There are some moments in life that are so traumatic that it not only makes you suffer due to the loss of something cherished, but also because it shatters your whole concept of reality. That’s exactly how I felt when I came home on April 28, 2018 and my wife said to me, “I can’t do this,” two days before a scheduled embryo transfer. I was losing my spouse and, at 39 years old, I also knew I was losing the family I wanted to build.

However, the thing that made reality snap for me was the manner in which my wife did it. She didn’t apologize and had totally emotionally detached from me overnight. This was a side of her I didn’t even think she was capable of as she had always been so warm and loving. I couldn’t reconcile how I didn’t see any signs that she had this in her. I thought being a born and raised New Yorker had given me special intuition about people, but I was wrong. I could no longer trust myself or anyone else.  

I do not know how I made it through each day during that time. Nothing tied me to this world anymore and nothing brought me joy, not even skiing. However, one day I was online and an ad popped up for PowderQuest’s Women’s Backcountry Ski Camp. As I was reading the ad I saw three words that stood out: no experience necessary. I wanted to get into backcountry skiing while I was married and even got a touring setup just in case, but my wife wanted to stay on the resorts so I put that aside. Something in me knew this was the universe throwing me a lifeline, so I took it.

I spent the remaining months watching YouTube videos on ski touring and learning how to use my equipment. I know it said no experience necessary, but I don’t like being totally unprepared. In August of that year, I went on my first backcountry tour in Chile where I met the most supportive women in the world and managed to smile and laugh for the first time in months.

Ski touring is a lot of physical work, but I had so much negative energy to move out that I knew I needed to keep doing it even after the tour was over. I started hiking all the Catskill high peaks to prepare myself for navigating in the woods by myself (my ex used to be the navigator on our hikes). During the winter, I’d get up before dawn to skin up the resorts and eventually tried skiing Hunter and Bearpen (the two most ski friendly Catskills high peaks). 

As I was hiking, I kept having this persistent thought, “Wouldn’t it be cool if I could ski all these too,” but the terrain just seemed wildly beyond my ability level. There were ledges, cliffs, tight trees, talus fields, rocks, and every obstacle you could imagine. There just seemed no way to control speed and so many challenges to figure out. However, the thought persisted until one day I said to myself, “Let me just see how far I can get.”

Coincidentally, I started on January 18, 2021, the day that would have been my wedding anniversary. I still needed to hike Balsam for my initial Catskill 3500 Club hiking patch, so I decided to do it on skis since there was snow on the ground. When I first started this project, I thought skiing had to look a specific romanticized way in order to be considered skiing. You had to be making beautiful turns all the way down, but that ideal image clashed with the reality of the rugged Catskills terrain.

I found myself on barely covered rocks and ledges to the point where it was a bit ridiculous. The trails were also so narrow and made hairpin turns. I would often just crash into trees as a way of stopping. My initial tours took so much longer than they should have because I was constantly transitioning from uphill to downhill mode and putting on boot crampons at times too. Psychologically, transitioning was just demoralizing. Eventually, I figured out that if I kept my skins on when there was nowhere to turn or a series of ledges that didn’t have a safe runout that I could control my speed better and stop using trees as brakes. I was able to drop ledges with no problem after that and just keep going safely. 

I’m not saying I stopped taking my skins off and making turns, but I was definitely developing techniques that allowed me to move efficiently through the mountains. I learned that there is backcountry skiing where the objective is perfect conditions and then there is backcountry skiing where the goal is to get to a location as quickly and safely as possible. In the latter scenario, skis become a form of transportation that entail applying many techniques beyond just making powder turns. That hero’s journey type of skiing is what I’m into.

With each peak conquered, my confidence returned and as my experience in the backcountry grew (both locally and worldwide) I learned to trust myself again. I’ve also gained so much more from skiing. When I was teaching remotely during Covid, those defense mechanisms that were always on high alert in the city melted away and I was able to go from being an atheist to feeling a connection with the universe. I felt all these opportunities in the ski and hiking world opened up to me. The universe replaced the loss of the family I dreamed of with a ski family who supported me just as much as any biological family would. And, I went from being a loner to having a tremendous amount of support in the Northeast ski community.

I don’t know why, but the universe wants me to ski and just keeps opening doors for me. I am someone who didn’t get serious about skiing until I was 27 and all I wanted to do was become as good as I can. I didn’t even fantasize about the way this aspect of my life would unfold, but I’ve learned that the life the universe has in store for you can be even more enriching than the desires you cling to. It always feels like you’re dying when you have to give up a dream, but the universe creates a vacuum to fill it with something that will make you a better version of yourself.

-- Julie McGuire