Forrest Shearer and I first met in 2017 while engaged in environmental advocacy for Utah’s Bears Ears National Monument. We soon began spending time together in the mountains to better understand how we begin to address a broader idea of climate change and to reconcile the history of indigenous dispossession that created our public lands. The mountains have been our teachers, and our quest to find answers has resided in short “cultural” adventures in my ancestral homelands in the Southwest. 

I only learned to ski recently, but it has provided a pivotally important part of my identity as a Navajo person. It gave me a language to communicate and connect with mountains that I could have never imagined. It has allowed me to explore how our mountain landscapes, and consequently our cultural relationships to them, are changing with climate change. In many ways Forrest has served as a mentor and knowledge holder of safe snow travel and generalized mountain stoke for me. In other ways, I have served as a mentor and guide for indigenous knowledge for Forrest. The common language with which we have exchanged this knowledge has been movement through mountains in the snow. It began with a 2019 trip to Arizona’s highest point, 11 miles north of Flagstaff: Dook’o’oosłííd in Navajo, and Humphrey’s Peak in English…

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Lake Fork Peak guards the flank of the Taos Ski Valley, NM. In the last 100 years, New Mexico has warmed, on average, by more than one degree. Since the 1950s, snowfall has steadily declined. Photo: Isaiah Branch-Boyle