Episode Intro:

Dear listeners of the Female Guides Requested Podcast, welcome back and happy Wednesday. This is your host Ting Ting from Las Vegas. In this podcast, we spotlight the stories of women guides and guides from other underrepresented groups and see how they navigate the complex terrain of mountains and life.

Today we’re thrilled to host a true veteran of the backcountry: Natalie Brechtel.

With over two decades of professional experience, Natalie’s journey is nothing short of breathtaking. She’s gone from guiding in New Zealand to spending ten seasons working for the U.S. Antarctic Program as a Field Safety Coordinator and Mountaineer, all while contributing to the high-stakes world of Yosemite Search and Rescue.

Natalie is the founder of Gut-Z Journey, a business dedicated to building deep-seated confidence in the outdoors through a unique, holistic lens that combines wilderness medicine, strength training, and functional nutrition. As you’ll hear today, the name “Gut-Z Journey” perfectly embodies her philosophy—it’s about trusting your intuition and optimizing your health to make critical, life-saving decisions.

In this episode, Natalie shares her powerful insights on the importance of never outsourcing your decision-making in the field, why she prioritizes working with clients who are “invested in the process” of learning, and how she shows up every day as a strong female role model in male-dominated technical spaces.

If you’re looking to turn your physical and mental fortitude into unshakeable outdoor confidence, stay tuned. Let’s dive in with Natalie Brechtel.

Natalie’s Links:

• Gut-Z Journey
• WMA Instructor Bio
• My philosophy
• Gutzjourney IG
• Dirtbag diaries podcast

Quotes:

• I live in a really outdoor driven town and I actually can find it exhausting to be around so many people that are so driven in the same direction. And there’s just something to be said about when you’re in your own community sometimes behavior just changes.
• I really believe in going from the gut first and it’s a double-edged thing for me. because I also went to school for holistic nutrition later in life and microbiome health and our gut sends a lot of signals with our intuition and a lot of messaging.
• when someone feels physically stronger they’ve reconnected with their body then they frankly tend to feel more confident
• I was trying to think about what I could do back in the US that would still feel fulfilling… that gut part of my intuition was like, Natalie, you need other things.
• I didn’t have examples of women doing the things I wanted to do… I can at least represent that these things are possible.
• You outsource that decision to authority and end up in a precarious situation, even though you knew it wasn’t the right decision.
• I think that when one really wants to pursue challenges just for their own growth, then there is no end point to that.

Episode Intro:

Dear listeners of the Female Guides Requested Podcast, happy Wednesday. I’m your host Ting Ting from Las Vegas. Today, our guest is Caroline George. I’d say every active and want-to-be female guide should listen to this episode multiple times. Caroline’s voice was soft and comforting, but the words were incredibly impactful. The wisdom came from the essence she extracted from life events and decades of mountain climbing and guiding. The conversations provoked me to look into myself honestly and asked the ultimate question of “why.”

Caroline, an IFMGA mountain guide based near Verbier in the Swiss Alps, has faced many curveballs, but the mountains have always been her refuge—a place to find balance, reconnect with herself, and rekindle her inner light.

Most recently, she faced an unimaginable loss: her life and love partner, Adam George, perished in a helicopter crash in the Swiss Alps. Now, as the sole parent to their child, she is learning how to navigate the mountains in this new reality—both as a guide and as someone deeply connected to the peaks that have shaped her life.

Though the mountains remain unchanged, we experience them differently as life evolves. Caroline is discovering a new way of inhabiting this space, adapting to her shifting world while staying true to her passion. Guiding has become an anchor, offering both stability and a sense of normalcy as she forges ahead on this new path.

Now, please enjoy this episode.

Caroline’s Links:

• Into the Mountains (website): www.intothemountains.com
• Instagram: carolinewaregeorge

Quotes:

• On this journey of grief and healing and rebuilding, I can see that the mountains is a place of grounding for me.
• It’s like my life is constantly being forcing me to go deeper and deeper and to figure out the essence of my identity by stripping all the things that no longer belong.
• I think it’s a really hard place for women…it’s violent when you have to adapt so much to who you’re not just to get a certification.
• I feel like I have met that mold that whole time to really work myself into the ground…And now in my latest situation of survival, after having lost my husband and being the sole parent to my child, I’ve had to revisit how is it possible for me to be a guide.
• As guides, we can do a way better job to protect our own lives with our clients by empowering them.
• A good metaphor for that is all the technical skills you learn are a little bit like the walls and the roof and the bedrooms in a house unless they’re inhabited by people. They’re just walls, there’s no life to it.
• You can’t say no all the time just But with critical thinking and your gut feeling and your intuition, your experience and your knowledge all combined, you have to have the ability to step out of this situation and say no.
• I really want it to be a lifelong career should my body enable me…through that job, you’re forced to stay healthy, to have somewhat of a healthy lifestyle. And, it keeps you fit to be out there in the mountains. It keeps you smart and alert and not be a couch potato. So, on some form or another, I think I will always do that.
• I think in life it’s about finding passion, finding a community that feeds your soul and from there everything is possible.

Amber’s Links:

• Amber wants to share her writing with you! To sign up for her newsletter or to contact her, follow this link! https://linktr.ee/ambersaffirmations
• A personal essay from 2018 all girls Mount Baker climb: https://mountainmadness.com/blog/among-women-in-the-mountains-a-female-guideâ-s-learning-from-an-all-girls-climb

Episode Intro:

Dear listeners of the Female Guides Requested Podcast, happy Wednesday. This is your host Ting Ting from Las Vegas. Today our guest is Amber Smith.

Amber is a femme-queer AMGA Certified Rock Guide with over a decade of experience. Most summers you’ll find her at the Yosemite Mountaineering School, climbing grandiose granite walls with her guests. She is passionate about playful, trauma-aware, and embodiment-focused instruction, and she views climbing as an opportunity for powerful personal transformation. If you go climbing with her, she will encourage you to craft a positive affirmation to hone your power.

Before landing in Yosemite, she guided throughout the western United States. She has led glacier mountaineering and alpine rock objectives in Washington’s North Cascades, ski descents in Wyoming’s Grand Tetons, sandstone crack climbs in Utah’s deserts, and girls’ climate science research expeditions on Alaska’s glaciers. In 2016, Amber earned a degree in Geography and wrote her undergraduate thesis on what she called “Feminist Outdoor Leadership: A Guide to Facilitation Strategies for Inclusion and Participant Empowerment in Outdoor Adventure.”

I enjoyed my conversations with Amber. Her thoughtfulness was evident when listening to her reflections on her life journeys. She is also inquisitive and not shy about experimenting with new ideas. She is keen on exploring her inner voices to facilitate her own growth and be tuned to others’ needs. Now please enjoy this episode with Amber.

What We Talked About

• Amber’s current, past, and future plans
• Amber’s Affirmation on guiding – be safe, have fun, try your best
• Doubts and questions about guiding as a profession
• Engrossed in the outdoor leadership program in college
• Feminist outdoor leadership
• From Oregon to Washington, stepping into commercial guiding and keep her foot in outdoor education
• Transitioning to Yosemite and guiding full time
• Loved the Yosemite climbing community
• Yosemite climbing and work cultures
• Hosted a webinar about working in Yosemite
• Thinking entrepreneurial – mental health and mindset fields
• Learn to Lead with mindfulness clinics
• Experiments / Curiosities on grief and climbing and guiding
• Affirmation in life – exercise your weakness, leverage your strengths, don’t worry about the looks
• 
  

Quote:

• Keep my priorities clear. And its number one, keep yourself and your guests safe. If that’s all I do at the end of the day, nobody had a great time, but at least we were safe, then that was a successful day.
• I’d say that’s the whole journey of this industry for me is building the confidence in my voice, trusting myself and figuring out how to be myself in these spaces while also still sort of meeting some of the expectations of what your employers and your clients may want from you.
• I’m definitely not [the best climbers in the world]. But what I am good at is supporting people in their climbing goals. And that’s what the job is actually about..
• I think that’s really rad that I’m an ebike commuter to my rock guiding job.
• I think we get a lot of burnout when we’re not being intellectually stimulated.
• I’m basically not like ingraining negative association with the experience. I’m keeping my association with the process positive. and by having these positive associations, then I want to keep doing it
• One of the most important attributes of a guide is that you need to be intuitive with your guests. It’s very customer service type job. And we need to be intuitively listening to what they need all day.

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EP 52 – Amber Smith – AffirMATIONs – Female Guides Requested Podcast