I’m Vicki, a climber based in Seattle, Washington. I quit my corporate tech job in 2023, and started asking what life was really all about. After time recuperating from burnout, I started learning a ton about the Pacific northwest forests and ecology. One of the things I work on now is reforesting the PNW with climate change resilient trees at PropagationNation.

Training through injuries became painful and often made things worse. Out of equal parts necessity and curiosity, I started turning to medicinal plants for help. Thanks to an ethnobotany course I took (shoutout to Gabe from Raven’s Roots!), I was introduced to the different ecologies of the PNW and their plants. I became fascinated with what I learned–how for millennia indigenous peoples have related to these plants as food, medicine, tools, and spirituality. I learned about how “invasives” may actually help remediate ecosystems, and how a forest arises after humans or a natural disaster level a landscape. It was in this hands-on class that the ethics of leaving more than you take when harvesting was instilled in me. 

On my own, I started researching different species I was interested in, and experimented with them. I re-taught myself high school chemistry to learn more about their medicinal constituents, and then turned that knowledge into tinctures, teas, and balms that I used for myself.

When I shared my creations with friends and climbing partners, many saw a change in their long standing injuries and healing times. I incorporated their feedback and enthusiastically iterated on my infusions, and in this process, I found a way to merge my love of climbing, science, and ecology repair into something that could help others keep doing what they love!