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

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

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.

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:

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: