IDAHO SPRINGS — Even when the sun warms up a bitter winter morning and freshly fallen snow gently catches and cradles each footstep, the climb up to St. Mary’s Glacier is a challenge.
A group of Colorado hikers who trekked to the glacier near Idaho Springs just before the turn of the year knows the struggle involved in each vertical foot of gain. They’ve faced similar battles at home, wearily pushing through rounds of uncertainty and doubt, each while figuring out their own way to quit drinking and using drugs.
The path — both to sobriety and to the base of a glacier — winds into the unknown, which is why Nick Pearson created an organization, Sober Outdoors, for people to find their footing together. The group is ramping up activities as the start of a new year ushers in a month of pledges to give up drinking, better known as dry January, at a time the nonprofit has grown into a refuge for people in all stages of sobriety. That includes people who are exploring the idea of quitting — call them sober curious — along with those whose lives have been upended by the disease of addiction and are in the first days of recovery.
Pearson said he has seen the movement toward abstaining from alcohol continue to surge in recent years beyond dry January, hand in hand with a broader realization of the health dangers alcohol poses. U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy on Friday called for greater transparency in the extent to which consuming alcohol can increase the risk for cancer. Murthy is urging alcoholic beverages to include warning labels explicitly highlighting that risk.
Sober Outdoors launches people into all kinds of outdoor settings — snowshoeing to Lost Lake close to Nederland, hiking up Chief Mountain near Idaho Springs and snow tubing at Fraser Tubing Hill. In each place, nature steadies Pearson with a quiet calm and a renewed sense of feeling alive, both of which he could never find at the bottom of a beer bottle.
“Now with sobriety and nature, I get to find that peace,” said Pearson, who has been sober for six years. “It’s at the top of a mountain. And I get calm and I find comfort in just life and being in my own skin and feeling like a real human being in this journey of whatever this life is that we’re all living. I got to see that when I stopped drinking. I got to see how beautiful it was, and I wouldn’t have been able to do that had I not been to the backcountry.”
Pearson, executive director of Sober Outdoors, rolled out the Denver nonprofit in 2022 in hopes of forging a community he desperately needed after an alcohol-drenched career in the outdoor industry and his own realization that he needed help cutting alcohol out of his life.
Pearson, who comes from a family of alcoholics, said alcohol didn’t become a glaring problem until his mom died when he was 25.
“I didn’t wake up one day and just decide I was going to be an alcoholic,” Pearson, 36, said. “I woke up one day and I had a beer in the shower at like 6 in the morning before going to work and I was like, ‘what is going on here?’”
He entered a 30-day treatment program and continued trying to convert to a sober life with support from other recovery programs. Eventually, he craved something beyond the string of meetings that often come with the walk through sobriety.
Pearson conceived Sober Outdoors as a space for sober professionals in the outdoor industry, looking to connect with likeminded peers in a work world he describes as “super boozy” — from alcohol-laden hikes, campouts and work dinners to trade shows where Pearson said he and his colleagues would start drinking midafternoon.
With a vision to be more inclusive, Pearson, a gay man, expanded the group to sober members of the LGBTQ+ community until he decided he didn’t want to limit anyone from joining Sober Outdoors. In the past two years, the nonprofit has immersed an estimated 800 people — both those committed to sobriety and their allies — in the outdoors through close to 40 events. The organization is also gaining momentum in other states, with budding chapters in Portland, Oregon, and Boston.
Pearson, who says he quit his job in sales in the outdoor industry to limit his exposure to alcohol, started a local ski company with a friend before shifting to running Sober Outdoors full time. He now frames his days around supporting others trying to keep clear of drugs and alcohol. That happens in both subtle and provocative ways.
Pearson makes a point to be the caboose of most hikes and other outdoor adventures, sticking beside anyone who gets tired or overwhelmed or who simply needs a friend by their side.
But he has also had to aid people in much more heightened states of distress. Pearson said he once had to administer Narcan to stop someone from overdosing at a Sober Outdoors event.
Many of the people who land at group outings are brand new to recovery, he noted, so the organization does what it can to both set them up for success in sobriety and ease access to the outdoors.
Along with providing scholarships to individuals so that they can attend events and afford treatment while getting sober, the organization rents out gear like snowshoes at heavily discounted rates and arranges carpools to get-togethers.
Through each conversation and each stretch of silence spent together off the grid, Pearson said he hopes Sober Outdoors helps chip away at the underlying stigma around the disease of addiction.
“Even if we just help one person at the end of the day stay sober one day longer, then our mission is accomplished,” he said. “That’s what’s important to us. If we help that one person stay one more day sober then we did it. It’s worth it, all the money, all the time, all the effort.”
First, discomfort. Then, a sense of calm.
The first steps into the mountains during most Sober Outdoors events usually come with jitters as new participants arrive to a small crowd of strangers. The only thing everyone knows about each other within those first minutes is that they’re all there in pursuit of a substance-free life.
But as the minutes and miles pass, so do the nerves.
A tinge of anxiety followed Rubi Solis, now five months sober, to her first Sober Outdoors event up to St. Mary’s Glacier. As she plowed through the climb with her snowshoes, she opened up about the new direction her life has taken since she decided to stop drinking.
Solis, 30, said she turned to alcohol as a source of courage and fun, but she now realizes she no longer needs a drink to give her either.
She is healthier and more fit after putting her energy into exploring the outdoors and beginning to train for her first half-marathon. She can feel the difference, especially after reversing her fatty liver diagnosis since becoming sober.
Solis said she learned she had fatty liver disease, a symptom of chronic drinking, a week after quitting alcohol. Her eyes took on a yellow tint and she was constantly bloated with a burning sensation in her stomach as if she had just downed a shot of tequila. Her diagnosis became another wakeup call after she lost her uncle to cirrhosis of the liver, also stemming from alcohol. This time, she listened.
“I think it was a sign that my body was saying, ‘you shouldn’t drink anymore,’” Solis said. “I wasn’t feeling good about it anymore anyway.”
Her relationships have also changed as she’s grown closer to her family, enjoying their company without the misery of a hangover. But along the way she’s lost friendships that largely revolved around drinking, too. Solis said she no longer hosts regular happy hours. The friends she used to clink glasses with have disappeared.
So she’s setting out in search of new friends, finding the peace she once sought at brunches and clubs deep in Colorado’s trails.
“It was amazing,” Solis said after her first Sober Outdoors hike. “It was great relating to other people who are also outdoorsy and who are also sober. And it felt great being able to share each other’s stories and journeys and how we are navigating all of that, alone and with each other.”
That same longing for community is a big part of why Seamus Cronin has become a regular at Sober Outdoors gatherings. Cronin, more than 90 days sober during his most recent attempt at sobriety, has shaken off a lifestyle he outgrew after brewing beer for 14 years. Alcohol never threatened catastrophe in his life, he said, but he knows his limits and that it’s simply time to change.
“The truth is I can’t accomplish anything while under any sort of substances,” said Cronin, who pivoted to a career in heating, ventilation and air conditioning in 2023. “Sobriety provides a clear mindstate. I’m able to be present and focused and have a clear direction on what’s next.”
Cronin, 35, said abandoning alcohol has helped him feel more at ease in his own skin.
“I will admit that I am 100% uncomfortable with myself,” he said. “It’s gotten better and I think that’s the big payoff at the end of the day. I get to understand myself better and know that versus trying to be somebody else through the guise of alcohol and using alcohol as an igniter. I think there’s healthier ways for people to escape reality and the mundane routine and it’s possible if you just put yourself out there.”
The sober hikes have become a sacred place for him to escape the day-to-day noise of his life in Denver.
“It makes me realize how small of a person I am and how much out there (that there) is to explore and how much opportunity I have to become the person I want to be,” Cronin said. “Those moments where you can actually hear silence, that’s me going to church right there.”
Within that silence, Lawrence Petsky has tapped into a deeper connection with others, himself and his surroundings — what he was chasing all along while under the influence of drugs and alcohol. Petsky has a long history of coping with drugs, beginning with smoking marijuana as a young teen growing up in upstate New York. It was his gateway drug that led him to abuse Adderall and eventually cocaine.
Petsky moved to Colorado six-and-a-half years ago hoping to start fresh and get some distance from the cycle of drugs taking over his life, amplified by friends also experimenting with drugs with no plans to change.
But he continued using cocaine as he dove into Colorado’s electronic dance music scene. He recalls hazy nights spent in overnight detox, times he threatened suicide and had to sit in a psychiatric unit and one attempt to overdose on his antidepressents. His family was concerned about him. And he was losing friends along with himself.
“I finally got to my breaking point,” Petsky, 26, said. “I was like this is a quarter of my life and I don’t want the next quarter of my life to be this miserable.”
He has now passed the 90-day mark of sobriety from all drugs and alcohol. Sober Outdoors has been one piece of the answer as the organization has surrounded him with people who he can freely open up to about his newfound sobriety.
Or just simply be with, soaking in the silence together.
“I think in sobriety you have to do something with your time and you have to figure out what is important to me,” Petsky said. “I think since I came out here I’ve just been so amazed by Colorado and the outdoors that being able to leave Denver and have some quiet time in the mountains is really great. That paired with getting to talk to people about sobriety is really healing.”
