NCOAE Blog

Back in December of last year, we asked key NCOAE administrative and field staff to share some of the things for which they were most grateful. Those gratitude’s, as they’ve become to be known around here, comprised our year-ending blog post for 2018. And if you read that post, you may recall that today’s featured staff member — NCOAE EMS Program Director Julius McAdams — thrives on teamwork and the quality of our students.

Born and raised near our headquarters in Wilmington, North Carolina, Julius ascended to the role of Program Director in early-October of 2018, having previously served as one of our very capable and enthusiastic EMT Training Instructors. In his current position, Julius is responsible for coordinating and scheduling all of The National Center for Outdoor & Adventure Education’s emergency medical services-related trainings, as well as teaching some courses and helping prepare our students to pass the National Registry of Emergency Medical Technicians (NREMT) exam.

As we do with our staff profiles and ‘get to know us’ posts, we asked Julius to tell us about his background, and here’s what he had to say: (more…)

It’s official. We’ve symbolically planted a National Center for Outdoor & Adventure Education (NCOAE) flag in the ground and established a basecamp for our South American operations in Southern Chile/Northern Patagonia. What does that mean to you?

It means that — as of the final days of last year — we officially have a base of operations from which we can now run our future trainings and outdoor courses when in South America. Fittingly, the basecamp was established at the outset of one of our Patagonia-based 24-day Outdoor Educator courses, witnessed by a group of students we took down from the University of North Carolina-Wilmington.

Located alongside a river, the basecamp offers unique accommodations that include a treehouse dormitory, hosteria (which is an inn-like facility), eco-friendly domes, a riverside group kitchen area, and quiet forested areas for camping.

Among the highlights of the property is a treehouse dormitorio offering sleeping quarters nestled within the forest trees. Constructed over, around, and in between the forest, the result is a building that incorporates reliable cool summer breezes, an abundance of shade, and neighbors that include (more…)

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: (more…)

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 (more…)

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: (more…)

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 backcountry cooking 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: (more…)

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 (more…)

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 (more…)

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 (more…)

Over the past two summers, The National Center for Outdoor & Adventure Education (NCOAE) has received a total of nearly $9,000 from Island Women, Inc., a group of savvy, talented and passionate women who live in nearby Pleasure Island, N.C. Island Women is a not-for-profit organization that’s on a mission to enhance the quality of life on Pleasure Island, which is located just five minutes south of NCOAE’s headquarters facilities in Wilmington.

The generous donation (totaling $8,874) was designated by the local group to be used in NCOAE’s not-for-profit subsidiary, Education Without Walls — an outdoor- and adventure-based program that provides academic and life skill guidance for high school kids living at or below the Federal Poverty Level. The end goal of our program is to motivate and support low-income students in identifying and achieving their potential.

Among many other commitments, Island Women promotes education, cultural expression, and mentoring among women. In our case, Island Women’s members were interested in our Education Without Walls program after NCOAE Co-Founder Celine Adair was invited to address the organization in the summer of 2016.

Celine described how the majority of (more…)

How would you like to spend three weeks in windswept Patagonia, summiting a 19,000-foot-high peak in the Andes, taking on Class III and IV rapids alongside a volcano — and picking up six college credits for adding this adventure to your academic experience?

The University of North Carolina-Wilmington (UNCW) is offering this 24-day course (EVS 485/592) during the upcoming winter 2018 break, and the classroom is as described above — Patagonia, a nearly 300,000-square-mile area shared by Chile and Argentina that features the imposing Andes mountain range, deserts, plains, rocky coastlines and ice fields. This pristine real estate is enormous, yet only 5 percent of the populations of both countries live there.

And it’s available to adventure-seeking Seahawks as the result of an academic partnership between UNCW and us — the Wilmington-based National Center for Outdoor & Adventure Education (NCOAE). Our renowned center promotes critical thinking, environmental stewardship, and the acquisition of technical outdoor skills through accredited outdoor and adventure-based experiential education courses.

(more…)

As you’re probably aware, we here at The National Center for Outdoor Adventure & Education (NCOAE) do a lot more than just organize backcountry trips for teens, Outdoor Educator courses for outdoor education industry professionals, GAP Year Programs for college-age students, and wilderness medicine and EMT training for anyone desirous of such certifications.

For certain, our wilderness outings and trainings are our bread and butter, focusing as they do on three-day to three-month adventures targeting everything from mountaineering to surfing and certification-granting trainings ranging from Emergency Medical Technician training to Leave No Trace ethics.

But among our tasks — and admittedly it’s more of a rewarding commitment than a task — is giving back to the outdoor education and adventure recreation industry what was so freely given to us. Our aim has always been to serve as a clearinghouse for information related to our profession, and one of the ways we do that is promote and participate in select outdoor industry meetings, markets and conferences.

And by promote, we mean we go the extra step to keep our industry peers up to date on happenings that affect our employees, our clients, our profession and of course, the environment. We want to get the word out about these upcoming and most important outdoor shows, seminars and confabs.

Having said this, what we offer below is a list of upcoming outdoor industry conferences and events that you might consider attending. Here’s what the calendar looks like for the rest of 2018 and the beginning of 2019: (more…)

Growing up in a small town in the foothills of North Carolina, Chris Brooks claims his lifetime dream from the age of 5 was to become a paramedic. Today, he is the Emergency Medical Services (EMS) Program Director here at The National Center for Outdoor and Adventure Education (NCOAE), where he teaches EMS courses in order to equip the next generation of emergency medical providers to become the best at what they do.

Chris arrived here at NCOAE in the summer of 2015 when he was hired as a part-time EMS instructor. But long before that, Chris had his eyes set on rescuing others on the trail or in the wild. He attended a community college right out of high school, receiving an Associate of Science degree in EMS in 1997 and became a paramedic when he turned 19 years old.

He later attended the Emergency Medical Care Bachelor of Science pre-med degree program at Western Carolina University in Cullowhee, N.C., and continued to work as a paramedic until 2005 when he took a supervisory position at an EMS agency in upstate South Carolina.

Four years later, he was hired on as an anatomy and physiology lab instructor at Central Piedmont Community College in Charlotte, N.C., soon becoming the anatomical laboratory director at that college’s Levine Campus.

We asked Chris to fill us in on the rest of his life — particularly in regard to his work at NCOAE’s Wilmington campus and his lifelong career choice. Here’s what he had to say: (more…)

Here at The National Center for Outdoor & Adventure Education (NCOAE) we’re not very big on endorsing products or brands. In fact, if you were to research our blog all the way back to the first entry at the end of 2013, you probably won’t find more than two or three posts chatting up products that we heartily support (most notably among them, our June 2014 endorsement of Banks Fry-Bake Pan).

But NCOAE is a super big fan — and customer — of Osprey Packs, a company that has been making some of the best expedition-style backpacks available in the outdoor recreation marketplace for the past four and a half decades. In particular, we’ve been hugely pleased with the Escalante 75 +10 backpack and the Kiva 70 +5 backpack — both available for our outdoor programs only.

As an Association for Experiential Education (AEE) accredited provider of guided outdoor trips and training in the realm of outdoor education and training, our organization qualifies for wholesale pricing for 100 or so manufacturers of expedition-style backpacks. But over the years, when it comes to program packs, we continue to work almost exclusively with Osprey. Why? (more…)

Strange and interesting things are afoot in the human-powered outdoor recreation community, and if you’ve been paying attention to issues surrounding the use of wilderness areas lately, what follows here might not come as a surprise.

What has emerged is a growing division among outdoor enthusiasts as to whether or not mountain bikes should be allowed in designated wilderness areas. The question, which has turned controversial as of late, fosters fears that mountain bike organizations are beginning to align themselves with companies, organizations and politicians insisting on making their way into wilderness areas for resource exploration.

Photo by Patrick Hendry | Sourced from Unsplash

But first, a brief description of how the U.S government defines wilderness:

“The Wilderness Act, signed into law in 1964, created the National Wilderness Preservation System and recognized wilderness as “an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.” The Act further defined wilderness as “an area of undeveloped federal land retaining its primeval character and influence without permanent improvements or human habitation, which is protected and managed so as to preserve its natural conditions.“

That description also specifies that (more…)

The ideal time to consider the best communications options for your backcountry trip is not after you’ve arrived at the trailhead, only to discover you can’t get a signal on your smartphone.

Ensuring you have a reliable means of reaching the outside world — especially during a backcountry incident or emergency — is an item on your checklist that should come way before you’ve parked the car, struggled into your backpacks and are a half-mile down the trail.

Cellphones with sketchy service might be acceptable for a quick four-hour hike within a populated area, but what are your choices should you be heading out on a multi-day adventure in a desolate wilderness area or a national park?

Possessing a reliable device when you need to communicate with people outside the immediate group of hikers accompanying you is a must. Because when it becomes necessary to communicate with search and rescue professionals, things probably aren’t going as smoothly as you had hoped.

And that’s when you want the best user-friendly device you can afford. Here at The National Center for Outdoor Adventure & Education (NCOAE), we recommend you become familiar with two or more communications systems you might want to carry with you into the backcountry.

Below are several suggestions from which to choose, keeping in mind that the choices you make — especially in an emergency situation — can make a (more…)

Meg Young joined the staff team here at The National Center for Outdoor & Adventure Education late last year as office manager and was swiftly promoted to director of admissions. She works closely with our students to ensure their registration and enrollment process goes as smoothly as possible — something she believes sets them up to succeed throughout our courses and trainings.

Meg attended the University of North Carolina Wilmington (UNCW) for two separate degrees. She received her first degree in 2010, which was a Bachelor of Science degree in Environmental Science. Four years later Meg went back to get her Master’s degree in Public Administration (MPA) with a concentration in Nonprofit Management, which she received in 2016.

We recently sat down with Meg for an interview focusing on her path to NCOAE and a variety of other topics we’d thought you — the readers of the NCOAE Blog — would appreciate. Here’s what she had to say:

NCOAE: Where did you grow up and what did the 7-year-old and 11-year-old Meg want to be when they grew up?

Meg: I grew up in Richmond, Virginia. I’m not sure if I was quite 7 years old, but there is written evidence that my first career aspirations were to be a (more…)

It stands to reason that the success or failure of any non-solo outdoor adventure depends to a great degree on the person or people accompanying you. As a result, and long before you head out the door on your next adventure, you’ll want to ensure you don’t select a partner who can quickly turn either a day hike or week-long trek into a peacetime version of the Bataan death march.

In addition to the hardships that accompany many human-powered outdoor recreation adventures, there are issues that should be cleared up before hitting the trail. For instance, there’s a thin line between picking a partner who is a good conversationalist and a motor mouth who is too self-important to pay attention to what’s really going on around the two of you.

Photo © Dylan Siebel (sourced and used with permission from Unsplash)

What we present here is a rundown of what leading outdoor industry publications and journalists have to say about finding the perfect outdoor partner or buddy. In each case, we’ve provided a link to the referring source. That way, you can (more…)

When shopping for human-outdoor equipment, keeping up with the Joneses used to be the norm. New skis, boots, boards, kayaks, apparel, bikes, wetsuits and more. Whatever your sport or pursuit of choice, you had to have the latest technical outdoor gear, whether that be the freshest technology, the most wicked new design, or equipment that’s sleek and half the weight of last year’s model.

Photo © by Lukas Robertson. | Used with permission – sourced from Unsplash.

But that was then, and this is now. And good luck discovering what’s the norm in today’s adventure sports world. Stroll into your favorite outdoor store, surfshop, bicycle store or paddleboard purveyor and your head will spin at the options available to outdoor recreation enthusiasts today.

And while the manufacturing side of the outdoor industry might try to sell us on the notion of a new norm, the participants themselves hold the upper hand. That’s because this is the best time to be an outdoor recreation enthusiast. The offerings are endless and the manufacturers in the field are treating us to new equipment that was unimaginable just a few (more…)

We here at The National Center for Outdoor & Adventure Education (NCOAE) are very proud of the Education Without Walls program and its students! Education Without Walls is a wilderness-based outdoor education program that engages 13 to 18 year old students in a variety of adventure activities, including backpacking, rock climbing, surfing, kayaking, and camping.  This non-profit program, established by the The National Center for Outdoor & Adventure Education (NCOAE), provides scholarships for motivated students in financial need, to participate in outdoor adventure programming.

By using Wilderness as a classroom, Education Without Walls offers an exceptional learning environment — one where instructors foster curiosity, students apply critical thinking, and memories are constructed and not soon forgotten. Instructors use NCOAE’s Core Curriculum to guide lesson planning and the facilitation of experiential education activities that focus on personal development, community building and the acquisition and mastery of technical outdoor skills. As a result, Education Without Walls students make close friends and learn incredible skills, all while having a blast on adventures of a lifetime.

Joaly participating in an Education Without Walls trip in 2013.

We’d like to introduce you to one of the many success stories that has come out of Education Without Walls — Joaly Canseco — and tell you a little about her background and thoughts about her own life-changing experience with Education Without Walls.

Joaly, who is now 19 years old, first started participating in Education Without Walls back when she was 13. We sat her down for a brief Q&A, and here is what she had to say: (more…)