Sandy Stott
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Sandy Stott

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When I was two, my father carried me into the foothills of the Sierras in his backpack. I’ve been going to the mountains ever since. Even in the disaffected stretch of my teen years, I knew that uphill was the direction of life, that it felt good to climb. These years later that’s still true. Wherever I am, I hope for a daily trail and some time on it. Much of my mountain life has been spent in New Hampshire’s White Mountains, where Cardigan is my home mountain and all the other uplands its cousins. These mountains are an inheritance from my father, who fashioned his own mountain life, first under the wing of White Mountain legend Joe Dodge and later on his own. I first heard stories from the Whites, and then later shaped my own on foot. What I heard and felt led me to writing about those mountains when I found that writing and teaching would be at the center of my worklife. Beginning with a poem in 1986, I’ve written for and edited (for 10 years) the journal Appalachia, and that work has sent me along word-trails that often invoke the foot-trails I know so well. At the same time, I became a teacher, drawn finally and centrally to the work of Henry David Thoreau and to the sentence-by-sentence teaching of writing. The 17-year-olds I taught at Concord Academy were ideally suited for the explorations both subjects asked. Thoreau’s and my students’ objections and questions helped shape my mind and writings; both are at work in the background of Critical Hours — Search and Rescue in the White Mountains, the book I’ve written. In it, I see the rescuers at its heart as guides who shepherd those lost back to familiar life. But, I have found, they are deeper kin than that — rescuers are good at what they do because, over time, they have explored the mountains in a way similar to that of teachers exploring their subjects. As one veteran rescuer said to me, “we’re simply at home in extremes.” It sounds a trifle melodramatic to say so, but so too are teachers. I note that my paragraphs are beginning to grow longish for a short bio. I’ll close by saying that at the outset of writing this book, I didn’t expect the strong resonance between mountain guides and classroom teachers, but, as it developed, it kept shaping the stories I was hearing and telling. All of this kept leading me back into the mountains.
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  • Critical Hours cover art

    • Critical Hours

    • Search and Rescue in the White Mountains
    • By: Sandy Stott
    • Narrated by: Kyle Tait
    • Length: 11 hrs and 42 mins
    • Release date: 28-02-19
    • Language: English
    • 5 ratings

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