Lauren catches up with travel writer Will McGough more than a decade after they met on a ski trip to Portillo, Chile. What starts as a story about skiing shifts into something bigger: memory, grief, ethics, and the tricky line between telling a good story and protecting what’s worth protecting.

Will shares how covering the Virginia Tech shooting early in his journalism career shook his belief in the news cycle and pushed him toward something with more life in it: travel writing. Since then, he’s written for CNN, Outside, and dozens of others, carrying both curiosity and a sense of responsibility into every piece. He’s reported from Antarctica, dragged skis through remote villages, built a kombucha company, and wrestled with what it means to write about places that are being loved to death.

This is a conversation about the stories we choose to tell, the ones we can’t forget, and the ones we carry even when we think we’ve left them behind.


Topics include:
 • The ethics of writing about “hidden gems”
 • Skiing culture, then vs. now
 • Why Portillo still matters
 • Grieving a parent, and what Antarctica had to do with that
 • How kombucha fits into all of this
 • What good journalism should actually do
 • Writing as a way to remember, and to make sense of things that don’t


You can learn more about Will at www.wakeandwander.com