And Soon, Spring: A Short Climbing and Backpacking Film Dedicated to My Mentor, Lost Too Soon

There are a lot of things I get out of climbing and mountains. One of the most significant, to me, is community. Mountaineering is a strange craft. And while formal instruction and informational videos and equipment improvements all play a role in keeping us safe, it’s the magic of mentorship that teaches us to deal with the vagaries of circumstance and the internal struggles we all feel.

A few weeks ago, the mountaineering community lost a great person. She wasn’t famous. She wasn’t self-aggrandizing. She wasn’t “the best” climber. But she was audacious and caring and generous with her time.

She was a friend, always, and a mentor to me - first in the outdoors and then in life as she moved through cancer with humor, humility, and hope.

I found out she was taking her final turn the evening I began a four day trip with my boys. I found out she had passed the morning that trip ended. It struck me how the lessons she had taught me were actively being passed on to my boys at the very moment she was passing on from us.

I made a short film of the trip and dedicate it to her memory and to mentorship, to the notion that we all flourish “...when we plant trees under whose shade we shall never sit.”