On Powder Prozac, Indie Ski Hills, and Dirtbagging
Mentally, we're somewhere in the mountains, looking downhill, and strapping in.
Below you’ll find three stories centered on ski culture by Nicole, Kestrel, and Katie, in that order.
Baby Dirtbag
Two weeks before I graduated from Wheat Ridge High School, Principal Harrison called me to his office. I didn’t think a thing of it. I knew him well, we were pals, and I was involved in enough school activities that the meeting could be about anything. He waved me in to sit. Then, he spread four sheets of paper across the desk in front of him.
“Do you know what these are?” He looked at me with his eyebrows raised. I shrugged and shook my head.
“Your absences this year. These are your absences. Fifty-eight. You’ve missed fifty-eight classes and skipped seventeen unexcused days of school. That doesn’t count your excused days, which would add another ten. You’ve missed nearly a month of school.”
My eyes went wide. I chewed on my lip, and said nothing.
I’m sitting in a beater car with two boys I’ve skipped class with, because we decide there’s no class on powder days. We are caught in I-70 snowstorm traffic on the way back from Breckenridge, and the horn of the car is stuck in a constant, loud blare. We’re getting flipped off by everyone, and I am laughing so hard I am crying.
That damn horn sounds for 45 minutes straight, so we blast what? MxPx? Nelly? as loud as we can all the way home, laughing and singing with youthful abandon.
He raised another sheet of paper, and he handed it to me over the desk. I read the bullet points, down each line, then set the paper in my lap.
One day, (or three days, maybe four) I skip class to chase powder alone. I keep my ski gear in a bag in my truck for such occasions. I’m supposed to turn east on I-70 and instead I turn west. Right blinker, not left. Again and again and again.
“That’s a list of everything you’ve accomplished in spite of your absences,” he said. I was deeply involved in school, sports, art, creative writing, student government, and clubs. He’d written down the scholarships I’d won, my good-girl GPA, each Advanced Placement and honors class on my schedule, in addition to my leadership positions in student government and lacrosse.
Lacrosse kept me in school, and it kept me after good-enough-to-play grades. I was the team captain that year, a Colorado All-Star, and an All-League defensive player. But before the season, powder dumped on the Rockies and beckoned me out of eight straight hours of hard plastic chairs. After the season, the red rocks of Chautauqua called from the jagged edges of the Front Range. The anathema of the classroom grated against Colorado bluebird days.
At lunch hour on one such day, I head home, grab my German Shepherd, and hike so high into Chautauqua I have to hoist his 80 pounds over small rock rims, climbing a short ladder up to one of my favorite spots — a tiny cave we both sit in to watch the sun fade, sharing a saved half of a lunchtime sandwich, and sucking down water.
“What were you doing?” He asked me this straight up. “Most kids skip school and get into trouble. So what on earth were you skipping school for? Because I don’t think you were getting into trouble.”
I smack my unhelmeted head on icy snow and get an obvious concussion while skiing alone. After wobbling down the hill, I sit in my red 1995 Ford Ranger, seeing double for a few minutes. Should I call my mom? I’ll be in so much damn trouble if I do. I decide to suck it up, shake it off, drive home, and keep it to myself.
I avoid looking at Principal H, running through all the scenarios of what I’d been up to, deciding how to pay the piper for my deeds.
Really, on any given day, anxiety and grief would hit me like a flash flood. I’d excuse myself to go to the bathroom, run to my truck, drive to the nearest river snaking through a red canyon, and watch the water flow until the edge of my feelings eroded to soft sand.
Should I tell him that? What trouble awaited if I did?
I sit with my toes in the water, counting the rhythms of old man fly lines as they swing in the air. I think about childhood bluegills, I think about red-tailed hawks circling above me, I think about how big a mule deer is in comparison to a midwestern whitetail, I think about the soft muzzles of horses I love, how I miss life in Ohio, my friends, and even my job in the local sandwich shop. I think about my future college roommate and what she’ll be like. I wonder if I’ll make new friends. I think, I wonder, and I think some more.
After a minute or two, I gave up the ghost. I told him everything, what I’d been up to, the sudden overwhelm that prompted me to run to snowy slopes or to sit riverside or to hike amongst tall and ancient red rocks. I couldn’t stand it, and I couldn’t sit still. Harrison took a minute, nodding me through my story. He pursed his lips. The pause lasted.
At Keystone, I ride under the lights until 7 p.m. I only skip my last class to get there. That teacher lets us choose between the early class and the late class, so I go to the early class and catch navy blue spring corduroy with stars twinkling above me. Stars! The trees stand like heavy ghosts once night falls, the only sound my board against spring corn, carving, and carving, and carving. No headphones. Too bulky. Just me, sky, and snow.
“You’ve missed too much school on paper to graduate,” he said, looking down at the papers on the desk. A lump rose in my throat, fire following behind. He let the weight of the sentence hit me. My mind reeled through the rungs of everything I’d already been through. I wasn’t counting skip days that year; I was gasping for air.
The list he doesn’t hold is the one I now tick off. My dad passes from cancer during sophomore year. We move from Ohio to Colorado 10 months later for my mom’s job. My mom is busy working, trying to support two kids alone. When I’m not home, she assumes I’m at school, in some activity, and I keep up the ruse. I’m accepted into Colorado State University, among other schools. I win multiple scholarships for “overcoming adversity.” I will be a first-generation college student. I am going to go to college. But maybe I’m not. Maybe I…
“You shouldn’t graduate, but I’m going to let you graduate,” he added, interrupting my panic and shuffling the papers together with a sigh, “Promise me one thing?” I nodded, tears forming.
I breathe out, my future no longer hanging in the balance. I breathe out, for what feels like the first time in a long time. And when I breathe a big gulp of air back in hungrily, I breathe every ounce of it back out, once more.
“You won’t miss another day of school?”
I promised. I promised him, and I promised myself. I let the overwhelm settle like a cloak in those final days of high school, staring out windows and willing myself to stay put. I eked it out and set up a good summer gig coaching sports in a day camp. It was something to look forward to. Freshman year started in less than three months. My new life felt so close that I could almost touch it.
A few weeks later, I walked in a navy cap and gown across the stage. When Principal Harrison handed me the near-miss diploma, his face split into a mischievous grin, he winked, and I began laughing. He laughed, too. Neither of us divulged my skipping secret to anyone, and we laughed my itchy and ever-dancing feet across the finish line, together. I swelled with gratitude for his good and merciful deed, pride for all my hard work, and the stark relief of being done.
Ahead of me lay so many more rivers, mountains, high alpine valleys, glacial swims, encounters in the wildest of places, powpowpow across so many new mountains, and itchy feet that would never stop yearning for mileage. I knew none of it, but the stage had been set.
Adventures, so many adventures, yet to come. That I sensed. That I knew.
-Nicole
Skiing Is [Life/Stupid/Fun]
My first time downhill skiing, my mom took me on a discount night for local school kids, lessons not included. After giving in to my pleas to ride the main lift, my terrified mother demanded we remove our skis and hike back down under the chairs. I hated being seen stumbling under the bright lights in Sam’s Club tights and a Goodwill barn jacket. On a later run, I couldn’t stop and plowed into a snow fence in front of a gaggle of laughing ski patrollers.
Despite these middle-school humiliations, I returned home to the natural snow in our yard where I stayed up well past my bedtime digging a cave. High out of my 11-year-old gourd on the thrill of hurling my body down a mountain for the first time, I fixated on individual flakes under a flashlight and imagined what it would be like if I never left the snow. Recently, I realized I spent that the last 30 years chasing the pure elation of that first time on skis.
Until that night, all I knew about downhill skiing was what I overheard from my parents: how it would bring “yuppies” from the city (my dad hated yuppies) and increase property taxes and traffic on the narrow country roads. In the end, it did very few of these things. The nearby small town where I went to school and rented video games from the combo-VHS-store-tanning salon changed little, except that the corner liquor store hung a “Welcome Skiers” banner alongside the “Welcome Hunters” one.
The next season, my dad proudly drove me to the mountain’s sales building over Thanksgiving. He bought me a pair of rental skis and a lesson package for Christmas. Because when other people’s children do something that was out of reach for you, they’re yuppies. But when your kids do it, it’s an accomplishment.
In my later teens, I got sent to West Virginia with family friends whose son raced on a ski team. I spent weekends borrowing the wife’s little-used season pass to poach lift rides, flailing down the mountain while my friend carved effortlessly. There, in Canaan Valley, I encountered the skiing and mountain recreation as a way of life. Today, skiers joke that the popular higher-end brand of backcountry touring ski, DPS, stands for “dentists, proctologists, surgeons.” Those are indeed the men — and they were mostly men— I met in my teenaged introduction to a lifestyle built not around labor and family, but outdoor hedonism.
Following crusty old nordic skiers through the West Virginia mountains in leather boots and skinny skis, I embraced the flow of telemark turns through fresh snow under birch trees, the satisfaction of skiing from a crowded lodge up a mountain into wilderness and back down many miles later, the mysticism of a foggy spruce forest covered in ice rime, and the glint and clatter of surface hoar under a full moon. Nothing else married my love of nature and movement like ski touring.
Two years into college, I sat in a geology class as my professor showed us photos of glaciers from mountaineering trips in his home state of Washington. In hindsight, I had many reasons to move West without a support system or connections. But skiing in bigger, snowier mountains was the strongest conscious pull. The next summer, I took a seasonal science job in Colorado, packed my bike, kayak, cross country skis and some books in the Subaru wagon I’d just inherited from my grandfather, then told my parents I may or may not be back.
Inspired by a much more experienced local friend, that summer, I tried to hike up a year round snow patch under a 12,000-foot peak in August and descend it on my nordic skis — my first turns in the Rockies. This was obviously going to end badly. I made two jump turns on skis without full metal edges, then started sliding. Much like on my first encounter with that snow fence, my friend arrested my fall. I plowed into him instead of the rocks below.
Enrolling into the University of Montana was the first step that shaped my entire life around an activity that is fundamentally pointless, especially to everyone not doing it. I wanted to be a scientist, not a ski bum, so I took heavy course loads and got jobs in the labs of professors I knew from the nordic trails or riding lifts. I donated plasma to afford my ski pass, avalanche equipment and safety training. I spent every weekend trying to ski up and down a new peak in the Bitterroot Mountains. My backcountry partners were marathon runners and I worked tirelessly to keep up on dawn to dusk days where we regularly covered 5,000 vertical feet. When summer came, I didn’t stop, carrying my skis past tourists and picnickers on hiking trails, hunting for shady crevices that held snow. I wanted at least 100 days a year like my friend in Colorado who skied off 14,000-foot peaks and did all-night endurance races traversing mountain ranges.
In those days, I thought skiing was some kind of antidepressant, that it was the thing I needed to feel whole and healthy. I kept shaping my life around it. I tried dating non-skiers in college and it was a consistent disaster. They were jealous of my time in the mountains and the people there with me. They didn’t understand that skiing was mandatory and untouchable, that I saw it not as an activity, but as a fundamental part of who I was.
So I didn’t have boyfriends, I had ski partners whom I dated to varying degrees. I met them in classes, ski-tuning clinics, or later in Albuquerque while I was peeing behind a bush and one pulled up on a snowmobile. I ended up marrying one of them, and into a whole family of skiers. We got engaged on a summer road trip to glaciated volcanic peaks in the Pacific Northwest. Our honeymoon was an August backcountry trip to South America, and our tenth anniversary one to Japan. We shared one of my favorite days on skis while touring overnight in the Beartooth Mountains, where we followed the tracks of wolverines around a high alpine lake to catch a view of them outside their den.
One of our first big fights was about whether I, as a tired and stressed graduate student studying declining spring snowpack in the U.S. Southwest, was sufficiently motivated about our weekend ski trips. We went to Taos with a big group of hard-charging friends and while it was fun, it was rarely carefree. For expert women skiing in a mixed-gender group, “keeping up” can become an unshakable thief of joy. Even my (admittedly frequent) bathroom breaks seemed to cause tension. I couldn’t go pee anywhere on an exposed ridge like the guys; so I slowed the group down.
Living in Bozeman, Montana, I saw college freshmen with green Vermont license plates on old Subarus stacked with skis and felt wistful for that time in life. Skiing was so uncomplicated then. Health problems, aging and stress were distant problems. No one monitored my relationship with skiing to make sure it was enthusiastic enough. The weird, gendered component of middle-aged skiing hadn’t happened yet — group trips default to “boys trips” because of a skill or interest gap between men or women in hetero couples. I questioned if I was taking off enough powder days to make it worth the career sacrifice of being a journalist in Montana rather than on a coast. Even though I was relatively inexperienced and unskilled in college, I was more “hardcore” then. Or more importantly, more motivated and excited. What happened to me?
Eventually, the boogeymen from my childhood, the ones I thought skiing kept at bay, caught me. I started therapy, and took medication for anxiety and depression. Skiing wasn’t just an insufficient treatment; it seemed to make me sicker. I suffered nausea and vertigo while looking down couloirs, occasionally I couldn’t take full breaths of air and hyperventilated. For years, I thought I had sports-induced asthma. What I really had was PTSD. Like too many female athletes, I came into the sport I loved under the guidance of a predatory mentor. The family friend who took me skiing in the West Virginia mountains as a teen was also abusing me.
I didn’t ski much for the next two seasons. It’s hard to live in a mountain town in your 30s, in your prime endurance years, and see other people notching adventures you can only dream about while sitting at home. But I did heal. Then I made friends with women who could ski steeps and loved the mountains as much as I did, but also understood that at a certain point, skiing isn’t everything. We called ourselves The Sad Person Sports Club. We made up fake badges for crying in different places, like in your car while booting up in the parking lot, on the lift, or on the skin track.
During the fall of 2020, at the height of a Black Lives Matter-inspired reckoning in my majority-white mountain town, I attended a workshop about diversity in conservation. The facilitator started by encouraging us all to consider our identities — not the labels others might apply to us, but how we see ourselves. This was a first step to considering how others might experience the world differently from the way we do. During the group share, a woman at our table said very sincerely that she identifies as an outdoor recreationalist.
I tried my hardest to be kind and generous in the moment, but my knee jerk thought was, who cares? As a young adult, I thought I was special for being really into skiing and people around me validated it. But at some point it turned me into the social equivalent of a giant panda. Instead of bamboo forests, I thought I’d die if I wasn’t on snow and around other people who love it in the specific ways that I do. It shaped my friendships, education, career, even my marriage and mental health issues. I had started to wonder what friends I’d left out because they were the ones who couldn’t “keep up.” Existing in a whole community of people who treat being a good skier as a form of social capital became tiresome, even as I benefited from it. Being a skier doesn't imply that you have any values besides valuing skiing. And if you make an activity your identity, it becomes painful to admit that the activity is supposed to be for fun and joy, even though you’ve taken it way further than that.
I often think about what one of my dear friends from graduate school said as we rode the ski lift at Taos Mountain one sunny day. As a former ski racer and coach, she had shaped much of her early life around skiing more than most. She also knew when to stop at the summit for an impromptu dance party in ski boots. As we watched intermediate skiers fly down the slope below us in imperfect and uncool fashion, unzipped jackets flapping in the wind, she pointed out that sliding on snow is a goofy thing for humans to do even when we’re really good at it. It’s just really pointless and fun. Or rather, fun is the only point.
Last winter, my first one back on the East Coast since I drove away at 18, it rained so much that I booked a last minute trip to backcountry ski in Norway. Snow may not cure my depression, but a lack of snow can drag me down into it. I went into this winter still grappling with how to fit skiing into my new life in a warming landscape, where I’m just a little too far south to have a reliable winter snowpack.
This weekend, I didn’t have any of those conflicts. A snowstorm blanketed much of the U.S. and big fat flakes fell on Whiteface Mountain in the Adirondacks, where terrain that hasn’t seen enough natural snow to ski in years opened up. The wind and bracing cold of powder blowing back into my face as a ripped big fast turns down a steep open slope sent me into the peaceful static of a flow state for a few precious minutes. It’s the same place I’ve gone in meditation, the mental equivalent of black and white television static that my dad used to say looked like a “polar bear in a snowstorm.”
That afternoon, my 10-year-old stepson took a lesson where he learned how to go off jumps in the terrain park. He and his brother, along with my partner, started learning to ski last season. We’ve gone most weekends this winter, no matter the conditions. I spend the mornings on the upper mountain, and the afternoons cheering everyone’s progress. Like the “no one cares that you tele” bumper stickers of my youth, no one back in town cares if we ski or not, or if we’re any good. In short, it’s of great consequence to my wellbeing, and of little consequence to anything else.
The next day, the oldest kid wanted me to be his “terrain park buddy,” which is apparently my newest identity, and in high demand. I’ve never been a park skier, but have been gaining comfort with skiing over progressively larger metal or plastic boxes this season. As my stepson and I approach one, we discuss trying it. He goes first, too slowly, and wrecks. I go next — it’s the tallest and longest feature I’ve tried yet — and realize I’m also lacking speed. Soon, my skis violently slip from under me, and I’m on my stomach, sliding like Superman for the box’s edge where I crumple into a pile. I make sure the kid saw my epic crash, and quietly curse the hand-size bruise I’ll have on my thigh while we laugh about my fall all the way to the lift. When we get home, he doesn’t come inside to warm up with the rest of us. Instead, he goes to work tunneling five feet into a snow drift.
-Kestrel
The Last Worst Best Place
Author: Katie Hill
I stood under the blazing Texas sun, sweating through an old t-shirt, as a mechanic crouched next to me and explained the notion of swollen lug nuts.
The rims on my truck were “full of them,” like how a dog might be full of ticks or a diabetic octogenarian gout. The warping was probably a result of past tire changes, the mechanic said, combined with exposure to weather extremes. I made a joke about how, in the past year, Meredith had withstood everything from -30 degrees Fahrenheit the weekend before we left Montana to a Texas summer of 100-plus degrees. She lived outside in both situations, so if changing weather caused lug nuts to swell, she was categorically high-risk.
It was the last week of January, and everyone in my life seemed to be drowning in snow except for me. My parents ran around their old Vermont farmhouse, stashing firewood and shoveling pathways in the yard so their dog could take unencumbered shits. My sister and her boyfriend sat in Colorado ski traffic for three hours until they gave up and turned around to head home, crawling down the other side of the road where powder had accumulated like shaving cream.
When I got home from the mechanic, I stood in front of my bathroom mirror and pressed two fingers into the sunburn on my chest, the byproduct of a weekend long run in a tank top. And I thought of Maverick Mountain.
Maverick Mountain is a 1,671-mile drive from my mechanic. It has one chair lift that makes two stops, distributing skiers and boarders to a network of 24 runs. A full-day lift ticket costs $49. Inside the lodge, shag carpeting covers some of the walls, even parts of the ceiling. The bathroom stalls are made from plywood and, like saloon doors, are short enough to encourage socializing between patrons as they rise to hoist their ski pants back up.
Three years ago, Austin took me there for the first time, his prized hog of an indie ski hill in the Grasshopper Valley of Beaverhead County, Montana. Dillon, the county seat and main population center, is 40 miles from the mountain, which makes it feel even more remote. Of Montana’s 56 counties, Beaverhead ranks 38th for population density. (Maybe that’s why Taylor Sheridan shipped Beth and Rip off to a ranch there, where they’ll undoubtedly blow it up with their new “Yellowstone” spinoff.)
If you don’t know where any of this is, I won’t stop you from looking, although I won’t roll out a welcome mat or draw you a map, either. I’m not trying to gatekeep; I’m just not sure you’ll find anything here that you can’t find at a different indie mountain much closer to home.
But that’s my favorite thing about Maverick — there’s no beckoning. It doesn’t vie for your attention. The burgers are cheap, the beers are cheaper, and the lift makes me wonder about things like liability insurance and release forms. Not to sound like some antagonistic boomer, but what I understand to be the gritty foundation of rural ski culture clings to every corner of this place like sand in the carpet of an old beach house. Dads in jeans and Mossy Oak sweatshirts zoom after kids in hand-me-downs. The parking lot reeks of two-stroke snowmobiles and Camels. But above all, everyone — from the camo-clad slednecks to the backwoods hippies — is so incredibly happy to be there.
When I asked Austin what he loved so much about Maverick, his first answer was cryptic.
“You don’t have to deal with any of the crappy resort stuff,” he said, blowing on a fresh $6 coffee. We sat at a coffee shop in downtown Austin surrounded by people who looked like they might enjoy said “crappy resort stuff,” which I took to mean luxury gift shops and parking lots the size of Rhode Island. But then Austin followed up with another answer that made me realize maybe “crappy resort stuff” actually just meant people.
“You never have to wait longer than five minutes in a lift line. Ever.”
I pointed out that perhaps Maverick’s routine emptiness was a sign of it actually not being that great. But he doubled down.
“No. The value of other people not being there is insanely high.”
He went on to recall his best-of-all-time day of skiing. (We technically snowboard, but my man is frugal with syllables, so he “skis” for the sake of conversation.) He and his friends spotted a powder stash from the lift and proceeded to ride it all day without a single other person showing up to partake, despite it being a weekend.
I’m a new snowboarder, so I know very little about what makes a desirable experience at a mountain. But I do know this much; if skiing is about freedom, open space to zoom through, and the physics of leaning downhill and manipulating your body across a planar field with little more than the turn of a hip and the shift of a few pounds from one side to another, few things are more diametrically opposed to a good day on the mountain than lots of other people. If that’s the case, then maybe the worse a mountain is, the better. With its musty wall carpet, rattling lift, social bathrooms, and hours of distance from anywhere with more than a few thousand people, it doesn’t get much better than Maverick.
Austin taught me how to snowboard on its slopes, which only adds to my affection for the place. We’d been together for less than a year when he marched me into the rental shop on a sunny Saturday morning. The shop attendee loaned me a heavy pair of clip-in boots and a broad, dull board with bindings set too wide for me. Austin sent me down the bunny hill over and over again, often to an eventual tumble. When I reached the bottom, I unclipped my bindings and hiked back up to the top, since the notion of using the rope tow was lost on me. At 7,500 feet of elevation, in midday sunshine, clamoring up the snowy hill with cement-heavy feet, this was incredibly hard work for very little return on investment. I killed myself climbing uphill just to bruise my ass and strain my neck muscles all the way back down again. But by the end of the season, I was leaning downhill, swooping back and forth from my heel edge to my toe edge, and disembarking lifts (mostly) without incident.
We rode other indie mountains like Lost Trail and Discovery for the rest of the season, and much of the season that followed. Then we spent one day at Sun Valley in Ketchum, Idaho, where I felt like an alien. The $200 lift ticket gave me heartburn, which worsened as I picked through racks of $400 sweaters and ordered a $20 sandwich. I rode in a gondola for the first time, which was cool, but the act of snowboarding there didn’t feel much different as a beginner.
What set Sun Valley apart from the familiar indie mountain scene was my ballooning fear of hitting other people. Everywhere I looked at Sun Valley, crowds of skiers and boarders careened down the wide, groomed runs. They all seemed like the kind to threaten civil litigation if I accidentally lost control and bumped into them. This wasn’t much of a concern for the Maverick crowd, where whomever I bumped into would curse me out briefly before helping me up. An out-of-court settlement for a personal injury claim had nothing on a $3 draft at the Thunder Bar.
Learning a new skill as an adult has countless benefits for brain health, as peer-reviewed research proves time and time again. In that sense, Maverick Mountain was my adult classroom, a place to grasp at the freedom my ski-obsessed peers always experienced but that I had yet to taste. But over time, I also realized it was just another variation on the same theme. I see it popping up everywhere, of me and my kind gobbling up all the delicious scraps left behind by the increasingly luxe exclusivity of blue-ribbon outdoor recreation. Whether it’s a $49 lift ticket at a small indie mountain, a $10 doe tag in an unpopular general unit, free dispersed camping, or skipping an expensive race and running the same route for free the next day, the notion that the best outdoor experiences are priced to match is a fallacy. It only becomes more of a fallacy as some prices jump the moon while the experiences themselves remain unchanged in any meaningful way.
So goes the if-it-ain’t-broke logic that makes Maverick Mountain a crown jewel. A simple, affordable, shag-carpeted, hell-yeah-brother, Crown-of-the-Continent jewel. Since I’m pretty sure Austin is the greatest snowboarder on the face of the planet1, his love for this place would be enough to make me, a newb, commit to a great and everlasting affinity for it.
But truthfully, even if he suddenly decided to dump me tomorrow, I’d take my chances of running into him in the lodge just to keep going there. The Last Worst Best Place is worth it.
-Katie
Nicole Qualtieri is the Editor-in-Chief of The Westrn. She’s written for Outside Magazine, USA Today, GearJunkie, MeatEater, Modern Huntsman, Backcountry Journal, Impact Journal, and many others. A lifelong horsewoman and DIY outdoorswoman, Nicole lives on the outskirts of Anaconda, MT with a full pack of happy critters.
Kestrel Keller is Executive Editor of The Westrn. Their writing and reporting on science, conservation and rural culture has appeared in High Country News, Smithsonian, National Geographic, MeatEater, Outdoor Life, Outside, and many others. Kestrel is a reverse transplant from Bozeman, Montana to New York’s Hudson Valley.
Katie Hill is a freelance outdoor journalist and managing editor of The Westrn. Her writing has appeared in Outdoor Life, Field & Stream, MeatEater, High Country News, Modern Huntsman, and other publications. For more of her work, check out her website.
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Suck it, Shaun White.
Wow Nicole. I never realized that you had so much fun in your pseudo senior year. You go girl. Takes 20 years for the truth to come out. 😂