M A K IN G I T W O R K | 05. 20
Vanlife •IN THE TIME OF CORONA •
A DA P T F O R A B E T TER FU TU RE ne thousand dollars: It could change everything. This time, though, I wasn’t choosing between new Pergo floors or a diesel heater in my van. These funds weren’t a down payment on next year’s multi-resort ski pass, either. That easy G, withdrawn from an ATM on the semi-abandoned streets of a popular mountain town in Idaho, wasn’t part of an investment toward ski bumming next season. No, this cash in hand would go straight to my new landlords, a lovely young couple who would rent me an apartment so I could follow the shelter-in-place orders issued in over 41 states in the face of COVID-19 in March. I had been self-quarantined in my home, a 1995 Ford E250, since March 13, 2020. This van, an older, mid-sized rig built to function as my home office and gear closet, had
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seen the Sierra, San Juans, Rockies and Tetons so far this season, and proven itself to be a sanctuary in even the nastiest of winter weather. Yet the onset of the novel coronavirus— and social pressures that have accompanied it—left me questioning if public lands really could be my sanctuary. Maybe I needed to conform to a more traditional model of living, even if winters before this in my van had taught me the value of divergent thinking. Things were different: I needed to adapt to a new paradigm, if only temporarily. If I ignored signs to change, I would just continue feeling anxious, trapped, and isolated as society shaped itself to fit into a new normal. Remote work and ski bumming while vandwelling could very well jeopardize my ability to pursue my passions in the future.
E L E VAT I O N O U T D O O R S / M AY 2 0 2 0
Powder to the People
Vanlife (and truck-life and Subielife) is about minimalism, rooting my happiness in experience and exploring the realm of my possible. For me, adventure travel— splitboarding, climbing, and running through the mountains—isn’t about wanderlust or escapism. Instead, it’s been about finding and creating the personal agency that comes with moving through beautiful, high-consequence mountainscapes. That agency, independence, and freedom has also helped me build my dream career. As a
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strategist and consultant, I’ve been able to build my business without the massive overhead that a brickand-mortar shop would incur. Even though I don’t always have a plan for where I’ll sleep in a week, I do have the security of knowing that my career path—diversified for economic resilience and mapped for future planning—follows an intentional, selfdetermined direction. I haven’t owned a mega-resort pass since April 2018, which means that the past two snow seasons have been purely human powered. Even though this is my sixth season as a backcountry
I felt pressure to leave the public lands I loved so much, to conform to a traditional model of living, even if winters before this in my van had taught me the value of divergent thinking.
PHOTOS BY DANI REYES-ACOSTA (LEFT), iain KUO @MTNIAIN (RIGHT)
by DANI REYES-ACOSTA
