#38 Steph Williams

Stephanie Williams (her friends call her Steph) is a mountain guide, field biologist, and co-founder of the Cascades Wolverine Project. She has over a decade of experience in field science, and two decades in the outdoor industry. She first worked as a guide in 2003 on the glaciers of Alaska’s Wrangell Mountains. Since then, she has skied and guided in alpine wildlands of India, Iceland, Switzerland, New Zealand, China, Chile, and across western North America.

I contacted Steph after seeing her appearance in a short film called Finding Gulo - Gulo gulo being the scientific name for wolverines. Finding Gulo is about the Cascades Wolverine Project’s efforts to monitor and share images of the elusive creatures as they attempt to recover in parts of their historic range. The film shows the immense effort that goes into finding wolverines, and the people who are passionately trying to support them through field monitoring, storytelling, and backcountry community science.

We talked about what drew Steph toward living and working in the mountains, and the formative experiences that led to her backcountry skiing career. We covered wolverine behavior and characteristics and, finally, the recent film.

You can watch Finding Gulo online at CascadesWolverineProject.org. It’s really concise and beautiful, and you’ll get to see Steph in her element trying to track down these critters.

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