Ladies and gentlemen, please allow me to introduce you to one Ms. Amber-Lee Dibble.
Not your typical Spin Sucks reader, Amber-Lee runs Pioneer Outfitters in Alaska.
She manages and is a big game guide (which means she hunts and shoots animals much, much larger than she) for the wilderness excursion company and has been for 20 years. But she didn’t grow up in Alaska; she grew up on a dairy farm in New York.
You know how most of us graduate from high school, headed for college, and have no idea what we want to do with the rest of our lives? Not Amber-Lee. She knew exactly what she wanted to do: Join the Navy.
Upon graduation she did and headed off to serve our country in Desert Storm. But, after deployment, she realized having automatic rifles pointed at her wasn’t such a great way of life and re-evaluated her hopes and dreams. She received an honorable discharge and went back to the dairy farm.
She read an article in The Paint Horse Journal about master guide Terry Overly and Pioneer Outfitters and sat down to write him a letter.
Not only did she receive a response, he sent her a plane ticket to Alaska. And she never looked back.
More than 25 percent of Wrangell St. Elias National Park and Preserve is covered by glacial ice. In fact, it is the greatest concentration of glaciers in North America and it has more than half of Alaska’s glacial ice.
But most vistors to the park see only the southwest side because there many tourist facilities and a road system available. Very few ever get to experience the northeast side of the glacial divide. This is where the people of Pioneer Outfitters live and work. And this is where Amber-Lee made a home for herself and, later, her family.
She has certainly brought the company into the information age. She blogs, she tweets, she Facebooks, she pins, she links, she pluses, and, if that’s not enough, she wrote a book, “My Identity Crisis.”
She is an incredible woman. We always joke how vastly different our lives are. She’ll gasp at something I encounter in the big city and I can’t get my arms around her life in the wilderness. But I learn a ton from her and I’m lucky to call her a friend.
Introduce yourself to her in the comments below, follow her on the social networks, read her blog and her book, and get to know her.