For more than a decade, Vickie Lanthier has been sharing tips and advice about her favourite hikes around the national capital on her Girl Gone Good blog and Instagram accounts.
It taught Lanthier to never take her mental health for granted and sparked an interest in helping her fellow soldiers cope. Lanthier experienced her first “mass casualty incident” at age 21 in East Timor, when the truck she was riding in with three other soldiers came upon a horrific road crash. A civilian truck loaded with about 30 passengers had plunged over a cliff.
“When we were leaving I thought, ‘We’re going out on patrol. I’m bringing everything — extra water, extra food, garbage bags, a note pad and a Sharpie.’ I got a good ribbing about it. ‘They were saying, ‘Oh, gosh. Look at the girl packing everything.’ But I thought, ‘I’m going to be the mom here and bring it all.’ And lo and behold, we used all of it.”
“It was after the rotations in Afghanistan and seeing the fallout with some of my friends that I started engaging with them.” Her blog drew interest from civilians too. She put together a spreadsheet of 100 of her favourite hikes and posted it online. Within a day, it had more than 2,000 downloads and she realized she could use the information to raise money for charity. So far, she’s contributed $27,000 to her favourite causes, mostly the Mississippi Madawaska Land Trust, which works to protect the sites Lanthier holds so dear, and Boots on the Ground, which provides peer support to first responders.
“People are going to come anyway,” she said. “It’s teaching people how to appreciate the land. Who owns it? What birds nest here? What type of forest is this? The more you get people curious about an area, they more they’re going to take care of it.”
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