The Pemi West group in 2006 in Olympic National Park. From left to right, back row: Christina Demetro, Daniel Pfeffer, Duncan Fisher, Jamie Andrews, Tim Billo, Emily Blackmer, and Hayley Daniell. Front row: Matt DeCaro, Corey Fauver, Anne Carman.
In 1997, when I was 18, I traveled out to Crested Butte, Colorado, to take part in Pemi West’s inaugural season. We had a base camp at 10,000 feet in the Maroon Bells, and spent almost a month living in the mountains. I still have vivid images in my mind from that summer—the tall conifers that surrounded the base camp, the fields of wildflowers we hiked through, the drama of the vast, snowy mountains that were our home. And the Pemi spirit, so distinctive in New Hampshire, was with us out in the Rockies.
The next summer, after my first year of college, I returned to Pemi in New Hampshire and worked as a trip counselor for the summer in the White Mountains. (We’ll have more about the trip program at Pemi in New Hampshire in a forthcoming item here.) Then, in the summer of 1999, I traveled back out to Colorado to work as a staff trip leader for Pemi West, co-leading a group with Scott Morgan.
My two summers out in Colorado built upon a love of hiking and the outdoors that I’d been nurturing for a long time, and vastly improved my technical skills and sense of confidence and independence in the wilderness, to boot. In college, I was a Mountain Club guide, and later, the president of the Mountain Club, and the fact that I arrived at Middlebury and felt ready to tackle anything in the outdoors has a lot to do with my training both at Pemi West and with Pemi in New Hampshire.
The ranks of Pemi West alumni are constantly getting bigger, and there is usually a good number of people who participate in Pemi West as a camper or leader and then migrate back to Pemi in New Hampshire, their teeth cut on the bigger mountains out west. Some have moved on to work for other organizations, or have led gnarly personal trips of their own. If you’ve been a part of Pemi West, either in Colorado or Washington, what was the experience like? Did you come back to Pemi in New Hampshire and join the trip program, or was it “just” a once-in-a-lifetime experience for you?
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I spent the summer of 2008 traveling through the spectacular Olympic National Park with Tim, and he’s certainly not exaggerating when it comes to his descriptions. My time at Pemi West constituted one of the best experiences of my life, and only my years at “Pemi East” can rival it.
I can’t say that I have just one favorite memory from that summer. It’s tough to choose between all the great memories: traversing several miles-long glaciers, fraternizing with llamas and mountain goats and banana slugs, going to sleep under the brightest stars I’ve ever seen, eating pounds of gorp, summiting Mt. Olympus, cooking Pad Thai in the wilderness, and so much more.
If you have even the slightest of inklings of interest in this amazing program, just do it! I used to dread hiking, but Pemi West has raised it to the top of my “Things I Love to Do and Never Want to Stop” list. I’m sure that every other Pemi West’er would say the same.