Alpenglow Sports, Tahoe City’s 39-year-old mountain shop, will launch a new in-house adventure presentation series, “Tailgate Talks,” this fall, featuring presentations focused on adventure, travel and mountain exploration.

FROM NEWS RELEASE...

Tahoe City, Calif. (August 19, 2017) – Alpenglow Sports, Tahoe City’s 39-year-old mountain shop, is proud to announce a new in-house adventure presentation series. Coined the “Tailgate Talks,” the shows are focused on adventure, travel and mountain exploration. The shows take place at Alpenglow Sports on various weekday evenings throughout the fall. Each show is communal in nature, designed to provide a fun and inspiring outlet for the North Lake Tahoe adventure community and benefits a local non-profit in need. 

The first installment of Alpenglow’s Tailgate Talks drops on Thursday, September 21st at 7pm with Bree Loewen, a thoughtful and elegant explorer of the hardships and joys of search and rescue, risk and motherhood. Loewen will present stories and readings from her new book Found: A Life in Mountain Rescue.

Bree Loewen’s first book, Pickets and Dead Men, was her account of the three seasons she spent as a climbing ranger on Mount Rainier, in Washington, beginning at the tender age of 21. Through her utterly honest and often gripping stories, she revealed her struggle to gain the respect of her male coworkers, her self-doubt, and a continual pondering of that neverending question: Why am I here?

Now in her mid-thirties, Loewen has become a wife, a mother, and a leader of Seattle Mountain Rescue (SMR), a volunteer-based search-and-rescue operation. As a volunteer, she is bothered by the lack of respect her amateur status brings her—but also cognizant of how that status makes her the perfect person for the work she loves: “This is a job for a human, not a hero, a human who has nothing else to do today but this.”

Despite her self-deprecation, Bree and her fellow SAR volunteers provide critically important help, reaching stranded individuals when mountain conditions are too difficult for helicopter access, and collecting data for the medical examiner when it’s too late for a rescue. In Found: A Life in Mountain Rescue, Bree shares the drama and the camaraderie of this work, as well as the challenges of trying to fit her other roles as wife and mother into what is still largely a masculine environment.

In a fearless voice—disarming yet laced with dark humor—Bree guides us through intense recoveries, vivid wilderness landscapes, and the warmth she discovers in motherhood.

“In Found, Bree Loewen brings readers along with her in a constant race against death, while illuminating the people and work of mountain rescue—as well as her own challenges to juggle family demands and discern her life calling. A great read for anyone who enjoys the adventure, peril, and responsibility that goes with life in wild places.” —Shannon Huffman Polson, author of North of Hope: A Daughter’s Arctic Journey

Other speakers in the Tailgate Talk Series include Obi Kaufmann on October 2nd, a premier of Patagonia’s “Fish People” on October 19th and Chris Noble on October 25th. All shows are $7 and adult beverage sales benefit hand-chosen local non-profits.

Please come early for drink specials and good seating. The show begins at 7pm. Doors open at 630pm. Please call Alpenglow Sports at 530.583.6917 for further details.