When I moved to Montana more than twenty years ago, “home” for me still smelled of orange blossoms, a sweet whiff that conjured the utopic image of small-town Southern California: familiar faces, fruit and vegetable stands on corners, orange groves gently rising to dun hills and big blue mountains. That scent is warm twilights practicing tennis on the high school courts. It’s watching sunsets from the little gazebo my parents built on the hill in our backyard that looked out across the tumbleweed field beyond. The groves were torn out to make way for track housing. And yet. The scent reminds me still.

So too does the hot musk of rare rain on sage and pavement. And goddamn, the salty brine of the coast. That smell is the cove in Laguna with the mean beach break where my sister and I learned to swim in the ocean, where my dad carried us out on his back past the foam; it’s shirley temples at the dockside in Dana Point after sailing on our tiny sailboat. It’s vague memories, like a horizon veiled in sea mist, of my parents putting us to bed in the tiny forward berth on that boat and falling asleep to gentle rocking and the slap of sea against the bow.

And under the scents of memory, my California is movement. It’s a muscular land pushing against itself. It’s earthquakes in the middle of the night and diving for doorways, cracks in the wall, dust billowing from far mountains, bathtubs filled with water, just in case. It’s toting that ziplock bag full of non-perishable snacks, labeled with your name, on the first day of school to hand over to the teacher. Just in case.

California to me is dust and heat and smog. Salt and sand and waves and powerful earth.

I meant to return to it those twenty years ago. I did. After all, I would never be “from here” the way born-in-Montanans were “from here.”

The land, though, had the last word.

From my essay “Home Land” in Camas Magazine. Such an honor to be the 2026 Kittredge Distinguished Visiting Writer and be offered space in the publication of my alma mater. Support burgeoning writers by ordering the issue with the full essay here.

When I spoke to author Heather Hansman earlier this year for this essay on The Rise of the Literary Outdoorswoman, she told me that she came up in both raft guiding and outdoor journalism reading what she thought were the classics. “Abbey, Krakauer, Leopold,” she said. “I tried to fit myself into their mold for a long time because other stories were harder to find. In large part, I think, because of who publishes and repeats stories, and whose voices get elevated.”

Now Hansman’s third book, Fierce Country, is hitting shelves, and hitting right at the heart of elevating suppressed voices—while knitting together some damn good adventure yarns that the world has been missing out on for decades.

The book is a gorgeous and powerful portrait of three outdoorswomen who unapologetically blew the roof off what the world thought women were capable of, and showed the rest of us how to love and protect the natural world in the process: Georgie White, a whitewater rafting pioneer in the Grand Canyon; Anne LaBastille, a homesteader, wilderness guide and conservationist; and Delores LaChapelle, the deep powder guru with a cult-like following.

But rather than a one-dimensional canonization (you all know I hate those), Hansman honors them by refusing to shy from the reality that these were also women who lied and drank, were obsessed and cocky and problematic. And if that weren’t enough to keep you turning pages, the most propulsive thread of the whole book is Hansman’s excavation of her own place in this lineage of outdoorswomen. It’s a riveting, beautiful search for complicated heroines in a space that’s long left them unacknowledged.

I asked Hansman how she came up with the idea for Fierce Country. She said that Georgie White appeared in her first book Downriver, and Delores LaChapelle made a cameo in her second book, Powder Days. When her editor suggested she lean into these women, though, “my gut reaction was that I didn’t want to do a ‘girl book’,” Hansman said. “But then I thought that response was really interesting. There’s a core tension to being a woman in the adventure space, and that core tension is what pulled me in.”

Hansman and I have talked about this tension before. There are all the fraught narratives around “women-only”, “female firsts”, the classic “there’s only room for one” attitude, toxic masculinity, and, as we all know, around feminism in general. And there’s the erroneous idea that books written about women, by women, are only for women (news flash: that’s as absurd as believing that women won’t read Into Thin Air or The Road or any number of books written by men about men).

Hansman and I dream of the day when, regardless of the gender lens, a good story is just a good story. Period. Same with compelling characters. The glorious thing about Fierce Country is that it has all those elements, at the same time it underlines the fact that these were women, who were doing things in their times that women were not supposed to do. They followed their passions, behaved badly, were totally enthralled with elements of the natural world, and are examples to all of us for how to live on our own terms. For those “sins”, they were called “crazy” and “witches”, were subjected to ire and harassment, and systematically underestimated and shut out.

One more point: this book also is not just about these women. It’s brimming with history about the Grand Canyon, the Wilderness Act, public lands, and the birth of the conservation movements that shaped our modern America. “That context felt important to me,” Hansman said. “It’s the world these women were living in, that we get to live in now today.”

If you like adventure, surprising characters, conservation, and lovely writing, Fierce Country is the one new book you need to read this summer.

When my husband Ben and I met big wave surfer Tikinui Smith last year in Tahiti, it took the entire day before he admitted he was chasing surfing’s wildest record: to surf the biggest wave ever paddled into. Smith is so modest he didn’t want to talk about himself. But me being me, I couldn’t stop asking him questions. A…

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My latest story, for Esquire, is part adventure, part plot twist, and 100% compelling character. Montana’s race for Congress, once a foregone conclusion for Republicans according to political pundits, is now in play as a rare competitive seat. Is a young union leader and public lands worker who fights forest fires, and eschews purity tests and polarizing rhetoric, the one to turn Montana purple again?

Story out today on Apple News. Look for it for free on Esquire’s website next week. Here’s a sneak peak:

HIGH IN the air outside of Fairbanks, Alaska, the twin engine’s roar competed with the howling of the wind barreling through the plane’s yawning door. Three thousand feet below sprawled a sea of black spruce, licked in flame. This fire wasn’t big yet, not like some of the others Sam Forstag, a firefighter from Missoula, Montana, had seen that benighted the sky with billowing smoke. He sat in the plane with five other smokejumpers, an elite group of wildland firefighters who parachute into rugged, remote terrain to battle burns. They had passed over a small development of cabins just three miles distant. In the midsummer heat of June 2025, this fire was the top priority.

At 30 years old, Forstag—outfitted like the others in U.S. Army combat-designed Kevlar jumpsuits, tall leather boots, a full parachute system, and a motorcycle-style helmet with a face mask for protection against landing in trees—had already launched himself into dozens of fires in his four years as smokejumper. As the plane circled above the flames, he didn’t feel the same intensity of nerves that he used to. And anyway, he had plenty of other things to think about.

Just months before, in February, the Trump administration terminated thousands of people from the agencies that manage the 640 million acres of public lands in the U.S.—including people trained to provide the wildfire fighting support smokejumpers critically need to keep them safe. Forstag, a union leader of Forest Service employees in western Montana in possession of a surprisingly deep well of policy knowledge from engaging in state legislative organizing in his off-seasons, had been working constantly between jumping on fires to protect his colleagues’ rights. He was increasingly fed up with the silence from Montana’s all-Republican (and astronomically wealthy) Congressional delegation, despite the fact that a rural state like Montana, with a high proportion public lands and an equally high proportion of public lands workers, was hit hard by the cuts—most of which targeted people who made less than $19 an hour.

Forstag himself, making roughly $20 an hour and working a thousand hours of overtime each summer risking his life to fight fire, could barely afford the mortgage on his 1,100-square foot house alongside skyrocketing monthly expenses. But Montana’s Representative Ryan Zinke, famed for his lean on his Navy SEAL resume and as the Interior Secretary during Trump’s first term who resigned over ethics violations, wouldn’t grant a meeting with Forstag and the rest of the union leaders to discuss the impact of the cuts.

The state only recently went all-red in 2024, when voters ousted three-term Democratic Senator Jon Tester, the last working citizen in the Senate as a third-generation farmer, in favor of novice MAGA Republican Tim Sheehy, in a race that shattered spending records as Republicans aimed to re-take the Senate. Before that, Montana had been purple for nearly a century. Now, Trump’s policies attacking public lands and the people who steward them, and the inequality that’s glaringly increasing as Montana transforms into what many see as a playground for the rich, are rendering that newfound red status precarious.

After Forstag spoke at several local rallies protesting the administration’s actions over the course of the spring, including one bursting with nine thousand attendees, people all over the state had been asking him to challenge Zinke to flip the seat for the Democrats. He was, in many ways, a ridiculously compelling opposition candidate: the smokejumper versus the Navy SEAL, the barely-scraping-by union leader against one of the wealthier men in Congress, the public lands protector facing down the public lands hollower, the young man against the old guard. And the analogy between leaping into a flaming wilderness and entering one of the most dysfunctional Congresses in recent memory? It was too good to pass up.

But running for Congress would mean resigning as a smokejumper, given federal employees cannot run for partisan political office. Forstag would have no financial safety net if he lost. Running would mean putting everything on the line to stand up for working people like him, and the ones with even less than he had.

But the smokejumper wasn’t, in fact, thinking about any of those things in the wind-pummeled the cabin. As he maneuvered toward the open door, all he focused on was the far ground below, and the four-point check list meant to save his life. He touched each piece of equipment on his parachute system as he mentally recited: drogue handle, cutaway handle, reserve handle, lower reserve static line.

Then he stepped into the thin air of the burning morning.

What he didn’t know then was that Zinke would eventually make an announcement that would change the whole narrative, long after there was no turning back. Nor did the smokejumper know, as he hurtled through space, that this was the fire that would nearly kill him. The one that would weight everything to come.

TO UNDERSTAND smokejumping is to start at the beginning.

After World War One, in the burgeoning age of complete fire suppression, the U.S. Forest Service began using aircraft for aerial fire detection in the West. Once one was spotted, wildland firefighters would then hike twenty or more rugged miles into the burn, arriving tired, and likely with the fire having blown up enough to meet them halfway. In 1934 the idea was first proposed of dropping self-sufficient firefighters directly into the blaze to provide initial attack.

The notion of men swan diving from planes into wildfires was immediately dismissed as absurdly risky. One forester with the agency, headquartered in Missoula, wrote in 1935, “The best information I could get from experienced fliers is that all parachute jumpers are more or less crazy—just a little bit unbalanced, otherwise they wouldn’t be engaged in such a hazardous undertaking.” And yet, the concept wouldn’t let go, and in 1940, two men made the first jump into a fire on the Nez Perce forest in Idaho. Smokejumping was born.

Norman Maclean, venerated author of A River Runs Through It, once wrote that the first smokejumpers “were not far from their origins as parachute jumpers turned stunt performers dropping from the wings of planes at county fairs just for the hell of it plus a few dollars, less hospital expenses.”

Yet to imply these firefighters are reckless is to invalidate the insane amount of knowledge, training, and risk calculation needed to pull off leaping into wild burning terrain. Smokejumpers are scientists, understanding wind direction and how thermals behave in the air, and how those elements affect fire on the ground. They must be able to read fire behavior in the space of a gasp. They’re arborists and climbers, able to descend from trees after landing in them. They’re master woodsmen adept with chainsaws, crack doctors trained in emergency medicine, wizards with sewing machines who repair much of their own gear.

They are so uniquely skilled that in 1951, as the U.S. government was beginning clandestine operations in Southeast Asia, a young Central Intelligence Agency sent two agents to the smokejumper base outside Missoula to learn to parachute into mountainous, isolated areas. The agents returned and reported to the CIA there was no need to send any other agents; there was a cadre of men out here already trained and willing to take on secret missions. From the 1950s into the 1960s, smokejumpers became a covert weapon in the secret war in Laos, training Hmong forces; and in Vietnam, Cuba, Tibet, and the Arctic. A Missoula jumper, Gar Thorsrud, led air operations in the Bay of Pigs invasion.

Naturally, smokejumping is wreathed in a familiar kind of mystique. “Within the American mythos, there’s a certain strata of people who are special operators, commando types, that serve as this modern archetype for masculinity, the ‘ultimate warrior,’” Conor Hogan, a smokejumper who grew up with Forstag and fought fire alongside him out of Missoula, told me. He lists Navy SEALs and Green Berets among examples. “Smokejumping is one of the only versions of that”—old CIA connections aside—“that doesn’t involve violence.”

Wildland firefighter David Stadler Wildland firefighter David Stadler said that when he first met Forstag on a burn, he got what he calls the typical smokejumper vibe of “Iron Man surfer bro... but humble about it.” (Stadler asked not to be identified by his position, and was clear that his opinions are his own, not those of any agency. After DOGE cuts and the myriad examples made of firing remaining employees who spoke up, federal employees are afraid of government retaliation for going on the record.)

Jumpers are quiet heroes, Stadler said. On the first big fire he ever fought, he watched a load of jumpers “falling out of the sky” to aid the crews already on the ground. It was hot, hard work, and after they’d all gotten the fire to lay down, they collapsed onto their pads, exhausted. Stadler woke at one in the morning to a glow on the other side of the ridge. The fire had rekindled and was making a run. He worried about whether it would blaze down into camp. Should the crews drag themselves awake and hike to work on it? Then he saw headlights start heading up the mountain.

“It was two smokejumpers. They had gotten up in the middle of the night, saw what I saw, and hiked up the ridge to keep an eye on the fire. They stayed up all night watching it so the rest of the crew could get some sleep. That’s the moment I realized what smokejumpers are all about.”

That, he said, is the kind of guy Forstag is. “He’s one of them.”

Rural hospitals are so, so important. They were already struggling before this administration’s budget cuts that passed last fall, which will likely be the death knell for many of these hospitals. Nearly a quarter of America’s population lives in a rural area, and without these hospitals, people wouldn’t make it to cities before the worst happens. And t…

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After the Tahoe avalanche, it took me a long time to read the coverage of it. As a skier, I knew it would be devastating. Of course it was—but not just for the tragedy and loss and grief. So much of the coverage was dripping in judgment for the actions that led to those skiers being killed. And little of it seemed to offer empathy for those who survived, who had to try to find and dig out any they could, then spend a horrific night in the mountains before help came. Few pieces acknowledged the trauma those survivors will have to experience.

I wrote a piece some years ago for Adventure Journal, when the mountain community was just beginning to come to terms with the emotional trauma avalanches exact after the 2017 tragedy in which we lost Inge Perkins and Hayden Kennedy. I’m pulling out a few highlights from that story from Jennifer Fiebig, a therapist practicing out of Durango, CO, who was one of the first therapists to counsel people for outdoor trauma, for comfort and context. Fiebig is also an outdoorswoman, with an intimate knowledge of how accidents can affect people.

And below her quotes is the full story, The Reckoning, which follows the journeys of a few skiers who were willing to share their stories after surviving avalanches, often when others didn’t, should you care to read it.

May we have empathy, at all times.

Comfort from a Counselor

Jennifer Fiebig, a therapist practicing out of Bozeman, regularly treats avalanche survivors and rescuers. She says it’s common for survivors to present symptoms associated with PTSD, along with dual diagnoses of anxiety and depression. In addition to flashbacks and recurring nightmares, Fiebig says, it’s common to dissociate and not remember the event itself.

The other common emotional response that Fiebig notes among her clients is shame.

Backcountry snowsports require mastery of an enormous amount of expertise: knowledge of snow science, weather, terrain, technical equipment, and companion rescue. Triggering an avalanche represents a gap in that knowledge or a failure in its execution—a mistake of sometimes fatal proportions. The result is a shameful experience that many survivors don’t want to reveal to their peers.

“There’s a culture of analyzing all the data after an accident that takes the humanity out of the survivors,” says Fiebig. “They’re already thinking ‘I killed my friend’ or going through other grief, and then descending into a shame spiral on top of that. We need to know what happened, but we also need to make that space for the survivor to feel cared for, to feel validated that they did the best they could do, and recognize the pain that they just went through.”

The Reckoning

A Reeling Mountain Community Begins to Face Avalanche Trauma

From Adventure Journal Volume 11

It is important to affirm, and prove, that we go to the mountains to live and not to die, that we are not fanatics but firm believers, and that the few accidents which occur are hard but not useless lessons.

– Guido Rey, Italian alpinist, 1861-1935

ONE year after an avalanche swept her over a cliff, the day she nearly died came back to haunt Melissa Hornbein.

The ghost of the memory gripped her in May 2012, just as she and her partner Aaron Gams crested a ridge on Taylor Mountain, on the western side of Teton Pass. It was a bluebird morning, and the snow was bulletproof after a hard freeze the night before, still hours away from warming into prime spring corn. They were traversing under a cornice cemented to the mountain when the panic hit Hornbein like a punch to the gut.

Unable to breathe, heart pounding, suddenly soaked in sweat, she froze. She was certain that the snow was about to slide out from beneath them, swallowing them in its violence. She knew it was irrational, that the snowpack that morning was as stable as it gets—but terror was real, made even more frightening in its disembodiment from the circumstances.

“I didn’t know if the fear was completely visceral or if it was rooted in actual danger,” she recalls. “What that avalanche took away from me was knowing how to trust myself.”

Most avalanche narratives deal with the accident itself: the science behind the snowpack and the factors, both human and natural, that led up to the mountain releasing itself, while avoiding the impact on the psyches of those involved. But the truth is that many avalanche survivors suffer from lingering post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and other emotional trauma. This is partly a result of a North American culture that struggles to deal with mental health issues in general, and partly a result of a unique loop of shame and survivor’s guilt.

But the narrative broadened, perhaps forever, in October 2017, when an avalanche on Montana’s Imp Peak claimed the life of 23-year-old Inge Perkins, a rising star in the backcountry skiing and climbing worlds. Her partner and well-known climber Hayden Kennedy, 27, survived the slide but couldn’t locate Perkins, who was buried with her transceiver turned off. After searching in vain for three hours, Kennedy drove home to their apartment in Bozeman, wrote a note describing where to find her, then killed himself. His father Michael, the former editor of Climbing magazine, later wrote, “Hayden survived the avalanche, but not the unbearable loss of his partner in life.”

The tragedy laid bare the magnitude of loss and trauma left in the wake of an avalanche and has spurred a reeling mountain community to begin to address the emotional aftermath experienced by those who’ve been involved in one, whether they’ve been swept up themselves, participated in a rescue, or lost a loved one to the volatility of the mountains.

Even as numbers of backcountry users increase (a snowsports industry study documents a staggering 4.1 million users who reported accessing the backcountry in 2016-17), avalanche fatalities in the U.S. have remained static over the past decade, averaging about 27 per year. The reality is that the vast majority of non-fatal avalanche accidents go unreported. A Canadian study estimates that only about 10% of non-fatal incidents are reported, which means that 90% of people who’ve been involved in avalanches are slipping by unnoticed—and so is their associated trauma.

Jennifer Fiebig, a therapist practicing out of Bozeman, regularly treats avalanche survivors and rescuers. She says it’s common for survivors to present symptoms associated with PTSD, along with dual diagnoses of anxiety and depression. In addition to flashbacks and recurring nightmares, Fiebig says, it’s common to dissociate and not remember the event itself.

THE last thing Hornbein recalls from Memorial Day weekend in 2011 is stopping at a grocery store on the way up Wyoming’s Togwotee Pass with Aaron. She doesn’t remember boot-packing the final pitch of the snowy chute, the skis strapped to their packs swaying with each step kicked into the steep face. She doesn’t remember the instant when the top layer of snow cracked and began to move, or being swept over cliffs. She doesn’t know how Gams got them out to the road with his ripped-apart knee.

The next thing she remembers is waking up in the hospital with a fractured pelvis, a fractured skull, and a dozen broken teeth, asking “Were we in an avalanche?”

But her body began remembering immediately. She would experience the sudden sensation of falling when her physical therapist did subtle movements to her head. That feeling of plummeting would continue to engulf Hornbein out of nowhere for years.

While her body slowly healed from the trauma, the gap in her memory played with her mind. “It messed with my sense of reality. I was constantly double-checking what was a real memory and what wasn’t,” she says. It also undermined her decision-making skills, particularly when she was in the backcountry—because she couldn’t remember how she and Gams made the calls that day that led to the snow cracking off the top of the couloir. Even in the safest conditions, she’d experience overwhelming panic responses and question whether to call off the mission.

The anxiety also spilled into her everyday life, especially after her daughter was born. “For the first six months or so, I worried so much about this little baby and having no control over her health and development,” Hornbein recalls. “All of these horrific things that I imagined happening to her were in reality very unlikely. I was hypervigilant, worried that if I wasn’t constantly on alert, something would happen.”

It was a classic trauma response, according to Fiebig.

“Sure, it seems like I don’t have dramatic symptoms in the aftermath,” Hornbein goes on to acknowledge. “But you never know what’s going to trigger it, until something does. And you think about the fact that this is a community that prides itself on being rugged, independent, and strong. But there are people who are walking around wounded. They’re putting up a good front, but that doesn’t mean they’re not going to break tomorrow.”

The other common emotional response that Fiebig notes among her clients is shame—which is also one of the reasons why so many people fail to go public about their accidents.

Backcountry snowsports require mastery of an enormous amount of expertise: knowledge of snow science, weather, terrain, technical equipment, and companion rescue. Triggering an avalanche represents a gap in that knowledge or a failure in its execution—a mistake of sometimes fatal proportions. The result is a shameful experience that many survivors don’t want to reveal to their peers.

AARON Gams remembers everything about that day on Togwotee Pass.

As the slide came to rest, he was only partially buried and scanned the debris for Hornbein. He spotted her immediately, only partially buried as well—but she was unconscious, with blood trickling from her ear. Their gear had been swallowed by the snow. With all three major ligaments torn in his knee and a separated shoulder, he somehow pulled Melissa out of the debris and wrestled them both the mile out to the road, where he flagged down a passing car.

Despite this heroic effort, he says, “I felt like I had massively screwed up—I was the one who was pushing for going higher. I was so worried that I had really messed up Melissa. I was feeling guilty right away.” That summer as the snow melted out, he returned to the site of the avalanche repeatedly to search for their lost gear, a dual act of healing and personal penance.

“There’s a culture of analyzing all the data after an accident that takes the humanity out of the survivors,” says Fiebig. “They’re already thinking ‘I killed my friend’ or going through other grief, and then descending into a shame spiral on top of that. We need to know what happened, but we also need to make that space for the survivor to feel cared for, to feel validated that they did the best they could do, and recognize the pain that they just went through.”

Professional skier Elyse Saugstad is deeply familiar with the shame phenomenon. She was part of the 2012 Tunnel Creek avalanche outside of Stevens Pass in central Washington that received national attention, mostly because it involved a group of more than a dozen highly knowledgeable people in the ski and snowboard industry. The avalanche swept up Saugstad, who pulled her airbag, and three other skiers—Jim Jack, Chris Rudolph and John Brenan—who were killed in the slide.

“I had to talk about it because I was thrust into the spotlight, but embarrassment is one of the main reasons people don’t talk about their avalanche accidents,” Saugstad says. “Especially among the pros, you don’t want people thinking you made a mistake. But even highly professional people in the industry make mistakes. You can be really well-educated, but we’re human, and to be human is to err.”

To channel her emotional trauma after the accident, Saugstad threw herself into education around avalanche airbags. She didn’t want her friends’ deaths to be in vain. But some people leveled accusations that she was using her accident to promote a product. On top of that, she felt judgment from the many people who felt compelled to scrutinize the mistakes the group made that day in Tunnel Creek.

“I understood that people would judge what happened, so I did my best to shut out the negative criticisms,” she says. “I had already lost my friends and that was bad enough. Just as long as I was honest with myself about the mistakes we made and could objectively go over what I personally did wrong alongside the group, that was enough.”

Saugstad believes that bringing avalanche trauma into the open—and taking judgment out of the equation—starts with professionals telling their own stories publicly. She’s joined in that belief by well-respected experts in the snow safety industry, including Dave Richards, director of the Avalanche Office at Utah’s Alta Ski Area.

If the avalanche community sets the standard for safety mechanisms like beacons and rescue techniques, he says, it makes sense for the same group to set the standard on dealing with the mental trauma that inevitably follows an avalanche accident. “It’s not as sexy as explosives—there’s nothing cool about it—but it saves as many lives as your beacon skills. And even if it only saves one life, then it’s all worth it.”

Richards is leading by example in beginning to tell his own story publicly. His nightmare began with pulling the broken body of a young man from the snow during a response to an avalanche in Utah’s Wasatch Mountains. The hard, sad, and sometimes gruesome rescues came one after another over the next 14 years, while Richards attempted to play it tough. In 2016, visions of these tragic accidents began flooding his brain in an overload that caused him to shut down. His co-workers finally intervened and urged him to seek therapy.

“I’m willing to stand in front of the whole Wasatch community and say that this is the real deal,” Richards says. “I think the rest of the professional community is as well. You just have to be willing to say, ‘I’m a little broken.’ When things go bad, it hurts, and you just have to admit that it hurts. That’s the first step.”

This is the saving grace in facing trauma: the mountain community is already a uniquely strong one for processing it together. “We’ve chosen a lifestyle in which loss is inherent, so a support structure is organically part of the community,” said Christian Beckwith, founder of Alpinist magazine. “It’s a tribe, and its members understand the deal, and one another. There’s no shame in the trauma. It’s the price we pay for living in such close proximity to life itself.”

Beckwith is intimately familiar with how high that price can be. His own earth-shattering accident happened in 2013, when he was skiing Prospectors Mountain in Wyoming’s Grand Teton National Park with good friend and fellow Jackson Hole resident Jared Spackman. An avalanche broke above them as they were ascending the Apocalypse Couloir, and the slide carried Spackman 1,000 vertical feet down the narrow chute, claiming his life. Beckwith was unscathed.

“The bomb goes off, shattering all equilibrium,” he said, speaking quietly of the aftermath of such an event. “Eventually, the ringing in your ears begins to subside, the dust begins to settle. You realize you’re in the bottom of the crater, and you do your best to crawl out of the bomb hole, stagger to your feet, and begin walking in the direction you think is right.”

HORNBEIN and Gams have found their way back to the mountains in the years since Togwotee Pass. It didn’t happen overnight. They eased back into skiing, navigating the twists and turns of their emotional and physical responses—like one day on the Sphinx the following winter in Montana’s Madison Range, as the weather warmed and Hornbein struggled with whether to call off the mission.

But the irrational fear and the panic attacks gradually disappeared, edged out by that unequaled sense of elation that any snow devotee can recognize, even if they can’t always name it. For Hornbein and Gams, the backcountry is where they met, where they fell in love, a vast wild they hope to share with their daughter, and their love of it is brighter than the fear left behind by the avalanche.

“I remember skiing off Teton Pass a few years after in waist-deep snow and thinking, I love this,” Hornbein says, the passion spilling through her voice. “That accident isn’t a reason to stop going to the mountains. It’s just a reason to think.”

When Republican Terry Zink spoke to me for my recent Politico story, “I Didn’t Vote for This”: A Revolt Against Doge Cuts, Deep in Trump Country, he suspected he might get a bit of flak from some folks on the right for publicly disagreeing with the party line.

But it wasn’t “a bit of flak”. It was a skewering. It was pitchforks and torches.

And it wasn’t …

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A few months ago, The Atlantic published "Thomas McGuane Is The Last of His Kind", a nostalgic piece mourning what we lose when we lose the literary outdoorsman. It generated a ton of chatter, most of it—that I saw—criticism. Not against Thomas McGuane, who is undeniably a great writer. But against the general premise, which was, quite frankly, offensive and totally blindered. Here’s why.

A few years ago, I went looking for mainstream adventure books featuring women. I was starting in on writing a manuscript, a survival epic on the first all-women’s ascent of Denali back in 1970, and I wanted examples to look to. I found shockingly few, even fewer that were actually written by women, and barely any that were based in the West, as mine was. Everyone eagerly points to Cheryl Strayed’s Wild to contradict that kind of statement. But one book, however epically popular and important, is far from critical mass.

For centuries, the pursuits that help define the outdoors, and the West in particular—from fishing and hunting to mountain climbing, wilderness expeditions, and ranching and wrangling—have been overwhelmingly dominated by white men. So have our stories about them, crafted by generations of literary outdoorsmen. These experiences have often been characterized and romanticized in writings through a set of familiar themes: violence, extraction, stoicism, infallibility, conquering, and hardened individualism. This literature has shaped the perception of adventure and rugged outdoor pursuits, and perceptions of the West itself—especially for those outside of it, turning the West into something of a caricature for the rest of Americans. It’s a brand of toxic masculinity that, also for centuries, has served to gatekeep, shunting women and people of color to the background in outdoor pursuits, the literature around them, and as legitimate voices.

At its best, literature reflects culture. Before movies, before social media, the written word was our cultural bellwether. Still today, even with the volatile state of publishing, the populace’s diminishing attention span (looking at you, TikTok), and the ever-present option to consume content through a firehose, longform written stories persist as the foundation of the lasting popular mythologies that shape how we see the world. And when we don’t see ourselves in our cultural narratives, it’s hard to feel we belong.

Author Heather Hansman told me that she came up in both raft guiding and outdoor journalism reading what she thought were the classics. “Abbey, Krakauer, Leopold,” she said. “I tried to fit myself into their mold for a long time because other stories were harder to find. In large part, I think, because of who publishes and repeats stories, and whose voices get elevated.”

But as I was preparing to release my book Thirty Below, which came out in March of 2025, I started hearing about other books from women writers slated for release. The face of the outdoors has been changing for a while, though slowly, and sometimes feeling more like lip service than anything authentic. But over the last year, a critical mass of works from a new wave of writers signaled that change, in fact, is here. It’s at the doorstep, banging to get in. Because these aren’t just niche reads. These books are receiving the kind of nods and acclaim that rockets books into the mainstream as worthy of cultural attention.

Bridget Crocker’s The River’s Daughter, a memoir framed in whitewater raft guiding, and non-binary author River Selby’s Hotshot, framed in wildfire fighting, made Amazon Editor’s Picks lists. Both are explorations of coming to terms with trauma and searching for hope through intense outdoor vocations. Both also include the themes of sexual violence—but from the perspective of the one upon whom the violence was perpetrated, in a stark departure from the Cormac McCarthy-esque kind of Western literature in which flat, often nameless female characters are raped and/or murdered early on, “and then all these guys are left hashing it out and trashing the land,” in the words of Colorado-based author Amy Irvine.

There are more. Diane Boyd’s A Woman Among Wolves, a memoir from one of the first female biologists in the country to study wolves, who lived and often researched alone in the remote Montana wilds, won the National Outdoor Book Award. Washington-based author Melissa Arnot Reid’s Enough, an excavation of inner demons and a quest for self-worth as much as an account of pursuing one of mountaineering’s improbable firsts, has been spotlighted by the likes of climbing legend Alex Honnold and literary rock star Glennon Doyle.

The wave isn’t confined to the Western writers, either. Sophie Elmhirst’s Marriage at Sea, about a sailing disaster, and Amity Gaige’s Heartwood, about a female game warden searching for a lost hiker on the Appalachian trail, swept year-end best-of booklists, a sign that broad audiences are hungry for women’s adventure stories on a far grander scale.

Before I’m accused of cherry-picking works to illustrate a trend, I’ll point out that this rush of books comes alongside Modern Huntsman, the hot new print literary magazine for outdoor enthusiasts, featuring eighty percent female writers in its last issue—a move that editor Chris Dombrowski called “pure chance” in the magazine’s mission to “publish the most potent writing we can find on the natural world.” In the new media realm, women-led outdoor publication The Westrn is surging on Substack with thousands of subscribers. And at the Banff Mountain Film and Book Festival, considered the Oscars of outdoor media, and where Thirty Below won the book competition’s Grand Prize last month, female storytellers outnumbered men for the first time in the festival’s 50-year history.

Not that this change has come about easily. As a general rule, pop culture doesn’t tend to welcome challenges to its dominant narratives with open arms. In 2018—the year that arguably started this trend, dubbed the “Year of the Woman” for the record number of women elected to Congress, and then the calls for similar empowerment in other arenas that spread like, say, a Western summer brush fire—Amy Irvine was commissioned to write an essay to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of Desert Solitaire, that iconic book from the consummate literary outdoorsman Edward Abbey. Abbey’s writings had shaped Irvine’s life and environmental activism work in profound ways. But there was also much about his writing that was dated and offensive, including “outright slurs against women and indigenous people,” Irvine said. The essay ballooned into a short book titled Desert Cabal, in which Irvine admires Abbey while challenging the white male supremacy that’s still at the core of the wilderness movement.

The backlash was swift. Irvine received everything from cold dismissal to inflammatory hate mail at her “takedown” of one of the West’s accepted environmental messiahs—even though Desert Cabal wasn’t a takedown, nor a cancellation of Abbey’s work.

Let me be clear. I have no patience for cancel culture. It’s unproductive and destructively blanket statement-y. Not to mention that Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove, Jim Harrison’s Legends of the Fall, and Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild, among other seminal outdoor works, are all high on my list of favorite reads. These and other similarly famous writers are masters of craft, and have contributed vastly to the canon and culture. Just because a book is written by a man, featuring men, doesn’t mean it’s toxic by default.

That’s just as absurd as clinging to the assumption that books written by women, featuring women, are only “for” women.

Instead, the conversation here is about expansion. It’s about a new acceptance of the reality that there’s room for more than one kind of voice, more than one kind of experience. Consider this: after one of Irvine’s readings, a man approached her. He’d been a personal friend of Abbey’s. He told her, “No one would have liked what you had to say more than Abbey himself.”

We’re overdue for a more complete roster of adventure heroes. Hansman, whose forthcoming book Fierce Country (July 2026) tells the stories of three trailblazing women who shaped America’s conservation and outdoor recreation movements, said that she wants to correct for others the fact that she didn’t have role models herself in those spaces. “It took until I was in my late thirties to realize that it wasn’t because women weren’t adventuring or writing about their adventures, but because their stories had been sidelined or pigeonholed or belittled,” she said. “When I started looking for people other than white men who could have been my heroes, it wasn’t actually that hard to find them.”

Which begs the point that, at the same time this rise of literary outdoorswomen is encouraging, we still have a long way to go in shedding the sense of privilege and entitlement inherent in the idea of who gets to be part of the West and its landscapes. Native voices and those of people of color are still too often ignored, particularly if they’re women’s voices. Skeptics may point triumphantly to bestselling author Robin Wall Kimmerer and former U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo. But again, we’re far from critical mass.

At its best, literature also catalyzes change. When we can see someone who looks the way we do or shares our experiences in our cultural mythologies, we understand that we belong. This wave of writers is legitimizing other perspectives as valid ways of interacting with the natural world (because they are valid, and have always been so) through narratives that also value vulnerability, community, family, connection, inclusivity, and preservation. We need these stories in order to paint a deeper, richer, truer picture of how we see the world, what we know of it, and what we are capable of in it.

To go straight to my latest for Politico, click here. For the inside scoop on the story, read on.

When the Department of Government Efficiency cuts to public lands agencies staff and funding started coming down in February (and kept coming), I thought: this is going to hit rural communities the hardest. Which are often deeply conservative. And are one of Trump’s strongest bases.

And yet no one seemed to be talking about that. Most of the national spotlight has fallen on the impacts of these cuts to national parks, as that’s the public lands model the majority of Americans are most familiar with: Yosemite, Yellowstone, Glacier, Grand Canyon, etc.

In the rural West, though, federal public lands are more than just a scenic spot to take a family vacation once a year. These agencies are often the primary employers in the communities adjacent to public lands. Steve Ellis, chair of the National Association of Forest Service Retirees who was stationed in small towns in Oregon, Idaho, Nevada and Alaska in his career, told me that the federal payroll from the BLM, the Forest Service, and the Fish and Wildlife Service in these small rural communities is sizable, helping pay taxes and keep the small hospital open, and provide the summer jobs employing local youth. These agency employees are the volunteer ambulance crews and firefighting crews. “Hollow out the agencies,” he said, “and the communities themselves are hollowed out.”

In addition to the employees and their families who’ve been impacted, ways of life and livelihoods that are major economic drivers out here revolve around adequately staffed and managed public lands. Ranchers and farmers use public lands for agriculture; outfitters and guides take guests into them; hunters access them regularly to put food in the family freezer; and forestry, timber, and sawmill workers fulfill contracts on them for wildfire mitigation and lumber.

“The changes this administration is wreaking on rural America are really profound,” Susan Jane Brown, a lawyer specializing in federal public lands forest management and a landowner in rural eastern Oregon, told me. “These communities are all living on the federal dime, whether it’s subsidies for grazing fees or timber or rural hospitals or rural broadband—all things that are disappearing pretty quickly. But a lot of my rural community partners, who are much more conservative, don’t want to talk about it, even though they feel it.”

In Montana, people are talking about it. And, in this state that only very recently went from purple to red, it may change the way they vote, especially as they feel and see impacts to their everyday lives on an increasing basis as these policies play out on the ground.

For more, you can read my latest for Politico: “I Didn’t Vote for This”: A Revolt Against DOGE Cuts, Deep in Trump Country.

About eight years ago, I was working on a three-part series for Outside Magazine on motherhood and big mountain careers. Mountain guides, pro skiers, avalanche forecasters, and mountaineers face uniquely weighty factors in deciding whether to become mothers. They operate in a male-dominated livelihood centered on risky endeavors that require …

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The other day, I went looking for national leadership. Some beacon of hope to look to in this wild moment. I’m so tired of “leadership” that name-calls, and preaches hatred and bigotry and misogyny and revenge. I went looking for the kind of leadership that unites people, and through union, offers a way forward—a path out of the pressure cooker.

I’m so t…

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I want to share with you my favorite piece of journalism I’ve written all year. And it wasn’t for a major glossy magazine. It was for my hometown’s local news organization, The Pulp.

If you love music, it might be hard not to notice how our once-obscure town in Montana landed on the national music scene. This piece is about that, and a certain company—an…

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The savage wind flattened the tent wall into my face. Again. I was in a fetal position inside, with my hand out the zippered door in a desperate bid to hold the fly in place against sixty-mile-per-hour storm gusts. My newlywed husband lay at the other end, doing the same with the opp…

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I met Shelby Stanger at Mountainfilm back in May when we were on a panel of women writers, which also included Cheryl Strayed, Leslie Chang, and Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer. Shelby immediately struck me as someone who’s unequivocally made it. She’s the host of REI’s Wild Ideas Worth Living podcast, the flagship podcast from one o…

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With all that’s happening right now, I feel like I should be writing about war. About democracy, or how lawful immigrants feel like they can’t leave the U.S. to visit their families in other countries, or attacks on veterans and people with disabilities and gender and sexuality and reproductive rights and public lands.

Instead, I’m writing about love—the unexpected kind. About opening our hearts and letting go of perfectionism and expectation and the most unlikely teachers for it.

For all the years after my canine soulmate died, I said, to everyone who asked, that I would never get another dog. No other pooch would measure up to The One. Plus, I didn’t want to be tied down. My husband and I have no children, we have freelance jobs where we make our own schedules, and can travel or adventure at whim (finances permitting—we’re both writers, after all).

That’s not to say I don’t love dogs. In fact, it’s what I chose to donate my time to in the midst of all the political and social chaos this year: walk dogs for the Humane Society. A selfish donation, that’s for sure, given it didn’t make anyone’s life better except mine and the dog’s I walked on any given day.

Anyone who knew me knew where this volunteering would lead. One could say I was unconsciously, casually shopping. But it was still a surprise, even to me, when my husband and I brought home a two-year-old stray mutt from the shelter at the end of March. She was absolutely amazing for the first two days. “We lucked out!” we said to each other.

And then she turned into... a handful, to put it politely. She barked at old people on the trail. She chased cars. And bikers. And runners. And the dog across our fence. She dug holes in the yard. She growled at my mom. And she pinned dog after dog. She never lost a fight. Not that Ben and I waited around to see what would happen after she’d gotten the unfortunate offenders on their backs. No lawsuits for us, thanks.

I wanted to give her back. I’m not going to lie. You can judge me all you want. This was not the kind of relationship I wanted or understood. My first dog had been my companion right away. I hadn’t had to train her at all. She was a dream. This dog made me hate myself for having to discipline her. We had to get a prong collar (you can keep judging). I hated having to correct her with it. I laid awake nights simmering with anxiety that we’d never be able to take her camping or skiing or hiking, never be able to let her off leash to just run. That my sister’s family, who was supposed to be our go-to-dog-share family, would never want to watch her. We’d made a huge mistake. I didn’t even tell half my friends that we’d adopted a dog, in case we had to give her back. I didn’t want to have to explain myself for that.

But then (oh, predictable plot twist) we ended up falling in love with her. Even for all her “faults”. She clearly loved us. She let my niece and nephew drape themselves all over her. And damn, she showed herself to be smart. We invested some money from our tight budget in a trainer to help us with a few sessions, mostly to teach us how to train our dog. It turns out that Raven, as we named our little prize fighter terror, only wants to fit into the pack. She just needs us to show her how, with patience and trust and lots of love. She never means to mess up. She’s always doing her best.

Which meant I needed to give her my best, too.

Just last week, I went out with our trainer (who, by the way, is a wonder worker who’s trained dogs in rural India to protect people from tigers—seriously) to learn how to teach Raven to meet other dogs without immediately trying take them out. It meant I had to put a shock collar on her, and be willing to learn how to use it (yep, judge away). And my god, Raven was doing so amazingly over the next several days of practice with me that I decided I hadn’t been giving her enough credit.

Ben had been away on assignment, and when I proudly took him on a walk with us to show off our astounding progress... Raven fought and pinned another dog so fast I didn’t even have time to shock her. Luckily, it was the dog of a friend, who was very understanding—she used to have an aggressive rescue pup, too—and promised not to slap us with an expensive lawsuit.

Shit, I thought. We’re never going to have the dog I want, with the anxiety-free walks and adventures and companionship that I envision as part of the life I want.

My friend texted me later that evening. She told me that even her current dogs, who are well behaved, sometimes have issues with other dogs. “It’s been a real lesson in my own perfectionism, and accepting that my dogs don’t have to be perfect to be awesome.”

It seems obvious what a fitting analogy this is for life in general. You can literally apply it everywhere. I just forgot how easy it is to lose sight of it.

It can be hard to open our hearts to different kinds of love than those that came before. Raven is so different from my first dog. I love her differently. I know now that that’s okay. I still love her with my whole heart. I can’t even imagine her not being part of our little family now (and my niece and nephew would frankly kill me if I ever gave her back anyway).

I also know that it’s a big deal to enter into a relationship with another being. We both deserve the effort of always doing our best, and recognizing that in the other. Again, an obvious analogy for life, but it bears pointing out that it’s a good time to apply that sentiment to our fellow beings on this Earth.

Now I need to play with my pup. Go and find a little love too, y’all. Be sure to look in the unexpected places.

Outside Magazine, that once hallowed go-to for provocative writing on adventure and outdoor culture, isn’t what it used to be. That doesn’t mean that such stories are dead. The world of adventure is too big, too nuanced, too much a facet of the human condition for such storytelling to simply fade.

Instead, it finds new homes.

My latest for longform powerhouse The Atavist Magazine pulls back the curtain on a pursuit that’s long been romanticized, and takes a deep dive into the psyche of the kind of modern explorer western culture idolizes. It’s the story of what some called the greatest ski expedition ever completed, a journey of obsession, depression, love, loss, survival—and the cost of following a drive to go further and higher than anyone had before.

By the dawn of the 21^st century, the age of exploration seemed largely over. What remained to be explored required great imagination, an almost magical (or crazy, some might say) capacity for impossible thinking. Because there was, in fact, one formidable challenge left that spanned a sweeping portion of the globe: to traverse North America’s Coast Range, a giant’s backbone of mountains stretching more a thousand miles from Canada’s border with the U.S. all the way to Alaska and the Yukon.

Veteran mountaineers and skiers said it was impossible. The range was too remote and glaciated, shot through with raging rivers, notorious for unholy elevation gain, and difficult to access. To traverse the whole of it would be the equivalent of climbing more than eighteen Mount Everests over the distance of nearly fifty back-to-back marathons.

One woman thought it could be done.

Outwardly, Lena lived a life of epic adventure: skiing, mountaineering, through-hiking, cycling across the continent. Inwardly, she mostly felt lost and depressed. She had no structure in her life, no steady job, and was often overwhelmed by a bottomless feeling of isolation. Mountains were the only place where her brain calmed.

Lena wasn’t the only one in adventure sports who battled demons. Such endeavors often draw the misfits, the slightly crazed, the traumatized. Acute levels of risk, like those found in mountaineering, ski touring, whitewater kayaking, and climbing, can offer a tantalizing opportunity to mask a void—or, for people like Lena, fill it. Walking the thin line between life and death demands the kind of focus that can cause the demons to fall away entirely, and help athletes feel part of something bigger than what plagues them. But many never take the next step and figure out what’s behind an interior wound, or do the deep work to heal it.

Lena would do both—but only after her Coast Range journey brought her face-to-face with death.

Here’s the opener to this story. Read the rest in Atavist.

The Longest Journey

The tent quaked in the howling wind. The storm had raged for three days, trapping Lena and Ruby Rowat at a narrow notch in the mountain ridge. By now the ceaseless sound of flapping nylon had become maddening. When the storm was unleashed on March 25, 2001, the sisters had only just skied to this pass, called Manatee Col. They hastily assembled a tent; there’d been no time to build up enough snow to create a windblock. Snow now piled against the shelter’s walls, threatening to collapse and bury them. When the women went outside to shovel it away, they threw themselves through the door to keep their sleeping bags from being covered in snow, which could soak the down that kept their bodies warm. They couldn’t afford to be careless. The nearest town—the British Columbia ski mecca of Whistler—was at least a four-day journey south on skis, up snow-draped peaks and down unpopulated valleys.

Lena, 28, and Ruby, 30, lit a stove inside the tent to cook food and dry their gear—a calculated risk, given that the tent wasn’t flame-retardant. But the heat from the stove and their bodies melted the snow beneath the floor, and it began to dip like the hull of a canoe, pooling water and pitching the sisters toward each other as they slept. Above the rampaging wind, they could hear the muffled roar of avalanches around them.

In the besieged interior of their meager shelter, Lena’s stomach began to roll with nausea. In the hours that followed, it worsened. She had to exit the tent repeatedly to relieve herself. The storm showed no signs of abating as Lena’s illness intensified. In that moment, dejected mentally and cut down physically, she considered abandoning the attempt altogether.

But she couldn’t go back now. Not after all the work that had gone into planning the expedition. Not when all that waited back home was crippling loneliness and the lurking sense that she’d failed.

Read The Longest Journey in Atavist.

Montana has a lot of folks whom I’m honored to claim companionship with as fellow Montanans. Tracy Stone-Manning is one of those. She’s the former director of the Bureau of Land Management under the Biden administration. Now, as President of The Wilderness Society, she’s been vocal about the unprecedented threa…

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I’m on the road for a book tour. I always find it harder to be creative and productive when I’m not in my own space, that’s imbued with whatever magic I’ve already transferred to it after years of writing there. The other morning, I wandered the Whitefish hotel trying to find a comfortable, quiet spot. I’d get one or two things done, find myself too dis…

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Melissa Arnot Reid is on an undeniable high. She’s an accomplished mountaineer known for being the first American woman to summit and descend Everest without oxygen. Beyond her alpinism skills, she’s known for responding, with her significant medical training, to an avalanche on the mountain that claimed the lives of severa…

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From 1917 to 2015, North America’s tallest mountain was officially named Mount McKinley. But even over that century, Alaskans, mountain climbers, and many others still called it by the name it had held for millennia. In every language of the Athabaskan people living near the mou…

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