By Meriwether Hardie
After college I began working as an instructor for the National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS), an organization that takes students of all ages and experiences into wilderness classrooms around the world. Though I didn’t know it at the time, my work with NOLS was about to become a common thread woven into my life. Over the years and through different jobs, schooling, cross country moves, and big life changes, I stop and take time to lead a NOLS course.
I do this because the wilderness allows me to slow down and look inward, away from the distractions and busyness of normal life. I do this because I love facilitating people to explore past their comfort zones. I do this because outdoor guiding enables me to hone, shift, practice, and build new leadership skills. In these mountains, I learn, teach, deconstruct, transform and renew.
The following paragraphs are excerpts from a journal that I kept during a course that I led for NOLS this past summer in the Pacific Northwest, where we traversed south to north through the Olympic National Park.
The art of teaching is the art of assisting discovery. – Mark Van Doren
Today I watched a group of young women learn that they are stronger than they ever thought possible. They shared this reflection with me as we sat soaking our feet in the glacier-fed stream by our camp, after thirteen hours of hiking across snow fields, over a steep alpine pass, and through river crossings that were flush with snow melt. There were many tears shed and moments of overwhelm. During these moments, we paused as a group and found a place to sit down off the trail. We shared snacks, exchanged stories and jokes, took our hiking boots off and bandaged blisters. We then put our boots back on, took deep breaths, looked at the map to determine where we were, sang Rihanna, and kept going. During one such break, we watched a black bear across the valley meander through a field of wildflowers. During another break, we picked and ate bluebells and salmon berries. Today, was a good day.
We are living and learning on the ancestral homeland of the Coast Salish peoples and the Klallam peoples. They are the original caretakers of this place and throughout the course we pause to recognize that we are traveling through their lands.
Many of my students had never slept outside or carried a heavy pack before this experience. Watching them struggle, adapt, and awaken in this environment is a powerful reminder of how inherently connected humans are to wild spaces. During today’s many hours of hiking, I let myself fall to the back of the group and reflect on this past year and a half of our global pandemic. We have all experienced big impacts on our personal and professional routines, habits, and rituals. In different ways (both unseen and seen), this time has been hard on all of us. Just like the students who I led today, I have had many moments of wanting to sit down and just break down. I have also felt this breaking point many times during my own learning around the interconnectedness between food systems, climate, land ownership, equity and racism. Most recently, I felt this when the IPCC AR6 Climate Change update came out, confirming the drastic ways that human activities have changed our climate, and what aspects of that impact have now become irreversible. When I first read the report, I was filled with deep heaviness, and left wondering, is anything we are doing making a difference?
Yet, the simple beauty of this wilderness space fills me with courage and perspective. I trace back through my footsteps from today— to the black bear, the peregrine falcon, and the many Sitka spruce trees. These interactions fill me with energy, and affirm it is essential that we maintain hope and that we keep working towards a future that we believe in.
I trace my footsteps back even earlier in the day, to when I watched a large bird swoop down and attack a long-toed salamander. The salamander waved its tail back and forth as the bird landed on the ground with its talons outstretched. It was in this tense moment, as the talons dug into the earth, that the salamander suddenly separated from its tail. The bird was left chasing the squirming tail as the salamander slunk away into the bushes. Over the next couple of days, that same salamander will regenerate and regrow its tail. The long-toed salamander is an incredibly resilient creature.
The lessons from wilderness spaces are relevant for these students and myself while we are out in these mountains, as well as for my work with my Bio-Logical Capital team back home.
We live in uncertain times and navigation is key
At the beginning of this NOLS course, the students almost quit when they learned that just like them, I too had never been to the Olympic Peninsula before (and some of them would have started walking towards home when I shared that— had they known what direction to start walking in). They looked at me in disbelief as I shared that one of the goals of a NOLS course is to teach them the tools to enable them to comfortably navigate and travel through new wilderness landscapes. In this mountainous setting, I am so comfortable not knowing where I am. I have all the tools that I need to safely navigate and lead us through this landscape - the sun, the mountains, my compass, and a topographic map (and lots of snacks). We live in uncertainty every day. And gaining the skills to navigate that uncertainty, whether on a mountainside or in a concrete jungle, is an empowering tool to have and use.
Mistakes are an essential part of learning
On the first day of this NOLS course, I was eager to start moving and I asked who in my group had the compass. One of the students raised her hand and shared that it was packed in the bottom of her pack, as she hadn’t realized that we would need it today. Not wanting to take the time to have her unpack and repack her pack, I confidently stated that we didn’t need it and that we would just begin hiking. As a result of my impatience, I hiked my group in the wrong direction for 30 minutes before looking at the map and realizing my mistake. I paused the students and had them huddle around the map. I explained what had happened and acknowledged what emotions impacted my decision making (excitement and impatience). The students groaned as we turned around and hiked back the way we came from, eventually returning to our starting point, and then hiking the several hours to our camp.
This experience turned into a really good conversation that continued throughout the course. The students shared the tremendous pressure they feel in school around the climate, social justice, and our society, to do good, to achieve, and to create impact. When I asked them how the adults in their lives talk about mistakes, most of them couldn’t give any examples of healthy conversations that allowed them to examine their mistakes with curiosity, instead of just feeling shame or guilt. Mistakes are inevitable, they are part of being human. With each mistake comes choices—how do we lean into those mistakes? How do we learn from them? How do we express empathy to ourselves and others to accelerate healing and growth? How do we allow ourselves and others to move on?
The students have now all gone to their tents, exhausted but with full bellies and mostly dry socks. I am left sitting solo on a large rock, trying to capture in my journal my thoughts and reflections from the day. It is dusk and the valley below me is filled with bird calls. Screeches, hoots, and twitters echo off the granite walls. The air feels alive. Suddenly all falls quiet and the stillness feels sharp. A lone howl lifts out of the mountains somewhere from above. The howler calls out several times, pausing to receive back the echo of its voice off the mountain walls and ridges.
After many calls, there is finally an answer. Far off, probably several peaks and valleys away, comes the howling of a distant pack. The lone call from above becomes excited, barking faster, howling longer. The distant pack answers.
Then all is quiet again. This time the silence is broken by a single bird call, a twittering that sounds like ‘alllllll is clear, clear, clear.’ Soon this lone bird is joined by others, and the night is once again filled with life.
I sit quietly, taking this all in. Tomorrow we have another mountain pass to cross and it is time that I, too, go find my sleeping bag.