Who we are, and why we built this
Who HIKE with Her is
We're HIKE with Her, a Spokane women's community built on one idea: you don't have to climb alone. Most of the time that means helping women across the Inland Northwest get seen, connected, and supported. When the fires hit, that idea just widened. This site is HIKE with Her showing up for the whole community. Not only women, not only business. Everyone the fire touched.
Who made this
This site was built by Stephanie High, founder of HIKE with Her. She's a PhD candidate in psychology specializing in trauma and community resilience, with a master's in performance psychology and a trauma-informed practice of her own. She built it in real time during the fire.
But the why behind it is better said in her own voice.
I was 17 when I lived through my first fire evacuation. It almost took my childhood home. It happened again just two years later.
I was 25 when I moved to Japan, months after the Fukushima earthquake and tsunami. I saw firsthand what it looks like for a community to come together and build back.
Where the 6R's come from
The 6R's (Readiness, Response, Relief, Rehabilitation, Recovery, and Resilience) are Stephanie's own framework, built and adapted from years of disaster-management research. There's no single canonical version, so she made one shaped for how a community actually lives through this, not how an agency charts it. It pulls from FEMA's recovery framework, the classic emergency-management cycle, and humanitarian relief-and-recovery models, grounded in a trauma-informed lens.
Two things make it different. Every phase is shown two ways at once. Around you is the structural side: insurance, shelter, rebuild steps, timelines. The emotional toll is the psychological side: the nervous system, grief, numbness, guilt. And there's no progress bar, on purpose. People move backward into earlier phases all the time. A smell, an anniversary, a piece of mail. That's a normal part of recovery, not a failure.
Sources
- Federal Emergency Management Agency. (2025). National disaster recovery framework (3rd ed.). U.S. Department of Homeland Security. fema.gov
- National Governors' Association. (1979). Comprehensive emergency management: A governor's guide.
- United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction. (2015). Sendai framework for disaster risk reduction 2015–2030. United Nations. undrr.org
Why this exists
When disaster hits, everyone rushes to the practical. Where to sleep, what to file, who to call. All of that matters. But nobody hands you the other half: what's happening inside you, and the fact that it's normal. So this leads with your nervous system first and the practical help second, because you regulate before you problem-solve.
And it's for everyone the fire touched, not just the people who lost homes. The smoke, the fear, the not-knowing. That counts too.
I built this in the middle of the fire because I couldn't not. Watching this community show up for each other has been the one steady thing. Honestly, doing this has given me somewhere to put the fear, and something like hope. If it gives you a little of that too, then it's doing its job.
You don't have to climb alone.