A spontaneous camping weekend in late July, trying to make the most of the summer. When you’re surrounded by mountain beauty, getting away is quick and easy (and only half an hour from home); there are few excuses not to get up and go, and yet so often we all let life get in the way of the experiences, moments and opportunities that truly matter to us.

This summer was fleeting, in a vastly different way to that of last year’s. This year felt a lot like treading water, taking things one day, one step at a time. Before I knew it, it was mid-July, and my backcountry trip to Berg Lake was fast approaching. All the glamorous ideas I had about training for the trip went out the window while I focused on working and applying for permanent residency.

A memorable day for many a reason, although I find myself wishing that one of those reasons was not that my bear spray accidentally went off as I was putting my pack on. Thankfully, it only mostly affected my hands and we carried on.

A moody, rainy day in late June. Our summer in the Rockies looked mostly like this, but the rain helped to keep the smoke from the wildfires at bay, for a time.

I was about to say that I wasn’t sure why blogging has been so hard for me in the last year, but I do know why. It’s hard to believe it’s taken me a year to blog these very precious memories with my brother and sister. My siblings are like pieces of my heart that only came to form after they were born; two of my safest places, they carry the parts of me I often cannot. They know me inside-out and they love me anyway.

This time last year—a hike with my siblings and my friends Bek & Chloe, enjoying our usual dance with winter in Kananaskis Country.

In many ways, and in the biggest of ways, this year has been a reset. When I think about why this reset feels more akin to having the ground lifted out from underneath me with no safe place to land, vs. a reset that is rejuvenating, clarifying, and a slate wiped clean, I know that it is because it is intertwined with the ever-complicated emotions surrounding loss.

This has been my longest hiatus from writing on the blog in years. Today, the words flow, so here I am, ready to share some of those swirling thoughts with you.

We didn't know it at the time, but this would be our last weekend away together as a couple. In my 2017 year-in-review, I wrote briefly about how we struggled; how we worked hard to maintain our love and our friendship after months of bitterness that had been making its way into the smallest spaces of our relationship for what may have been the last 2-3 years.

From early December, already a lifetime ago. We took our new friend Rob to Kootenay National Park with our friends' dog, Hobbit. The four of us chased winter across the British Columbia border, the thaws in Banff & Canmore leaving everything bare of snow.

When I sit down to write this post every December, it always takes me some time to collect myself and my memories of the year. When I write, I try to say what I mean, and mean what I say. Some things are often hard to put into words—and to write from a place of authenticity requires pause.

At the start of October, Martin's mother, uncle and brother visited us and the Rockies. Apart from showing them some of my favourite hikes around Banff & Canmore, we were lucky enough to join them up north in Jasper for a few days.

Photos from when my brother & sister visited me during my first year in Canada.

21 years ago I sat with my 3-year-old sister in the waiting room of a hospital in Auckland, New Zealand. I would be late going to school if this was going to take a long time, I thought. I fell asleep. Upon waking I panicked, first checking that my sister was still with me.

It's going to be hard for me to put into words the depth of my love for the mountains. The unexplained affinity I have for these tall piles of ancient rock and how it is that I'm drawn to them in the first place, as a woman born in an archipelago of 7,000 islands who spent her entire life in countries surrounded by the ocean (amongst zero mountains).

Every week in summer had me asking the same question: “which trail should I try this weekend?”. Cue messaging all my friends to see who was free to join, and behold, a plan would emerge. Tent Ridge in Kananaskis Country will forever remain one of the best hikes I've ever done.

Summer brought us a string of visitors from Australia; one of whom was my dear friend Annie. An incredibly talented photographer, I'd been quietly following Annie's work since she was 16, and even then she was blowing my mind.

There are some cities in the world I know I definitely want to see before I fall asleep forever, and Paris is one of those. Paris was one of the first cities I had been excited to go to when I was younger, and French is the language I was drawn to learn in high school (for reasons I couldn't and still cannot explain).

My final trip with LUX* Resorts was at LUX* Saint Gilles, Île-de-La-Reunion. It was the 3 days I spent on this little island where I was able to truly had to exercise what little French I knew/could remember from school.