Wilderness Expedition in Patagonia: Waking up to Nature and Real Learning : Intro // Experiential Education #1

I want to share with you about the most formative experience of my life, and how it completely reshaped my connection to the larger-than-human world and redefined my views on learning, education, and the good life. It has defined my place in the world and my life's work.

I was 20 and had just finished my 2nd year of studying philosophy at university when I decided I needed a drastic change. I had to get out of the USA, to learn from different cultures than my own, and go to different places. I found myself in some of the most wild and remote places I've ever been, like this:

Before I went to college, the public high school I "attended" was - I kid you not - a factory. To me, it was a prison. I was forced to be there, I wasn't allowed to leave, and I had almost no choice in what to learn or how. Worst of all, I was told that any chance I might have to "succeed in life" would depend on my performance there, and my compliance with their way of doing things. I was nearly expelled from high school for truancy and other forms of misbehavior. You could say I was a problem child.

I had a really hard time relating to my age peers, or to my teachers and I struggled with serious melodramatic teenager angst, anxiety, and depression. I felt like a mutant, extraordinarily alienated from those around me, and with no desire to live in what I knew to be a boring, meaningless adult world.

But I did have music, and I did have a few cherished friends.

Miraculously, I graduated from high school, and in a very rare moment of surrendering my trust to an adult, I listened to a beloved family friend and went to college. "It'll be different," she said. "You'll get to choose your classes, and you'll get to live on your own."

Miracle of miracles, she turned out to be right! It was different. I loved it. I loved my friends, I loved what I studied, I loved living on my own, and I loved being able to longboard to the beach whenever I wanted to.

Two years later, things fell apart for me and my university situation. My heart was ground to a pulp in what felt like a gut-wrenching betrayal from my best friend. I could no longer see anyone from my ultra tight friend group without going to pieces, and we were planning to rent a house together for our 3rd year.

Like so many young men, I was sorely lacking in emotional intelligence and communication skills. Rather than putting in the hard humbling vulnerable work of reconciliation, and probably not even knowing what that was, I did the only thing an animal in shock could do.

I ran away. Eventually I got so far as El Fin Del Mundo, the southern tip of South America.

On my way to the so-called "end of the world," I signed myself up for 5 months of wilderness expeditions, skill building, and team building and leadership development in Patagonia with U.S.-based experiential education company NOLS. They'd send us off for 30-day trips kayaking and then mountaineering with all of our food, gear, a satellite phone in case of emergency, and 50-year-old military maps.

In 60 days, only twice did our group see other humans.

NOLS was quite clear that this would be the most physically challenging I would ever do, and it most definitely was-- our group pushed our bodies way beyond what I knew to be possible. For mountaineering, we carried 70-pound backpacks off-trail through thick bush, usually uphill, and through slippery mud. For weeks we just shuttled our food, setting up an attempt at a first ascent of Cerro Hyades, which our guides had chosen as our objective.

Along the way, we built the outdoor skills necessary to try to achieve our expeditions' goals and our guides gave us steadily more responsibility and decision-making power as we demonstrated our individual competencies and our groups' ability to work together.

That's a view from our high camp, 5 days' travel from the nearest road, a place where even twisting an ankle or breaking a bone would be a real problem. Tipping your kayak in freezing cold water or popping through glacial snows into a crevasse could have serious, potentially fatal consequences.

Our fates were literally tied together. On the glacier, we were connected by ropes. If one fell, the next better be ready to catch and hold all of their bodyweight on their harness, and the next better remember how to make a snow anchor and a pulley to rescue the fallen team member.

That's Gray, just after jumping off a cliff to test our anchor and recovery skills.

NOLS was a crucible of learning and growth that came for me in a different manner, method, and philosophy than I had ever experienced before. Though I joined worried about the physical demands it would make on me, it turned out that the social element was much harder.

Imagine being in a group of twelve 18-to-25-year-olds, 10 guys and 2 gals, with 3 instructors.

You have no choice in who these people are, nor the skills and attitudes they bring to the team, and there will be no change to the group's roster. Like it or not, you're stuck with each other.

You depend on each other completely for your food, your safety, and your comfort.

You must work together. Or drive each other crazy.

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Those were the starting conditions for our expeditions.

Here's part 2 for more detail about how NOLS' format helped shape a learning environment that taught me more than any schooling ever did, and how it also afforded me a deep connection with the wild that will forever inform who I am and what I care about. I'll wrote more when I can about how this has influenced my work as a homeschooling instructor and an experiential educator working with a group of adolescent boys doing rites of passage work.