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:

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:

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

Here at The National Center for Outdoor & Adventure Education (NCOAE), it’s not always necessary for employees to be front and center in order to be seen as a vital asset to our operations.

Take Liz Shirley for example. Sure, this veteran outdoor program director can often be found leading our clients on a variety of backcountry trips and programs. And to be sure, hers is a friendly face around our North Carolina headquarters. But as our fulltime program coordinator, Liz most often can be found working behind the scenes — primarily on course logistics.

This busy outdoor education industry executive is in charge of staff recruitment, training, and supervision; planning new course areas; and the always evolving processes we have in place for communicating with clients and students. She also oversees all of our trip logistics — an area of focus that includes course schedules, gear, food and transportation. In addition, Liz works with our founders to review and update our corporate policies and procedures when the need arises.

Describing herself as an outdoor jack-of-all-trades, Liz was able to tear herself away from her responsibilities to answer a few personal questions

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North Carolina native Adam Parish hails from a coastal town called Newport that is located about 100 miles northeast of our headquarters in Wilmington. He attends the University of North Carolina in Wilmington, where he is majoring in recreation, sports leadership and tourism management — a degree he expects to pick up next spring.

Prior to accepting an internship position here at The National Center for Outdoor & Adventure Education (NCOAE), Adam was a marine science technician with the United States Coast Guard. Our newest intern says his favorite pastimes include surfing, hunting, kayaking, and exercising.

As we often do on our blog, today we offer a brief and very informal synopsis of our newest NCOAE staffer. With that being said, and the only serious question posed at the outset of the interview, below are some winsome, hardly worthwhile queries we placed before our new intern. They’re included here mostly for our edification and entertainment, as well as for “look back material” that we can reference when Adam makes it to the big time in the field outdoor- and adventure-based experiential education:

NCOAE: Why did you apply to be an NCOAE intern, and what do

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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:

One thing we don’t do here at The National Center for Outdoor & Adventure Education is work within a vacuum. We depend heavily upon many organizations that went before us or that help us realize our mission and full potential.

Today, we’d like to shine the light on one of those groups that works behind the scenes to ensure that our efforts in outdoor education, adventure travel and backcountry guiding continue to benefit from standards that keep us and our clients safe and sound in the wilderness.

Specifically, we’d like to tell you briefly about the Wilderness Medical Society (WMS), which was formed in 1983 by three California physicians — Drs. Paul Auerbach, Ed Geehr and Ken Kizer — who integrated the sound principles of medical practice within a wilderness setting.

The specific purpose of the Wilderness Medical Society was to encourage, foster, support, and conduct activities or programs concerned with life sciences, which may improve the scientific knowledge of the membership and the general public in matters related to wilderness environments and human activities in these environments.

As envisioned by these three physicians, WMS evolved into the world’s leading organization devoted to wilderness medical challenges. What challenges? These include wild animal attacks, wilderness trauma, expedition and disaster medicine, dive medicine, search and rescue, altitude illness, and weather-related illnesses.

This society explores health risks and

It’s been a while since Zac Adair and his wife, Celine, co-founded The National Center for Outdoor & Adventure Education (NCOAE), and while it would be nice to think they jumped into this challenging not-for-profit enterprise with eyes wide open, that wouldn’t be completely accurate.

Yes, going into it they had a great game plan. They had previously founded and run two other outdoor education organizations — a not-for-profit named Panacea Adventures, and the Adventure Education Institute (AEI) — which they merged to create NCOAE. But these North Carolina-based outdoor educators — raising their infant child — were working under a disadvantage that certainly couldn’t be ignored in the planning stages of NCOAE. And while some would consider it a major hurdle to their career plans, Zac and Celine saw it more as a nuisance.

So much so, in fact, that they haven’t felt it necessary to bring up the fact that Zac — a veteran surfer, rock climber, whitewater river guide and outdoors program business manager — lost the majority of his vision when he was struck on his bicycle by an automobile back in 2003.

And now, more than a dozen years later, he has less than 2 percent vision left (in just one eye) and he describes that vision through his good eye as, “seeing the world through a soda straw.”

The accident happened in Nags Head, N.C., in the late summer of 2003 while Zac was riding home on his bicycle after a session in the surfline. He was struck by a taxi traveling at 59 miles per hour. Zac was on life support for a full week. His cervical spine was broken in four places, his right leg was broken, he suffered severe right scapula damage, and as a result of the trauma, a year later he lost 98 percent of his vision in one eye, and 100 percent of his vision in his other eye.

Not many people — even those closely associated with NCOAE — are aware of Zac’s blindness, nor is it something the couple really cares to have bandied about. In fact, few of the course and training participants who meet Zac at NCOAE headquarters in Wilmington prior to departing for a local trip have any notion that our co-founder is legally blind.

North Carolina native Forrest Stavish is a National Center for Outdoor & Adventure Education (NCOAE) field instructor who also happens to be a lifelong hiker, backpacker and climbing enthusiast. He is a member of the American Mountain Guide Association (AMGA), where he received his single-pitch climbing instructor certification, and is a qualified Wilderness EMT. He holds a SARTECH II search and rescue certification and on top of all that, he is an Assistant Fire Chief.

As we do from time to time here on NCOAE Blog, we thought it would be appropriate to find out more about this ace climbing instructor, so we put him on the spot and posed some serious — and some fun — questions for him to answer:

NCOAE: Tell us about a time you realized you had the power to do something meaningful.

Forrest Stavish: After taking my Wilderness First Responder (WFR) training, I realized that I could use the skills I learned to help my local community. And I continue to do so as a volunteer EMT and Assistant Fire Chief.

NCOAE: Who is your role model, and why?

Forrest: I can narrow it down to two people — one being someone I know and the other I never met.

Jena Honeyman was born to teach, but not in the public school system where standardization appears to have removed hope of educating the individual. That’s why Honeyman — a native of Washington State who was raised in the Adirondack Mountains of New York — is a perfect fit for the staff here at The National Center for Outdoor & Adventure Education. Her recent experience of hiking the Appalachian Trail with friends convinced the 2011 graduate of the Univ. of North Carolina Wilmington to pursue a career that meshes the outdoors with education. She wants kids to know that they can learn and enjoy things without a bunch of money, as well as create memories to last a lifetime while preserving the world’s beauty for the next generation.

Get to know this self-described Amelia Earhart fan here, in our latest NCOAE Staff profile:

NCOAE: Tell us about a time you realized you had the power to do something meaningful?

Jena: For starters, we have to realize that everyday is meaningful. We will all be gone soon enough, so it’s important to live while we can. When teaching in the public school sector, a student wrote me a note that pulled at my heartstrings. I realized then it wasn’t a “could do” but that “I was” impacting lives. The note referred to the interesting approach I took to teaching and thanked me for the nature walks and classes in the sunshine. We all have the ability to connect as humans in so many beautiful ways if we just allow ourselves.

NCOAE: What do you think about when you’re alone on the trail?

Jena: In addition to being aware of my surroundings and safety, I wonder about random things such as… Do we have such an affinity for electronic music nowadays because we live in an age where we are so ‘linked in’ that our brains respond better to the frequency of a computer and not the soul of a bass string? Pretty random, right! And then I snap out of it and think about how I don’t want to be in love with a computer and its frequency, but instead with the soul of the artist. That’s when I realize that I’m an artist in just my walking and the way I move, and then I laugh at how ridiculous the thought is and I smile and hope I’m not the only one thinking such ridiculous things when alone on the trail.

NCOAE: What gets you excited?

Jena: SQUIRREL! Oh wait; that’s Penny my dog. But as you can sense, I’m as easily stoked as she is. Killer sunrises, sandy toes and warm coffee excite me, as does waking up to newly fallen snow — particularly of the light and fluffy variety, which is excellent for skiing. The warmth a wood stove gives off excites me (especially when tuned into the knowledge that I started, stoked and maintained that fire myself). Giving excites me. Giving a smile that creates one back or leads to laughter. Guiding someone to see a cliff, a view, or a vista and knowing that I am part of him or her forever because of that shared experience excites me.

NCOAE: On a scale of one to 10, how weird are you?

Jena: You tell me… I