Meet Angie
“…outside all the time.”
14 December 2015 | Eagle Point, Ore — Angie Panter moved from Spring Valley, CA to Eagle Point in 2006. She found herself selling insurance for work. “It was one of the crappiest jobs in the world,” she says.
So on a lunch break she went on a walk, on a hunt for help wanted signs. The next day she was hired at Great Harvest Bread Co. in Medford. And in the meantime she started hiking.
“I had a completely sedentary life,” she says. “I never left the house.” Then she started car camping.
“I started hanging out with people that were outside all the time. Then it was walk in the woods, then hiking.” It was a slippery slope. “By 2011 I was getting into the more ambitious hikes,” Angie adds, with hikes up Mt. Mcloughlin, South Sister, and Pilot Rock.
In 2014 she was on a PCTA work trip near Mt. Ashland when she told another SMC member she loved the work, and wanted more opportunities to work in the field. “SMC had that,” Angie says. That summer she worked side by side with the SMC trail crew on the Pilot Rock Trail. And she’s been at it ever since.
Panter has crosscut jackstrawed trail sections in the Kalmiopsis, bucked downed old growth in the Red Buttes and Wild Rogue, and led a hike up Mt. Mcloughlin. She’s donated over 200 hours on the trail this year alone.
Her most memorable trip of the year: “5th hitch, in the Kalmiopsis,” she says. “We got caught in a really bad storm. I like to go through something so harsh and uncomfortable and enjoy every minute of it.
“I like to suffer,” says Panter.
Angie’s hard work primed her for a nomination to the SMC board in October 2015, which she accepted.
“I want to surround myself with more people and ideas about working on trails,” she says. “I want to make a commitment.”
Angie thinks people should go hike the Kalmiopsis, “if they never have before. Everyone should experience that, because it’s so different. It’s this weird kind of combination of everything.”
She has some advice for backpackers on the Wild Rogue Loop as well. “Branch off and look at Hanging Rock. Or it’s not complete.
“I like climbing mountains,” she says.
