Life in the Mountains as a Backcountry Caretaker
Emotion, transformation, and a pursuit for conservation
These photographs were made during my time spent working as a Backcountry Caretaker in the White Mountain National Forest. Over the course of these three months of living alone in the backcountry, I experienced some of the most powerful, visceral emotions of my life. This emotional time led me to express myself through photographs and re-envision my relationship to photography in the mountains. Although my time was filled with immense and endless beauty, the process of photography became my refuge to express my emotions and grapple with the immense struggles and loneliness that was pervasive everyday.
The photographs in the project are a reflection of the emotion I experienced most deeply this summer — hope, emerging and subsequently fading through difficult times. This hope manifested itself in many ways, but was often through the subtleties of light and the emergence of the sun after many days of rain. The work is a sensitive and honest approach to the realities of living in the backcountry, as I did not wish to idealize nor misconstrue the human experience in nature, especially when living alone in the woods full-time.
The sadness was sometimes overbearing but the joy was subsequently the greatest that I have ever experienced. I did not go into the summer thinking that a sunrise would make me instantly cry, but when you go almost two full weeks without seeing the sun, the tears flow instantly. Beyond the rollercoaster of emotion, the connection to the land that is built when working in unison with it changed my perspective on the human relationship to the places that we call wild. I do not believe humans within the mountains to be the problem at all, as we can build a reciprocal relationship with them if we collectively recognize how much we are taking to enjoy them. Becoming a caretaker formed a reciprocity between the land and I, which helped to transform my perspective on the duty I must carry forward to all of my time in the mountains – they give to me so I must give back to them. It is equally metaphorical as it is literal. Through trail work, composting human waste and the other litany of tasks that a caretaker must do, I was an active participant in conservation while simultaneously letting go of the previous misconceptions about the mountains that I am working in. These peaks went from a wild place that I believed was disconnected from society to a place of great connection to the human experience, as I realized our interconnectedness is what makes them so special.
Adam DeSorbo is a photographer located in the Northeast and studying at SUNY-ESF. His work is based on the environment and humanity’s relationship to it. He sees the concept of nature as an endless pursuit of understanding and works to break down the barrier between humanity and what society calls wild to realize that everyone is amongst nature’s collective.
