I first climbed a mountain when I was five years old.  

And then again, and again, and again. I climbed that mountain about five times before tragedy hit my family. As a family, we spent a lot of time in the backwoods hiking, canoeing, snowshoeing, and camping. I loved it, and I loved the time spent with my Dad. He taught me so much about what it meant to respect nature.  

Little was I to know that mountain was about to become a metaphor for my entire life. I was a stubborn child, and constantly told everyone around me that I could do it myself.  I didn’t need help, and I surely didn’t require any assistance in climbing this mountain at the young age of five. Miss Independent from the moment I was born, I was bound and determined to prove myself. 

Blackrock Mountain in Alberta, Canada is just off the beaten path, close to Canmore.

It’s a little-known mountain and takes quite the drive to get to the trailhead. There is often a river crossing or two to get there, depending on the time of year. Later in the summer, the river dries up above ground and retreats under the rocks.  

Climbing the mountain is easily a day-long adventure and not something for the faint of heart. It’s a steady climb ten kilometers up, and you gain 873 meters as you go up. It used to be an old fire lookout, so there is a decrepit old cabin at the very top, tied down with cables. As soon as you get above the tree line, there are some challenging parts to the climb as you have to scramble across rocky slopes. The last part of the climb is the most challenging and becomes extremely steep.  

Climbing this mountain at the age of five instilled in me a sense of pride and accomplishment.

While climbing, I felt the need to push harder, try harder, and work harder. I wasn’t willing to give up, and through sheer willpower alone, I got myself to the summit of that mountain. I created a belief in my mind that if I just pushed a little harder, I would succeed. Being a farming family, the work ethic was something that was instilled in us before birth, but this mountain simply served to prove my mind right. 

Reaching the summit of that mountain was an incredible feeling.  The pride and satisfaction I felt in getting to the top without help were undeniable.  However, I created a belief in my mind that everything had to be hard.  Everything in life required work, and all things worth doing were better done alone, or independently.  Asking for help went against every bone in my body, and simply wasn’t done.

These were the beliefs that landed for me at age five, while climbing Blackrock, and were setting me up for the next 35 years of my life. 

From that moment on, I made a choice for my life to be hard.

I decided that I had to prove myself. I made a decision that in order to be successful, one had to see the blood, sweat, and tears.  

These beliefs were to send me down a path of near destruction.  While I do believe in the power of a little hard work, there were so many more things to learn in life that was about to guide me down a path of poor decisions.