Dan Miller first noticed Julie Wrend’s hair. He thought it was cool that an older woman could have a punk haircut. When he found out she loved the outdoors as much as he did, he was intrigued.
“It may have been one of the reasons we fell in love,” Miller says.
On their first date, Wrend told him her hair wasn’t because she loved the Sex Pistols: It was growing back after her cancer treatments. The news surprised him. He thought, “How could a woman battling breast cancer be such a strong hiker?”
Wrend’s answer led Miller to found Live by Living, a Lakewood-based nonprofit, decades after they met in 1990 and married two years later. The outdoors, she told him, gave her that strength.
Dan Miller and Julie Wrend.
It was like a superpower: Years later, just four months after doctors handed Wrend a stage 4 diagnosis—there is no stage 5—she backpacked from the North Rim of the Grand Canyon to the Colorado River and back, a trip with the length of a marathon and the elevation gain of many of our 14ers.
Hiking probably added years to her life, Miller says. She battled breast cancer for 19 years, a remarkably long time, and with every setback, she found solace by hiking, skiing and enjoying hut trips she and Miller organized for 18 years while working as environmental lawyers for the Colorado Attorney General’s Office. Those trips continue to this day.
Wrend passed away at age 53 in 2007. On a somber 2008 hut trip, the first without her, someone suggested to Miller that they build a hut to honor his late wife. That sparked another idea.
“What would be more fitting than to create an organization that gets cancer patients together and share the same benefits we got from [hiking]?” Miller remembers saying to the group.
That same year, he formed a board and founded the organization, aptly named Live by Living. Then in 2009, he reserved a hut trip specifically for cancer survivors and their caregivers. It filled up that first year, with nearly a dozen people joining him on the trip.
A different kind of support group
Now Live by Living hosts three levels of trips for survivors and those who care for them. Miller wanted to offer a way to help those battling cancer because he remembered how hiking helped Wrend, but he also wanted to include caregivers because he knows how hiking helped him through the trials of caring for her as well as the grief of losing her.
Miller had an agenda on that first hut trip in 2009: He wanted the survivors to talk about their experiences, much like they would in a support group. But an oncology social worker along for the trip cautioned him against it.
“That person said, ‘You know, they’re done with treatment and had it up to here with it,’” Miller says, raising his hand above his head. “So, I just decided to keep them unstructured. People can talk about whatever they want to talk about.”
Live by Living is a good alternative to traditional support groups, Miller says, as hiking in the wilderness with others who share their experience encourages people to open up more than a room filled with awkward beginnings.
“Support groups can be valuable,” he says, “but a lot [of cancer survivors] are not interested in doing that, especially going back to the hospital where they received treatment.”
The organization is based out of Miller’s home in Lakewood, but the programs are open to anyone, and many from Northern Colorado take part in them. They are all free and include trips for beginners, which are really just flat walks that are, at most, three miles long. For those looking for a challenge, Live by Living will even take a few people up a 14er after a 10-week, hiking-based training program and an OK from a physician.
All the trips are led by trained volunteers. The organization also puts on retreats and offers online support.
“We want people to stress themselves, but do it safely,” Miller says. “We have a good track record.”
There have only been a handful of survivors who needed to leave a trip early out of the 1,000 or so who have attended a retreat in the mountains—a record that would probably rival any other organization, not just one for those with a history of cancer.
There were 361 individuals who hiked or went on a retreat last year, Miller says, compared to 270 in 2023. A few dozen made it up a 14er.
Hiking Mount Sherman, a 14er near the Mosquito Range.
Healing through hiking
Coleen Fischer discovered Live by Living a couple years after her first breast cancer diagnosis in 2007. The organization supported her through 2021, when she had a reoccurrence. A couple years later, she went on a tough trip to Lake Isabelle, which climbs to 11,000 feet in the Indian Peaks Wilderness.
“It’s a place where you can talk about your scars, your treatment and how scared you are,” says Fischer, 62, who spent most of her life in Fort Collins before moving to Westminster a decade ago. “There’s no other place I have found like that.”
She says the group’s support helped her reclaim her body and gave her the confidence to go on a hard hike.
“Someone in that group is always walking right beside you,” she says.
Aside from the mental and emotional benefits, there is some evidence that being active and spending time outside help reduce the risk of reoccurrence, says Katie Paganucci, the managing director of Live by Living, and these things may even reduce the risk of death during and after treatments. They also help with depression and anxiety, two common side effects of being diagnosed with a dangerous and sometimes deadly disease.
“It’s kind of a magic pill,” Paganucci says. “We all know that it’s good for the mind, body and soul, but now a few studies actually back that up.”
When his duties as executive director allow it, Miller still gets out and hikes as often as he can, sometimes with Live by Living, sometimes with friends and sometimes by himself. Occasionally, he feels Wrend right beside him too.
