With its sandy beaches, quaint seaside villages, dramatic cliffs, and stunning wildflowers, Alumni Backpacking Portugal’s Fishermen’s Trail is quickly becoming a well-loved classic of the alumni trips lineup. The champion and architect behind this trip is Susan Brame. Her passion for the Portuguese coast and desire to share this unique bit of trail with others led her to come out of retirement and a 30-year hiatus from NOLS field work to bring us this outstanding trip.
I sat down with Susan to discuss her NOLS career, how an idea for an alumni trip became a reality, what about Portugal inspired her… and to get some advice on hiking the Fishermen’s Trail before my dad and I join an alumni trip there next year.
Photo by Rich Brame
Beginnings
Susan came to NOLS for the first time in 1984 on the recommendation of her co-worker. She was spending her summers off from college working at a summer camp in North Carolina teaching horseback riding and hiking. She had never heard of NOLS but thought it sounded interesting. She was an outdoor-minded and ambitious young woman who wanted to travel and climb mountains, even some that she wasn’t necessarily ready for. “I went down to Mexico that year with a couple of friends and plans to climb three volcanoes,” Susan said, “One of my travel mates got sick and we ended up only climbing one of them, Popocatépetl. Although that was maybe a good thing. The one we climbed was non-technical. We’d brought some mountaineering gear and ice axes with us, but we didn’t know how to use them.” Susan laughed but remarked that that trip was something of a wake-up call. She decided if she wanted to climb mountains she ought to get some training.
This propelled her to take her first mountaineering course with NOLS in Wyoming’s Wind River Mountains in 1984. “It was an incredible experience,” Susan remarked, “the instructors were awesome. All three of them were engaging, smart educators, and their outdoor skills were so solid.” Studying at the time to become a classroom educator herself, Susan caught the eye of her instructors who suggested she consider applying for an instructor course. A couple of years later, with that course still fresh in her mind, Susan made it back out to Wyoming in the summer of 1986 and completed an intensive 5-week instructor course. I asked Susan what courses she worked on at the beginning of her career. “Hiking. For those first few years, I only worked for NOLS in the summer. I was teaching high school math in North Carolina. Then I was in grad school in Durham.” Susan also recalled instructing several adventure courses, courses for 14 and 15-year-olds, in Wyoming’s Big Horn and Absaroka mountains during those first few years. “The adventure courses were the youngest NOLS students. It was something of a rite of passage back then to work those courses.”
Summers in Wyoming were beautiful and with a few seasons under her belt, Susan was itching to spend more time in the Mountain West. So she relocated to Lander.
“In 1989, I ditched a bunch of my possessions in North Carolina, filled up my Honda Accord with the few I’d kept, and headed to Wyoming. I drove out open-ended with the goal of staying a year. I wanted to see all the seasons out here, and I did,” Susan said. Over the next few years she continued to work hiking courses, sections of semesters (these were her favorite), canyon courses, and courses for other outdoor educators. “I also took a caving seminar,” Susan said. Seminars are courses that instructors can take to develop skills in new disciplines. “Those caving courses were a hoot. It was like going to a different planet.”
Finally, Susan also decided to take a mountaineering seminar to hone the skills that had originally sparked her interest in NOLS. “I was scheduled to work my first mountaineering course, but then I found out I was pregnant. It was decided that an Alaska hiking course would be better.”
Photo by Rich Brame
The Development Office
With the arrival of her first daughter in 1991, Susan decided to take a hiatus from field work and stepped into a role in the Development department. Over the next decade, Susan held various positions in this department and made substantial contributions to the school.
"I job-shared the outreach and training manager position with Rich (mostly development of the LNT curriculum and partnerships), then segued over to Development where I wrote grant proposals, developed materials for various fundraising campaigns, and created the Friends of NOLS Newsletter." One publication she contributed to during these years was the NOLS Wilderness Primer about environmental ethics and land management agencies in the United States. The second edition of this book was retitled Wilderness Ethics and is still used by field instructors.
The NOLS Family
Susan met her husband, Rich, working for NOLS and together, they have almost 80 years of NOLS history and experience. Some of that time includes the years their family was semi-migrational moving between Lander, Wyoming, and Whitehorse in the Yukon. Rich was the director of the NOLS Yukon Branch which ran summer hiking, remote canoeing, and mountaineering courses.
“We’d pack the two of us, our two daughters, two German Shepherds, a cello, and a violin into our Ford crew cab and drive up there every summer. It was an adventure,” Susan said. When I asked Susan what living in Whitehorse and running the Yukon Branch was like she responded, “Well, the Yukon had about 30,000 inhabitants at the time, and 23,000 of them lived in Whitehorse. You got the feeling that it was a very resourceful community. The people there learned how to do things for themselves because that was their only option. NOLS rented a warehouse in Whitehorse, and that was our only permanent building there. So each summer we needed to find a new rental in town. That was part of the adventure to see where we’d be living each summer.”
With the yearly summer moves, the Brames’ two daughters grew up immersed in the NOLS communities that their parents helped build. They learned the same resourcefulness and resilience that characterized Whitehorse and that instructors teach. Susan jokingly said that when a NOLS instructor asked their eldest daughter, who was 10 at the time when she’d take her first NOLS course, she responded, “My life is a NOLS course.”
After ten years in the Development office, Susan took a step away from NOLS professionally to return to teaching math in the Lander, Wyoming public schools, an experience that she remarked was “both fun and frustrating. After working at NOLS for so many years where I found that most people were passionate about the work and believed in NOLS’ mission, I, maybe naively, believed that I’d find the same in the schools. That wasn’t always the case.” She retired from public education in 2018, but it didn’t take long for a new NOLS project to catch Susan’s attention.
Photo by Rich Brame
Portugal's Fishermen's Trail
Thirty years after teaching her last backcountry course for NOLS, Susan was finally persuaded to become an active instructor again. NOLS needed her back. Not to simply teach a course in the mountains of Wyoming, but to build an alumni trip, from scratch, in a place where NOLS had never operated, in a language she didn't speak. But that was her idea.
“Why Portugal?” I asked Susan.
“It was a place that had intrigued me for years,” she said, “our first time was a pretty classic first trip to any country. We visited towns and museums, went for day hikes, that kind of thing.” But on that trip, Susan saw signs for the Fishermen’s Trail, a long-distance hiking trail, on the coast, and wanted to return to do it. “I fell in love with the culture, the food, the people, and the language,” said Susan. So she and Rich returned the next year to hike the Fishermen's Trail with some friends. “After that, I started to push Rich to put together an alumni trip hiking the trail.” He was initially reluctant, believing they might not be able to find enough lodging in the small coastal towns the trail passes through. “But I thought we could make it work, so I started building it,” said Susan. “I was already building it when the COVID pandemic started and I was learning Portuguese. That was my pandemic project.” I asked Susan why she wanted to learn Portuguese. “I’ve always loved language,” Susan said. “Reading, writing, wordplay. Portuguese is a beautiful language. Plus it helps with some of the logistical planning, but it was more for fun.”
The first Portugal Fishermen's Trail trips were added to the catalog in 2020 but were canceled because of the pandemic. Finally, in 2022 the first course went out with Rich as the course leader. "I was a participant on that trip," Susan said but quickly added, "Afterwards I knew I wanted to segue from just planning the trips to being an instructor again. So I completed a re-entry process to renew my instructor certification." I asked Susan how it felt to go back to field work. “Alumni trips are a soft introduction back into field work,” Susan said. “I appreciate that the instruction is more open-ended. If I don’t have the knowledge to teach something, like regional geology, we can learn it together… It’s helpful to know about the culture, human history, and natural history, but I don’t have to pretend to be an expert. We can look things up together, it’s more relaxed that way.” Susan also commented that it’s fun working with current field instructors. She explained that she learns a ton from them sharing what they know and are good at, and they keep her up to date on current field practices.
I asked Susan what her favorite town and section of the hike is. She responded, “Participants ask me this question all the time, and I think I give a different answer almost every time. I think Odeceixe is my favorite town, and I think the walk from Carrapateira to Vila do Bispo might be my favorite hiking section. It's got a little bit of everything: stunning precipitous cliffs, secret little beaches, and a few ruins from a clifftop 12th century Moorish fishing village.”
A Word from the Wise
Finally, I asked Susan if she had any wisdom to pass on to my dad and me as we prepare to attend the alumni trip that she built, hiking the Fishermen's trail next year. She responded that going for long walks ahead of time is the best preparation. “Being in shape for the hiking makes it more fun. But it’s not only the fitness. It’s the mental fortitude to be on your feet for that long. Being okay with continuing the last mile when it’s already been a long day.” Aside from that she also remarked that an openness to trying new foods and a new way of doing things is important. “Try to be flexible and have a sense of humor,” she said.
“Something will go wrong on every trip. It might be minor, or it might require some 're-logisticating.' But I’ve learned not to get bent out of shape about it. Many times, the participants want to and can be very helpful. And it helps to include the group in the problem-solving. We are an expedition even though it's very different from a Wind River Wilderness course and that’s a part of Expedition Behavior.” Something tells me Susan has been offering advice like this to students in the backcountry and classroom for many years and will continue doing so for many more.
