On the power of platform

I live in a liberal bubble, I’m queer, and I think part of the power of this particular platform — having a Nat Geo film telling this kind of story — is that it reaches an enormous audience that is actually quite different from my normal one. So it’s been amazing to get this feedback from people who identify with some piece of me as the character, and in some ways, I am even more excited to hear from people who are very different from me.

On being a woman in male-dominated spaces

In terms of mountaineering, I’m not sure it’s actually changed very much, particularly with high-altitude climbing. I remember saying, as a 20-year-old climbing ranger in the States, that the higher you go, the less women you find, and that is still the case. I am still generally the only woman. 

When I was a climbing ranger and a guide, before I went back to grad school for what I do now, it was really hard. I was the first female climbing ranger in Olympic National Park. I worked only with men. I was judged all the time by the people I was helping. And the same was true as I started guiding. I never had a female client. When I was guiding a climb on Aconcagua, I went to pick up these three big American guys from the Mendoza Airport, and it was so hard. They were like, “You’re the guide?” just because they looked at me — I’m a small woman. And that particular trip was pretty transformative. They had complete 180’s within about a week, and we had amazing conversations about their initial judgment and that was something I will never forget. 

Those years were very hard. I felt very alone. And I would say that’s generally true in my little field of science, but I’ve seen more leaps in my academic field than I have in high-altitude mountaineering in the last decade. There’s a long way to go in both spaces.

On her next big adventure

The next [ice core] deep-drilling project that I am co-leading with [alongside a team from] Denmark is on Axel Heiberg Island in the Canadian High Arctic. I will be gone for about two and a half months in the spring. I’ve drilled ice cores on the eastern edge of the archipelago along Baffin Bay on Ellesmere and Devon Islands, just across Baffin Bay from Greenland, and this will be the first time that anyone has gone to that Arctic Ocean edge to drill a surface to bedrock core. It’s an ice cap just over 600 metres, which is phenomenal for a tiny island. We anticipate something like a 10,000-year climate record and, in this case, probably new information about Arctic Ocean variability that hasn’t been captured by these Baffin Bay Eastern Archipelago cores. 

On teaching youth

There are 300 ice core scientists in the world, and usually, especially if I have younger groups, they have never even thought about this before. Like, people are doing what? There’s a world of scientists doing things that you didn’t even know was going on right now is very empowering. I can see it from kids who are seeing something new for the first time and then I can feel it myself when I realize they didn’t even know someone like me existed. 

On what gives her hope for the future

To be honest, the younger generation gives me hope. The Greta Thunbergs, or kids like her, truly gives me an enormous amount of hope. The work that I do with Girls on Ice Canada, which is related to supporting that generation, gives me an unbelievable amount of hope. The younger generation is speaking very loudly, and I find it incredibly motivating.