BECKY FUYS

Photo: Bo Wagner @bo_wagner

As Pigpen once said, “Seize the Carp.”

My journey to the mountains didn’t follow a typical path... Instead of growing up in a mountain town, I lived in a suburb of Chicago and called our 200 vertical foot, man-made, ice-covered garbage dump my home mountain (yes, it was literally an old landfill covered in grass and man-made ice/snow). I grew up watching hockey, playing team sports, and didn't experience real mountain life until I moved to Logan, Utah at the age of 17. It was the best spontaneous decision I've ever made. On my first day snowboarding in powder I tomahawked down the entire mountain with a huge grin on my face and inevitable whiplash.

Sophomore year of college I joined Utah State University's Outdoor Rec Program by accident and am extremely grateful for the friend who tricked me into it. I'm a huge advocate for course-based learning, but what I found even more impactful was the mentorship I received through my employers and peers. Through that community, I learned how to ask for help, overcame my fear of failure, and discovered my passion for teaching. Between USU and my summer gig at a horse ranch, I guided rock climbing, backpacking, backcountry splitboarding, horseback riding, ziplining, and river trips over the years.

I started teaching wilderness medicine courses for Desert Mountain Medicine in 2015 and held onto the teaching side-hustle as a passion project while I bounced between other “real jobs” over the next 8 years. In 2023, I finally gave into the dream of turning teaching into my full time profession and launched Backcountry Ready, my very own wilderness medicine company. While I still teach for DMM and USU (using DMM’s WFA & WFR Curriculum), I now have the freedom to create custom courses and clinics for my local community right here in SLC. Although I’m still getting started and still have so much to learn, I’m pretty stoked to see where this takes me. A friend of mine told me, "Sometimes you have to stop looking and take the leap." So here goes!