Accepted to Teenwork

Best news of the week was that our application to present a workshop on the Wilderness Challenge program at Teenwork in Los Angeles in March was accepted! I will be taking Kayla Wharton, a senior at Downieville High, and Morgan McKinney and Nick Roberts, a freshman and sophomore at Loyalton High with me, and they will have to do the actual talking, but we will all be working together over the next few months to build a multi-media presentation about this unique outdoor program, which I believe gives a very strong youth leadership training to those who stick with us for several summers, as these three have. I will be posting some photos of past outings, but we have done so many different things. We hike on average two to three days a week all summer in the Gold Lakes Basin area, as well as backpacking trips to Wades' Lake, Caribou Wilderness (east of Mount Lassen National Park), rock climbing, and, one of the best-ever outings for me, kayaking on Lake Tahoe last summer (this outing included an overnight camp at the boat-in-only campground located on Emerald Bay). We have snowshoed in winter, and I have led lots of snowboarding outings in the past four years, but the multi-day summer events and the ropes courses with our colleague, Mike Selby of Project Discovery, have been the strongest leadership trainings.

I am excited that we get to bring this information to people all over the state.


This photo of Kayla (top) and I (bottom) was taken at our evening campsite during our Lake Tahoe kayak trip; note how sunburnt Kayla's legs got!