Profile of Nat Gillis: Pilot, Poet, Photographer
It’s with a heavy heart I post this piece today, in remembrance of Nat Gillis — a friend, fellow creative soul and shining light who died Monday June 17, 2024, when her aircraft crashed in Albany, NY. I had the fortune of writing a profile about Nat for Kootenay Mountain Culture for their Summer 2023 issue. I wanted to share more about Nat so I’m posting a excerpt below with a link to the full article so that you can learn more about Nat’s journey and see some of her gorgeous photographs.
Commercial pilot Natalie Gillis has sailed the Southern Ocean and guided expeditions in the High Arctic. We race to catch up with a young adventurer to discover why she’s so fly.
Profile by Meghan J. Ward | Photography by Natalie Gillis
It is late 2019 when seasoned adventurer Natalie Gillis comes upon an unfamiliar scenario. She has been hired as a sea-kayak guide to accompany six clients aboard a 60-foot sailboat destined for Antarctica. As she stands on a dock on the southern tip of South America, in Ushuaia, Argentina, she realizes she has a lot to learn—she has no idea how to climb aboard this large vessel. She has never been on a sailboat before, let alone one destined to cross the famously treacherous Drake Passage, where waves can reach 12 metres high. She spends five days crossing the water, tethered to the boat, wondering if the kayaks she’d tied down by hand would be lost to the sea. “This sailboat was either airplaning or submarining with every crest and wave,” Gillis says. During one of her three-hour stints on watch at the helm, going up and down and “crashing like craziness,” she remembers thinking, “Oh, my god. What have I gotten myself into?”
To people who know Gillis, it might be surprising to hear the Drake’s wild waves ruffled her. The Calgary, Alberta, based adventurer has credentials and experiences that could span several lifetimes. She’s a wilderness expedition guide with 10 years of experience working in the Canadian Arctic, Greenland, and Antarctica. She has her Canadian commercial pilot’s licence, and she flies charter aircraft at both poles for remote scientific missions; mail and grocery deliveries to northern Inuit communities; military contracts; and supporting adventurers, explorers, and filmmakers.
Gillis has the hard skills to keep people alive in the wilderness and a burgeoning creative side. An accomplished photographer with a striking, minimalist style, she holds a master’s degree in creative and critical writing from England’s University of Gloucestershire. Her collection of poetry, This Is Where Atlantis Sank, chronicles her sailboat journey across the Drake Passage.
She’s also only 33 years old.
Gillis thrives on the extreme and exceptional. In the Arctic, her guided hiking and kayaking trips on Baffin, Ellesmere, and Bylot Islands require her groups to be self-supported for two weeks at a time. For ice-floe-edge expeditions, she drives snowmobiles across the sea ice, towing wildlife photographers in qamutiiks (sleds) behind her. In the Twin Otter, she flies low and slow so wildlife biologists can scan the coastlines for narwhals and walruses. She also brings supplies to people maintaining the sites of the Distant Early Warning Line, a series of radar stations installed during the Cold War to detect Russian bombers or sea and land invaders. In Antarctica, the Twin Otter is outfitted with skis so she can land on snow or ice with scientists or expeditioners. She has helped German scientists retrieve data from weather-monitoring equipment; assisted climbers, like Conrad Anker and Alex Honnold, with their film projects; and done medevac flights for skiers in distress.
Born in suburban Toronto, Gillis was not raised to love the outdoors. But an opportunity to go kayaking…