For Andrea Charest, climbing is entwined with community. She and her husband Steve own Petra Cliffs, a climbing gym and mountaineering school in Burlington, Vermont where they also work as guides. She’s volunteered much of her time over the years to Crag Vermont, a nonprofit organization dedicated to conserving, protecting and advocating for climbing access in the Green Mountain State (her’s is the first face you see on the organization’s website–a face that is surprisingly calm as as she reaches for a sloper high overhead).
She empowers her fellow climbers to take the lead, and has a knack for enabling others to move past their perceived limitations.
Earlier this year, Charest became an AMGA-certified ice climbing instructor, a hard-earned goal years in the making.
In this conversation, we talk about her journey through the ice instructor exam, and how she balances business, play and parenthood. Charest shares her love for the global climbing community, her excitement around the continued growth of Petra Cliffs, and the importance of helping climbers make the transition from the gym to the crag.
This episode is brought to you by Rab Equipment
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Host: Abbey Collins
Guest: Andrea Charest
Producer + Engineer: Mike Horn
An Enormously Familiar Voice: Chris Kalous
The Calling: Barry Blanchard
To Abandon: Claire Carter
Strange Music: Doug McCarty
Open Heart: Alpinist Digital Editor Derek Franz
The Vertical Humor of Tami Knight
Fire in the South Platte
Climbing Doesn't Change You: Kathy Karlo
A Few Seconds: Whitney Clark
Sisnaajini: Stories from White Shell Mountain
Threshold Shift: Nick Bullock
The Adventure Gap: James Edward Mills
Available Light: Jimmy Chin
Art of Freedom: Bernadette McDonald and Voytek Kurtyka
Stillness and Storms: Mayan Smith-Gobat
In the Bear's Lodge: Voices from Devils Tower
The Climbers: Jim Herrington and Fred Beckey
Mountaineering and Climate Change
Death and Climbing, Part 2
Death and Climbing: David Roberts
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