The final bell has rung and children at public and private schools across the nation have cleaned out their lockers and headed out the doors and hopefully, outdoors.

Some of these children are departing schools that rarely allow their students to get down and dirty in the outside world — such as Polaris Charter Academy on Chicago’s West Side, where the school’s 450 students had been kept indoors due to fears associated with gun violence. In other parts of the country, fewer students get the opportunity to truly explore the world outside the playground or even lie down in the grass and point out the significance of cloud formations above.

These same schools, for a variety of reasons, don’t take the time to schedule impromptu short excursions to neighboring parks and wilderness areas, teaching students the names of native birds, plants and trees, pointing out urban and suburban wildlife, or following a slow-moving creek to a larger, more rapid tributary.

But just because most schools don’t fill that obligation doesn’t mean families can’t take over the job now that summer has arrived. The objective is to send these kids back to school in the fall — freshly cleaned up and rested — with heads full of new connections to the natural world.

So how do our children and students truly benefit from outdoor and adventure education? Here’s a short list of the positive attributes of wilderness exploration:

“What’s fructose? What’s GMO? What do these words mean?

These are some of the questions my 9-year-old daughter asked me last June as the family shopped for good snacks for a backpacking trip. By July, my daughter had vowed to stop eating food with “junk” in it. And to date, she has kept her word.

Take a tour of your local grocery store, and peruse the list of ingredients on the back or side of the packaging of many of those so-called healthy snacks. You might be unpleasantly surprised to find that an abundance of these products tout themselves as containing all natural ingredients, when in actuality they contain just the opposite.

It’s a bad habit, but often when we shop for those “in-between foods” (between meals), we’ll grab up what looks good or is easy to pack. Or we find ourselves purchasing items out of habit or convenience. But the truth is on the trail:
Sugary, high-calorie snacks never translate into positive energy.
Time for Change

We’ve all experienced the benefits of using

Here at The National Center for Outdoor & Adventure Education (NCOAE) you can find us toiling year-round to bring our students and clients the very best in guided outdoor adventures with meaning. So, as far as our staff is concerned, we’re always in the “getting ready mode” for outings in the wilderness.

But as we approach our busiest time of the year, we’d like to pose some questions for our seasonal participants:

What are you doing to get ready?
What does it mean to be ready?
Can we ever really be ready?

Let’s distill outdoor preparedness into three categories, Physical, Emotional and Gear.

Physical: Lounging on the couch with a belly covered with unnaturally orange Cheetos dust while watching 180 Degrees South: Conquerors of the Useless for the 100th time might suggest it’s time to get busy getting fit before you head out on a course.

Whether that entails short hikes with heavy bags, bike rides across town, hitting the gym or some distance running, it’s entirely up to you to decide what works. Just know this. Time’s ticking and the first summer excursions are less than the turn of a monthly calendar page away.

Emotional: So you’ve been hiking, biking and swimming and you’re feeling like you’re getting your mojo back. Swell. Now it’s time to prepare mentally for what lies in store on the trail.

Take a moment. Close your eyes and picture your favorite course area. It’s easy to recall the bucolic views, pristine settings, and warm campfires at night. But they say pain has no memory. Now think about an unrelenting sun beating down on you, or a trip that featured nothing but rain, day and night. Your gear and body are getting funky, you’re exhausted. And when you look around, you notice your fellow course mates appear to have been

Celine Adair, our own co-founder and director of operations, has been recognized with a Women of Achievement Award for her work in social justice, presented earlier this week by the YWCA Lower Cape Fear.

The award ceremony — held each year since 1985 — is the YWCA’s signature fundraiser to recognize and celebrate the accomplishments of women and young leaders in southeastern North Carolina. Celine joins more than 300 other women leaders who have achieved this status over the past three-plus decades.

(Caption: Left to right: Dr. C. Sue Combs from the University of North Carolina Wilmington (and herself a 1991 YWCA Women of Achievement Award Winner) poses with NCOAE’s Celine Adair. Photo credit: Terah Wilson / StarNews)

The YWCA organization’s programs and services promote racial justice and gender equity for thousands of women, children and their families in the Lower Cape Fear region, which is home to The National Center for Outdoor & Adventure Education’s world headquarters. This year, 56 nominees

A North Carolina television news station has run a colorful three-minute segment called “Extraordinary People,” that highlights our very own co-founder and executive director, Zac Adair (video footage from the segment appears at the end of today’s post).

Daniel Seamans, evening anchor correspondent for WWAY TV3, put the cameras on Zac and The National Center for Outdoor & Adventure Education in the Extraordinary Person of the Week portion of the network affiliate’s evening news. WWAY TV3 is the ABC, CBS and CW-affiliated television station in Wilmington, owned by Morris Network, Inc.

Entitled “Blind Ambition,” the veteran correspondent interviewed Zac as well as a half-dozen students in our Education Without Walls (EWW) program, NCOAE’s year-round adventure education program for highly motivated and ambitious youth who have significant financial needs.

The news station called the segment ‘Blind Ambition” because Zac lost the majority of his sight when the bicycle he was riding was struck by a car back in 2003. The accident did little to slow this veteran surfer, whitewater rafting guide, rock climber, and outdoor program visionary and business manager. Today he is totally blind in one eye and has less than 2 percent vision remaining in his other eye.

Nonetheless, on a near-daily basis, you can find Zac in the

Spring has sprung and it’s the beginning of another fine season of outdoor adventure, which means it’s time to start unpacking, inspecting, cleaning up and then repacking your gear.

As you start pulling out the dusty Tupperware containers crammed with camping gear you’ve had since your first journey beyond the pavement, take some time to reflect. Revel in the moment as you remove each memory from the box. Think about where that tool or boot or piece of canvas has taken you, and the gifts you in turn received by being able to use that equipment with confidence.

Dig deep and you’re likely to find a piece of gear that appears — to the uninformed — to be broken and unusable. But to you, a broken cam that you’ve had for years has meaning to it. In fact, you’re pretty much convinced that, in the event of an emergency, you could set that passive piece to save your butt.

As you’re reading this, one of you might be thinking about an unusual rock you and a buddy picked up on a particularly fantastic trip. It’s never left your bag. Maybe it reminds you of

Here at The National Center for Outdoor Education & Adventure Education (NCOAE), we recently welcomed three new field instructors, a climbing instructor and a program coordinator to our outstanding team of staff members.

Earlier this year, these five candidates — two women and three men — successfully completed our Winter 2017 Instructor Candidate Training Program, becoming part of a staff treasure trove that annually attracts some of the best outdoor and experientially-based wilderness educators in the country.

Much of the success of our Instructor Candidate education goes to our training program, where NCOAE instructors work directly with candidates who — on their own steam — are highly qualified outdoor educators.

Many of these candidates have worked for top-drawer wilderness organizations, and our training serves as a means of taking their experience and fine-tuning it to fit NCOAE’s extremely comprehensive curriculum.

Our candidates tell us that despite their prior instructor training and experience, an intensive week of training at our North Carolina headquarters only serves to ratchet up that experience, giving them something more meaningful when guiding and instructing in the field with NCOAE’s students and participants.

But enough about us. Let’s meet these five new NCOAE staff members: