For Ingrid Nickelsen, an avid hiker and backpacker, wilderness experience was fundamental to creative practice. This artist’s approach to landscape painting involved hiking, often solo, to remote locations, packing in gear to initiate works that would later be completed in the studio. She painted favorite rivers, creeks, and mountain peaks repeatedly, sometimes remaining at those sites for days to make the observations that would be registered and transformed in her paintings’ translucent layers of rich, glowing color. Her work was influenced by early twentieth-century Expressionist painting, indigenous arts and crafts, and by indigenous Californians’ approach to the land. Tragically, Nickelsen died on a solo hike in the Siskiyou Wilderness in 2005, after sustaining incapacitating injuries in a fall. She had a canvas and other art materials with her, as she was preparing to paint from that location: getting ready for her first solo exhibition at the Morris Graves Museum. In her last days, she used artist’s charcoal to inscribe a will on her trail map, remembering friends and relatives, and expressing her wish that her estate be used to fund grants for women artists.