‘We all have scars’ — plane crash survivor Stephanie Nielson is taking life one mountain at a time

On the third day of her ascent of Mount Kilimanjaro, Stephanie Nielson felt sharp pain, right where the scar bands wrap around her ankles. With the elevation increasing, she could feel the bands tightening, cutting into her legs like tourniquets. Still ahead was a grueling hike up the Barranco Wall, a steep ridge on the mountain’s south side known for testing climbers’ endurance. Concerned about her discomfort, the doctors on the hike suggested that a porter carry Nielson’s backpack through the tenuous stretch. But Nielson declined the offer. In 2008, she’d survived a plane crash that left burns on more than 80% of her body. She insisted she could carry her pack to the top.
“I just don’t want to,” Nielson told the group guide at the campsite, tilting her head back and closing her eyes, visibly frustrated. The moment was captured in the footage of “Courage Rising,” a documentary chronicling the seven-day climb of a group of burn survivors from the Arizona Burn Center to Africa’s tallest mountain in June of 2022. “I just want to carry it,” she said.
She wore a blue Cotopaxi jacket and a yellow hat that said “Rise and Climb.” Carrying her backpack was a tangible sign of full commitment to herself that she could make it to the top. “This felt like this is something I can prove that I’ve done,” she told me recently on a Zoom call. After all, she carried a baby, her fifth, after the accident, relying on the same swollen, scarred and aching ankles.
Over the 16 years since her life-altering accident, Nielson has known the many dimensions of healing — the relentless reconstructive surgeries and skin grafts, the wells of anger and grief, the pleading with God that she could forget everything that happened and then to remember it again, the gratitude of being alive and the sense of purpose she feels in sharing her story. Her blog, the NieNie Dialogues, which turns 20 years old next year, has grown with her into a vulnerable and earnest record of Nielson’s healing.
Nielson, who now lives on a ranch in North Carolina with her family, still keeps up with the blog, although the posts are less frequent and more sporadic than they used to be. Her five children are older now — two daughters are in college, her son is serving a mission in Brazil for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the two youngest are still living at home. But beyond celebrating motherhood and the artistry of homemaking, the blog stands as a chronicle of Nielson’s resilience — a space where she could tell her story on her own terms, choosing life, hope and faith amid unrelenting pain.
Climbing up the bouldery path to Kilimanjaro became an extension of that journey. Often physically exhausted and emotionally drained on the hike, Nielson faced the question that is now part of her everyday life: How do you live with inescapable pain and devastating memories and, despite the agony, move forward anyway? “My whole recovery is climbing mountains every day,” she told me.
She would climb this mountain too, she resolved, even with her pack pressing against her scarred back.
Earlier in November, when Nielson and I spoke, the family had recently marked a new milestone at their ranch: They processed their first cow and have since begun selling their own “Homestead Beef NC” in Pittsboro, where they live. Nielson’s husband, Christian, is farming full-time, while Nielson helps out. Watching the full cycle up-close — what the cows are eating, where they’re grazing — has been fulfilling for Nielson. “We raised it, we loved it, we cared for it — and now it’s giving back to us. It’s just lovely,” she told me.
The family moved to North Carolina in 2018 after a year of living on the family ranch in Bluewater, New Mexico, where the couple visited the day of the crash. And before that, they left their dream home they had designed and built in Utah.
On her blog, Nielson described feeling a spiritual prompting to leave Utah and move her family to the ranch. “I just felt like I needed to start fresh, so our family decided that we were going to take on a new adventure,” she told me. At times, she also felt “suffocated”, even though she can’t quite pinpoint the source of the discomfort. Perhaps, it’s just the stage she reached in her recovery, she told me. Christian had launched an app to help farmers manage their cattle and land, and they wanted to test it out in the South. They had friends in North Carolina, so they decided to move there.
The Nielsons now have 35 cows, chickens, a dog and a cat, as well as four La Mancha goats. Nielson’s 18-year-old son, Nicholas, is responsible for the goats and plans to sell them to help fund his mission.
Meanwhile, Nielson is busy with another family enterprise. They had just bought a Barre3 studio franchise in Pittsboro that will offer a version of a barre workout that combines cardio, mindfulness, and strength. After finishing her training and once the construction is over, Nielson will teach classes and run the business. Maybe one day, her girls could take it over, she hopes.
“I just want women to feel grateful for their strong healthy bodies, no matter what they look like,” she told me.
Nielson entered the mommy blogging scene before one really existed, back when the internet was less angsty and overwhelming. In 2005, Nielson, who stayed home with her three children at the time, was feeling homesick in the family’s new home in New Jersey where they had moved from Utah. So she went into the laundry room in the basement where the computer was located and impulsively started a blog on Google’s Blogger platform. “I felt like the CEO of my own little magazine,” she wrote in her memoir, “Heaven is Here,” which became a New York Times bestseller in 2012. Nielson set two rules for her blog: one, that she would post only original ideas for projects; second, that she wouldn’t complain.
The NieNie Dialogues — named for the three letters in both her first and last names — quickly became a pocket of the internet that captivated women. She elevated motherhood and homemaking to the point of artistry, sharing her holiday traditions, crafts projects, recipes and family goings-on. And while it wasn’t always perfect, it was sincere. And women nationwide clung to Nielson’s zest for family life. “She was a talented homemaker and drew me in with her beautiful home presentation,” a friend and blog follower told me. Another follower Jody Best was attracted to Nielson’s emphasis on tradition, but “not in the tradition for tradition sake type of thing, but in the ways that she brings her family together,” Best said.
In 2011, Emily Matchar wrote an article for Salon about the Latter-day Saint women bloggers, including Nielson: “Their lives are nothing like mine — I’m your standard-issue late-20-something childless overeducated atheist feminist — yet I’m completely obsessed with their blogs,” Matchar wrote. The obsession with “mommy bloggers” evolved into obsession with a new species of “momfluencers.” This fixation — think the popularity of the Ballerina Farm — typically begins with “finding a mother whose performance of motherhood shocks you, inspires you, enrages you, or helps you better understand something about yourself — good or bad,” Sara Peterson writes in her book “Momfluenced.”
Nielson’s idyllic life was interrupted in 2008, after Nielson and her husband and his friend and pilot instructor spent the day four-wheeling and visiting gardens at the family ranch in New Mexico. Three of them got into a small Cessna plane to return to Arizona, where the couple was living with their four children at the time. Shortly after takeoff, the plane stalled and plummeted down, striking power lines and a woodpile in a residential area. The fire engulfed the plane, leaving both Nielson and her husband with severe burns; Kinneard died 24 hours later. The couple was placed in medically induced comas — Christian, who had burns on more than 60% of his body, woke up five weeks later, but Nielson’s coma lasted three months. She recalled waking up in the hospital in Arizona, her body pulsing “with a sudden and steady beat of agony,” she wrote in “Heaven is Here.”
The memories from that horrific day are seared in Nielson’s mind, she told me: the panic of the plane going down, the acrid smell of burned flesh and gasoline, the new, leather moccasins she wore that day that saved her feet from the fire, and the tree leaves swaying in the wind when she opened her eyes laying on the ground. “My body hurts, so I’m always reminded of it,” she said.
After the accident, Nielson prayed fervently, asking God to erase these scenes and sensations from her memory. “I just remembered all of it and it was too much,” she told me. “I prayed so God would take that away from me so that I could function.” Over time, the sharp edges of those memories began to blur. But as she healed and began sharing her story, she discovered that, in fact, she didn’t want to forget any of it.
With time, she gained a new ability to talk about the plane crash, to summon the vivid details without being crushed by them every time. “I can bring it back and I can talk about it, and that it’s not all tragic and devastating and that these hard times can actually be like beautiful blessings,” she said. “I didn’t really see that in the beginning.”
Women around the country, and the world, rallied around Nielson. “… Stephanie Nielson’s story is evolving into one about how the Web can forge powerful friendships,” read an article in The New York Times, which noted that, in contrast to the sometimes snarky and judgy blogosphere, “these women inhabit a feel-good corner of the Internet.” After the accident, the readership of Nielson’s blog, according to the article, jumped from 1,000 readers a day to 20,000.
But there were times when Nielson considered quitting the blog and being so open about her family life. She’s gotten emails and comments from people who criticize her parenting methods and her writing, and who scrutinized her marriage (she still keeps a file on her computer titled “mean people,” where she keeps some of those emails.) In 2020, she made all of her posts private before reverting back to making them public. “I was just like, I don’t care. These stories are real, this is truly what’s happening,” she told me. “Someday my grandkids are going to read it and laugh and it’s going to be something that our family’s going to connect over.”
Today, among the devoted readers of the NieNie Dialogues are Nielson’s father-in-law, who tends to check in with “Are you OK?” if there is a lull between posts. But she’s surprised whenever people tell her they read her blog. She views her blog as a “public journal,” a kind of record of the childhood memories and a memory “of happy, safe, comfortable times” in their life. But she hopes the posts can also inspire others. “It’s the greatest gift someone can give me is to tell me something that changes me or helps me,” she said. “And so I want to do that as well.”
This commitment was celebrated in 2018, when Nielson was awarded an honorary doctorate of humane letters from the University of Utah for her contributions to empowering women and families. “Stephanie Nielson recognized the powerful role she could play in empowering women in our society through championing their roles as mothers, caregivers and community anchors and found an engaging, interactive blogging platform for her voice,” said Elaine Dalton, a former president of the Young Women organization of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Due to COVID-19, the planned hike to Mount Kilimanjaro was postponed until the summer of 2022. Leading up to the trip, the group met on Zoom calls, discussing conditioning and other preparations. The trip would raise money for the new burn center and would include doctors and patients who worked and were treated there. The Nielsons knew some of the other burn survivors in the group: Isla, who, when she was 10 years old, was burned when a leaking propane tank caught on fire at a family gathering, and Jason, a father who was burned over 80% of his body in a gas explosion in a garage. Nielson and her husband earned the nickname “schmoopies” on the hike, because they were often holding hands and hugging. “Sharing our scars is a beautiful, unifying experience together,” she said.
One evening during the hike, Nielson was listening to a talk by Church President Henry B. Eyering about climbing mountains. She thought about the religious symbolism of mountains — Moses ascended one to see God; it’s where temples were built, and where revelation was handed down to ordinary people. A thought struck her that night that this whole climb, her pack weighing on her puffy ankles, the emotional exhaustion — all of it — was also what healing looked like.
“We could have some horrible thing happen to us, and for me, it’s not like it’s just going to get better one day and you don’t have it anymore,” she said. Healing is incremental, and often frustrating — and she learned that it’s not something that would ever end. She continued: “I think healing is happening every day. I think I’ll be healing forever.”
I asked Nielson where she thinks her fighting spirit comes from. She’s always had it, she said — maybe it came from growing up with five brothers; maybe it comes from her dad. “I don’t know… I’m not sure.” She paused to think. “I think when it all comes down to it, it’s my pioneer spirit. I attribute (the fighting spirit) to my pioneer heritage. I like to think of these women long ago, who fought their way through some hard trials. I always go to my inner pioneer girl.”
At the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro, towering over 19,000 feet above sea level, the jagged rocky surface resembled a landscape of another planet. Looking down, Nielson saw a blanket of feathery clouds.
Despite all she has achieved, Nielson says she sometimes gets tired of people staring at her at the grocery store. Sometimes she’ll stare directly back at them in silent frustration. But then she reorients herself toward a more compassionate view. “We all have scars. Some of our scars are on the outside, some of them are on the inside,” she told me. “Whether I look weird or not, whether I have scars on my face or not, I have this light in me that I can share with other people.”