to the whole experience of just going against the grain of what people expect you to do and after moving out here since i've moved out here it's it opens taking that leap of faith and putting yourself in a difficult position opens up uh you two going out of your comfort zone and your comfort zone just keeps expanding expanding expanding kind of like exponentially almost so and it's a beautiful thing and people just need to realize that um getting into the outdoor community just getting into sports even um that like you said you were 29 when you decided to start going out and adventure like it doesn't matter what age you are you can still go out try climbing for the first time hike that 14 or that you'd been not wanting like wanting to do but like just putting off and and all that so and just that first step is so important and people just need to see that they can take it and i think your story about how you went into it completely blind at the age of 29 is a great kind of like reminder to people like you don't need to know a ton to get into it you can just everyone starts somewhere so i mean i had you know friends who had kids and here i am starting on my path right yeah and so you you find yourself discouraged practically every step of the way and you're thinking to yourself like how much worse can it get man like how much worse can it get you know i'm poor i literally don't have a place to sleep tonight there's nobody nearby that could even drive to me that i know and i gotta figure out what to do to get to tomorrow you know those are real situations that i encounter these are above and beyond you know hanging off a cliff and maybe having like a piece of protection fail yeah right so you're not like it's not that instant possible danger of death but the slow simmering you know destruction of your life that you're watching before you as you're investing every single effort into something incredibly risky so uh you know i don't i don't want to sound distant from your audience i want to say to them we are this generation that is dealing with the way that society has transformed and it is entirely up to us to shape what's going on yeah and that means that if you're doing something that's shaking things up you are the person changing the the norm the status quo you are and if people resist and they do that by standing in your way or actively working against you or disagreeing or discouraging you i think what you're doing is you're creating your vision and they're saying wait no we don't want change and it's like you don't want change why are you complaining to me every single day about your crappy boss about how you work too much how you're not recognized how you don't get enough value for these things yeah you know how close are each one of us to complete bankruptcy i think that coronavirus kind of revealed that because now we have significant problems across the united states and then you're looking at people you know so so where would you have invested your time right in a job like jim carrey said this right you can work your entire life towards a career and then it have it fail and if you don't love what you did it means not you just wasted your entire life yep or you could work towards something that you're passionate about and that you absolutely love and if you fail you still participated in that thing you love at a level that's you know just the beginning but you did you put that time in and now that i look at like the opportunities that have opened up the families the communities that are like families that i've created around the planet i feel like there's purpose in my life i feel like there's a reason for me to be to for me to wake up yeah and i don't get paid in money you know let me get let me just be very clear everybody you don't earn money with a non-profit right but you have a purpose and you live experiences and you have a family and you have people and you have an opportunity to speak like i do and by improving the world by providing opportunities to people who would otherwise not have them you're making the world a better place and so whatever your vision of what the meaning of life is there's a purpose that you discover by doing these things and that purpose drives you in a way that money never could yeah and it's an incredible transformation that has taken place in my philosophy behind life because if i was earning tons of money right now as an attorney somewhere i would be looking forward to that tiny opportunity to actually go and climb and pay for a guide to take me somewhere but now i'm literally living that so what good is money why don't we just take that out of the picture and if there's milo money and my goal if i take that money out bam i am literally living life that i want to live and that just means that you know and what i tell people is like this wasn't something that like you know i said to you i wanted to be an explorer ever since i was a kid but the picture is not so clear when you get started yeah right it wasn't like i want to be you know uh indiana jones here's my hat my kangaroo leather hat it's like i want to be indiana jones right no that's not how it works the reality was i didn't know what i wanted to do i literally didn't and so i started looking for it all i knew was that i wanted to discover things that's it nature was really easy to get to because there's no entry fee to nature if you hike in uh if you have your tent and your stove and some food with you you're good to go man you know just purify some water um i did not know i i had failed at so many things i was an artist an attorney a mathematician an economist an event producer uh i was a video producer photographer like all these things all of them web web designer like everything art like uh uh writer like all these things and like each one i did until i reached the point where i'm just like no i really can't do this for free you know i had my own expedition company that i started in 2011 called exp adventures at first it was just an expedition company for everybody and then i transferred over into private clients designing their trips uh their ideal trips their dream trips and i realized i really didn't want to be babysitting people who really didn't know what they were doing either and then ultimately i kind of whittled it down and whittled it down and whittled it down and now i have this focus of producing humanitarian programs in remote locations around the world for communities that need them for marginalized communities that's literally creating opportunities for them and i couldn't get to here without all the wrong turns the mistakes the bad decisions i couldn't get here you know if i had not done that so i don't want to give this impression that i like got out of the starting starting gate and i knew exactly what i wanted to do it was like no i spent a significant amount of time and effort searching for what it was that i wanted to do and uh only through that process was i able to get to where i am today so if you're looking at this or you're listening to this this podcast and you're saying to yourself man i'm not like milo it's like i think you're probably better than me in a lot of things i just figured out that i am incredibly stubborn and i don't give up and that's sometimes a problem i've got i've learned my lesson many times but at the same time it's brought me to here and so if you are stubborn and patient ultimately you are going to be the person that's going to define the community that you are entering because all the old guys and the old women they're all going to pass to a better place and the people that are left are going to be the people that participated from a long time ago and that's you yeah that's that's a good way to think about it i didn't i never even thought about that is like if you're in a community if you end up dropping out you're out of the community then where if you stick around at some point you're going to be one of the you know the people that people look up to and ask questions because you're the one that's been there you're the one that's been around they see your face around and you become that person that you're looking up to at the beginning like oh i could never get to where they're at and then you become that person by staying in and just being persistent like you said it's a great way to think about it yeah um so back to the the knolls course so after that um where did you kind of go from there because you got your knolls course um that's yeah so that's when i started the the expedition company um and i and the knolls course was necessary because if i'm going to be trekking out with anybody else out into the wilderness uh you know i i don't want to be dependent on anybody else for for rescue or for medical assistance at all at least i need to understand it how to do it how to perform it how to identify potential problems um so i had that for a couple years and of course that includes you know event production to promote it building the website creating marketing campaigns flying like literally traveling around the world as much as i could in order to uh get experience and that was not paid what i did is i started to look for volunteer opportunities there is so many of them my god okay if you believe that there's no opportunities out there for volunteers you're blind and inexperienced you can literally look like okay let's let's let's start let's do it this way would you like to go to hawaii and to go see some volcanoes would you like to go to costa rica and go to a yogurt treat or bali would you like to go australia and go surfing right what you can do is you can go online and you can look up surfing retreats or tourist destinations or whatever in those locations and you just send them an email and you say hey i'd love to volunteer at your location for free i'll work for free all you have to do is give me housing and food and i will work for free and guess what the entire world will open to you maybe a couple places will say no but man who's going to turn down a volunteer to come over and to work for free for them most of these places have extra rooms anyway and the amount of food that they produce they throw out anyway so to them you're effectively you know free labor yeah and that's how i got my start i ended up going to yukon territory and uh being a uh dog handler um at one of the largest kennels in the entire territory i worked with 158 dogs uh i went into costa rica like i said you know costa rica is one of those locations where you could volunteer as well and there was a whole number of these things you don't get paid right so every single time your parents call you're gonna disappoint them you're not gonna be able to go out on dates and you know get dinner with girls or anything like that but what you are going to do is you're going to start you know chipping away at that rock that is your future career and it's the only way to do it and you're just not not especially in today's environment you're just not going to find a paid position if you do man congratulate yourself um i had you know as a writer what i discovered is i couldn't afford gear but if i reviewed it i would be provided that gear for free so i started working for several different publications online and receiving gear for free eventually i started making 15 per article which is woefully underpaid by the way and uh you know in order to be a writer you have to stick with it for a very long time you have to like writing um but you also have to realize uh influencing becoming a social media influencer is highly unlikely to happen the reason i say that is because companies literally hire people whose only job and only responsibility is to build social media campaigns and create marketing campaigns so if you're trying to build your career and have that as a on the side promoting yourself you're fooling yourself you know and you can hear this from regular influencers and everything this is my opinion so if i'm offending anybody please you know send me an email let's talk uh but the reality is you know you have people who whose entire job is to do just that and they have resources to do it you don't so that ship has sailed you know like we're past the dot-com bubble we're past all that stuff now it's just figuring out how to do these things and what i can tell you right now is that a genuine person who is competent is uh and reliable is such a rare thing in the outdoor industry because we're just a bunch of hard-headed jocks who have their own idea of what reality is you know also hippies or whatever you want to call us but we are you know free-spirited people who really are nomadic at this point so if you demonstrate competency and reliability man you are going to have doors open for you real quick but you also have to tolerate a bunch of nonsense a lot of a lot of bull um so you know it hardens people over time yeah but getting back to you know the entire process uh you know i don't want to go down my entire timeline because yeah you know going through all of it what i do want to say is that every single next step may feel like a catastrophe in the beginning but what's actually happening is it's life pushing you to the next step it's saying ah you've exhausted your time here now it's time for you to start growing over here and the question becomes how rapidly can you set up a network how rapidly can you identify resources and how can you put those two to work so that you can accomplish the goal that you came to this location to accomplish whatever that is and it's very easy to be distracted you know so you really have to you know ask yourself what do i want to do and maybe put that up on your mirror so that every day in the morning when you're brushing your teeth you can say you can see it and you can ask yourself what do i want to do do i want to stay here or do i want to go somewhere else and the more you practice that the more you're going to get to the negotiation and when somebody says this is all that we can offer you you can go well that's great that's not what i'm looking for so i'm going to go look for it elsewhere and you can understand that you are not in a critical place with your resources where you're going to die literally no you are lit you can live a sustainable life whatever sustainability means to you at that point if it's just having a place to sleep at night you know i've been there the reality is how do you put yourself in a place where you're negotiating power is your feet and if somebody's saying ah we can't offer any money and you're at the point in your life where that's what you're looking for well guess what there's a billion billions people out there who are only going to be able to offer you nothing except like not money so you can walk away from those guys there's plenty of people looking for money but it's harder to find but it's there because you could be reliable and dependable and that's really all it takes stick around patience yeah um switching gears a little bit was there a certain experience during all this that has impacted you the most and made you realize like hey this is definitely the path that i i want to be on and like kind of stuck with you um well uh

i mean it's probably once a year that happens at least yeah uh because you know like here's the thing uh recently last year i needed to collect funds in order to get this school started in iraq yeah and i was talking a bunch of people and i was proposing you know what we're gonna do and i had a guy who was just like all right milo let's have some real talk here all right i want to give you money okay but i need to know that that money is going to go to the right place so let me ask you two questions let's just be real you got to answer them for yourself first question have you ever met the people to whom you're going to give my money and i was like no i've never been to iraq and he's just like okay that's an important question to answer second question have you been there do you know where they're building the school what they're doing who the people around them are and i was like no i don't and he's just like so you expect me to give you tons of money and you don't know who you're giving it to or where it's going and i was just like no and he's just like why would i give you money and he's right he's absolutely right and so there that suddenly the decision came to be right in front of me i had to fly to iraq

that was not an easy thing to do because first of all i was paying to go there second of all i was going to visit people i've never met in a country that we had been at a war with for a very long time we are it's a complicated view that people have of americans over there especially people who are going on their own for the first time without ever having been there without military experience and so i was faced with this dawning reality of okay you know adventure milo i created this brand i created the wet i got the website i got the logo i put it on everything what does it mean like do i want to be what do i want to be right so do i want to be an influence or do i want to like am i a lie do i want to just fly to bali hang out on the beach get my camera equipment where's my camera it's not over here uh you know and try to take the best photos to compete with those professional photographers who hire models do i want to do that and just kind of like hang out and try to get as many followers as possible or do i want to fly into an actually dangerous situation with no support to start a project that no brand is interested in touching with a 10-foot pole but i stand to chance creating opportunities for thousands if not millions of people that i will never meet in my life to actually create change in the world i was faced with that decision because i was either going to fly to iraq or i was going to go to some tropical place like ibiza or like hawaii or somewhere else and just try to jam myself in with everybody else and that was a very important decision to make because my life was actually threatened you know i i'm careful saying that now that i know iraq much better and now that i have a community of people who love me over there you know i don't want to say like you're flying into hell uh but in the beginning the propaganda and all of the experience and exposure i had to iraq at all had indicated to me that this was practically flying into a volcano you know with a helicopter with the attention just crashing and so uh you know that was a very important decision i had to make am i the real thing you know am i am i just living some sort of like you know lie or do i actually want to do this and you know you can see the decision that i made because i didn't receive any support uh you know i had i posted on multiple climbing groups and i said hey guys we're collecting gear for my school in iraq and we need new gear and so many people said you are stupid who's going to give you new gear what ask for used gear right and i'm just like really well you know am i going to get used client now i'm not a climbing expert i consider myself to be a novice climber i can't even tell if a gear is adequate for being used i can't tell if a rope is good enough or not like after use you give me a rope i'll look at i'll be like yeah that's a rope that's as much as i know so now what would happen if i created a school and we've got a child hanging off of a rope and one of the pieces of protection fails the rope swings out and snaps right now we have an international incident where the most positive intentions the most good will just flowed into an incident that paints us as an enemy bringing inadequate gear into a country and causing the death of a child in that country i didn't have a choice i had to get new gear and so i was like you know what i don't care man this isn't your project if you don't believe you can do this too bad and so you know these types of decisions came all the time i drove from poland through slovakia hungary bulgaria serbia actually serbia then bulgaria into turkey i drove through the conflict through the war that is actively taking place on the border of syria and turkey and i drove into iraq in order to deliver nearly ten thousand dollars worth of donations that i personally collected from all across europe because there was no other way for me to get there i literally drove through a [ __ ] war and when i was in iraq and i finally reached my destination on january 4th this year 2020 the united states dropped bombs on baghdad and killed the iranian top general kusam soleimani when i was in the country alone with my 19 year old car hold on a second my battery might be dying here you're good uh actually let me plug this in yeah take your time otherwise we're gonna disappear so america bombed iraq and killed the top general in iran and i was in the country alone effectively and i needed to escape with my life it's crazy so when i found out about that i actually got it recorded so if you guys should watch documentary i'm producing right now please support it the money is going to the documentary which is publicizing the school and we are doing incredibly effective things but i literally had to escape with my life with human beings who were hunting me iranians and iranian sympathizers immediately started to crawl up americans and you probably didn't hear about this didn't really make it to the media that americans were in specific danger every single humanitarian organization that we reached out to in iraq immediately sent out an email to all of its international volunteers and workers and employees that said do not leave your residence meanwhile i had to drive almost seven hours to the border i was escorted by a couple of the guys you know i'm really grateful for that i feel blessed that they were willing to drop everything they're doing and escort me to the border instantly by the way on the way literally my wheel broke off of my car because the roads are bad over there and then i had to drive the next seven days non-stop through the war zone in turkey again and back over to the safer european union countries that's what happened you know and that when i'm driving when i was driving home i really felt like the grim reaper was sitting in the back of my car

and the further i went the more i got just became crazy and grateful that i was alive grateful for these experiences but one thing suddenly dawned on me that childhood dream that idea that i held when i was like five seven whatever it was of wanting to be luke skywalker indiana jones or whatever any one of these guys suddenly i had a purpose traveling through an area as one of the only people who have ever done this that wasn't from that country driving through western turkey or eastern turkey rather and i was there with a purpose to help people i was literally living out my childhood fantasy as an explorer even though i was pissing my pants with fear i suddenly realized this is exactly what i wanted to do and a piece came over me and i said yes this is what i want to do this is who i've trained myself for this is the vision that i had and i'm enacting it right now and so here i am i'm not afraid anymore and the reality is when i came home and when everything happened after january 24th when he opened our doors for the first time then corona hit and we had to start making video lessons and i started to have volunteer incredibly accomplished volunteer athletes from around the world want to participate and to teach for me that's when it suddenly dawned on me now you got to realize i had ptsd at the time i couldn't sleep that was a nervous wreck anxiety was eating me alive and uh i was sitting there up at night probably 3am in the dark alone and i had realized that i had accomplished something that by all standards was literally impossible i had become the first person to reach the mariana trench to climb mount everest to reach the moon in my own way i had taken an idea that was absolutely impossible given my resources given my connections given my experience and it came to fruition we had open doors and so you're asking about like you know this crazy moment of epiphany here it was i had literally demonstrated to myself that i could do anything anything i can achieve the impossible and that realization shattered my world view because i recognize now that whatever projects i had now that i had i will be putting on my plate would come to fruition i wasn't afraid of failure anymore i had absolute certainty and confidence that what i was going to do i would figure out and my life is now transformed completely you know we're having this interview right now but the depth with which i speak the types of experiences and wisdom that i've gained not having resources and being able to accomplish these things you know it's laughable the type of excuses people give me now oh well i've got a job well i've got student loans oh well you know we're going to have a baby oh we've got a mortgage and it's just like really you know i've met quadriplegics that climb 14ers yeah i know people who are blind who've ascended the top of mount everest i have friends who have multiple children who are actively exploring nature and you're telling me that you've got some depth and you can't do this this is just not for you yeah so if somebody would have asked you 10 or told you 10 years ago that like i'm from the future i'm coming back to tell you that in 10 years you're going to be driving through a war zone to set up a climbing school in iraq what would you have said to them man i don't know i don't know it's uh it's one of these things that you don't you know i i told you before that i i didn't have the capacity to imagine what was possible because i was constrained to that small box of the world that i was used to with a bunch of people telling me what to do and what was possible and what wasn't and i felt like they had the experience and the wisdom to tell me the truth but in reality we're all just grown-up children playing by our own rules so if you define those rules and if you keep breaking them you keep figuring them out you're eventually going to get to a place that nobody else has been yeah but if you play by those rules you just get put into a box so you know are you somebody who is brave enough to do something you haven't done before think outside the box and just go be your own person and be happy which i feel like a lot of people uh like you said uh settle kind of settle you know you you have this life where it's comfortable but you're not doing the thing that you love like you have your bills paid you have all this other stuff but you know that childhood dream i feel like people stop dreaming once they hit a certain age almost oh yeah and it's like you had that dream as a kid like you said and at a certain point that dream becomes just a dream like you don't actively pursue it anymore you're like yeah it would be awesome but i'm comfortable now i have my bills paid i can't go chase after that i can't go do this because i have xyz now i feel like that's such a mindset that a lot of people get sucked into that it's hard to break it is hard to break because comfortability you know comfort is it's comfortable you know even if it's not happy you're you're at a place where you don't want to go out your comfort zone because you're afraid of getting hurt or yeah failing or anything like that i mean you know one of the things that i do want to divulge here you know i want to make i gotta i gotta express my vulnerability to you because you know there's times i've had breakdowns catastrophes have happened personally you know personal breakdowns where like i felt like i've reached my limits i've reached the end uh completely broken back down and battered you know zero money zero things to show for all the effort that i put in somebody stole everything i had and the problem is i still woke up the next day

so i had another 24 hours to do something else and if you keep wallowing in self-pity you know you're just extinguishing your own flame and i know it's hard to get up and to move and i know it's hard right but nobody's going to be there to help you nobody's going to come and lift you up you've got your two feet so take the next step and you know which direction it is to go to safety and if you don't take it anyway because worst case scenario you're just going to backtrack but you're going to know where not to go now so i don't want you to think that milo's had this incredible life of opportunity because i haven't there is a just like a destructive like just trail of destruction behind me i just haven't stopped moving and now i know which direction to move in with confidence and how to value my experience because i have accomplishments i could show for it and if somebody doesn't believe me tough you know because i don't tell you that i'm going to be good yeah i can show you that i'm good yeah you went out and you made a climbing school in a place where if you told someone anyone 10 years ago they'd be like what are you talking about climbing school in iraq for let me pose you a a suggestion how about we go to north korea and start a basketball school how crazy does that sound sounds just sounds absolutely ludicrous yeah right well that's what this idea sounded like when we started it the difference was i had a bunch of people in iraq or just a group of people like five people in iraq who said we absolutely want this and if you give us any resources we will immediately put them to work towards that goal so all i did was just got whatever i could and i gave it to them and that collaboration it just worked man it start it's it sparked the fire then i know you're not the guys that are there in iraq but i mean i i'm sure that you can kind of gather kind of like their mentality and like who they are oh god it's like outdoor people if you want to just talk about them for a minute and kind of shout out to them and talk talk about that because that's that's deserved on their part too i gotta be honest you know i can't take the credit for this entire project i'm the guy that's operating outside of iraq right but these guys are the guys that are operating within the constraints of an economic island practically every country in the world has placed sanctions so you can't send products or produce services that iraqis purchase so they just have whatever resources they came up with as a country then and there's a wall between them and everybody else these guys have zero exposure to the outdoor world world except for through some internet that kind of works through that's not in their language so they see pretty photos and videos and these are the guys who are the first generation there is no generation before them that had went and explored because they're dead yeah because there was conflict there for over a century and so these are literally the explorers they are in it's like a sample it's like this this you know vacuum this petri dish and they are the first people exploring and this past month just within the past month we have rediscovered a lost canyon we set a new route to one of the most popular mountains as well as another route you know and we have now uh discovered a new a a series of new things in caves that were only discovered i think five months ago by a german team that went in there and there's nobody else exploring caves in the country we're working with the head of the water keepers for the country as well nabil musa and we are exploring uh how to do river sports as well as you know diving and things like that so this school the scope of it has grown significantly not through my actions but because these guys are going out there with no experience except for what they taught themselves and they're entering areas where by the way there's mines explosives so on the iranian border there's literally millions of mines the first time that i went climbing with them we found them we found a mortar shell and a bunch of bullets an exploded mortar shell so if you're going hiking in iraq and you're going on a trail that nobody's hiked before you can step on a mine right so this team of people is right now exploring the lost parts of iraq these guys are insane they are so passionate they have regular jobs families a cultural expectation to do things and they also are busy with their lives just like every single one of us paying the bills learning figuring out what they're going to do today they have things that they got to do for people like family or friends they have wives children you know they have debts they have no opportunity and yet they find through passion this burning desire that will not let them stay home but they throw themselves out into this incredibly dangerous undiscovered terrain i feel like that's part two it's hard to summarize how i feel like i'm in the presence of greatness when i'm around them and they're like milo without you we couldn't do this and i'm just like no no without you i you couldn't have this man i'm just like this cheerleader on the side yeah that's like publicizing this but you know i feel like i feel like everybody in the group uh feels that way i feel like that's that childhood kind of like uh you know that want to explore and they're just freely showing it and actively listening to that childhood voice in your head to hey go climb that rock go paddle down that river go you know do something climb climb a tree in the woods you know go explore it's that i think everyone has that as a kid and like i said it a lot of people lose that sense of adventure that sense of awe and wonder and um unless you've actually gone out and been somewhere where not many people have been or just out in the middle of the wilderness it's kind of hard to describe that feeling of just being in awe of nature and that sense of adventure you know i just i i do want to mention though that this you know this isn't all sunshine and rainbows we had um the founder of the team probably one of the first five people who started climbing in iraq his name was raza and on september 9 2019 he was the first casualty of climbing in iraq and we experienced the moment where everything could turn upside down yeah because in the culture of the country you have to put yourself in their shoes you have to realize these are people where for several generations the only place they could survive not live but survive barely get enough food and shelter was in the villages within their community so this is the first generation of people who are saying i would like to walk in that direction for three days i will sleep on the ground we'll go up mountains and cross streams and stuff and then we'll come back and so the people who are in the villages they're like why what you're crazy why would you like to go in that direct what's over there and they're like nothing nothing's over there we're just gonna walk out over there right so we have a we have a culture that is completely inexperienced to why the outdoors even matters and suddenly this sport that they don't understand called mountaineering has produced its first casualty and so the entire country suddenly is at a fork in the road do we reject this crazy sport that doesn't bring any value that i understand because someone has died or do we just let these people continue to do this and have our children participate in a sport that kills right and so we were at a very very dangerous juncture in the development of the sport in the country and i was fortunate in having interviewed hauraz who had become a good friend of mine uh several times i recorded my interactions with them obviously because we're producing a documentary about this so that everybody that's listening here can share and uh i'd love for you to link the video so i'll send you the link yeah but i produced a video where i used interviews with haraz and i used his own words to describe the passion with which he pursued outdoor recreation outdoor sports mountaineering climbing and you and his words where he talked about recognizing the risks recognizing the passion that would make it impossible for us to stop people from going into the outdoors and recognizing that there was an absolute necessity for a program that taught people how to responsibly go outdoors how to be responsible and safe his words the person that died saying i don't have the right equipment i don't have the right experience and i might die but if i die i hope that it is because i am developing this dream so that others can climb safely after me yeah and uh you know i can't say that whether it was that video or the collective actions of all of us but climbing is more popular than ever we have 50 women in our classes we have a female instructor as one of our four instructors sally who is the first middle eastern woman to summit lenin peak and she has a something else planned for the next month that i want to talk about because i don't spoil it for her yet but we have created an environment where women can achieve equally to men which is unprecedented in the country as well i'm not going to talk about that yet because we're still developing what's going on over there and observing what sort of things are going on we don't want to create any dangerous situations for anybody but i do want to say that the sport of the outdoor sports in iraq uh are creating a very very unique environment and we are the ones that are that are heading this so so i do want to say that you know this is real this isn't some sort of uh you know i'm not trying to glamorize this i'm not trying to to say like oh man outdoor sports is radical and sometimes people die it's like no this is real it has consequences if you don't do this correctly you're going to get hurt you're going to injure people in your life you're going to change drastically the way that your family and your friends you know lives are yeah through the actions that you're doing on the other hand we can't stop ourselves we can't stop people from going outdoors that's where freedom lies that's where we don't have rules yeah you're not going to have a debate between the eagle and the bear no one is going to eat the other one that's how they live and you know the rules in nature there is no rules you can't put rules in there so that's where we're going to look in order to find you know a voice inside of us when we listen to that so that's what you're saying about going out to nature and yeah you know really appreciating it we evolved in nature yeah so these strange constructs the ability to speak to you through a flat piece of plastic that shows glowing lights and produces sounds the fact that i have shelter and running water and electricity is really a completely novel concept that we have not evolved to at all yeah but if you go outdoors and nature calling that's just home yeah so teach yourself some basic skills and start enjoying it yeah it's out there nature is one of those things and that that risky aspect is something that you always have to talk about especially with adventure sports i mean that risk of death i mean from the outside some people look at it as the whole oh my god radical like they're they're crazy and they just accept it it's like you don't exactly accept it but you accept the fact that it's mother nature and you know anything can happen and people inside the community i mean if you're in there long enough you're going to know somebody that's died climbing or died in some way doing something it's just a part of being a part of the outdoor community i feel like it's it's a sad aspect but you know and then mountaineering also i mean it's it's just a part it's a part that you have to explore yeah and people that don't understand it just and it's hard to describe unless you've actually been out in that type 2 fund where you're out there just miserable to understand why people do it because some people just don't understand why people would put themselves through hell let me tell you man after after you have been you know hauling gear up a mountain for several days in a row when you discover a hot spring you you understand comfort and pleasure in a way that you could not possibly understand it if you're working in nine to five you just can't you just can't it's not going to happen and so i mean you know everybody could say that about what they do right but like and i don't want to say that i'm sort of sort of like you know authority on this but what i do speak from is experience yeah and i know how to give it my all and have life slap me right back in the face and just say too bad not today and over and over how many years has taken and you know what i can't say i'm successful yet i can say i did something cool but we're still working on it yeah you know so i hope you guys get a chance adventure milo.com iraq check out the information about the project you can see all the other projects on my website as well please consider making a donation the only reason the school is running right now is because of donations that we received from across the world including patagonia and adidas who really needed to have their arms twisted in order to make that happen but if you are a climber consider that these people do not have access to climbing gear climbing training or anything else and we are the first people providing it with your donation we can really make a difference in changing the entire culture of an entire country yeah deeply appreciate it thank you yeah no problem and is there anything else that you want to end with anything else that you want to talk about just to kind of close out or is that about it i mean if anybody's got questions i you know encourage you to reach out uh you can find me on social media adventure milo all of them facebook instagram twitter um so uh send me an email visit the website make a donation even five dollars man i mean that makes a huge difference you know we've had big donations small donations but it's it's the participation and the betterment of you know mankind all over the world no matter where it is makes a huge difference awesome well it was great to hear your story very happy to have you on i'm sure i'll be in touch um with everything so thank you very much and that's the end of the episode i will see everyone else later on the next episode thank you if you enjoyed this episode please comment like subscribe review and share this episode with your friends thank you very much for tuning in again and i will look forward to talking to you guys next time on the next episode thank you and have a great day

Episode 0

In this episode you are welcomed to the podcast. It starts out introducing you to the host. After that Mitch goes into what the show is about. He describes how the show is and details how it is about allowing people to share their path into what they do in the outdoor world. Then it goes into how he plans to grow the podcast and wants it to be in person down the line. From there he tells some of his own story in the outdoor community. It starts with his skiing from a young age but never got out west to ski until college. He then goes into his freshman year of college and how he joined the mountaineers and also made it out west to ski for the first time. He was hooked and threw himself at the outdoor community after that. He details how he got into climbing heavily while in college and how that continued after he graduated. He did not get out west at all for about two years after graduating and finally decided it was time to move out west and found a job in Denver. He moved out there and was still working on projects when this idea for a podcast hit him and he started working on it. Now that this preview episode is launched he is starting to work on his guest interviews and is planning a big drop of the first five in the near future. This podcast will then be week to week it is explained. He thanks listeners asks them to like and follow and is excited to get rolling and will see everyone on the next episode.