How my placement got me stuck in a blizzard and I made it on US television

Henning Rix

Henning Rix is a 3rd year ITMC student, doing his internship at Sustainable Travel International (STI), a US-based non-profit organization, located in White Salmon, WA. This is a short account of a blizzard related adventure he recently had!

Before I landed in Portland, OR about 3 month ago, I was not fully aware of the diversity in leisure activities and the beauty of my placement location. The placement I am currently undertaking is at Sustainable Travel International (STI), a US-based non-profit organization, located in White Salmon, WA, promoting responsible travel and ecotourism development world-wide.  White Salmon is a very small community located directly in the Columbia River Gorge – the nation’s only scenic area and a region that National Geographic rated in November of 2009 as the 6^th most beautiful place to live. It is a truly breathtaking environment, which allows me to take part in many exciting and not Dutch leisure activities – such as mountain-biking, trekking, skiing, white-water rafting, windsurfing, etc – you name it, the Gorge offers it.

During the first three months of my internship, I have been integrated in the daily work routine of STI and been able to express my wishes in order to gain the most out of my placement. My priorities within the STI team are shifting on a daily basis; however one of my major responsibilities was to write a marketing plan for a future project of STI. I’ve been also involved in various outreach activities and been able to start my own small European-focused marketing campaign with the goal of attracting more businesses to implement sustainability guidelines and contribute to the global movement of sustainable tourism. Besides helping with marketing related projects, I am also involved with administrative issues such as entering the continuously growing amount of contacts and members into our database and managing daily inquiries.

During the last 6 weeks I have been able to get a little more involved with STI’s Sustainable Tourism Eco-Certification Program™ (STEP) and helped with the preparations of the first STEP auditor and consultant training course. This story is set at this first training course, which was held last week at Timberline Lodge – many of you may know as the Overlook Hotel from Stanley Kubrick’s film version of Stephen King’s book The Shining. During the second day of this seminar, we witnessed a harsh change in weather and we started to worry about being able to leave the lodge at night. Together with a one of STI’s staff members, I was the only one who had to leave the lodge that night, as the participants stayed there to continue their training the following morning and sure enough, once we were ready to leave the blizzard had picked up.

Timberline Lodge

I have never seen weather like this: vertical rain, mixed with hail, snow and ice and about 100km/h winds from changing directions. After a short struggle I was able to open the passenger door of the car and was surprised to see that it did not close again. Turning around to help my co-worker clean the windshield from ice and snow I realized that he was talking to a camera crew who drove up from Portland to cover the surprising return of winter – in May. After all, I guess it was not so surprising to the locals, as we were at about 2000 meters above sea level, however it was surprising to us. The TV crew also took the opportunity to interview me and we were finally able to leave this forsaken place, which started to remind me of the outside scenes from The Shining, not surprising as it was shot there some thirty years ago. I have never seen a storm like this – the exhaust pipe of the car was frozen shut, so were some of the doors, and water and ice had found its way through the door seals and had opened the trunk by expanding.

Besides this small exciting, but very cold and unpleasant incident, I am enjoying my work at STI a lot and am looking forward to the weeks to come – also to the upcoming summer to be spent in the States – working and backpacking down the West Coast.