The Places That Made Me

I grew up in the Green Mountains of Vermont. Learned to sail on the blue water of the Northeast. Ended up in the high desert and coastal ranges of the West. These places didn't just shape where I lived — they shaped how I see the world.

The backcountry skiing, the sailing, the hiking — these took me further. To reefs in the Sea of Cortez that Jacques Cousteau called the aquarium of the world. To glaciers in Patagonia that are smaller every decade. To mountain villages in Japan and South Tyrol that have sustained themselves for centuries on the same rhythms, the same slopes, the same knowledge passed from one generation to the next.

I have been lucky. I know that.

I've also watched things disappear. The waters are cloudier than they were thirty years ago. Reefs that were abundant when I first dove them are diminished now. Glaciers I've skied are retreating visibly, measurably, in ways that aren't subtle anymore. The cultures that made these places what they are — the guides, the fishing families, the rifugio operators, the village elders — are under pressure from modernization, from tourism done badly, from the inexorable pull of urban economies that offer more money and less meaning.

The commercialization of wild places is not inevitable. But it requires active resistance.

Keel Ridge is part of that resistance — quietly, without performance. We work exclusively with locally owned operations. We don't use aggregators, white-label packages, or middlemen that extract value from the communities that make these experiences possible. We direct a portion of every trip toward conservation and community investment in the places we operate.

More than any of that: we try to show up as advocates, not just visitors. To experience these places as authentically as possible. To leave them with something more than our footprints.

The windows are closing on some of what I've described. Not all of it. Not yet. But the argument for going now — and going right — has never been stronger.