Brooke Hess

Brooke was on skis before she could walk, in a climbing harness before she could read, and in a kayak before she could drive. She grew up whitewater kayaking with her dad in the rivers around Missoula, MT and competed in her first freestyle kayaking competition at age 16. She earned a B.S. in Geoscience from University of Montana before qualifying for the US Freestyle Kayak Team, which lead to nearly a decade spent paddling the biggest and best river waves in the world. She stood on the podium at numerous international big wave freestyle kayaking competitions and extreme races, was featured in Teton Gravity Research’s Breaking Through series profiling female athletes reaching the next level in their sport, was named runner up two years in a row in the Whitewater Awards Best Trick Freestyle competition, and was the keynote speaker at the 2023 National Paddling Film Festival. Brooke supported her travels and training by writing for outdoor industry publications.

She earned a M.A. in Science Journalism at University of Nevada Reno and completed a science writing internship at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, combining her undergraduate work in geoscience with her recent work as a writer/editor in the outdoor industry.

For the past several years, Brooke has been working in river conservation in the Snake River Basin, where the salmon populations are rapidly declining. In 2022, she completed a source-to-sea kayaking expedition of the Salmon River, a tributary to the Snake River. The expedition was over 1,000 miles and took 79 days. The all-female expedition team used the expedition narrative to conduct a mass communications campaign advocating for salmon restoration in the Snake River Basin.

Brooke is now a producer for The Grand Salmon feature film and a freelance journalist for The Associated Press. She spends her free time skiing, kayaking and climbing in the mountains around Lake Tahoe, where she currently resides.