Climate change is affecting Idaho’s outdoor industry, creating challenges for workers who experience environmental shifts in real time.
Hilary Hutcheson, an environmental advocate and river guide with Glacier Raft Company, said those challenges can be easy for guests to overlook when they see guides at work.
“They get to be outside. They are super funny and witty, and have all these adventure stories, and can do backflips off the rocks,” Hutcheson said. “And they don't really think about all of those super challenges that go with being this really rad person on the river.”
That struggle has a name: ecological grief, or eco-grief. Hutcheson said support services are available for guides who need help.
She said Pursuit, which owns Glacier Raft Company and Glacier Anglers, offers eight free counseling sessions. The company works with the Redside Foundation, a nonprofit that serves the outdoor guiding community in Idaho, Montana, Wyoming and Colorado. The group also offers a confidential helpline and financial coaching.
Hutcheson said finances are another major stressor for outdoor industry workers. She pointed to ski area employees who saw their mountains close a month early this past winter, if they opened at all, because of a lack of snow.
“It's really stressful to be a guide these days in the ski industry or in the outdoor industry in general, certainly as a river guide,” Hutcheson said. “And a lot of that has to do with these changing conditions and the transitions seasonally that are more variable than they've ever been.”
Hutcheson said the role of river guides is also changing. When she started guiding in the 1990s, she did not expect to be talking about climate-related issues more each year. Now, she said, it has become a normal part of the job.
“We're having to look at how to diversify, how to try to talk to our guests about expectations, how to talk to our elected leadership about trying to maintain winter and trying to protect those high snowpacks,” Hutcheson said.
Hutcheson testified at a congressional committee hearing in 2024, asking lawmakers to take decisive action on climate change.
Source: Public News Service
