Even when the sun warms up a bitter winter morning and freshly fallen snow gently catches and cradles each footstep, the climb up to St. Mary’s Glacier is a challenge. 

A group of Colorado hikers who trekked to the glacier near Idaho Springs just before the turn of the year knows the struggle involved in each vertical foot of gain. They’ve faced similar battles at home, wearily pushing through rounds of uncertainty and doubt, each while figuring out their own way to quit drinking and using drugs.

The path — both to sobriety and to the base of a glacier — winds into the unknown, which is why Nick Pearson created an organization, Sober Outdoors, for people to find their footing together. The group is ramping up activities as the start of a new year ushers in a month of pledges to give up drinking, better known as dry January, at a time the nonprofit has grown into a refuge for people in all stages of sobriety. That includes people who are exploring the idea of quitting — call them sober curious — along with those whose lives have been upended by the disease of addiction and are in the first days of recovery.

Pearson said he has seen the movement toward abstaining from alcohol continue to surge in recent years beyond dry January, hand in hand with a broader realization of the health dangers alcohol poses. U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy on Friday called for greater transparency in the extent to which consuming alcohol can increase the risk for cancer. Murthy is urging alcoholic beverages to include warning labels explicitly highlighting that risk.

Sober Outdoors launches people into all kinds of outdoor settings —snowshoeing to Lost Lake close to Nederland, hiking up Chief Mountain near Idaho Springs and snow tubing at Fraser Tubing Hill. In each place, nature steadies Pearson with a quiet calm and a renewed sense of feeling alive, both of which he could never find at the bottom of a beer bottle.

Read more at ColoradoSun.com