Shaun Raskin came to two conclusions growing up in New York. She would live somewhere in the West and she would never work in an office.
So far, so good. The accomplished backcountry telemark skier, rock climber and mountain-biking guide has happily figured out a way to work and play outside and make money doing it.
“I plan on keeping it that way because I’m my own most happy self when I’m outside,” she says. She delights in sharing her love affair with nature and play, and perhaps awakening that “happy self” in others through recreation and direct experience in the great outdoors.
Raskin, 29, has called Park City home since 2005, but she was never a stranger here. Born in Manhattan, she moved with her family as an infant to nearby Armonk, N.Y. She was on skis at the tender age of two when the family took a ski vacation to Park City.
Most of the time growing up, Raskin wandered amid the 100-acre woodland behind the family home. An admitted tomboy, she developed an abiding love for nature at an early age. “I pretended I was ‘woman of the wild,’ running through streams and making little huts in the forest,” she laughs.
She was rock climbing at age nine. “My best friend and I were just obsessed with rock climbing, but neither one of us had the gear or the knowledge we needed,” says Raskin. “We used one of those orange outdoor extension cords for a climbing rope and some webbing we wrapped around ourselves and called a harness. We would ride our bikes around my neighborhood looking for slate boulders, steep dirt mounds or anything that came close to resembling what we had seen people climb on TV. Luckily, somehow we never got more than a few scratches and we still, to this day, laugh at our naïveté and the endless adventures we had.”
But it was Raskin’s love of skiing that drew her inexorably westward. “I actually learned at the Park City Mountain Resort and just fell in love with it from the start,” she says. As she grew older, winter ski vacations took her to other resorts in Utah and Colorado. Snowbird was a perennial favorite.
After high school graduation from the Rye County Day School in Armonk, Raskin promptly packed up, headed west and enrolled at the University of Colorado in Boulder. “That had been my dream since I was eight years old when I visited Boulder with my parents,” she says.
During her college years, Raskin used her summers to build the skills set she would need to avoid a dreaded office job. She graduated from the National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS) mountaineering program and became a certified instructor with the American Institute for Avalanche Research and Education. She also became a certified wilderness first responder. After earning a B.S. degree in sociology, Raskin went back home to New York briefly to regroup and chart her career course. The compass needle swung west again in 2005 when she got a job as a wilderness instructor/counselor with the Park City-based Norwegian Outdoor Exploration Center.
On familiar turf in Park City and vicinity for the summer, she joyously introduced young teenagers to the outdoor world of hiking, biking, camping and, yes, rock climbing. Fortunately, she had by that time replaced extension cords with climbing ropes.
That experience led her to White Pine Touring a year later. Already a seasoned and highly skilled mountain biker, Raskin fit the job of summer mountain guide like a well-worn bike. This summer will mark her seventh season with White Pine and a job she dearly loves.
Like most young adventure junkies in Park City, Raskin has done her share of waiting tables, working at the Blind Dog and High West Distillery. “Those jobs let you ski and play all day, make some money at night and then get up in the morning and do it all over again,” she says. They are not, let the record show, office jobs.
Raskin, who places a high value on direct outdoor experience, says she’s seeing an alarming trend in our society. “I think people are becoming disconnected, even disenfranchised, from the natural world because of so much social media and they’re kind of missing something,” she observes. “At the same time, I believe most people are looking for a deeper sense of existence.”
She has what she considers the solution to this modern day conundrum. “What better way to reconnect with ourselves and others than by using nature as a medium and extended metaphor for accomplishing our own personal life goals,” says Raskin.
Though not in any hurry, Raskin hopes to one day create her own “wellness/guiding” company, combining outdoor recreation with life-coach counseling to help people deal with issues and realize their lifelong dreams. She’s even got a name for her own dream company: “Inspired Summit Adventures.” She doesn’t expect to get rich doing it, but insists that’s not the point. “If I can figure out how to be a full-time guide by helping people heal and grow and not starve doing it, I will be a happy girl.”
Steve Phillips is a Park City-based writer and actor. Send your profile comments and suggestions to him at [email protected]
VITAL STATISTICS
Favorite things: telemark skiing, biking, climbing, hiking, backpacking, camping, cooking, sitting around with good friends
Favorite foods: sushi, avocados, bananas, tofu and coconut ice cream
Favorite authors: Barbara Kingsolver, Richard Bach, Terry Tempest Williams
Favorite music: “Lady Gaga to Bob Marley. I love it all.”
Animal companions: Nelson, nine months old, part hound, part German shepherd. “He’s a ‘Furburbia’ rescue dog and he’s already hit the bike trails with me.”