I pulled into my kids’ preschool at 3:29 P.M., jumped out of the minivan, and ran inside. I’d squeezed in a two-hour rope-soloing session at the local crag after finishing work early that afternoon, and I was just in time for afternoon pickup.

“Mom! Quinn and Adaline invited us to go to the fairy houses!” my five-year-old daughter, Eloise, said. “Can we go?”

I looked at the girls’ mothers, who nodded. We were, indeed, invited to the , a fanciful temporary art installation along one of Bozeman, Montana’s in-town trails.

“Sure,” I said as we walked out of school. “But I have to figure out how to carry Gus.” Eloise’s little brother weighed around 25 pounds at the time and wasn’t walking yet, and while careful climbing didn’t bother my chronic neck pain, I could hardly get him from the school to the van in my arms, much less the half-mile to the fairy houses. I didn’t have the baby backpack or stroller in the car, but I did have my climbing gear.

Maybe my climbing pack would work, I thought.

I unclipped my pack lid, opened the drawstring, and dumped the whole thing upside down, pouring my harness, gear, and rope into a heap in the back of the van. Then I put Gus in the pack feetfirst, cinched the drawstring under his arms, and snugged the side straps. He looked happy and comfortable, and he wouldn’t fall out. Not bad, I thought, especially since he usually screams in protest when I clip him into .

That old became my toddler carrier for the next few months, but practicality wasn’t the only reason. I’ve had that pack since a 2007 expedition to climb mossy granite domes in the boglands of Wood-Tikchik State Park, Alaska. It was also a choice to remind myself who I am: a writer, business owner, fairy-house mom, and climber.

It wasn’t the first time I’d repurposed my outdoor gear for parenting, and it won’t be the last. Here are some of my other favorites.

1. A Rope Bag as a School Tote

I thought I’d carry, well, a climbing rope in when I got it last spring. But then I stopped climbing during the shutdown, and this super durable tote instead became the kids’ school bag. In winter it fits warm clothes and lunch boxes, and in spring its thick nylon and waterproof bottom panel make it perfect for the wet, muddy gear we drag back and forth daily.

2. A Puffy Jacket as a Carrier

Gus had intense colic for the first three and a half months of his life. Desperate to get outdoors after the constant 12-plus hours a day of screaming, I eventually strapped him to my chest over a pair of fishing waders, zipped him inside a one-size-too-big , layered an  on top of it, and spent a snowy October day on a guided fly-fishing trip with . I kept the zippers cracked for airflow, and, magically, Gus slept most of the float. The jackets were tight enough to spread his weight more evenly across my back than the baby carrier alone would have, easing the strain. And those moments of peace—plus the four trout I caught on a fly—helped keep me sane.

In a pinch, a jacket with a backpack can also work as a carrier: pull the child to your chest, wrap their legs around your waist, zip it up with them in it, and buckle your backpack’s waist belt and sternum strap around their body so they don’t fall out.

3. A Ski Pack as a Diaper and șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű-Mom Bag

While it’s not as stylish as some fancy diaper bags, your ski pack has seriously specialized compartments that make it at least as functional as one designed for hauling children’s gear, if not more. The diaper kit slots into the hydration pouch, extra clothes go in the main compartment, and snacks can be dropped in the shovel/probe pouch.

I use my in-bounds pack, , to ski with my daughter, bringing along extra mittens and jackets, hand warmers, treats, and water or a thermos of hot chocolate. Meanwhile, my old ski-patrol pack, a much larger (35-liter) , has become her ski duffel. It fits all her gear, and before she was strong enough to carry her own skis, I strapped them onto the A-frame carry to schlep to the warming hut where we used to boot up pre-pandemic.

4. Climbing Gear as a Baby Bouncer

Don’t chuck that ratty daisy chain you used on your first big wall. During the short-lived but thrilling period (for the baby and the parents) when a child can’t yet walk but can jump aggressively in a bouncer hung from the ceiling, your old rigging systems and skills will come in handy. The three hand-me-down bouncers we used were all hard to adjust height-wise. With , though, adjusting to baby’s fast-growing legs was as easy as clipping the next loop higher. To rig it, tie a figure eight on a bight in the bouncer’s factory webbing, then clip the bight to a daisy chain with a carabiner. The whole setup hangs from an eyebolt in a ceiling beam. Bomber.

5. A Hunting Frame Pack as a Carrier

Out at the fairy houses that afternoon, I ran into a former climbing partner who is now a mother of four. When I showed her my baby-in-the-climbing-pack system, she nodded. “That’s a good one,” she said. “When he grows out of it, try .”

So I dug out the one my husband found in his parents’ garage some 20 years ago and strapped Gus in. At first he would squirm out of it, but now he stands on the platform and plays. If he wants to look backwards, he turns around 180 degrees and leans against my back. With three straps holding him in, ±ő’m not worried he’ll fall out, and it carries well—it is, after all, designed for hauling meat.

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You wake with a start, spit spraying across your face. It’s your four-year-old coughing. You fell asleep in her bed. Your head is pounding. You check the time —it’s only 7 P.M.

You still need to put your skins on your skis. While you’re at it, you’d better pack your whole ski kit. You’ll be up feeding the baby by 5 A.M., and your plan is to be out the door by 7:30, but the house is mayhem in the morning, and you’ll be exhausted from feeding the baby at midnight and 3 A.M., too. You haven’t had a full night’s sleep since your second trimester. How long ago was that? Ten months? Can’t be. How old is the baby? Five months?

You stumble down to the kitchen. Skis, boots, poles. Beacon, shovel, probe. Skins. Med kit. Water. Lunch.

Lunch! This is a stage of life when lunch is a peanut butter and cheddar sandwich packed in a reused bag that says “Happy Baby Dried Oat Cereal.” When you pack the bag, oat shavings will fly around the kitchen, and that’s OK. It’s fine. And, yes, you should definitely take the kids’ leftover apple slices and the last of the Goldfish crackers.

You might want to text your ski partners to bring extra puffy coats so they don’t get cold while waiting around in the snow for you to pump (because you can’t go more than three hours without doing something about the milk buildup or you could get get mastitis, which is a breast infection, and you don’t want one of those). They may or may not listen to you, but that doesn’t matter. You’ll probably bring along a few extra coats for them, just in case. Remember? You’re a mom.

OMG. You’re going to have the minivan all to yourself tomorrow. Because: COVID. That means no whining, no screaming, and no one but you to drop crumbs. Did you think it could be this good?

Focus. This is your only chance to go skiing for the next week (or maybe for the rest of your life), so please triple-check that you packed your ski boots. But first go ahead and lick the peanut butter off the knife, salivating as you imagine eating the sandwich tomorrow, flakes of snow falling like magic from the sky.

You should probably get all the dishes done while the kids are sleeping, and plan dinner for tomorrow night. While you’re at it, why not plan dinner for the entire week? No, don’t do that. Go pack, and then read the avalanche advisory before bed.

Triggering avalanches on weak snow near the ground is possible
 however, these concerns are more localized to heavily wind-loaded slopes near ridgelines.
 With these hard slabs, avoiding suspect slopes is your best strategy.

That seems pretty straightforward to manage. Moderate danger on wind-loaded slopes, low danger elsewhere. One to three inches in the forecast. Now stop looking at avalanche videos, and go to sleep before the kids wake up again.

±ő’m a mother of very young children, too, so let me level with you: yes, you can still go skiing. It needn’t be in the backcountry, and the bunny slope and cross-country trails totally count toward your season total. And while COVID likely won’t make the Herculean effort of getting out the door much easier, there might be a few hidden new-mom benefits. Exhibit A: riding the lift solo means you don’t have to hand-pump on the chair next to a stranger.

And as we all know, getting outside is vital to your mental health, especially as a sleep-deprived new parent. So, whatever you do, go skiing.

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I met Hilaree Nelson in 2012 when I was considering getting pregnant. Three months prior, the ski mountaineer had become the first woman to climb two 8,000-meter peaks, Everest and Lhotse, in 24 hours, but instead of asking about that, I grilled her about becoming a mother and continuing mountain adventures. Would it be the end of my skiing and climbing?

“Some people lose their drive after kids,” says Nelson, whose sons are now eight and ten. “I didn’t.”

That response is one of the reasons I have a three-year-old daughter today, and ±ő’m happy to report that I also stayed motivated. But I’ve often since wondered if the ability to compartmentalize those two things—your parenting mind and your climber mind—is built-in or if it’s something we can learn and hone. Last fall, while reading about Nelson’s historic first ski descent of Lhotse in September 2018 with partner Jim Morrison, I kept wondering what, exactly, happens in her head during that moment when she flips on the focus switch.

“It really has to do with learning how to direct your attention to what’s important and relevant to the task at hand,” says Mark Aoyagi, director of the University of Denver’s sport and performance psychology program and a sports psychologist with the Denver Broncos. “A lot of times we talk about blocking out distractions, but you can’t actually block anything out, so the skill is to learn how to focus your attention to where it needs to be, and then everything else fades away.”

Yet it’s not always as simple as focusing on your mom thoughts or your athlete ones. Nelson describes a high-stakes situation in which thinking of her kids actually helped her survive. After climbing for nearly 50 hours during the Everest-Lhotse linkup, mostly above 8,000 meters, she began hallucinating while down-climbing loose, icy rock on Lhotse. In retrospect, she says, her brain was about to go off the rails, but because of the altitude, she didn’t realize it. “My kids just appeared in my mind so clearly. They were like, ‘Wake up. You have to get down.’” She channeled that energy in a mantra—“focus, focus, focus”—that helped her safely descend another 5,000 feet to camp.

But in 2017, when she and Morrison skied off 21,165-foot Papsura in India’s Himachal Pradesh state, thinking about her kids affected her differently. After waiting three hours on the summit for fog to clear, they began their descent in a whiteout, navigating blue ice barely covered in snow in the 55-degree couloir. When the clouds lifted 1,000 feet down, the exposure on the route became clear.

“If you lost an edge, there was no chance of self-arresting, and you’d just be gone,” Nelson says, describing the view 2,000 feet straight down to the crevasse. “As soon as I thought about that fall, the death, my kids popped into my mind.”

A ball of panic rose toward her chest. Her heartbeat went up, and her breathing shallowed. If she didn’t calm herself, she was hosed. She set the pick of her ice ax into the slope, turned her body so she could look uphill, and breathed until her heart rate came down. Then she pushed the thoughts of her boys out of her head.

The difference between her responses on Papsura versus Lhotse was about perspective, says Chris Heilman, a sports psychologist based in Driggs, Idaho, who works specifically with mountain athletes. “We all look through rose-colored glasses,” she says. “In her mind, she chooses whether thinking of her kids is helpful or hurtful. In the second scenario, it was hurtful, a scary situation. [On Lhotse] she viewed seeing her kids as helpful.”

Nelson navigated the sudden flood of adrenaline and cortisol by broadening her focus while on Papsura, Heilman says. This included looking uphill and conscientious breathing. “She stepped back into an open, broad focus to calm herself down and lower her arousal to a level that was appropriate for her to move forward,” he says.

Ultimately, this ability to focus is a vital skill for any mountain athlete—it’s just more evident in Nelson’s case, with the juxtaposition of mothering and serious alpinism. “If you don’t have the skill set to control your fear and your panic, then it’s going to inevitably work against you in a seriously dangerous way,” Nelson says. “It’s allowed me to push myself deeper into adventures and deeper into harder objectives.”

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Workwear as a style statement is having a moment. Google “Is Workwear Trending?” and the first few results show Calvin Klein models sporting road-worker orange and construction boots. From the to the to the , women’s clothing is getting more functional. The uniform-and-workwear industry is currently worth $30 billion and is projected to reach $48 billion by 2022. That kind of stable growth is an anomaly in the apparel sphere, where e-commerce has upended traditional retail sales and styles change with each season. A rise in the number of women in industrial occupations is a key part of the growth, according to , but blue-collar laborers aren’t the only ones driving it.

“To me, this is all about the #metoo momentum and the awareness that women are as strong and capable as men and deserve respect and all else that goes with that equality,” says Jeannie Wall, an outdoor-clothing consultant for Rab with 30 years of experience in the outdoor industry. “The new workwear speaks to the strength and power of women, with an aesthetic and fit that makes women feel strong and beautiful. It’s the new ‘power suit’ that finally doesn’t make us look like men.”

Dickies introduced its first women’s jeans meant for work in the late 1940s, according to Dickies’ senior design director, Erica Tew. During WWII, Carhartt outfitted Rosie the Riveter in coveralls, but the workwear giant didn’t have a until 2006. , a small brand out of White Sulphur Springs, Montana, also opened in 2006, manufacturing burly duck canvas pants, double reinforced in the knee and butt, in two cuts designed for women. . mailed its first women’s catalog the year prior.

The need was clear, says Red Ants Pants founder Sarah Calhoun, a former trail-crew worker and Outward Bound instructor. To get women into her made-in-the-USA britches, Calhoun traveled the country with an Airstream trailer, organizing Tupperware-style parties with pants and beer. Even with prices more than double that of Carhartt’s, women gobbled up Red Ants. Today she sells thousands of Red Ants Pants products annually, but she gauges her success by a different metric:  drew 18,000 people in 2018, its eighth season, and raised enough money to grant $100,000 to programs supporting women and girls in rural Montana.

Carhartt took a few years to nail its women’s line, but the branch is now the company’s fastest-growing business unit with its revenue increasing by a double-digit percentage from 2017 to 2018, according to Deb Ferraro, Carhartt’s vice president of product development. “Where we have the most success is where we take similar [men’s] product, and we don’t shrink and pink it, but we fit it appropriately for women’s shape.”

More recently, others have followed suit, reporting similar demand. “Our growth has been kind of like there’s a balloon going up in the sky and you grab a rope and hold on,” says Sara DeLuca, co-founder of , a women’s-only clothing company based in Portland, Oregon, that launched in May 2017. , which has manufactured heavy-duty tree-climbing pants since 1997 and women-specific pants since 2010, added three new women’s pants in the last three years.

But for all the success, there are also challenges. Dovetail, which offers sizes 000 through 18, is extending its line to size 24 this year. That inclusivity has garnered the tough, stretchy, attractive pants a fervid following, but it makes inventory management more complex, limiting new product development. Red Ants Pants’ decision to manufacture domestically has driven up costs, as have Dovetail’s and Patagonia’s partnerships with socially and environmentally responsible mills, and the latter’s application of environmentally benign textiles.

And one of the biggest hurdles for business growth is innate, says Calhoun: “Our pants don’t wear out.”

Still, innovation is happening in both fit and materials. After visiting a horse farm where women wore yoga pants on the job, Carhartt’s product team hybridized leggings and work pants into the Force Utility Legging. In one of the two colors offered, most sizes are sold out. Patagonia’s workwear, which dropped in 2017, is perhaps the largest departure from the mainstream. In a mix of traditional and cutting edge, Chouinard’s brand makes its apparel from organic hemp and cotton, recycled polyester, and Dyneema (a strong, lightweight fiber more common in sails). Patagonia’s testing showed that, while much softer than the ubiquitous duck canvas, its hemp blend was 25 percent more abrasion-resistant. Duluth, which saw a 150 percent increase in women looking for plus sizes on its website last year, is offering 55 percent of its core women’s line in extended sizing this fall and plans to offer more than 60 styles in plus by summer 2019.   

“You need to look like yourself, feel confident, and look like you take your work seriously,” says Taylor Johnston, founder of , a small women’s company inspired by historic, tailored work clothing, influenced by a New York City fashion sense, and focused on sustainable production.

Also a horticulturist who designed the gardens in front of the Guggenheim, Johnston sees room for growth in both her own business and the industry as a whole. “If you needed a pair of pants, heels, and a shirt for a desk job, you’d have countless options,” she says. “There should be just as many options for those who do dirty work.”

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