An indigenous mountaineer and triathlete search for healing in the backcountry

The moun­tains con­tain mul­ti­tudes. These impos­si­bly vast expans­es of rock, snow and ice are home to rare and rugged species of plant and ani­mal life. But if you know how to look, there are also count­less emo­tions and sto­ries con­tained with­in their peaks and val­leys, too. For ski moun­taineer Adam Camp­bell and pro-snow­board­er Sandy Ward, the moun­tains are reser­voirs of immense pain and loss – yet they are also places of learn­ing and of heal­ing. To arrive at this point, both Adam and Sandy had to work hard to trans­form how they inter­act­ed with the moun­tains – and with them­selves. Now they’re work­ing to help oth­ers cre­ate deep­er and more mean­ing­ful rela­tion­ships with the moun­tains and with the nat­ur­al world around them.

Lessons From The Land is the third episode in Break­ing Trails, an online film series from The GORE-TEX Brand that fol­lows pairs of inspir­ing indi­vid­u­als as they forge paths and form con­nec­tions in the out­doors. Each episode in the series sees two remark­able life jour­neys inter­sect on a phys­i­cal trail, where an intre­pid duo learn from each other’s expe­ri­ences and find com­mon ground despite their super­fi­cial differences.

Adam and Sandy are both from Cana­da but their back­grounds and their jour­neys into the moun­tains could not be more dis­tinct, as they dis­cov­ered on a ski-tour­ing adven­ture togeth­er through Pem­ber­ton back­coun­try in west­ern Canada.

“My life of adven­ture start­ed even before I was born,” Adam explains. ​“My par­ents were liv­ing in Iran when I was con­ceived, and the rev­o­lu­tion hap­pened. And so my mom, at nine months preg­nant, had to evac­u­ate out of Iran and end­ed up in Eng­land by her­self. And then my dad accept­ed a job in Lagos, Nige­ria. So my mom and my dad moved to Lagos, Nige­ria when I was nine months old. And from there we had this kind of a real­ly spe­cial childhood.”

After trav­el­ling exten­sive­ly as a child and young adult, Adam became a pro­fes­sion­al ath­lete. He trained at the Nation­al Triathlon Cen­ter with some of the best triath­letes in the world, fin­ished on the podi­um at the World Cham­pi­onships and won mul­ti­ple nation­al titles. ​“Maybe four, maybe five, I don’t remem­ber… to be hon­est, the records and things like that don’t real­ly mat­ter,” Adam reflects.

For Sandy grow­ing up, there was no expec­ta­tion of becom­ing a pro­fes­sion­al ath­lete or com­pet­ing inter­na­tion­al­ly – nobody in her com­mu­ni­ty had done so. ​“I didn’t feel that I belonged in the out­doors,” Sandy explains. ​“When you come to Cana­da, you don’t see Indige­nous peo­ple as guides any­where. Me push­ing through those bar­ri­ers and push­ing back on the peo­ple that told me I wasn’t in a space for me, it was real­ly hard.”

Sandy is a mem­ber of the Lil’wat Nation, a pro­gres­sive First Nations com­mu­ni­ty who live near Pem­ber­ton, British Colum­bia. The Lil’wat ter­ri­to­ry once spanned over 800,000 hectares of the Pem­ber­ton Val­ley but the com­mu­ni­ty was con­fined to a reser­va­tion that com­pris­es just 0.004% of that ances­tral land.

With the Lil’wat con­nec­tion to their tra­di­tion­al way of life and to the moun­tains sev­ered, Sandy blazed a lone trail. After dis­cov­er­ing snow­board­ing at 15, Sandy joined the First Nations Snow­board Team when she was 18 and entered a devel­op­ment pro­gramme for the Van­cou­ver 2010 Win­ter Olympics.

“Pre-Olympics, there was a ton of sup­port for Indige­nous ath­letes,” Sandy remem­bers. ​“Then when we didn’t actu­al­ly make it to the Olympics, a lot of that fund­ing dis­ap­peared. I tried to con­tin­ue on my own but it was impos­si­ble; just way too hard and way too much stress on a young per­son. I felt desert­ed by my teams, I felt desert­ed by my com­mu­ni­ty, I felt desert­ed by my fel­low ath­letes. That’s when I shift­ed toward main­ly teach­ing snow­board­ing rather than com­pet­ing and try­ing to make it as an athlete.”

Today, Sandy con­tin­ues to teach snow­board­ing and found­ed Indige­nous Women Out­doors, where she works to break down bar­ri­ers and bring more First Nations women to snow sports. She leads their Back­coun­try Men­tor­ship Pro­gram, offer­ing free or low-cost access to gear and train­ing, in order to ele­vate more Indige­nous women to lead­er­ship roles with­in the out­doors industry.

Adam has faced numer­ous road­blocks along the way, too, which have forced him to change course. ​“Any mis­takes in that realm [the moun­tains] can have real­ly pro­found con­se­quences,” he says. ​“At one point in 2016, I was in this deep inner tur­moil and I was try­ing to use the moun­tains as escape. I want­ed to go rage in the moun­tains and prove myself again, so I wasn’t ful­ly focussed and didn’t real­ly respect the task. So, I had a real­ly bad fall, over 80 metres. I broke my back and my hip and am real­ly for­tu­nate to have survived.”

In 2020, while ski­ing in the moun­tains with his wife Lau­ra, Adam trig­gered an avalanche. After 45 min­utes of fran­tic dig­ging, Adam found Lau­ra under the snow but she had already passed. Adam holds him­self respon­si­ble and con­tin­ues to strug­gle with grief and guilt. But through the coura­geous jour­ney of recov­ery and self-knowl­edge Adam has embarked on since Laura’s death, he has emerged as a pio­neer­ing men­tal health advo­cate. Adam works in envi­ron­men­tal pro­tec­tion as a lawyer and has shift­ed his per­spec­tive to see­ing land as not be con­quered but a space to be expe­ri­enced. This new rela­tion­ship with the moun­tains has been vital to Adam’s heal­ing journey.

“I think Adam I are very sim­i­lar in the sense that we would use the out­doors as – not nec­es­sar­i­ly an escape from the hard­ships in our life – but an oppor­tu­ni­ty to heal in the moun­tains and over­come any obsta­cle that we came across,” Sandy reflects.

After many sto­ries of the land passed down by her ances­tors were lost due to the erad­i­ca­tion of their lan­guage, Sandy is now study­ing the Lil’wat lan­guage, to help her heal from the inter­gen­er­a­tional trau­ma of being forcibly sep­a­rat­ed from her ances­tral land and cul­ture. Phys­i­cal con­nec­tion with the moun­tains remains incred­i­bly impor­tant, too. With Indige­nous Women Out­doors, Sandy helps women from her own and oth­er First Nations to heal through back­coun­try skiing.

“Hav­ing access to the back­coun­try and cre­at­ing back­coun­try pro­grammes allows us to get fur­ther out into into the land,” Sandy explains. ​“We see these things in areas that we wouldn’t see through the resort and through tourism. It’s also a way of explor­ing that ter­ri­to­ry, a way of reclaim­ing our ter­ri­to­ry. We’re show­ing that we do have those skills to get out there and to reclaim our lands: to see what things look like from these big peaks that nobody else can get to.”

Watch all episodes of Break­ing Trails from The GORE-TEX Brand, includ­ing The Blind Ascent with climbers Tama­ra Lunger and Jesse Dufton, and Chi­na’s Hid­den Paths with ultra­run­ner Yao Miao and con­ser­va­tion ranger Li Xinrui.

Huck Presents is our brand new stream to cel­e­brate films we love and cham­pi­on emerg­ing film­mak­ers we admire.

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