Updated August 2026

How it began

I am Lawrence Long. Recovery is why nEveresting exists, and it came out of the months I spent training for the 2022 Everesting Run Challenge. Long climbs, alone, in the dark. Moving meditations.

I am a lifelong runner and a former ultra-marathoner, and my decades-long battle with alcoholism taught me the value of consistent, balanced effort. Everesting appealed to the competitive part of me and gave the rest of me somewhere useful to go. I have written about how that path forward actually started, and a friend once wrote her own account of what change looked like from the outside.

The idea was never to scale Everest. It was to build a community that encourages growth by pushing past the edge of what feels comfortable, so people can do what they once called impossible. Our addictions lay dormant but they never truly rest. Recovery should be Everesting: never complacent.

What it looks like now

Four years later, I understand the climb differently.

Recovery is still built one day at a time, but most of those days do not look heroic. They look like keeping commitments, asking for help, doing useful work, staying connected, repairing what I can, and showing up when isolation would be easier.

Recovery is not something I completed. It is how I try to live. Most of what I have learned about that is somewhere in the writing here.

Recovery became service

Much of my work now centers on the Spokane Fatherhood Initiative, which marked its tenth anniversary and its 100th 24-7 Dad class this year. More than 900 fathers have graduated, with a completion rate above 90 percent. I help SpoFI tell that story and build the systems behind it: communications, donor development, campaign strategy, technology, and the unglamorous operational work that makes an organization function.

Service interrupts self-obsession. It gives pain somewhere useful to go. That is not only my experience: Jill wrote about the same shift in Seeing the forest through the trees.

It has also changed how I think about endurance. Sometimes endurance means continuing to move. Sometimes it means staying present, accepting responsibility, listening carefully, and helping build something that will outlast you.

The work that supports this

Photography

Photography is not a break from the rest of it. Strong photographs are evidence. They show the people, the conditions, and the work behind an organization’s claims.

I shoot nonprofit events and programs, business owners and field work, North Idaho real estate and aerials, Spokane landmarks, and documentary and breaking news. My photo essay from the Hands Off protests in Spokane is a fair example of the documentary side of it.

It asks for the same things recovery asks for: attention, patience, honesty, preparation, and a willingness to stay present when things get uncomfortable.

Not only my story

Erika Solberg has contributed her own recovery writing here, and her story belongs to her. What her presence represents matters for nEveresting: recovery gets stronger when people speak honestly in their own voices, without being pushed into one definition of it.

• A.A. isn’t everything, and that’s the point, by Erika Solberg
• Six months sober: my rose, thorn, and bud reflection, by Erika Solberg
• Finding strength beyond my limits: a journey to Stanley Hot Springs, by Erika Solberg
• Navigating recovery and embracing support on the path to wellness, by Jill C.

If you have a story you want to tell here, let me know.

Still climbing

I am less interested in proving how much suffering I can tolerate.

The climb might be a long walk, a hard hike, a day on a bike, hours carrying camera gear, or a campaign that needs rebuilding. There is no final summit. The work is to stay awake, connected, useful, and willing to take the next step. If you want the next step delivered to your inbox, subscribe.

nEveresting is an independent recovery, service, and storytelling project. It is not a treatment provider.