emilystifler
Introducing freelance writer and adventurer Emily Stifler. This is her story ...

RAIN AND SNOW blew sideways as Emily led the last slab pitch of Sykes’ Sickle, a 700-foot rock climb in Rocky Mountain National Park. She was scared and doubted herself. If her feet slipped on the wet granite, she'd pendulum 30 feet, scrape across the slab and smash into a deep cleft in the rock. "Trust the movement," said her climbing partner, Madaleine, from her belay stance, her voice shaking with cold. Finally, Emily committed and moved upward, clipping the bolt above, safe again. This is how she has felt about writing, too: reticent, but beneath it, knowing it was what she needed to do. “In college I studied biology, until chemistry and calculus almost killed me,” she says. “Then, when I impulsively took a fiction writing class, I knew I'd come home.” Now though, having completed an internship at Rock and Ice magazine, and with over 40 published articles for national magazines, she’s committed.

After finishing the 2008 season at Moonlight Basin in Montana where she works as a ski patroler, she’s took a huge jump: hitting the road with a group of three other ladies on climbing/writing/dirtbag tour. They traveled through Utah’s Canyonlands, to Western Colorado, then to Yosemite and finally, Alaska.  Up north, the girls established new routes on unclimbed domes next to Tikchik Lake, a remote area in Southwestern Alaska. After climbing, Emily stayed and research the Pebble Mine, an exploratory mining project near Tikchik, for an article she hopes to write. If developed, the ore deposit at Pebble will be North America’s largest open pit mine. This remote headwaters, scattered with Native villages and accessed only by plane or boat, drains into Alaska’s great salmon runs and then into the Bristol Bay fishery. The mine and associated development would irreparably change all that exists there now.

Freelancing is hard, and rarely immediately rewarding. Like that slippery granite slab, its freedoms come with uncertainty. On a ski patroler’s leftover wages, she pieces together plane and boat rides—begging, borrowing and bartering, but hopefully not stealing too much.