Three years ago, Maya Rodriguez spent 180 days a year outside. She guided backpacking trips in summer, ski tours in winter, rock climbing in the shoulder seasons. She lived in Bend, Oregon, in a house with five other guides, and her life revolved around weather forecasts and gear maintenance and which mountains were burning.
Now she works from a desk in the same house, writing code for an outdoor gear company. She still lives in Bend. She still hikes and skis on weekends. But she's not a guide anymore.
"I didn't plan to leave," she says. We're talking in her living room on a Tuesday afternoon. She's between meetings, wearing a hoodie from a guiding company she used to work for. "I thought I'd guide until my body gave out."
The smoke changed that. The summer she turned 31, Rodriguez spent six weeks evacuated or unable to work because of wildfire smoke. The fall before that, she'd guided exactly three ski tours before the snow melted in January. She was cobbling together income from a winter job at a ski shop, summer guiding that kept getting canceled, and occasional freelance writing. She was making maybe $25,000 a year, with no health insurance, no retirement savings, and no clear path forward.
A friend from college worked in tech and kept suggesting Rodriguez learn to code. She'd always been good with computers, had built websites for guiding companies as favors. She started taking online courses in the evenings. Within six months she had a junior developer job. Within a year she was making more than she'd ever made guiding, with benefits and a 401k and the option to work from anywhere.
The transition felt like betrayal. "I'd built my whole identity around being a guide," Rodriguez says. "I was the person who knew the mountains, who kept people safe. And suddenly I was just another person with a laptop."
She looks out the window at the Cascades. "I'm not sure why that felt like such a loss. Like, why did I need my job to be my identity? Why couldn't I just love the mountains without making them my career?"
She's still figuring that out.
The flexibility of remote work means she can actually stay in Bend, which she couldn't afford on a guide's income. She can ski on powder days instead of working them. She can hike without checking if clients need her.
But some mornings she wakes up and checks the snow report out of habit, and she feels this pull—like she should be up there, like she's missing something essential. Then she remembers she has a 10am meeting and health insurance and she doesn't know which feeling is more true.
"I miss guiding. I miss the clients, the teaching, the way you feel at the end of a long day outside. I miss being the person who could do that. I still am that person, I guess. I still have the skills. I just don't use them for work anymore. But that distinction—between being a guide and being someone who used to guide—it matters more than I thought it would."
Rodriguez knows guides who are making it work, who are adapting and diversifying and staying in the industry. "Some people need that identity," she says. "They need to be guides, not people who used to guide. I was that person. Maybe I still am and I just gave up too easily."
She talks about the next 20 years. The smoke getting worse. The snow less reliable. The fire seasons longer. "I could have stayed in guiding and watched my career slowly become impossible, or I could transition now while I had energy to build something else. It felt like the practical choice."
But is it actually more stable? Tech companies are doing layoffs. Remote work is getting less remote. Her 401k is tied to a stock market that tanks every time there's climate news. "I tell myself I'm more secure now," she says. "But maybe I just feel more secure because I have benefits."
She acknowledges the privilege in having a choice at all. She didn't have kids or debt. She had a college degree and tech skills and a friend who could help her break into the industry. "Most guides don't have those options," she says. "They can't just pivot to tech. So what happens to them when the seasons keep getting shorter? When the smoke keeps getting worse? I don't know. Nobody knows."
"I guess I decided I'd rather change my relationship to this place than lose it entirely. Some people need to stay until the end. I needed to leave before it broke me."
She's quiet for a moment. "At least I think I did. Ask me again in five years. Maybe I'll have a different answer."