Gratitude is most often used as a noun, describing as it does, the feeling of being thankful. This warm and comforting word is often bandied about during the holidays, when we reflect upon all of the things for which we are grateful. But for some of us — and in particular, many of our staff members here at The National Center for Outdoor & Adventure Education (NCOAE) — we treat the word gratitude as a verb.

Great employees often live in gratitude by taking positive action. And that means being present for others, which includes listening to their issues or desires and connecting with them. It also means becoming the person that someone else is grateful for.

Image © Simon Maage (sourced from Unsplash)

Just before the holidays truly got underway, we asked some of our staff members to list just some of the things for which they were most grateful. We’re not the least bit surprised that some of their comments encompassed our students and fellow staffers.

Here’s their take on gratitude, in their own words:

The economy is booming and we here at The National Center for Outdoor & Adventure Education (NCOAE) find ourselves in the position of seeking a few part-time instructors. Specifically, we’re looking for instructors to supplement our expanding team of EMT professionals who teach courses at our North Carolina headquarters. Among the many courses we offer is an intensive 19-day EMT-Basic course that satisfies eligibility requirements for the National Registry and NC EMT certification. These classes meet Mondays through Fridays with an additional 24 hours of clinical and field practice on either Saturday or Sunday.

If you know anything about us, you know we pride ourselves with employing some of the very best instructors in the industry, and that includes instructors who are also EMT-paramedics, firefighters, military operations specialists, and experts in critical care management.

As an AEE accredited organization, we provide an exciting and one-of-a-kind teaching environment where teamwork is paramount — which means our EMT offerings stand out from most teaching institution’s. Our instructors provide

The thing that makes Ricardo Flores exceedingly well qualified to serve as a National Center for Outdoor & Adventure Education field instructor is his love of the outdoors and experience in group dynamics through his corporate  management experience.

Specifically, Ricardo formerly worked as a logistics manager and a project manager for Proctor & Gamble, which was No. 42 on the Fortune 500 list last year. That’s not too shabby. In addition, he is a former CEO of an adventure tourism company, and a field instructor for Outward Bound.

In fact, Ricardo has been a wilderness aficionado since the age of 12, having spent 13 years in the Boy Scouts, plus, he’s amassed a boatload of summer camp, personal trip, and tour-guiding experiences. This Port Neches, Texas, native has professional certifications that include Project Management Professional (PMP), Leave No Trace (LNT) master educator, and Wilderness First Responder (WFR).

We asked Ricardo to fill in some blanks in his resume and tell us more about his life. Here’s what he had to say:

Some veteran backpackers claim the only time a heated can of Dinty Moore stew tastes delicious is when eaten outdoors, but today there are many quick and easy ways to pull together a gourmet meal from what you can grab out of your backpack. The trick is knowing what to pack!

Truth is, we here at The National Center for Outdoor & Adventure Education (NCOAE) are among the go-to experts when it comes to wilderness cooking for large and small groups that enjoy the backcountry. That’s because our veteran field instructors and leaders have had years to develop ways to transform mundane mountainside meals into Five Star (OK, maybe Four Star) dining experiences.

The secret? It’s all in what you pack in your gear. And with some advance preparation and careful planning, you can spice up your wilderness menus to taste just as delicious on your weekend trail trek as they do for us on, say, an Outdoor Educator Course in Patagonia.

Real estate inside your backpack is always at a premium, but here are a few items that — come lunch or dinnertime — will make you glad you squirreled them away next to your clean socks and underwear:

Today, we can happily report that — following the trials and tribulations of last month’s bullseye hurricane confrontation on our Wilmington, N.C. campus — we here at The National Center for Outdoor & Adventure Education (NCOAE) are back in action. In fact, just a week after our return from evacuating, everything was cleaned up and looking like Hurricane Florence had never visited our 17-acre outdoor education campus.

But no matter how experienced you might be at preparing for, evacuating from, and recovering after a natural disaster, you can never fully anticipate what Mother Nature might toss your way as part of her standard repertoire of weather. And while today, with on-campus and field courses back in action, it certainly didn’t look that way on the morning of Friday, Sept. 28, when a thunderstorm completely unrelated to Hurricane Florence rumbled over our property.

That’s when a massive bolt of lightning hit the window of our director of operations’ office, sending a bolt of energy through her keyboard to her fingertips while she was working. A second bolt of lightning hit a tree adjacent to our gear shed, traveled down the tree, through its roots, blowing a hole through our property’s water line and sewer line, and cooking the conduit that houses our property’s power line.

The central panel for our

Say what you will about global warming, climate change and other hemispheric anomalies, but there’s no question in anybody’s mind that a Category 4 hurricane is making a direct bullseye run at Wilmington, N.C., and The National Center for Outdoor & Adventure Education (NCOAE) headquarters facilities.

The good news is that our staff have all become bona fide experts in matters related to risk management. Our co-founders Zac and Celine Adair — along with the rest of our hometown administrative team — are hard at work preparing our coastal headquarters for a direct hit from this latest storm which you can track online through the National Hurricane Center.

Here on our campus, NCOAE staff has spent the last 36 hours preparing for the worst possible outcome — a direct hit. Buildings have been boarded up, all outdoor furniture and materials capable of being turned into life-threatening projectiles have been removed from the property, which ‘as the crow flies’ is located just a mile from the Carolina coastline.

NCOAE vans have been packed up with a

It’s not often that we derive inspiration while standing in the middle of an overcrowded parking lot, but for our co-founder and executive director Zac Adair, it was in just such an unlikely setting that the notion of opening a Pacific Northwest location for NCOAE took hold.

(Image © by Edward Etojakovic via Wikipedia)

This idea came to mind during a recent trip to Oregon, where Zac was checking out the outdoor recreation and education scene. Accompanied by a friend who also works in the human-powered outdoor recreation and adventure education space, the two men found themselves in the parking lot of the historic Timberline Lodge, situated about halfway up the 11,239-foot-high Mount Hood — undoubtedly the most majestic mountain in the state.

Well known for more than a century for its outstanding outdoor recreational possibilities — available year-round and in every outdoor rec category imaginable — the Mount Hood area and the nearby Deschutes River are virtual meccas for wilderness enthusiasts of every outdoor sport persuasion. And as Zac and his friend were to witness in that hotel parking lot on that day last month, diversity is the key when it comes