Between the Mountains and the Sea

I grew up between two people who had made different bets on the same idea — that the best life is lived outdoors, in motion, in places that demand something from you.

My father was a ski patroller, a boat builder, a sailmaker in Vermont. My mother ran sailing schools along the Connecticut coast. Week-long cruises through Fisher's Island, Block Island, the Elizabeth Islands. What I learned from her, early and without being told directly, was that the people who actually know a place are not the ones who visit it. They are the ones who live there, work it, understand its moods. Every guide I've trusted since has confirmed this.

I don't know exactly when I understood that this would define me. Probably I never made the decision consciously. Some things aren't decisions.

At UVM I studied forestry and sustainability. Then San Diego. Olympic dinghy sailing, which is a sport that will humble you efficiently and without apology. Then professional big-boat racing — the Caribbean, Europe, Hong Kong to mainland China. An MBA. Fifteen years now in the family office world, working with families who think in generations — the same families this work is built for. A life I'm genuinely proud of, and a pull toward the mountains and the sea that never quieted regardless of what else I was doing.

I'm in my mid-forties now. A daughter and two sons — thirteen, eleven, six. I pay attention to things I didn't used to pay attention to. My body. Time. The rate at which certain things are disappearing.

Glaciers are retreating. I've seen this. Villages that were remote ten years ago now have Instagram accounts. The guides who know the old routes are aging. Their knowledge doesn't transfer automatically — it requires someone to go there, to ask, to follow them into terrain that hasn't been packaged yet. The windows are closing. Not dramatically, not all at once. But closing.

This is not melodrama. It's arithmetic.

For the past five or six years I've done most of these trips alone.

Not because I prefer solitude — I don't, particularly — but because the people I know well have, for the most part, stopped saying yes. Careers. Kids. The accumulating weight of a comfortable life. I understand it. I've felt the pull myself.

So I show up solo. A lodge in Alaska. A guided group in Japan. Skinning into the Alps with people I've never met. And what I keep finding — consistently, in every one of these places — is that I'm not alone in being alone. The lodges and base camps are full of people exactly like me. Accomplished. Serious about this. Financially capable of being here. But without a group. Not because they lack friends, but because their friends have stopped saying yes.

They build extraordinary camaraderie for a week. Then they scatter back to their lives. Back to scrolling at midnight, half-planning trips that never quite come together.

I've done this enough times to recognize it as a problem worth solving.

Keel Ridge is not a travel company. I want to be clear about that because the distinction matters.

It is an attempt to build a small, permanent community of people who are serious about this — about the mountains, about wild places, about going now while going is still possible. People who understand that the point isn't the destination on the map but the guide who has lived there for thirty years, the descent that exists in no brochure, the week that changes something in you that a resort vacation cannot touch.

I ski the backcountry of British Columbia, Alaska, Japan, New Zealand, the European Alps. I sail remote coastlines. I build relationships with guides in places most operators have never heard of. I'm planning an expedition to Chile's Cordillera Darwin — one of the genuinely last wild places on earth, accessible only by sea, demanding in ways that clarify things.

I participate in every trip. I am not a tour operator. I am the person who figured out how to make this happen and decided, after enough solo lodge dinners with strangers who turned out to be exactly the right people, that it shouldn't just be mine.

If you've read this far and recognized yourself in it — the midnight scrolling, the trips that almost happened, the friends who stopped saying yes — then you already know whether this is for you.

I'd like to talk.