Healthcare worker, mountain athlete, and nonprofit founder Julia Heemstra nearly lost everything to the dangers of backcountry waters and avalanches. Then, she found a way to transform her pain into purpose, by helping others gain access to safe water.
In April 2015, Julia Heemstra and three trusted ski partners set out from downtown Jackson Hole, Wyoming, before the sun rose. They clicked into their skis at the String Lake trailhead and started under the moon, tracing the water’s edge to the Leigh Lake portage. The conditions were ideal. “It was the fastest crossing I’ve ever done,” Heemstra recalls. “The lake was perfectly frozen and so we could do these long skating glides.”
The group then ascended Mt. Moran, a prominent peak in the northern portion of Wyoming’s Teton Range, and carefully skied their way down the southwest couloir, which was full of frozen ice and snow deposited by spring freeze-thaw cycles. “It was clear that temperatures were increasing throughout the day,” says Heemstra. “And when we got back down to Leigh Lake, there was this thin little ribbon of water around the shoreline.”
Believing that the ice would stay more solid in the middle, Heemstra and her ski partners began to cross the lake. But it had warmed more than anyone realized. As the group widened the distance between them and the solid ground surrounding the lake, one of Heemstra’s ski partners broke through the ice. Instantaneously, the team shifted into crisis mode, using all of their collective training and rescue education in a scenario they had hoped they’d never have to experience. After an intense extraction, Heemstra tossed one of her skis to the partner to spread his weight out further. With only one ski to distribute her own weight, Heemstra herself plunged through the ice into the lake. “I think I churned through 15-20 feet of ice just pulling up and breaking through, pulling up and breaking through,” she recalls. “I remember thinking, ‘This is how I’m going to die.’”
After a desperate few minutes of trying to extract herself from the icy water, Heemstra was eventually able to pull herself back onto the ice where she lay flat. Two of her ski partners had managed to skate gingerly back to the edge of the lake on their skis. From their position of safety, they removed their skis and slid them over the ice to Heemstra and her other ski partner, trapped on the ice. The two clicked into the skis carefully, so as not to break through the surface again. The skis helped distribute weight across a greater area and although ice was cracking all around them, the skiers were able to skate to shore without plunging through again. Regrouping at the lake’s edge, the team was bedraggled, shaken, and faced with staving off hypothermia, but alive.
Heemstra is no stranger to the power of water, and throughout her life, water has been an important throughline. Originally from South Africa, she grew up experiencing regular water shortages. “We lived in the midst of a decades-long drought and always had water restrictions,” she explains. “So this powerful connection to water is woven throughout my life, it’s just a part of me.”
“Water is what brings me to life… and what also consistently almost kills me.”
- Julia Heemstra
As she got older, Heemstra was drawn to the mountains where she could find water in its many different forms—ice, snow, river, and lake. She has lived in Jackson, Wyoming for almost 20 years and has spent thousands of hours in the Tetons in all seasons. She’s climbed many of the range’s most technical routes and is known for a propensity toward steep, obscure ski descents.
Through both her upbringing in South Africa and her mountain pursuits, Heemstra has seen how water has the power to nurture and to destroy, and its duality continues to hone her purpose in life.
Being a big mountain athlete comes with some inherent risks. Breaking through ice on Leigh Lake was not Heemstra’s first time facing the dark side of backcountry pursuits nor the first time she’s seen the potential for water to kill. Just three years before her accident on the lake, on March 7, 2012, Heemstra’s longtime partner, Steve Romeo, died in an avalanche on Ranger Peak in Teton National Park.
Following this avalanche, it was hard for Heemstra to not see water as a central player in Romeo’s death. Heemstra, who has been caught in two avalanches herself, is not ignorant of water’s destructive potential. “Water is what brings me to life … and what also consistently almost kills me,” she says.
Romeo’s death complicated her relationship with the other things that she loved—the mountains, the snow, the water—but Heemstra kept going back. Motivated to move past her tenuous relationship with Leigh Lake after her near-death experience and determined to continue to embrace the mountains that have both given her so much and taken so much away, Heemstra decided to try to drop a record time on the Moranic Teton Triathlon. The Moranic involves bicycling from town to Leigh Lake (25 miles), swimming two miles across the lake to the base of the Falling Ice Glacier on Mount Moran, climbing Mt. Moran (12,605 feet), and then doing the entire thing in reverse. She succeeded—shaving 2 hours and 57 minutes from her previous record, and 1 hour and 17 minutes from the all-time record. This is what inspired her to try to do the same with the Picnic Teton Triathlon in 2020.
“Julia’s time in the mountains represents both a physical and personal exploration for her,” says Dan Long, one of Heemstra’s longtime skiing and climbing partners. “It’s where she pushes through love and loss, and [finds] growth and discovery.”
Heemstra’s response to the pain of trauma in the mountains is not uncommon. Many athletes turn to harder challenges in the alpine to cope with feelings of loss. Jess Shade is a licensed therapist and high-altitude mountaineer who works with a range of high-performing athletes and currently serves as the staff therapist for the Utah Avalanche Center. “Where mountain athletes might go to cope with stressors, traumas, and losses in daily life is often the mountains. And when accidents happen in the mountains, it can feel exponentially impactful because we just had the place we cope impacted and implicated in [our trauma],” she explains. “There’s a tendency [following loss] to push yourself hard to find purpose again.”
This was certainly true in Heemstra’s case but, after months of training, the day of her effort on the Picnic was filled with wildfire smoke and she felt sluggish, completing each section far from her goal times. “I was just pushing so hard,” she recalls. “And I remember exactly what rock I was at, coming down the trail when I was like, ‘Oh my god, I am trying so hard and this feels so hollow.’”
“Losing Steve remains the ultimate inflection point of my life—the ‘before’ and ‘after’ moment. Water shattered my heart and yet also, through AMANZI, is now repairing it, piece by piece.”
- Julia Heemstra
Shade says this feeling of hollowness isn’t uncommon among athletes. When that happens, “there’s a drive to recalibrate and get creative with where and how to source purpose.”
Following her failed effort on the Picnic and in response to her feeling of hollowness, Heemstra knew she needed to change tack. As with most things in her life, she turned to the water to guide her. At this point, she was working full-time at the Jackson hospital and using much of her free time to train for her time in the mountains. But she’d also been spending time working to install water filters in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa where she grew up.
In 2021, she left her decade-long career in healthcare and threw herself into her water work in South Africa with the same intensity she brought to endurance events. That same year, she started a master’s degree in humanitarian action with the United Nations Institute for Training and Research and Oxford Brookes University. Then, in August 2022, she officially incorporated AMANZI, a nonprofit dedicated to providing sustainable solutions for water access in rural schools.
For Heemstra, the water work in South Africa has provided a sense of purpose beyond herself—and beyond athletic challenge. It’s also given her a chance to look inside herself in a new way while drawing on a familiar skill set.
“Starting AMANZI has involved levels of risk and discomfort that are only mirrored in my more significant mountain experiences,” Heemstra explains. The overlap between her identity as a mountain athlete and her nonprofit work has enabled Heemstra to stay true to her core identity while also finding more balance in her everyday life. And as Heemstra has found a renewed sense of purpose in her nonprofit, she has continued to reflect on trauma in the mountains.
“I’ve now been in two avalanches and broken through a frozen lake, yet losing Steve has still defined the relationship with water in the most significant way,” she reflects. “Losing him remains the ultimate inflection point of my life—the ‘before’ and ‘after’ moment. Water shattered my heart and yet also, through AMANZI, is now repairing it, piece by piece.”
In the future, Heemstra is interested in continuing to push herself in the mountains while growing AMANZI and working with more rural South African schools to implement water solutions that confront the reality of scarcity in the region. And, as she strikes this balance between two career paths—her two passions—she will let water continue to guide the course of her life.
“It’s no accident that my organization is named ‘Amanzi,’ the isiXhosa and isiZulu word for water,” Heemstra explains. “So much blood has been shed between these two tribes and yet their word for water is the same. This is the ultimate reflection of the tension between life and death that I feel in my profound relationship with water. Contained in each drop, the continuous choice toward life is what continues to propel me forward.”
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Anneka Williams is a climate scientist and writer. Her research explores how climate change is impacting high-latitude and high-altitude ecosystems and communities.
