From Newcomer to River Guide: My Outdoor Journey with BCS

This past summer has been life changing for me. I was able to do something that I never in my life dreamed of doing: river guiding! I know that among the awesome, sendy women and non-binary folk in the Backcountry Squatters community, river guiding may be pretty commonplace. For me, however, going to Tennessee and working as a river guide is I think the coolest thing that I have done to date, and the scholarship that I received from BCS this year helped make it possible.

I am from Salt Lake City, Utah, where I’m now going to school. Salt Lake, and Utah in general, is a mecca for all sorts of outdoor sports, from climbing, to skiing, to running rivers. However, as the daughter of two immigrant parents, I think that the most outdoorsy thing I ever did growing up in this mecca was hike. Coming to college, though, I was introduced to a huge, wide-open world that took me into the mountains, and the canyons that define this state. Largely thanks to BCS, I met countless rad women who helped me explore these new territories, and I started climbing and had my first ski season this last year. It was these women who inspired me to and encouraged me to apply for guide jobs the summer after my freshman year.

As we all know too well, getting into a new outdoor sport is always expensive. It’s often expensive enough to delay us from doing the things we’re stoked on or keep us from them entirely. Even as I was applying to guide jobs, I knew that guide school and gear are expensive, and I was looking for ways to get past that. The prospect of going somewhere new for seasonal work was scary to me. The prospect of going out on a financial limb to do so? Downright terrifying. So, when I initially applied for the Backcountry Squatters scholarship in April, I planned to use it to cover the cost of guide school and gear. I was fortunate enough to get a guide job in Hartford, Tennessee that covered the cost of guide school and allowed me to work off the cost of gear.

At that point, I was left with $650 for something I no longer needed to pay for, and I felt really bad about it. But this scholarship wasn’t just a scholarship for guide school, it was a scholarship for outdoor education. And in this world, there’s always a million different things to learn, especially for someone as inexperienced as me. As someone who is so new to this world, I’m always trying to learn more. It’s really easy to feel alienated by a lack of experience in outdoor spaces, and picking up new skills always helps me feel more confident and secure. It also gets me a lot closer to my eventual goal of being able to initiate excursions myself and help provide others with the experiences that have been provided for me. So, given this money and this opportunity, I decided to pick up new skills in the realm of Wilderness Medicine.

This scholarship was able to fully cover the cost of my hybrid Wilderness First Responder course. I needed at least a Wilderness First Aid in order to work as a single day paddle guide. However, as a college student under the money constraints that a lot of students are, I was planning on getting it online as cheaply as possible, even if it likely meant learning less. This scholarship allowed me to go above and beyond and spend several days in person getting a much more extensive Wilderness Medicine certification.

Retroactively, I am so incredibly grateful that I was able to obtain my WFR in this way. I had an incredible summer as a single-day paddle guide, and next summer, I want to try my hand at oar guiding multi-day trips on bigger rivers out here in the West. For most multi-day guide jobs, you need a WFR, and I am so grateful that I now have that base covered. However, the time that I spent getting hands-on practice while obtaining this WFR has larger implications than just running rivers. It makes me feel safer and more confident in every outdoor experience that I pursue. And as I move into more involved and remote outdoor adventures this year, such as multi-pitch climbing and backcountry skiing, I feel infinitely more capable, prepared, and safe.

I’ve come to realize that existing in outdoor spaces is a virtuous cycle. The more you do, the more you feel comfortable, which means you can do even more, and feel even more stoked, and let your world become bigger and bigger. The hardest part is the first part. And I’m super thankful to Darby, and the awesome women at the University of Utah, and to Backcountry Squatters as a whole. You guys have provided not only the resources, but also the stellar community, that helped so much to kick me off :))

–Khushi, BCS Scholarship for Outdoor Education Recipient

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