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rachelsarahm

Freelance 🎥
She/her | vegan 🌍 | creating films, taking photos, + running around the mountains.

Two lone figures descending as we make our own way

Two lone figures descending as we make our own way up to the summit of Càrn Mòr Dearg.

A couple of hours later, in a white-out on the CMD arête, these two figures popped up onto our ridge after they had walked down to the end of the valley and headed up a col to get onto the arête, a way behind us. Perhaps not the safest route, but they made it. We waited on them both to catch up and then all four of us fought our way through the wind and confusion toward the summit together, and then back down, carefully navigating off the plateau, unable to see more than 2m ahead of us.

We ended up walking down the rest of the route with them, and once we got to their car, they drove us back to ours on the north face.

Meeting strangers in the mountains has always been one of my favourite things about them.

But: the worst thing - I lost their email address and couldn’t send them all the photos I got of them! Which is really sad, but I guess in a way it’s nice because we only know each other in the mountains, no more than that.

Watching the rain wash the snow away has brought b

Watching the rain wash the snow away has brought back a new sense of sadness, one that’s mixed with gratitude that the snow came to visit in the first place, to give a few days of refreshed local landscape and a new appreciation of where I live. Though I, in all honesty, still do not like where I live. Leeds was supposed to be a temporary place for me to pick myself up and heal after my breakdown, but a few years later I am still here. Which I’m admittedly both happy and sad about. It has people I care for, but it’s not where I would have actively chosen to spend years of my life. Especially now when the outdoors has become my career. This year, and everything that has come with it, has brought that to the forefront of my mind more than usual, and forced questions, conversations, and plans into my mind about how important it is to be happy with where you live, though it’s often not exactly easy to make that happen for a lot of people, for so many reasons.

One day soon I really hope that I will be able to say that I love where I live, but for now I still feel lucky to have this home, and greenspace nearby 🌱

There are days where you just don’t want to hear

There are days where you just don’t want to hear one more negative thing, you can’t. You unplug and get out - run, pay attention to nature, or curl up in bed, or zone out to a film. Or something, anything that means you don’t have to pay attention to the *bad stuff*. So what about those other days? If I’m tired at seeing what our government, our system, does to people and the environment and animals, then I can’t even imagine the rage felt by those directly impacted. Key workers, those relying on government support for food, housing, and more.

I see so many outdoors accounts here on this corner of the internet - inspiring, positive, creative humans. We need that, I crave that some days, just beautiful photography and film, and seeing people joyfully enjoying the outdoors. But we also need more conversations about how the system is designed to hurt and kill poor people, how it exists to benefit white people. How it’s truly fucking rigged and how the Covid response and Brexit deal and THE BEES are all interlinked issues. What links them? Greed, backroom deals, cronyism, profit, the suffering of human, animal, and planet.

Talking/writing/posting isn’t enough but it is part of action.

“I’ve decided to go about this lockdown and th

“okay, so if the three of you could just head ov

“okay, so if the three of you could just head over there, stay equal distance away from each other, and just walk normally.”

There are quite a lot of photos I’m excited about from my last shoot of 2020, but this is the one that makes me laugh everytime I’m scrolling through my edits. Of course it won’t make the final cut, but it brings me so much joy remembering my laughter in the moment as these three couldn’t do the simplest thing as WALKING?!

Doing this shoot for @paramooutdoor on a day where we were hammered with icy winds, white-out conditions, and me with lockdown jello legs that were not up for that loooong morning ascent was a challenge. I adored it. And I adored the people I was up there with. @itsadamcampbell @kirstypallas and @stevetrenier were brilliant models and competent, fun people to be in the mountains with.

I’ve been opening up more and more about what it’s been like being freelance. The ‘feast and famine’ - mostly famine at the moment - rollercoaster, being able to confidently price myself, knowing my worth, remembering that in all the editing anxiety (“are these good enough?!”) I actually truly love it. The bad outtake photos, the suffering, and the beautiful landscapes that I’m excited to shoot in again in the near future.

The rise and growth of right wing fascism is just

The rise and growth of right wing fascism is just as pervasive and scary here in the UK than it is over there in the US. It’s just a little different. For decades, people have been killed, beaten, arrested, for demanding things like clean drinking water? For justice for unfair deaths of their loved ones. And the word ‘antifa’ has somehow become a BAD thing?! Why. Shouldn’t we all be anti-fascist? And we have spent the last years in the UK going through our own version of this. Our own descent into more explicit racism and xenophobia and the class divide getting wider and wider, but all the while poor people blaming each other. Because that’s what they want. With Brexit they want us to fight with each other, because it distracts us from seeing the profit they are planning to make from trade deals and lowered food standards. Covid, they want us to fight with each other, that way there’s less scrutiny on PPE deals that haven’t delivered and an NHS that has been underfunded for YEARS. Solidarity with my friends who work on the frontlines, who are frustrated and scared and tired. And also to those who have spent their lives protesting, educating, living - and who have had to see a bunch of white fascists, encouraged by a sitting president, storm the capitol building and then walk back out again allowed to go home.

The US and the UK are aligned in so many ways, and for a lot of the wrong reasons.

I don’t have advice. I just feel like it’s quite hard to know how to engage with this dialogue on Instagram when it’s not a pretty graphic reshare.

But if we aren’t opening up a dialogue, then we are just ignoring it, and it’ll continue to happen until we get to a point of no return.

some radical reframing currently happening in my m

some radical reframing currently happening in my mind - thoughts that feel conflicting but I know aren’t. Anger at this lockdown, sadness it’s happening. But also so much relief that we are locked down. Feelings that are almost conflicting but I know that they’re shared by most people I know. My own mental health has, to put it lightly, been pretty manic these last months. Partially due to lockdown, to the anger and frustration we feel at each other, the judgement that bubbles up toward others internally and how it’s been directed at me, too.

All these conflicting feelings, but at the heart of it there still is one thing that stays solid and constant: I want to say it’s the outdoors or doing yoga or something equally as peaceful and mindful or wholesome, but the truth it that it’s a little voice that keeps saying “fuck the Tories, and those in power who don’t care about the rest of us, and one day be part of the movement that tries to make sure they’re held accountable.”

this little fire’s been burning for years now, and it’s one of the things that I come back to that helps me feel grounded.

The outdoors is not a cure. But the idea of anothe

The outdoors is not a cure. But the idea of another adventure keeps me going through endless editing nights and too much blue light and the days and days and days of politics and news and too much information.

- grateful for the snow and it’s changed how I feel about familiar places, how I interact with the otherwise boring, closer to home. It makes a difference.

A clear start that descended into an almost otherw

A clear start that descended into an almost otherworldly calm whiteout on the Carn Mor Dearg arête - in early March I had my favourite day of the year. A snow bunting came to say hello at Carn Mor Dearg, disappeared in the mist, and then again came right up to me as we descended Ben Nevis. I always tell myself it was the same little bird, though I can’t ever be sure.

I didn’t know it at the time but I think this was the day that made me really, properly, realise that I wanted to get into winter adventure photography - the toughness of it, the suffering, the beauty of the mountains swept with white. The meticulous planning and care to decide where to go, to stay as safe as possible.

Stress and anxiety about the future bubbles up daily now, as it does for most of us - so I’ve decided that when that starts to happen I’ll think about that snow bunting. About my favourite day of the year. I wonder if anybody else knows what their favourite day was? What it looked like, how it felt. I’d love to hear about it 🏔

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