Amelia “Mila” La Haye is a 29-year-old mountain guide-in-training, climber, dancer, and longtime dirtbag who has spent the past decade building a life around curiosity, connection, and very little money. At 19, she left Quebec for British Columbia with a hammock and climbing gear, and since then she’s lived in a car, joined a squat in Melbourne, studied dance, performed with a physical theater company, and traveled and worked her way around the world. (@m.i.l.a__s.o.l_)

Mila tells the story of dumpster diving and relying on strangers during a three-month, nearly zero-dollar bicycle trip across Europe with a friend, learning firsthand how much generosity exists when you simply ask. But that trip was just one chapter in a much bigger decade of experimentation: circus in California and Australia, workaways, vanlife, acroyoga, “trance dance” in Indonesia, Waldorf education, and eventually two years of adventure studies in Canada on the long road toward becoming an internationally certified mountain guide.

She has supported this lifestyle through seasonal jobs including tree planting, moving, gardening, wildfire work, and geotechnical fieldwork, often working only three or four months a year. She also has a financial cushion from childhood that gives her some psychological security, while keeping her expenses low and cultivating deep relationships has allowed her to live on remarkably little. Her recent geotechnical work even came through a chain of friends vouching for one another, illustrating just how much her life depends on community rather than conventional career ladders.

We talk about growing up in an adventurous family where treasure hunts, messy play, curiosity, and ridiculous family music videos were all part of normal life and how she found both the creative possibilities and cultural limitations of formal dance school. She also wrestles with the contradictions of working in the mining industry while caring deeply about the environment, and with the tension between her current “Mountain Mila” life of climbing and guide training and her desire for a home base, stability, and somewhere to keep her stuff.

Mila’s life is less a single grand adventure than a decade-long experiment in following curiosity, choosing connection, and repeatedly asking what makes her feel most alive. Her next chapter involves mountain-guide exams, ice climbing, skiing, another winter in Chile, and a 30th-birthday “celebration of life” in Squamish. The future remains pleasingly unclear.

Full transcript: dirtbagrich.com/mila