My outdoor education

By Ingunn Markiewicz

I had spent the summer months feeling inferior to my mountaineering peers, wondering where I was headed with my outdoor education. My term as a climbing student had
ended abruptly as I was clinging to an outdoor climbing wall in Spanaway, Washington - I was, it turned out, absolutely terrified of heights. Gone were my dreams of summiting Mount Baker. I would never scale the forbidding spires of the Picket Range.