Women’s Backcountry Scholarship Winners
Grand Prize Recipient
We’ve selected Mira as the grand prize recipient of the Women’s Backcountry Scholarship because of her wildlife work and commitment to scientific advancement via the backcountry. We feel that researching mammal behavior provides a lot of insights into a multitude of topics including climate impacts on our regions and how we can better protect and recreate in our backyards in sustainable manners. Mira has shown dedication and commitment to these scientist pursuits for years. Plus she is a total badass for pursuing her Alaskan research despite her crazy knee injury. We have a lot of respect for Mira on many levels and are excited to help Mira achieve her goals!
Mira’s Essay
My soul was made for the mountains. There is no other place that I feel more like myself, more alive, and more humble. Through my childhood snowboarding and hiking around Mt. Hood in Oregon, to my career as a wildlife ecologist that has taken me to some of the most remote and breathtaking places – I have developed a deep appreciation for wilderness, the outdoors, and above all, the mountains. While my soul loves the mountains, my body recently decided that it does not. After over 20 years of knee problems, exacerbated by countless days spent snowboarding, hundreds of miles of hiking in search of American pika in the Rocky Mountains, and months bushwhacking through the Alaskan wilderness to deploy remote cameras, I finally hit a wall: a tibial tubercle avulsion fracture in December 2017 that required surgery.
But just because my body decided to take a break didn’t mean that my work was able to. During the time of my injury, I was in graduate school gearing up for my final season of data collection in Glacier Bay National Park, Alaska, where I was using remote cameras to investigate the responses of bears, wolves and moose to human activity. Without enough time to recover from the surgery I needed, my only option was to spend 4 months in the Alaskan wilderness with a knee fracture. After the fracture and before I left for Alaska, I received orders from the doctor to take it easy. This meant no snowboarding, hiking, or mountain adventures of any kind. This was the truly excruciating aspect of my injury.
Two years later, I have recovered from surgery and recently got to snowboard again for the first time in two years. It felt like my soul was on fire. Now, I am setting my sites on a new adventure that will allow me to continue to explore the intersection between my passion for wildlife ecology and love of the mountains: backcountry touring to look for the ever-elusive wolverine.
Wolverines are incredible animals – they are rarely seen in the wild, have massive home ranges, and are highly associated with mountainous habitat/snowpack. The Cascades Wolverine Project is an organization that supports wolverine persistence in Washington, and uses remote camera technology and backcountry ski/splitboard touring to monitor their populations. I can’t think of a better application for my background in wildlife ecology and my love of the mountains! Unfortunately for me (and probably fortunately for wolverines), this means that accessing their habitat requires quite a lot of backcountry gear, and also unfortunately for me, wildlife ecologists are not known for their large salaries. There is a reason why I tortured myself with graduate school to become a wildlife ecologist and hobbled through the Alaskan wilderness with a knee fracture, and it definitely wasn’t for the pay!
Conservation International has a tag-line that says, “nature doesn’t need people. People need nature”, and I agree with this statement, to some extent. Mother nature is a powerful woman, and it’s indisputably true that people need nature, but I think that nature does need us. She needs us to be active participants in the stewardship of the land, and She needs us to fight to protect wildlife and wildlands. Having the proper gear to access mountainous terrain that feeds my soul while contributing to wildlife monitoring and conservation in Washington are the two reasons that I became a wildlife ecologist, and the Wandering Trails Media and Voile Women’s Backcountry Scholarship would be a game-changer for me, my career, my soul, and hopefully a wolverine or two.
Mira Sytsma is a snowboarder with an MSc in wildlife ecology from the University of Washington. As a wildlife ecologist from Seattle, she is focused on wildlife monitoring and conservation in the Washing mountain terrain. Visit Mira’s website to check out more of her work.