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I started my degree at UVic wanting to be a writer, as I was a bookish, outdoorsy introvert. But after a disappointing first year I considered quitting. I muddled through my second year, then signed up for a third-year Geography field school in the Canadian Rockies. This course was a watershed moment for me, as I realized that maybe I could have career outdoors, working in mountain environments while writing on the side.

Despite my initial desire to be a writer, my UVic field experience led me to a PhD in Arctic glaciology. It was fantastic. Three summers spent traversing, observing and monitoring an Arctic glacier that few people had ever seen. Listening to the glacier rumble like a freight train beneath our feet as it woke up after its winter slumber. Watching water spew out of the glacier surface like a Yellowstone geyser. Twenty-four hours of sunlight meant long days mapping the surface streams I was studying, climbing the almost vertical glacier snout to wait for the inevitable spring outburst flood. I was hooked.

Over the next few years, I did glacier fieldwork in the North Coast Mountains, where I shared chopper time with the same professor who had taught my field course. I set up some weather stations, then came back to collect them in the fall. We had to scare away a riled-up grizzly who was in the midst of dismantling one of the stations. During my first temporary faculty job, I worked in the remote interior of BC, measuring snowpack in different forest types. My limited budget meant my husband and dogs (shepherd cross and retriever) were my field crew; we snowshoed into my research sites with the dogs happily bounding beside us. In 2007, and now a tenure-track cold regions hydrology professor, I joined a large research project underway in the Southern Rocky Mountains, looking at snowpack after wildfire. It was great to be back working in the mountains again. Though I wasn’t on a glacier, I was still working with snow and water.

Throughout this time, I was also teaching field classes, sharing my passion for the outdoors with my students. It was great to see them enjoy it as much as I had, and to see them find their “aha” moments whether measuring streams or surveying floodplains. Life was mostly good.

But all was not well, and my dream career of working in the mountains came to a sudden end. A time bomb went off in my brain, and I was diagnosed with a mental illness (bipolar II; anxiety disorder). I couldn’t do my job anymore. I had crippling depression and got terrible anxiety before teaching, and my brain couldn’t function well enough to calculate and analyze data, let alone interpret it. It was a heartbreaking change, as I lost both my fieldwork adventures and my research community. Suddenly I was no longer an academic. I had spent my life working towards being a field scientist, to have it all taken away in a matter of months.

As crushing as it was to lose my career, there was a small silver lining: as a form of therapy, I returned to writing. With my illness, I can only write a bit each day, but that’s enough for me. Writing has helped me get through some difficult times, and I’ve managed to turn my career of outdoor adventure into a book. , documents my fieldwork adventures and mental health struggles, and how both have permeated my life

—Sarah Boon, BSc ‘99

Freelance writer and editor Sarah Boon, PhD, earned a degree in geography with a minor in environmental studies from UVic in 1999. Her book, Meltdown: The Making and Breaking of a Field Scientist (University of Alberta Press), was published in June of this year.