My rope team heading back to base camp. Photo by Liz Townsend.

You might think that seven years of working in the business world would have taught me about leadership. Yet the best lessons I’ve learned have come while climbing rocks and mountains and hiking miles into the wilderness, where traveling with companions over steep snowy passes and through thick forested valleys has forced me to face leadership challenges in ways that I rarely encounter inside.

Topics: tolerance for adversity and uncertainty, Backpacking, MBAs, Live the Dream, leadership, NOLS Custom Education

Photo from Pixabay.

Postholing is a gamble at best; the unstable snow holds a person carrying a pack one step and collapses the next, leaving you up to your knees in snow when you least expect it.

When my Leadership Development class from Bates College rolled into the NOLS Northeast campus in Gabriels, New York this spring, the last thing I could have imagined was that I would find myself hip deep in rotten snow, moving slower than imaginable, and pondering whether or not I would have to set up my tent in the dark.

Topics: Backpacking, Live the Dream, NOLS Northeast, NOLS Custom Education, Bates College

There I was in the middle of the Galiuro Wilderness in southern Arizona. Traversing a mountain trail at top speed for the terrain, sweating profusely in the desert sun, and humming Fergie’s 2007 hit “Glamorous.”

As a diehard Metallica fan, I didn’t expect this particular tune to be rattling around in my brain, but my fellow expedition members, 12 high school freshman girls, would not have it any other way.

Topics: Backpacking, adventure, Live the Dream, NOLS Southwest, NOLS Professional Training, leadership, NOLS Custom Education

“What did I get myself into?!”

Topics: Alumni, Behind the Scenes, Sea Kayaking, NOLS Alaska, backcountry, NOLS Professional Training, NOLS Custom Education

What does whitewater canoeing have to do with a board meeting? Or mountaineering with watercooler gossip? More than you’d think.

Topics: Behind the Scenes, education, NOLS Professional Training, leadership, NOLS Custom Education, Prime, Adult courses

Space, the final frontier, will now be brought into the private business sector as NASA prepares the first commercialized space flight. American soil has been void of launches to space for a while now due to a lack of funding. It has been the goal of NASA and government administration to once again make space flight a part of American industry, and that goal will soon be reached with the help of some incredible NOLS alumni.

NOLS graduates Doug Hurley, Sunita Williams, Bob Behnken, and Eric Boe will proudly participate in the first commercial crew transportation system and lead space exploration into a new era.

Topics: Alumni, NASA, instructor, Live the Dream, Astronauts, NOLS Professional Training, leadership, NOLS Custom Education

Topics: leadership, NOLS Patagonia, Backpacking, Live the Dream, backcountry, NOLS Professional Training, NOLS Custom Education

Accustomed to California sunshine and city living, 16-year-old Ale Sternberg was launched into a world unknown in fall 2012 as she spent a week backpacking through the North Cascade Mountains in Washington state.

Topics: Expedition Prep, Archer School for Girls, Wind River Wilderness Expedition, Archer, Arrow Week, NOLS Professional Training, NOLS Custom Education, story, women in leadership