As a child in Alaska, Merrick Johnston, a Fairbanks-born, Anchorage-raised athlete and ski guide was already supremely comfortable in the world’s alpine peaks. From tramping around the Alaska Range with her mother, to becoming the youngest person to climb Denali at 12 years old, to her first experience as a commercial guide on Denali at 18, it’s no surprise that she’s now an established, in-demand ski guide based in arctic Norway. It seemed she was born into a path for success and a career anchored to the world’s loftiest places.
“My mother loved the mountains, so when I showed interest, well, we really started getting out there and into the higher peaks,” said Johnston. “I learned how to ice climb at 8, rock climb at 9. And my mom had a rule for us kids; you couldn’t say you were cold unless you had already been moving for fifteen minutes!” With that kind of foundation, Johnston kept rising in the world of mountains – literally and figuratively, and is now a Nortind-certified (equivalent to the AMGA) ski guide, and the co-founder of the guiding operation Tromsø Ski Guides (TSG).
At TSG, Johnston has quickly become a go-to guide for filmers, professional skiers, commercial clients looking for a good day in the fjord-riddled mountains, and certainly by women searching for strong role models and mentors in the outdoors, a position she wholly embraces. She’s fully sponsored herself, working with brands including Norrøna, SGN skis, Vertical Playground (G3), and Petzl, and often puts on women’s camps ranging from avalanche skills and safety to how to pick and send big, fun, freeride lines.
However, it is not as it sounds – Johnston’s route has been far from the standard, unwavering journey into the guide track. Instead, it’s a full-circle tale, with Johnston touting an astounding resume and guileless modest demeanor. “I always wanted to be a guide, but my mother was very against it. She wanted me to be more versatile in life, especially as it was even more of a man’s world then – and guiding still is very male dominated, even here in Scandinavia,” said Johnston, “And it was very important to understand guiding is a job about teaching and showing, not just a way to get paid to be outside.”
So, in the name of versatility, she moved to the lower 48 to attend Dartmouth College, but still spent summers guiding clients with Exum Mountain Guides in the Tetons. Johnstson continued in school for a graduate degree from the Colorado School of Mines in geophysics – and eventually was hired as a petro-physicist for StatOil, Norway’s state oil company. For a person who holds sustainability and the natural world in high regard it seemed like an odd move.
“I wanted to work in oil so I could understand how it worked, from the inside. I really wanted to get into energy and policy, and also, I wasn’t planning to stay so long in Norway,” she said.
Fast forward to March of 2023. Johnston, and Tromsø Ski Guides overall, is in high demand: Johnston and her two partners, IFMGA-certified guide Lena Dahl and avalanche instructor Edda Rainer work to organize, market and run the operation. Female-founded, owned and operated, TSG is so busy they recently hired three new IFMGA guides from Chamonix, including another woman, to shoulder the client load.
When I finally corralled Johnston for a WhatsApp chat, she had just wrapped up the day guiding Austrian pro skier Sandra Lahnsteiner and her production crew for a new documentary film on skiing in the Lyngen Alps. Most days after work, Merrick is a single mother to her 8 and 10-year-old children, and has another job using her second master’s degree: after seven years with StatOil, she left to study value creation from and utilization of salmon fishery by-products. Now, in addition to ski guiding she works for a company that is using fish farm excrement as a substrate to be upgraded to liquified bio-gas to fuel trucks.
“Originally, I took a severance package from StatOil to finally pursue my IFMGA certification. But, I liked ski guiding so much more than rock and ice, I love breaking trail – up, and down.” So, Johnston pursued only the ski guide certification. “There aren’t even that many females who have gone through the Nortind certification,” she says. Though it may come as a surprise, given Scandinavia’s reputation for gender equality, that culture of equality is not in every sector of society. Like most of the world, the guide world in Norway remains heavily male-dominated.
So, in order to make the most of her skills and talents, Johnstson joined forces with her friends Lena and Edda, and Tromsø Ski Guides was born, with the tagline ‘reduce risks, increase smiles.’
“We only do ski guiding,” says Johnston. “It’s enough! We have a very long season here, October to May.”
While the company will guide in other areas, Johnston prefers to pull people into the mountains right around Tromsø. “The rest of the Lyngen Alps are really busy, there are so many skiers there now. Around Tromsø, there is great snow, a great local scene, six microclimates, easy approaches, and with less crowds, it’s less risky to be out there.”
Now, TSG has more work than it can handle. “There aren’t actually that many certified guides in this area, so that’s why we brought in guides from Chamonix. We’ve been so well received, now even though this is only our third year, we’re so busy, and more than half our guests are already returning clients,” said Johnston.
Despite being an ultra-motivated, high-level skier and mountaineer, Johnston is extremely cautious when it comes to tagging lines and big objectives. “I have skied new lines yearly, but only when conditions are right, so I do not commit to objectives. I have a lot of them and take the ones that make sense - condition, group, timing wise,” said Johnston. “We are completely transparent with clients – we take them to runs with the best conditions, safety is a priority, and we explain why we do things the way we do. To clients, and to our kids, we always explain that you’re never done learning, you have to respect the mountains.”
And in the wake of all the pursuit of passion in the mountains and working for respect in the guiding world, Johnston, along with her partners Lena and Edda know they have one thing dialed. They have chosen exactly what kind of example they are setting for their children, and all the men – and especially the women - whom they encounter. “They see us, and they see us doing this on our own terms,” she says.
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About The Author
stash member Brigid Mander
All things skiing, fun lines, off the beaten path adventures, skid life, telling stories, and obscure vocabulary words. brigidmander.com
Rudimatt
April 8th, 2023
I’m still trying to understand why city people think being a ‘guide’ is so glamorous? It isn’t. You have to pretend the client is your friend and you have to stoop to their level of skill, or lack there of. It’s akin to idiot city people thinking being a liftie means you get to ski all the time, but the reality is different.