Hope Spargo

I was raised in Wasilla, AK with my three older brothers. Summers were spent alternately running around the mountains with my mom, an educator, and traversing the waters of Prince William Sound with my dad, a commercial fisherman. I studied biochemistry and psychology at Western Washington University. After too many months sequestered in an organic chemistry lab, I returned to Alaska to connect to people and place. I spent the following year working in my hometown’s emergency department as a scribe and substitute teaching K-12. At the end of the year I got a wild hair to apply to medical school.

In between submitting primary and secondary applications I went for some long walks on the Pacific Crest Trail, Camino de Santiago, and in the Khumbu Valley.  I was fortunate to join the Alaska WWAMI cohort of the University of Washington School of Medicine in 2019. I completed clinical rotations in urban and rural settings across four states, but it was a rotation in Butte, MT that ultimately piqued my interest in rural family medicine. I loved the scope of practice, the longitudinal relationships, and how integrated the providers were in caring for their community. Desperately homesick for wild places at the end of another degree, I’m overwhelmingly grateful to be returning to Anchorage to join AKFMR. My professional interests include rural, underserved, HIV, and wilderness medicine, and public health/policy advocacy. Outside the hospital I do my best to lose cell phone service as fast as possible, but you might catch a glimpse of me disappearing over a Chugach ridge line or hear a faint “Yew!” in the distance on a powder day.