Maria has been in the mountains since she could pretty much walk. From the Tatra Mountains to the Rockies and the Pacific Northwest, they've been a constant thread in her life in a journey of discovery spanning the great outdoors and self. Maria has 30 years of mountaineering, skiing downhill and backcountry, climbing, scrambling, and hiking. Beyond her day-to-day job of running design and user experience teams, she volunteers over 500 hours a year for one of the busiest SAR teams in all of North America. She's part of the Alpine Club of Canada and the BCMC (British Columbia Mountaineering Club) where she has taught Women In Mountaineering and Glacier travel courses and talks about snow safety. Beyond that, she's often doing trail work mercilessly cutting down Alders with her favourite silky saw and she once wrote a poem to her favorite Lowa boots.