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Elyse Rylander Is a Trailblazer for LGBTQ Youth

uchrobak — Tue, 03 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000

On a blustery afternoon late last August, members of America’s first LGBTQ youth conservation corps, traveling by kayak, found themselves momentarily stranded on Patos, an uninhabited island in Washington’s Puget Sound.

Elyse Rylander, the founder of a trailblazing organization��that brings LGBTQ youth outdoors, had hoped to make the crossing to a YMCA-run camp on Orcas Island earlier in the day. The Queer Crew’s seven teenagers and two trip leaders had spent four weeks doing conservation work throughout Washington under the programming umbrella of Rylander’s nonprofit,��, and the . This kayaking outing would��close their summer program.

They had a rare evening of rest planned on��Orcas, but as midafternoon approached, strong winds kept the group pinned down on Patos Island. Rylander deemed it too risky to attempt the crossing.��“Never a dull moment when you’re working with Mother Nature,” she said.

Rylander, 27,��officially launched��OTA three years ago to fill a gap she’d noticed over more than a decade working as an outdoor teacher and guide: a lack of nature��programming geared toward LGBTQ youth. The seedling idea for OTA began years earlier, while Rylander��was an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin; she developed her plan in a Microsoft Word document throughout her twenties. To keep the dream alive, Rylander told me she’d “donated eggs a couple of times” and worked part-time jobs.

“My vision, originally, was just to have a gay Outward Bound,” she says. But when OTA launched its initial programming in 2015, Rylander learned the extent to which the kids��usually craved something more than just an eight-day backpacking adventure. “T��re is this need to connect and to find a��community,” Rylander says, noting that queer high-schoolers often feel ostracized in their schools or peer groups. She refocused OTA’s programming to be especially attuned to participant's emotional nuances, and to follow-up with groups and participants after an adventure in a way more similar to wilderness therapy than Outward Bound.��

In just a few years, OTA has grown exponentially. In 2015, Rylander ran an eight-day sea kayaking adventure with just two participants; in 2016, she ran daylong and multiday surfing, climbing, and hiking trips with several dozen kids. A turning point came in 2017, when Rylander partnered with the Northwest Youth Corps to create the nation’s first Queer Crew, providing a multiweek experience that combined outdoor education, conservation training, and individual empowerment. Youth conservation crews have been a big part of maintaining public lands since the 1970s.��The national forests and parks hire kids to groom trails. The kids, in turn, get vital job training in conservation while spending a whole summer outside.

The Queer Crew was like the��multiple��other crews Northwest Youth Corps ran in Oregon and Washington last summer, but it��also made use of OTA’s expertise to boost confidence and bonding for its high school–age members, all of whom identify as LGBTQ in some way (as did all but one of the group leaders). “We want to get them to the point that they’re comfortable outdoors,” says Jay Satz, director of Northwest Youth Corps’��partnerships, explaining the need for a queer-only crew. “Sometimes you have to build that without the distractions and baggage that society comes with.”��In other words, the kids were able to focus on learning to cut trails without the constant worry that crew mates—like society at large—might judge them for not identifying with the gender they’d been assigned at birth.

(Nicole Schmiedle/The North Face)

(Courtesy Elyse Rylander)

Crew members signed up��for different reasons. Caroline Shea, 18, traveled from the Washington, DC,��area for an opportunity to work outside with other peers who identified as LGBTQ. She considered herself “outdoorsy” and spent a semester of high school at an environmental education school. But being queer and loving the outdoors had “always been super separate” parts of her life. The programs she��participated in prior to Queer Crew were largely “dominated by straight cisgender guys.” Queer Crew gave Shea an opportunity to be outside with a group culture where she could be fully herself. An added perk? Northwest Youth Corps’��conservation job training meant that Shea and other crew members were compensated for their work, rather than having to pay for an outdoor adventure��through Outward Bound or NOLS.

Mel Hanby, who identified as a trans young man, said he jumped at the opportunity when a��Northwest Youth Corps outreach coordinator visited his high school’s Gay-Straight Alliance to promote Queer Crew. He is considering a career in conservation, so Queer Crew was valuable initial work experience. The openness of the group culture was also a life-changing first: “It’s very one-foot-in-the-closet for me, in my rural little town,” Handy says. “Being out here has allowed me to identify as what I want to identify as. I want to bring that sense of safeness out into the world.”

Attention to details make the program accommodating to queer kids. Overnight camping programs, for instance, traditionally divide tents and facilities by gender assigned at birth; OTA does not divide tent groups by gender identity or expression. For a young person who has not yet come out to their parents, signing up for the Queer Crew or an LGBTQ-focused outdoor experience presents a unique hurdle. In response, Rylander frames OTA as programming “for queer youth and their allies” and is experimenting with encouraging self-organized outdoor group activities that OTA can incentivize��through social media.

The people OTA and Northwest Youth Corps select to support their shared programming are also equipped to handle emotional trauma. “Queer folks are overrepresented in all those negative statistics of youth depression, anxiety, even homelessness,” Rylander says. Several Queer Crew members referenced supporting one another through bouts of intense sadness and anxiety during the summer, “because [depression’s] a thing, and I’ve been there,” one said simply.

By the time Rylander and the Queer Crew found themselves stranded in the farthest corner of Puget Sound, they’d been outdoors with one another for weeks. They had cleared brush and stabilized trails in four different work sites across Washington. Their two transportation vehicles had been unreliable. They named the first “Rachel,” after Jennifer Aniston’s character on the ’90s sitcom Friends, because “it kept having breakdowns”; the second one was “Ross,”��another Friends character, “because he sucks.”��They’d seen bears. Mice had gotten into their weekly rations. They’d been rained on, scraped by brambles, and pushed to their physical and emotional edges. Being stranded on Patos Island for an afternoon, at that point, was just another challenge served up by the elements that they could overcome.

Eventually, the winds changed course.��Rylander and the crew relaunched their kayaks and, before sundown, arrived at Camp Orkila on Orcas Island, where they kicked back over pizza for one of their last nights of summer together.

Rylander frequently characterizes nature as a “disruptive force.” Borrowing from the theorist , she believes nature to be a particularly orienting space for queer people, whose identities resist the “straight and orderly” and whose place can often be uncertain in a society dominated by cisgendered straight people.

Nature is full of fluid expressions of gender and sexuality—from the ways plant and animal species behave to the fact that the trail is often literally not straight.

Nature, by contrast, is full of fluid expressions of gender and sexuality—from the ways plant and animal species behave to the fact that the trail is often literally not straight. Plus, on a practical level, being in the wilderness can render obsolete some of the obstacles that queer young people face in their everyday lives.��“We always joke that��trees don’t care where you pee,” Rylander says, referring to political controversy in some states over same-sex bathrooms.

Rylander developed an appreciation for the benefits of nature��at a young age. She was born in a small town in Wisconsin��and spent her childhood canoeing, skiing, and kayaking. Her parents were college-educated, outdoorsy, and liberal; educated at Madison, they “tried pretty hard to create a narrative counter to the very conservative and small-town feel of the community we grew up in,” Rylander says. She vividly remembers the Confederate flags and “ignorant” beliefs of some people in her hometown.

At age five, Rylander—a self-described “classic tomboy”—found herself with “a fat crush” on the pink Power Ranger��on TV. But it was not until later that she began to consider her sexuality. “Ellen’s show was not on at that time,” Rylander��says, “and there were no other queer narratives that I had access to that talked about even just being gay. I guess there was Will and Grace, but that was so far removed from my reality.”

In high school, Rylander began working and teaching for Rutabaga Paddle Sports, an outdoor store in nearby Madison��whose staff included��queer women. “I was seeing these really wonderful, strong, female, queer role models,” she remembers. Rylander��felt empowered by being a kayaking teacher and encountering positive queer idols for the first time. “It just happened to be a place that was doing all the things I need it to��do.”

In many ways, OTA is designed to replicate the safety and empowerment that Rutabaga gave to Rylander as a teenager. Ultimately, she wants the outdoors to be an equitable space for queer kids to learn, work, grow, and thrive—and be recognized. “We prize people who can go out and be successful in the outdoors—the sex appeal and the badassness of folks that are guides or professional outdoor people,” Rylander says. “That creates a lot of confidence and self-worth,” qualities that can be particularly life changing for young people who are often marginalized because of their identities.

The day after the kayak stranding, atop Orcas Island’s Mount Constitution, tourists milled around a sandstone-and-steel observation tower—which, incidentally, was built in the 1930s by��the Citizen Conservation Corps, a grandfather program of today’s youth conservation crews. Amid the swarms of chattering families in Patagonia and khaki travel pants were Queer Crew members—a curly haired youth clad in a T-shirt and beige gypsy skirt, a spry participant wearing an orange beanie and transparent black mesh tank top, another with a puff of pink hair. It was their last day together, and they gathered around Rylander—tall and athletic, with close-cropped hair, orange sunglasses, and an unconscious tendency to strike a camp-counselor pose of resting hands on hips.

She led the crew in an “affirmation circle,” a closing ritual in which everyone piled praise on one another. The young crew members fidgeted, shuffled to hug different friends, or wiped tears from each other’s eyes. They regarded Rylander with admiration verging on awe.

After each turn, Rylander resurrected an age-old camp tradition, giving each crew member a friendship bracelet made from rainbow-colored string—“Very gay,” she declared to the group.

Afterward, when the affirmation circle reached Rylander, the crew’s veneration spilled out: “You’re just this really badass queer woman who saw something that needed to be done.” “You’re someone who leaves a lasting impression on people.” “You’re so cool!” “I can see Elyse on a solo kayaking trip and she, like, breaks her arm and just keeps motoring.”

She wants the outdoors to be an equitable space for queer kids to learn, work, grow and thrive—and be recognized.

“It’s interesting for me to hear you all say these things to me��and to think of how I’ve gotten to where I am now,” she said. “One, because of my queer identity, and also because of all the time I’ve spent outdoors being worked by Mother Nature over and over again—having to learn that stuff never ends up the way you want it to, but often it winds up way better than you thought it would.

“All those tools that I have now that you all talked about,” Rylander continued, “I have because I spent time outside like you all just did for the last five weeks. You’re all on that path now as well.” Soon, it was time to say goodbye. Rylander and Alec��Robinson, another OTA staffer, waved as the crew piled aboard “Ross” and drove toward��the Orcas Island ferry terminal.

This year will be the biggest yet for��Rylander and OTA. In Washington, Rylander will run daylong and short multiday events before she and Northwest Youth Corps launch their second Queer Crew. She has launched adult programming in Seattle. In both San Francisco and Seattle, she has launched mentorship programs��and partnered with Outward Bound to create a program that combines two weeks of hiking with a period of urban service. She is piloting an initiative in four different cities that encourages kids and their parents to self-organize adventures. (OTA provides outdoor challenge ideas and rewards—often gear—from its sponsors.)��

Rylander has realized that the queer kids in OTA’s programs are eager for queer outdoor role models—one of them being her. She and her partner fronted The North Face’s first queer advertising campaign. She also launched the industry’s first in Seattle last November, with major support from the Wilderness Society, which drew 120 participants from the United States��and Canada. This year’s summit will be held in October in the San Francisco Bay Area.

“What I feel like we’re experiencing right now is the industry as a whole kind of dipping its toe into this conversation around queer equity, and I do think we will galvanize folks,” Rylander says. “People in the industry who are queer and haven’t been able to find a place for themselves are sort of coming out the woodwork.��And I really think we’re going to be able to bring people together.”

Portrait:��Clayton Boyd/The North Face

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Think James Bond Is Badass? Meet the Pilots Who Help Film Him.

oharlow — Wed, 17 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000

If you call 911 for a helicopter rescue in the contiguous United States—or, as Hawaiian islanders prefer, on “the mainland”—chances are the fire or police departments will arrive in their own aircraft. But if you need a helicopter to rescue you in Maui County, you’ll meet a member of Don and Donna Shearer’s helicopter team.

The Shearers own ,��a helicopter company that specializes in utility work. If that makes it sound like they’re missing the action, consider this: their helicopters have hoisted cameras for James Bond movies and American Express commercials; they’re the go-to birds for filming watersports at Jaws (they appear in Susan Casey’s bestselling book , about 100-foot swells and the people who chase them); they’ve detonated bombs to clear Navy testing sites; and they’ve dropped Drug Enforcement Agency officers into illegal marijuana patches. And��since local fire departments and emergency-rescue departments on Maui don’t have their own helicopters, the Shearers and their staff are on standby 24/7 in case one is needed for a rescue.��

After all, it’s Hawaii. “A lot of people come here,” Donna says. “Stupid things happen.”

Age: Both are 58
Job: Owners and operators of Windward Aviation
Home Base: Maui
Years in the Business: 32 (27 at Windward Aviation)
TV Inspiration:
Division of Labor: Donna handles contracting and hiring. Don flies (and does the firing). “Donna’s the brains of the operation,” says Don. “And he gets the glory!” adds Donna.

How They Got to Maui

Don:��“From the time I was a little boy I was intrigued by flight. I was born in 1958, and from World War II to the 1970s and ’80s, there was more progress in aviation than probably any other period of time. I would beg my mom to go to the airport so I could watch the planes take off and land. I started flying myself in 1977, the year I graduated from high school. I got my mechanics license to work on airplanes and helicopters, then one thing led to another and I was offered a job at Continental Airlines as��a pilot. At the same time, I had another job opportunity to fly helicopters in Hawaii for a tour company. I figured I could always get an airplane job.”

Donna:��“I moved to Maui in 1991��and did a tour on a helicopter the following year. Afterward,��I was like, Man, I’d rather learn how to fly a helicopter. And that’s how I met Don. He had a little flight school at the time, so I met him through the yellow pages.”

Don and Donna Shearer with their furry copilot. (Courtesy of Don and Donna Shearer)

There Is No Typical Day…

Don:��“We started Windward Aviation in the early 1990s. Just about every helicopter company in Hawaii does helicopter tours for starters. But with one of the previous employers, I got exposed to what’s called utility work. Utility work is where you do everything except tours. So we’ll put poles in the ground and string wire for utility companies; we’ll carry water to fight fires; we’ll take police into marijuana patches; we’ll take conservation groups, such as the and the , to save native rainforests by building fences and eradicating invasive species; we’ll do movies and commercials. And we have contracts with the fire department, the police department, the state and national parks, and the military.��

Donna: On any given day, we could be on all the islands��doing all those different jobs.”

On Filming Movies

Don:��“I’m kind of over it. It’s like, ‘OK, fly… No, don’t fly.’ ‘OK, fly!… No, no, no, don’t fly. We’re not ready.’ ‘OK, fly! Go, go, go!’”

On Flying at Jaws

Don: “It’s��I don’t think I’ll ever be able to get away from. I’ve been doing it longer than anybody, since about 1990. I’ve met and gotten close to many of the professional athletes that surf, kite, and windsurf there. We’re really sought-after for all the documentaries and films about Jaws.”

Best Part of the Job

Don:��“We’re constantly being dispatched for missing kiters, surfers, windsurfers, hikers, fishermen, plane crashes, people falling off waterfalls… It’s always nice when you get out there and you can actually rescue someone. That’s a very fulfilling part of the job.”

Donna:��“We did a big rescue one year, of like ! There was a flash flood, and they got caught up off the Hana Highway. There have been good rescues and hilarious ones, as well as some tragic ones. But if everybody comes out alive, it’s a good day.”

Worst Part of the Job

Don:��“T�� other side is when you’re picking up bodies. It’s a horrible tragedy, and you’re just providing closure for the family. That can wear on you over time. I’ve been to a plane crash with 20 fatalities. I’ve been to three other plane crashes with ten fatalities. It’s had a huge impact on me.”

Finding Time to Play

Don: “My cardinal rule is to try and get in the ocean everyday. All I need is an hour of surfing, kite surfing, swimming, or a downwind run on my stand-up paddleboard. Once I get my ocean time, the business world is easily managed. Prior to that, I find myself getting too consumed and stressed out. The other outlet I have is being on the flying schedule—once I leave the ground, my only concern is to be the most professional aviator possible. No cells phones in the cockpit! It’s totally an in-the-here-and-now kind of a moment.”

Donna: “Don gets to fly almost everyday, whereas I do the hard part and sit at a desk for the majority of the workday, so my goal is to perform at least one type of exercise, whether it be surfing, kite surfing, running, lifting weights, or bicycling. Surfing trumps everything. I follow the forecast like a maniac—it’s my second job! Waves can now be forecasted a few weeks ahead, so I adjust my work schedule to allow myself the opportunity to surf if conditions are good. I also have a small workout station in my office, so I can exercise whenever I want to reenergize during the day.”

On Working with Your Spouse

Don:��“We really started working together in 2004 and determined rather quickly that we��needed to develop some ground rules. She cannot raise her voice and I cannot use cuss words. As long as we play by those simple rules, everything works fine. I have added my own new rule recently that she has no knowledge of: if I find myself getting a little upset, I remind myself��how much I love her and how special she��is to me.”

Donna:��“My wonderful hubby knows that I need a bit more play time each day, as I do all the hard crappy work and he gets all the glory. So it's a fair trade-off.”

On Spending a Life Together

Donna:��“We’re stronger together. We shine brighter together. The only thing is when he drops in on my wave—that pisses me off!”��

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Meet the Marathon Runner Designing Your Trail Gear

oharlow — Tue, 02 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Have you ever wondered about the person who designed and tested the breathable vents and nifty hood of your favorite running jacket? Ever been hit by a downpour mid-run and wanted to thank her? If you run on the , you might get your chance.

Nancy Hoo, 50, is a design manager for the Arc’teryx . Hoo’s work fuses her talent for “the technical aspect of design” with her passion for running.

Her favorite part of the job? Watching buyers put her team’s clothing through the wringer. “When I’m outside and up in the mountains, I see gear that I’ve worked on—people wearing it and putting it to work,” Hoo says.

Name: Nancy Hoo
Age: 50
Job: Designer for the Arc’teryx trail running and base layer collections
Current City: Vancouver, British Columbia
Hometown: Hong Kong (Hoo came to Vancouver when she was three.)
Years on the Job: Eight. Hoo freelanced for Arc’teryx for six years while raising her three children; she’s been in Arc’teryx’s BC-based headquarters full-time for two years.
Must-Have Apparel Item: “A really great jacket. I’ve always liked outerwear!”
Outdoor Passion: “I’ve always been a runner.”
Design Area of Expertise: “I specialize in formfitted products with stretch materials. I’ve worked in areas from run to swim to bike that have allowed me to learn about body form and movement. Knits and stretch wovens work well in allowing the body to move without hindrance.”
Favorite Piece of Arc’teryx Gear: “My go-to is , short-sleeve or long-sleeve. I can wear it all season and use it for everything from long runs to skiing and hiking. I��never chafe in it. It’s amazing.”
Favorite Piece of Non-Arc’teryx Gear: runners. They are super-bright pink with a bit of blue, and I am definitely not a pink girl. It was the only color they had, but they felt so good that I had to have them. They are lightweight, give me amazing grip on the trails, and have a wide toe box with a good fit at the back heel.”

What She Loves About Design: “I’ve always loved clothing and how it’s put together. It’s amazing that you can make something starting with 2-D patterning, and then be able to sew it up. I’ve always been driven by material and texture, how fabrics feel and what you can do with them. When I got out of school at Kwantlen Polytechnic University, I went straight into the technical aspects of fashion (design, patterning, construction) and kept on going.”

Certification/Education Needed for Her Job: “A degree in fashion arts and technology will encompass an understanding of patterning, body form, sewing construction, textiles. And it’ll give you some computer applications like Photoshop and Illustrator. I live in the world of for my job.

“T��re are a lot of people here [at Arc’teryx] with industrial design backgrounds, too. It comes at it a different way, from a design point of view, and it looks at using materials for product needs and intended use. It’s very purposeful.”

A Typical Workday: “I get to just build really cool stuff! I get to talk to athletes. I talk to the [outdoor-oriented] people around me to see what they have a need for. Then I look at materials. I look at patterning. I look at different production details. And then I put it all together to build a collection that is small and precise and purposeful for the consumer. We also look at fits and the logistics of what it takes [for a garment] to be feasibly made and go into production.”

Her Area of Focus: “I do , which is trail running apparel. It’s hard to make a . Since you’re working super-hard when you’re running, your temperature goes up. You’re building condensation in your garments. You’re just sweaty! We want the jacket to be waterproof so you can run in all kinds of weather, but waterproof material has a membrane that has low air permeability, so you get a lot of condensation in the jacket.

“T�� is one of the pieces I’m most proud of. We have these really cool vents—there are no zippers, since we’re trying to make it lightweight, and pit zips are just too cumbersome to deal with underneath when you’re trying to work hard. We used in-house feedback; colleagues would come up and talk to me or send us feedback through email after trying out a prototype. We were thinking of how to create more air circulation to the jacket without adding weight, so we reduced it by not putting in pit zips and incorporating these vents under the arm, so it doesn’t leak in water but allows for circulation.”

The Arc'teryx Norvan SL Hoodie Jacket is one of Nancy Hoo's designs. (Courtesy of Arc'teryx)

Incorporating Athletes’ Feedback into the Clothing: “We were aware that some people will go out for a two-hour run or not a super-long run as part of their training, and they wouldn’t necessarily carry a pack. We thought of what you’d need to carry while trail running. A lot of people carry a phone, a wallet or ID, gels. So Arc’teryx created the and the . The Soleus has a five-pocket system: There’s a center mesh pocket that’s large enough to house our light jackets. Then we have a zipping security pocket that you can put your phone in, a stash pocket for gels and bars, and front pockets. In the Nera, we have a three-pocket system. The front is big enough for your phone, and there are two stash pockets.”

Workspace Setup: “We [designers] have a worktable right beside us that we can do patterning on��and that we can play and manipulate things on. Sewing machines are close by, so I can go sit on a sewing machine and do a quick mockup of something to see if it works��before I bring it to our pattern technicians to make it prettier and initiate a product with them.”

How to Get a Foot in the Door of Outdoor Apparel Design: “People ask me, ‘How do I become a designer?’ I say gain all the knowledge you can. Pattern making is super important; you need to understand how patterning works because fit is so integral to a fantastic product. If you don’t have fit, you won’t have a very good product. Learn about sewing construction, the sequencing of how to put your garment together. Gain knowledge about different machines, stitches, and what textiles are available and by what means you can put a garment together. Textiles are a huge part of outdoor apparel—textiles and materials are so integral to your design that you need to understand how they work and what their benefits and limitations are. Also, computer applications. You’re looking at Photoshop or Illustrator or InDesign to be able to communicate your designs and taking that to your product developers to be able to understand and read. That’s all knowledge you gain in school and internships.

“And then, just really having passion for the activity you’re building for. If you don’t know how to use it and what the intentions are, you won’t be able to understand it. If you have a passion for it and know the activity, that has an impact on your design as well.”

(Courtesy of Arc'teryx)

What People Don’t Understand About Her Job: “Design is only half your job as a designer. There are a lot of logistics. You have to understand how your product can get to market. You have to look at product-line planning to make a concise collection. You don’t want to overwhelm your buyer. You want to design a collection that addresses their needs but doesn’t have a lot of pieces. I don’t need to have 25 different T-shirts; I need to address [buyers’] needs. It’s about product knowledge, how to make things feasible, and how to communicate it. And there’s a lot of product testing.”

Minimizing Deskwork/Maximizing Outdoor Time: “T�� outdoors is such big part of our brand and product. At work, we’re all big users of our product. If we don’t go out and use it, we just don’t get the understanding we need to build useful gear. We’re surrounded by mountains. In Vancouver, you can be up in the mountains skiing, come back down and go for a bike ride around the creek, and then go on a lower trail run. All three things in one day. ”

Three Personal Bests: “I backpacked the ! It was amazing. The views were spectacular. It made me realize that, wow, I really live in a beautiful part of the world.

“And I did the New York Marathon. It wasn’t about the race; it was just about the people. [The crowds of onlookers] are so excited. They cheer you on every step of the way. They are so loud! I usually run with music, but I couldn’t hear it. I took my music out and put it away, and they were there for me. That was the best race I’ve ever been in.

“Also, my kids. My kids are the biggest highlight of my life. I have three, and I think they make you realize what life really means. I am just constantly learning from them.”

On Loving Her Job: “I always tell my kids, when you choose your path, you should love it. Work is a huge, huge part of your life. It’s not just a small part of it. It takes up so much of your time here on this earth. So, when you wake up, you should just love where you’re going.”

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Being a Pro Dog Photographer Is Even More Fun Than You’d Think

cthompson — Mon, 13 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Two years ago, Sagar Gondalia sold his medical billing business in Denver and moved into the back of his Toyota FJ Cruiser with Voo, his Bernese mountain dog. Around the same time, he drew one of the National Park Service’s rare permits to journey down the Colorado River in Grand Canyon National Park, unguided. “So, I figured I should buy a camera,” Gondalia deadpans.

After traveling to the Grand Canyon with seven friends, Gondalia��took Voo��road-tripping��around the United States, crashing at friends’ homes. “We’d flip through photos of our dogs and talk about them like they’re our kids.” Of his newly married friends, only a few had children. The rest had dogs that felt like their children. “Ten years ago, all these people were paying professional photographers to take pictures of their children,” Gondalia says. “Now those same people have the same amount of money and care about these dogs the same way.” Currently settled in Denver—at least until next summer—Gondalia’s is picking up steam.

(Sagar Gondalia)

Age: 30
Hometown: Cheyenne, Wyoming
Current City: Anchorage, Alaska
Office: “A cluttered mess on a desk, with a couple monitors, a laptop, and a lot of dog hair.”
Job: Dog photographer
Favorite Breed: He won’t say, but admits to being a “big-dog person.”
Favorite Climb: The Naked Edge in Eldorado Canyon

Training: Totally self-taught. “I’ve learned most of what I know from the advice of friends, YouTube, trial and error, and a shit-ton of Instagram,” Gondalia says. “A big revelation for me was probably that although YouTube has an absolute wealth of info, sadly the people making YouTube videos about photography tend not to be the people whose work I admire…those people tend to be out taking photographs.” For those looking to take up photography, Gondalia’s tip is to “reverse engineer” great photographs, like the ones you admire on Instagram—and always keeps a camera on hand in case inspiration strikes. Advances in digital photography help ease the learning curve: “I couldn’t have gotten nearly as competent as I have in the time period I did if I were still working in film.”

The Best Settings: Gondalia never shoots in a studio. “Dogs are so context dependent. My shoots have all been in-house, in backyards, at dog parks, on the owner’s typical walk—places the dog is going to feel comfortable and excited.”

What His Week Looks Like: “I tend to be shooting Saturday and Sundays—most people are working Monday through Friday and aren’t around to let me hang out with the dogs. I like to shoot natural light with dogs, which means early mornings and early afternoons are key. Monday through Friday, I’m able to be out skiing in the morning. By afternoon, I’m back at my computer and catching up on editing. I’ve worked as a guide, where every day is really different and every day you’re outside playing, and that’s the kind of life I want to live. Being a photographer definitely facilitates that.”

What Makes a Professional Dog Portrait Special: “Everybody can take great shots of dogs: you take the derpiest photo of the derpiest dog and people will love it! But what I really like to do is capture moments that owners really appreciate and owners will really see, because they spend 24/7 with these animals. Being able to get that level of emotional conversation with a dog in a few hours is hard. You have to work with the dog to figure out where in the house it likes to hang out, and where it likes to go in the yard, and what it likes to do—get it really comfortable and put it back in its natural habitat to get the shots.”

“When you shoot portraits of people, the person stands still. Dogs don’t care!”

A Typical Shoot: Gondalia often spends three to four hours with a dog per shoot. “I think it takes at least an hour, an hour and a half to get the dog where I want them to be,” he says. He never starts with the lens cap off while the dog, usually fascinated by this new person, works through its initial excitement. “I bring all my equipment in. I leave it in a corner…eventually, the owner gets bored and leaves me alone, the dog will calm down, and at that point the cameras come out.”

The key to getting a successful shot, Gondalia says, is “spending time with the dog to learn its habits and patterns. That way, you can construct shots, and then sit around and anticipate those moments. You have to be really patient about waiting for dogs to be in the right place with the right expression at the right time while you have everything set up correctly. It takes a lot more patience than people realize.”

Embracing the Unpredictability: “When you shoot portraits of people, the person stands still. Dogs don’t care! When I’m shooting with multiple lenses, when the dog is [near] me I have one lens. Then the dog runs across the yard and I need a different lens. Then the dog’s in the light, but by the time I get the right lens in the camera and everything’s focused, the dog is gone.” Gondalia brings multiple lenses and studies each dog’s movements to anticipate good shots.

There's More Where This Came From.

Making It in the Saturated Market of Photography: “Ten years ago, you could be a good climber or a good skier and a great photographer and make your way in that world. But these days, you need to be on the level of professional athletes to be photographing. You need to be on participatory climbing trips and participatory skiing adventures that allow you to get those shots that people will pay for. I’d like to keep climbing as a thing where I don’t have to be really strong and I don’t have to be really good at it every day just to support my livelihood.”

Seasonal Gig: Gondalia returns to Wyoming each summer to guide at Devil’s Tower, mentored by climbing legend Frank Sanders. “I’ve been working for Frank a couple of years, and this last season I had this great, really long lens. From the [Devil’s Tower Lodge] deck, you can see the top of the tower, and I could see there were a lot of people standing there…I started taking pictures of clients when I wasn’t guiding, and people loved them! I started selling them. I ended up making more from those photographs than from guiding.”

Building a Business: Gondalia advertises his work only through word-of-mouth, his website, and his company’s Instagram, . “I feel like I’m inventing a market. I’m selling people a product they don’t realize they want yet. I’m at the point where people are getting prints of dogs up on their walls. My hope now is their friends will come over and have that a-ha moment: ‘Oh, this is something I want.’”

Another Use for All Your Dog Photos: “I have an unreal number of pictures of my dog. At this point, I feel bad for my friends because I don’t use emojis anymore. I just have emojis of every expression of my dog. It’s a little embarrassing.”

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Today’s Toughest Dream Job: Environmental Attorney

lwhelan — Wed, 08 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000

The lawyers at the nonprofit law firm have been behind countless , representing, pro bono, indigenous nations and local governments to powerhouse environmental organizations like the Sierra Club and the Natural Resources Defense Council. So what did Earthjustice attorney Janette Brimmer think when Trump was elected? “I’m going to be honest,” she says. “I look at the change of administration coming in, and I think, ‘Oh my god. This is going to be really hard.’”

Brimmer’s litigation largely focuses on the Clean Water Act. Along with the rest of Earthjustice’s Pacific Northwest office, she’s spent an outsized amount of time in recent years fighting the coal, oil, and natural gas transportation and infrastructure projects cropping up in the region since North Dakota’s Bakken boom. Despite the major challenges in defending those regulations in the Trump administration, Brimmer remains passionate about her work. “This is a dream job,” says the lifelong outdoors enthusiast. “Who goes to law school and gets to do this?”

Job: Staff attorney at Earthjustice
Age: 55
Hometown: Madison, Wisconsin
Current City: Seattle, Washington
Legal Specialties: Clean water; national parks and wilderness protection; coal export terminals.
Weekday Hours: 7:30 a.m. until 5 p.m. (Unless she’s in court, which happens at least every few months.)
Caseload: Four to five active cases at any given time, plus another five or so on the back burner.
Favorite Flower: Monkshood
Favorite Place to Hike: The North Cascades, with her partner and their dogs. “We prefer less-visited, more-rugged places.”
Major Hobby: Gardening
Hero Environmentalist: Aldo Leopold. (Brimmer went to Aldo Leopold Elementary School as a kid.)

Outdoor Roots and Precocious Activism: “I grew up in a very blue-collar, working-class family. I was the first person to go to college in my family, on either side. My family was into the outdoors: a strong hunting and fishing tradition, a very strong camping tradition. We had this little shack in the woods—really, nothing more than a shack, no plumbing and no lights—that I adored. I spent all my childhood vacations camping. It was just a part of me from day one.

“I was a kid in the 1970s, the environmental decade. I was in school when the first Earth Day happened. Honest to god, when I was in third grade, I organized some of my friends in a sleepover to do anti-pollution signs and buttons, and then took them to school and said to the teacher, ‘Wouldn’t it be a great idea if the whole class wore these? And picked up trash on the playground?’”

The Early Wave of Environmental Law: Though major environmental laws like the Clean Water and Air Acts were passed in the 1970s, the practice of environmental law didn’t pick up steam until the early ’90s. “T��re weren’t any environmental law classes when I was in school in the mid-’80s! There was one that the antitrust professor taught to be a good guy,” Brimmer says. As environmental law has expanded its scope and the frequency of courtroom challenges has increased, Brimmer says that lawyers have seen “more of a backlash from industry than we did earlier.”

Her Typical Workday: “A lot of emails! Unless I’m in court that day, I’m probably writing something. And, like any law job, doing legal research, keeping up on what’s happening. If I am going to court, I do mock arguments in the office. My colleagues are probably harder on me than any judge has ever been. We just go for it. They play judge, and I have to get up there and argue and answer really hard questions. They just keep throwing it at you for two-hour stretches. We hire some of the top lawyers, and we have to be the best when we go to court. We don’t want anyone to think less of us because ‘Oh, gosh, they work for free,’ or ‘Oh, it’s those lefty-enviro types.’”

“I’m going to be honest, I look at the change of administration coming in, and I think, ‘Oh my god. This is going to be really hard.’”

Finding a Work-Life Balance: “You may not be able to avoid doing a lot of work, so you might as well care a lot about what you do. When you go through periods where you’re eating and breathing what you’re doing, you start to feel like that’s normal. Then you get to a time when you can finally take a breath, and you think, I don’t have enough work to do.”

Taking on Challenges: “We know that the hard, protracted cases are the ones where it’s more difficult for people to find lawyers, so we purposefully take those on. But that sometimes means that your success rate—well, it can be a grind. In fact, we have amazing success, and that’s great, but the ones you don’t [win], that’s a hard day.”

Brimmer and her colleagues also work on issues with effects and urgency that are not always immediately apparent. “It’s easy to see a clear-cut forest. People can understand that,” she says. But air pollution is a different story. Brimmer recently argued , a coal plant that she says obscured air quality and visibility in 11 national parks and wilderness areas. “You might not know that if you’ve never visited Grand Canyon, and you don’t realize that you’re supposed to be able to see rim to rim on most days, and you think you’re seeing something amazing because you have no basis for comparison—but in fact, it’s obscured by pollution.”

On Facing the Next Four Years: “T��re are days that you just want to crawl under your desk, because it’s so emotionally and intellectually difficult when you care about it that much. It’s hard. It’s an uphill battle.” The good news is that Brimmer has observed Earthjustice receiving an uptick in positive feedback——since the election. And that’s making a difference. “Definitely, support groups that you think are doing good work, that may feel indirect, but it is a big deal in terms of getting the work done,” Brimmer says. Among the organizations that Brimmer supports are the National Resources Defense Council, Audubon, Puget Soundkeeper Alliance, Trustees for Alaska, Oregon Wild, and the Minnesota Center for Environmental Advocacy.

What Ordinary People Can Do (Besides Donate): “Be informed, show up, and be heard. Many environmental decisions and policies require public comment. Be informed ahead of time, and submit written comments or comment at a hearing. (I think written comments are more effective.) Make sure your legislators at both the state and federal level know. Stay informed on Earthjustice or other organizations’ websites, as they often have information you can use to make informed comments. And finally, be a good steward yourself—those little everyday things can add up.”

How She Unwinds: “Last summer, after spending five weeks at trial—which came on the heels of an already busy year—I went backpacking in the Cascades for two weeks, which really helped. But it doesn't always take a big ol’ backpack trip. It can also be spending time with my dogs in a city park or gardening. I’ve been living in Seattle for close to nine years, and the fact that I can see the Olympic Mountains on my walk to my bus stop is freaking amazing. I will still get enjoyment from walking my dogs at dusk in the wintertime, when the sky happens to be purple, if it’s clear like it is right now, and the moon is out. That alone can make me feel really good.”

On What It Will Take to Protect Our Environment: “T�� law is an incredible tool. It is something that the powers-that-be tend to wield—and wield very well. We need it to fight back.” But the law, Brimmer says, is not the only tool environmentalists and outdoors enthusiasts need to tap to save the planet. “I am one of those people who believes we have to bring all the resources to bear. That includes communications, education, DAPL protests, the public saying hell no, lobbying. It’s going to take all of them, in a mix, to keep ensuring that the environment is there for generations in a way we can all appreciate and be healthy in.”

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