A bucket-list ride on a dog sled
In the Swan Valley snow, a woman looked at the six dogs attached to her sled Thursday before giving them the signal to go — marking another thing off the bucket list she has worked on between chemotherapy treatments for six years.
“I don’t know why dog sledding in Montana was on my bucket list, I was curious,” Ali Gilmore said. “People are pulled toward adventures — we just tend to forget that somewhere along the way.”
Riding with the dogs at Base Camp Bigfork was the latest adventure in the San Francisco woman’s life since she was diagnosed with Stage 4 colon cancer in 2010. She was 45 years old.
She used to view cancer as an inconvenient and painful experience that would disrupt her schedule for a year or so if it didn’t kill her.
But the diagnosis became the reason she went skydiving, watched the aurora borealis in Norway and sang in Italy’s summer festivals.
Gilmore received the news between work and her 45th birthday party.
“I asked the doctor, ‘Can you fix it?’ And he said, ‘Probably,’” Gilmore recalled. “So I went to my birthday and I didn’t tell anyone what happened.”
Gilmore fit well within a routine. She spent 60 hours a week working at a tech firm in San Francisco for a six-figure paycheck. Weekends were spent with friends.
When her 120-day medical leave transitioned to unemployment, Gilmore’s job was to survive. As her body recovered from 18 months of intensive treatments, she wrote her first book: “The C Card and Me: How I Beat Stage IV Cancer (to a pulp).”
“Cancer was a problem that needed to be solved. I got to know my specialists with a ‘See ya’ attitude,’” she said. “Before I went off into the sunset, my doctors warned me, ‘You’re going to be with us the rest of your life. Stage 4 cancer isn’t a death sentence, but it stays with you.’”
Since 2010, Gilmore has gone through 48 chemotherapy cycles to stop the development of cancer. Within that time, she has been diagnosed with it four times.
“It was hard to accept that I was there in that doctor’s office — again,” Gilmore said. “I spent 60 hours of every week supporting someone else’s dream, saving money for adventures I wasn’t having.”
After she beat cancer the first time, a friend talked her into going to Italy before she was due for another treatment.
They danced at night, went to the Island of Capri and flirted with Italian men who liked Gilmore’s blond hair, blue eyes and the pounds she had put on during steroid treatments.
After she returned to San Francisco, Gilmore began another six months of chemotherapy.
When the treatments were done, Gilmore cashed in her 401(k), reached into her savings and signed up for an airline credit card. She learned how to barter with locals and to book trips off-season.
After spending a month in Ireland, she began another series of chemo treatments and published a second book, “The C Card and Me 2: How I Beat Stage IV Cancer (again and again).”
“I’m living on one-third of what I had before, and my life is five times more full,” she said from the dining room of Bigfork’s Marina Cay Resort, where she stayed for free in exchange for taking professional photos of the business.
At Base Camp Bigfork, Gilmore looked small among the pack of dogs that surrounded her. She snapped photos and videos, uploading them to Twitter as she has done on every adventure. Somewhere along the way she gained 4,000 followers, which spurred her most recent dream of creating a film series documenting her bucket list (http://12adventures.com).
Dog sledding in Bigfork kicked off the first filming of the series, “12 Adventures: 12 Adventures of Incredibly Imperfect Ali Gilmore.”
“I’d ask people why they weren’t following their dreams and they would say what I always said: ‘I don’t have time,’” she said. “I want to show that if I can accomplish my dreams, physically limited and unworkable since 2010, anyone can.”
For the first time since her initial diagnosis, Gilmore hasn’t had to go through chemo treatments for almost six months.
Gilmore plans each adventure after a checkup, so she doesn’t know where or when she’ll mark off her next bucket list item. Other stops on her list include going vampire and werewolf hunting in Transylvania, racing a car across the Bonneville Salt Flats of Utah and exploring the Galapagos Islands.
“I may never have cancer again, or I could be going through another round of treatments in April,” Gilmore said. “Either way, I’m going to live my life and hope I inspire others to do the same thing, no matter what they’re going through.”
Online:
www.basecampbigfork.com
Reporter Katheryn Houghton may be reached at 758-4436 or by email at khoughton@dailyinterlake.com.