Why we're here. A tribute to Jean Dickinson

We arrived at the summit around midnight. It was a warm, still night in the dead of Mexican winter. The moon was centered in the velvety black sky, flanked by Jupiter and Mars. After two hours of steep scrambling, we were perched on the north end of a five mile wide ring of limestone peaks. In the midst of an already physically demanding rock climbing trip in El Potrero Chico, my crew had let me convince them of a night ascent to a local peak under the full moon. 

In the valleys and canyons below, clouds oozed a brilliant white in the moonlight. Distant towns spread out around us with their clusters of twinkling lights. We buzzed with a potent combination of sensations: the sweeping view, the immense gravity of the mountains, the dazzle of the heavens playing above, feeling the vitality of our bodies after the exertion of the climb. My companions knew that I had brought some of my mother’s ashes with me, and asked if I would share some about her. I was marking a year since she’d passed. 

Before I spread her ashes, I shared about my mom. I explained who she was, including her love of the mountains, and that I was in the practice of bringing her ashes to sacred, wild places. I found myself saying “in a way, she’s the reason we’re up here right now.” 

It’s becoming a familiar refrain for me in moments like these - deep in the wilderness, filled with reverence for the power and beauty of nature. “You know, we’re here because of my mom, Jean.” In this last year of her absence in particular, it has occurred to me many times. A few examples: 

• At the back of the pack on a WILD trip, hiking a section of the John Muir Trail, knowing that my mother had walked the very same steps in her backpack decades prior.
• With my brother, spreading our mom's ashes at Mono Pass, where she’d taken us when we were kids.
• Sitting in council around the fire with WILD participants, giving my answer to the question “why did you start Back to Earth?”

My mom, Jean Ellen Dickinson, was raised in Southern California, and when she was a kid, her parents would bring her and her two siblings to camp in Yosemite Valley. She shared memories with me of driving into Yosemite in the 40’s and 50’s, when Tioga Road was still a bumpy dirt track. Something indelible and profound was kindled inside of her during those childhood experiences in the Sierras. As a young woman in the 60’s, she ventured out into those mountains with a backpack, sometimes with friends or partners, and sometimes completely alone. Sometimes for weeks at a time. 

When she started a family of her own in the 80’s, she was committed to spending time in the wilderness with her kids. Before I was even a year old, she and my other mom, Nikki, brought us to the mountains. I can say that I’ve been a backpacker since I was a baby in my mom’s backpack. I have photos of my older brother and me as tiny kids on mountain passes, in campgrounds, and playing in snow-fed creeks. These experiences of growing up spending time in the wilderness are pressed into my bones.

It’s hard to overstate how much my mom’s love of nature made me who I am. I fell in love with nature over and over again as I was growing up, and that remains the most important connection in my life. I believe that my lasting devotion to the wilderness exists because of the way that she kept supporting me as I grew up. In the summer before entering high school, she saw that my interest in camping and backpacking with family was predictably waning. She sensed that I needed a rite of passage, an opportunity to inhabit the new bigness of my rapidly changing body and consciousness. So she pitched a multi-week backpacking trip on the famous John Muir Trail. We made it ten days in, and her feet failed her, but those ten days out there were life-changing for me. I got to step up into my growing capacities to navigate the wilderness, carry heavy weight and take care of myself. Because my mom walked slower than me, I spent hours out there walking alone, getting to experience my selfhood without any of the pressures or stimuli of other humans. I was surrounded by a wild beauty that I felt reflected inside of myself. 

When she could no longer physically guide me in the mountains herself, my mom scraped money together to send me on a month-long NOLS course in the Yukon Territory. I was 16, and she took the opportunity to fly with me and head out by herself into grizzly territory for the month to camp in the remote wilderness of Alaska. Camping in Alaska was on her bucket list. I’ll never forget the image of her with a can of bear spray holstered on each hip as she put together her hiking rig. My mom kept pushing and encouraging both of us to go deeper into the wilderness. We were kindred spirits, and her desire to impart, share, and encourage was met by my soul’s desire to be pushed and say yes to her invitations. In turn, I became the kind of person who has a vivid desire to invite others into the wilderness.

Back to Earth is the most obvious expression of my mother’s legacy as it lives through me. In the last decade of her life, she got to see me bring hundreds of youth to the mountains that she loved. Just as she got to witness me, I’ve watched the big medicine of wilderness immersion transform the lives of young people in our program. It gives me peace that my mom got to see her legacy bloom before she died. Thank you Mom. Bless your while entire life. You’re the reason we’re here.

‍

Jean Ellen Dickinson (3/8/43-12/10/23)