I grew up in the suburbs of New Jersey watching anime, playing video games and learning metal songs on guitar. My parents are recreational skiers and I feel fortunate that they took us out a week or two every year. Despite the small amount of time I got to spend in the mountains as an adolescent, the impact it would make on my life choices was tremendous. I was drawn to a college in Vermont that had a ski pass included in the tuition, and from there my exposure and love for the outdoors grew. After graduating with a double major in music and psychology, I sort of jumped head first into the “dirtbag” lifestyle of the outdoor industry and worked as a housekeeper at the Many Glacier Hotel in Glacier National Park in Montana. The mountains there and my adventures in them convinced me that I would eventually need to pick up a camera, but it wouldn’t be until five years later that I could afford an entry level one.

Until March 2020, I worked as a snowboard instructor and eventually supervisor at Big Sky Resort, and my summers were spent doing manual labor and various forms of guiding. I was able to budget in a camera after my second season leading trips to the Mendehall Glacier in Alaska, and embarked on my first climbing road trip soon after. Although I surely missed some shots while learning how to operate my camera in the field, I became hooked on the camera’s ability to encapsulate a moment in time and make it into a memory shareable with others.

In 2019 I hatched a plan to take advantage of my proximity to Yellowstone National Park and my experience guiding there; I traded my truck in as a down payment for a sprinter van, thinking I would start outfitting day trips to the park in the summer of 2020. Instead, COVID-19 and the lockdowns put me in a position where selling my house and moving into my van seemed to be the right option. My partner is chronically ill and disabled, and catching covid just so I could bring some folks to Yellowstone was not an option.

Currently, we are based in the Pacific Northwest, skiing and climbing as much as possible in between the slew doctors appointments my partner must endure to get her chronic pain and symptoms under control. While life can be challenging for us at times, we are driven by our goals of skiing big mountains and bringing the inspiration of those adventures back to our community.