The Squat Feed

From the Backcountry Squatters Story Night: by Noelle Coniglio My close friend Brooke was the first person to call me a badass and at the time, I did not deserve the title. To paint the picture of adolescent me, I was tall and chubby with braces, glasses, and a scoliosis backbrace. Needless to say, I was a vision. Besides being a physical specimen, I was more bookworm than mountain goat and so my outdoor endeavors were far from falling under classification as badassery.             Regardless, Brooke gave me the title after a conversation that went something like:             Me: “Yesterday, my family and I hiked up Arctic Valley and when we got to the top, we just kept going. Someday, I want to put on a backpack and hike and never stop.”             Brooke: “Wow, you’re such a badass.”    ...

From the Backcountry Squatters Story Night: by Eliza Donahue Where are you from? It may seem like a simple question, but it rarely has a simple answer. When I moved to Amherst, Massachusetts to attend college, I would tell people that I was from Santa Fe, New Mexico. What I didn’t tell them was that when I was a young child we lived in a pink adobe house with blue trim, a vegetable garden out back and a single aspen tree out front, surrounded by dead and dying grass and weeds. The railroad tracks ran past our neighborhood, and at night the train would shake the walls gently. Sometimes we would walk through the alley and out to those tracks where fine dust swirled in lazy circles at our feet. Tall trees stood guard over that alley; in the fall their leaves softened our steps and I imagined myself in a secret passageway.  Later, we moved to a different house near those same tracks. Out front there is a stunted peach tree, a remnant of a peach on a distant day just afte...

From the Backcountry Squatters Story Night: by Abby Westling I always wanted to climb Rainier. From across the Puget Sound I admired her and her prominence from the rest of the Washington landscape. So naturally, when I decided that I wanted to end my life, it became an objective that I wanted to accomplish, for myself, before I was gone. See, I had come up with this idea that I was a burden more than anything to everyone in my life—that I was not worthy of life and that I was a waste of resources and energy. It’s easy to convince yourself that this is true when you constantly tell yourself that you are not good enough. So when I decided to finally put into action a plan to climb Rainier, I was setting my expiration date. Of course there’s a lot that had to go into this plan. I had never climbed a mountain before. I wasn’t in mountain climbing shape and wasn’t sure what over 14,000 feet would feel like since I had lived at sea level my whole life. I didn’t know anything abo...

From the Backcountry Squatters Story Night:  by Leila Parson We all have times in our lives when we feel guilty for being alone—those uneasy, sad emotions that make you feel like you’re not enjoying your life to its fullest, that the grass is greener on the other side. It’s a combination of feeling guilty about solitude and being sad because you’re alone. Lately it has been referred to as FOMO, or fear of missing out. Before this summer, I felt that feeling often. This summer I worked in wilderness therapy, living in the desert for two weeks at a time. During the day we would hike through the Grand Escalante National Monument, and every night set up camp in a new place. After everyone had made their dinner, usually beans and rice, or “Keens and beans” (Quinoa and beans), we would all get in our sleeping bags and start dozing off. Before falling asleep I would look up at the stars and go over the events of the day in my head. And then of course, in the morning I ...

From the Backcountry Squatters Story Night:  by Andie Creel "Initially coming into this I thought I wanted to talk about Inge Perkins and Hayden Kennedy. I learned how to climb with Inge, and this last week and a half has been a shock. But I realized I’ve talked to who I need to talk to, and anything I’d want to say has already been said better by someone else. But with everything, I’ve been thinking a lot about the relationships I’ve formed in this community. And I want to talk about that instead. In the movies, you constantly see people coming together because of fate. There are all the Romeo and Juliet stories of couples who never should be together but end up together nonetheless. And there are always stories of friendships where sports stars and band geeks becoming best friends. Just by chance, two people who never should have formed any sort of relationship at all become one another’s person. But I don’t think that exist in this community. Nobody here mee...