Summer’s Bio

Summer is a 23-year-old Dartmouth graduate and aspiring outdoor educator. Raised between Central Florida and Raleigh, North Carolina, she didn’t consider herself an outdoors person until moving to New Hampshire for college, where she fell in love with hiking, paddling, and backpacking through the Dartmouth Outing Club. Her freshman year, she became a flatwater and sea kayaking leader for Ledyard Canoe Club, dreaming up and leading multi-day backcountry expeditions to the Apostle Islands, New Zealand, and Canada throughout the next three years. During her final term, she canoed 220 miles down the Connecticut River to the Atlantic Ocean with 25 other seniors, kickstarting her dreams to pursue even bigger backcountry challenges. Since graduating in June 2025, she has worked on crew at Moosilauke Ravine Lodge and the Appalachian Mountain Club’s Lakes of the Clouds Hut, completed a five-month fellowship with an environmental education nonprofit in the Galápagos, and backpacked across mainland Ecuador and Guatemala. In summer 2026, she led groups of high schoolers on backpacking trips in the Sierra Nevada for Overland Summers, and she is using this scholarship to fund a SOBO thru-hike attempt of the Vermont Long Trail from mid-September to mid-October.