From 4 years to live, to a clean bill of health: Former Vancouver photographer Jody MacDonald embraces every day

A photographer and adventurer, Jody MacDonald is basically Indiana Jones in real life.

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Published Sep 05, 2024  •  Last updated 0 minutes ago  •  6 minute read

Canadian photographer and adventurer Jody MacDonald. Photo by Troy Barmore /Citizen Watch

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For many people, a terminal medical diagnosis inspires a pledge to make the most of every moment they have left.

But Jody MacDonald has long been doing that.

“They told me I had one to four years to live,” MacDonald recalls of the 2019 diagnosis following the discovery of a large tumour in her abdomen. “But I was already ‘living my life to the fullest,’ pursuing what I wanted to pursue.”

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The Ottawa-born adventurer and professional photographer, who lived for several years in B.C. and now calls Idaho home, has spent the better part of two decades travelling the world in search of adventure. Travelling the world as a child when her family relocated to Saudi Arabia, she grew up with an appreciation and fascination for natural wonders.

And she wasn’t about to let a health diagnosis stop her from exploring it.

“I went in to surgery. The surgeon said, ‘during the operation we’ll take it and we’ll do pathology on it. And we’ll know right away if it’s benign or malignant.’ They were fairly certain it was malignant, which is why they gave me that diagnosis,” she says. “He said, ‘if it is, we’re going to remove as much internally as we can to give you, hopefully, the four years.'”

When she woke up from surgery, the first thing she asked was what the mass was.

“He said, we don’t know. We had to send it to Harvard,” MacDonald says, recounting what amounted to two torturous weeks of waiting and wondering to find out what the tests found out. When the results finally came back, they yielded an unimaginable surprise.

“(The surgeon) called me up and was like, ‘you’re one of only eight people in the world to grow this tumour. And it’s totally benign,'” MacDonald shares. “He said, you’re completely fine.”

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Speaking during a hike along a ridgeline of B.C.’s Purcell Mountains, a striking view of the Bugaboos mountain range just beyond, MacDonald shared how the health scare served as a vivid reminder of just how precious life is.

It was a solemn reminder she had received before.

A longtime lover of the outdoors, MacDonald found herself in B.C., Alberta and Alaska after university, working on tours taking people into the wilderness that she so adored. And everywhere she went, her camera went with her.

“I was taking pictures along the way, but it never came to mind that it could become anything,” MacDonald admits.

Eventually growing tired of guiding other people’s adventures — and admittedly feeling the pressure to settle down with a ‘real job’ of some kind — she relocated to Vancouver where she took a job at Mountain Equipment Company (MEC), first working with gear before transitioning to the role of photo editor.

“I did that for a couple years, which ended up being really great for me down the road, because then I could understand the photo editorial side of things,” MacDonald says. During her time in Vancouver, MacDonald started dating a “really adventurous guy” from Oregon who would come to visit her in the city.

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“He would come into my office and he would say, ‘Oh my god, this job is sucking your soul,'” MacDonald says. “It was fine for a couple years, because I was learning, but when it wasn’t challenging me anymore, it was such a comfortable job and really coveted job … people never left.

“And that started scaring the shit out of me because I could see my whole life passing me by.”

At the encouragement of her partner, MacDonald decided to quit her job for an adventure along the West Coast of the U.S., surfing and paragliding their way toward figuring out what they wanted to do next.

And then she got a phone call that changed everything. Her partner had died in a paragliding accident.

“It was my last day at work. It was one o’clock and I think I was finishing at two. I had quit my job and I had given up my apartment with my roommate,” MacDonald says.

In shock and grieving, MacDonald wondered what she should do next. Friends and family encouraged her to try to get her job and apartment back and remain in Vancouver. But she decided instead to go on the journey she’d planned to take with her boyfriend. This time, alone.

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“Moments like that totally amplify how I want to spend my time, who I want to spend it with,” she says.

Jody MacDonald, left, and reporter Aleesha Harris are pictured during a hike and interview in the Purcell Mountains in eastern B.C. Photo by Garrett Jones

After spending a few months exploring, MacDonald was invited to join a sailing trip in the South Pacific Ocean. She accepted immediately, flying to New Zealand and working on a sailboat to strengthen her experience at sea.

“We sailed from New Zealand to Vanuatu, and that next 10-day trip was the worst sailing experience of my life,” MacDonald says of the ill-fated trip that was the topic of her TEDx Talk in Vancouver in 2016. “We got caught in a massive storm, we almost demasted, none of us ate for 10 days, the whole boat felt like was falling apart.

“It was horrible.”

When they finally made it to Fiji, MacDonald briefly considered heading for the airport and never looking back. Instead, she returned to the boat, spending the next 10 years sailing around the world, eventually creating a kiteboarding-adventure business on a 60-foot catamaran, “following the trade winds, kiteboarding, surfing and paragliding in remote locations,” she says.

Fast forward to today, and MacDonald is an adventurer, explorer and award-winning photographer for international outlets including National Geographic. She was also recently named the newest member of Team Promaster, a team of outdoor enthusiasts who are ambassadors of the Citizen Promaster series watches that turn 35 this year.

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35th Anniversary limited-edition Citizen Promaster Skyhawk A-T, $1,395 at citizenwatch.com. Citizen

Joining fellow Canadian, ice climber Will Gadd, American diver and underwater photographer William Drumm, and American paraglider Jeff Shapiro on the team, MacDonald is the only woman in the lineup of extreme adventurers. It’s a fact MacDonald bristles slightly at when it’s brought up.

“In everything that I do, I do not think about gender. At all,” MacDonald says. “I just feel like, I’m a human, and I can either do stuff or I can’t do stuff based on my physical ability, my health, my muscle mass — those are my limitations. To me, it has no way, shape, or form, a gender role in it.

“And I think that allows me to do so much more. I think it really benefits me.”

Rather than be singled out as a role model for women and girls, MacDonald hopes her adventures and photography — whether encountered in magazines, online and on social media — inspire others to get outside and connect with the natural world.

“To be able to share how special these places are with people who aren’t fortunate to go experience them on their own, I think is just part of my responsibility of having this platform and having the privilege to be in these places,” MacDonald says. “Just giving people a glimpse into that — and hopefully inspiring them to make a trip to go there and experience it for themselves. Because I think that, once they do, it will change their life, in the best of ways.

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“Hopefully, they fall in love with it. And then, guess what? We protect what we love.”

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