Our trips are well under way from California to Alaska to Colorado, from the Pacific Northwest to the Blue Ridge. Adventure Treks students are challenging themselves with new activities in incredible settings while making wonderful new friends. Despite all of the fun, we also want this to be a learning and growing experience. The substance of our program begins with instructor orientation and we thought we would give you a glimpse of a small part of our two-week school for instructors!

The Method behind the Magic – AT Instructor Orientation 2015 from Adventure Treks on Vimeo.

From fall to spring, our directors work tirelessly to find the most committed and experienced role models for Adventure Treks. And each year, our team gets stronger and better.

Map-reading, a lost art.

During our two-week-long, intensive staff orientation this year, our instructor team created a powerful, inclusive community—which they are currently modeling and passing onto our fantastic students. During orientation, the instructors spent seven days training in southern Washington, discussing the big picture of what makes Adventure Treks so fun and transformative. We applied recent trends in youth development to an outdoor environment, focusing on a growth mindset and 21st century skills. We refreshed our medical skills, talked about risk management, spent an intensive day on van-driving training, and exchanged ways to develop the kind, inclusive communities that is the hallmark of Adventure Treks.

We also played a lot of games! If our instructors are having fun, so are our students! And there is actually research to back the impact games can have from a group development standpoint. There was also a lot of gear to sort at orientation. This spring, one of our trip leaders, Joe, spent two months organizing gear in our warehouse so that it could be sorted and distributed on site. Imagine:

• 21 brand-new 2015 Ford Transit vans
• 13 trailers
• 376 sleeping bags
• 377 sleeping pads
• 320 Deuter and Osprey backpacks
• 170 Big Agnes tents
• 170 MSR stoves
• 75 first aid kits
• 70 cases of fuel
• 27 van boxes
• 27 van first aid kits
• And much much more… We haven’t even talked about food yet! (But we do have 2,500 Honey Stinger Waffles!)

Award-winning Orientation judges!

Instructors arrived on June 9, though our trip leaders and directors attended a Leadership Retreat which began on June 3. On Monday, June 15, we left southern Washington and split off into our five or six-person staff teams and headed to our trip destinations. In the second week of staff training, our teams pored over their trip itineraries and mastered all the tiny details that ensure our trips will be exceptional. We continued to build our small staff communities, scouted trail heads, practiced our driving, refreshed backcountry camping and hiking skills, planned our food shopping and meals, and studied our student and parent questionnaires and health histories to prepare for our students’ arrival.

Now that our students are here, all of the hard work and training has paid off and we are ecstatic about the wonderful students that are having great experiences out in the Adventure Treks world!

Trip leaders taking a break for some fun outside!

Every year, Adventure Treks kicks off the summer with our five-day Trip Leader Retreat in Oregon, where our leadership team gathers in a cabin near Mt. Hood, next to the Salmon River, for senior staff training.

Our 14 trip leaders and four regional directors hail from 11 states, average 29.5 years old, and have 129 collective years of Adventure Treks experience, with an average of 7.3 seasons of AT experience each. (Two were former Adventure Treks students!) I’m proud to be a part of this group of mentors who will be training our new instructors and overseeing the success of our trips. As an Adventure Treks parent myself, I’m also thrilled to have these role models interacting with and inspiring my own kids!

The other half of our awesome trip leader team.

So what do we do at Trip Leader Retreat? Besides forming our leadership team community, we apply leadership theory and current child psychology and brain theory to Adventure Treks. We also learn and relearn the specific details of each trip itinerary, and we use this time to review safety and the policies and procedures that lead to successful trips. Together, we share the tips and tricks we’ve gleaned as we work hard to make every trip exceptional.

DMAC loves talking to our trip leaders!

As we prepared for our all-staff orientation that began June 9, I wanted to share what we have been reading this winter. It’s our job to stay on top of the latest youth development trends and literature so we can make sure that the Adventure Treks program remains relevant to parents. Besides being a ridiculous amount of FUN, as your partners, we want Adventure Treks to be a tool that helps kids develop the skills, mindset, optimism, confidence, character, and resilience that will help them become happier and more capable adults.

Topics from these and other books will be featured in our instructor orientation sessions as we facilitate the best possible learning and growing experience for your child. Below are our 2015 suggestions for those who share our obsession in helping teenagers experience personal growth.

From Harvard’s Robert Putnam, the expert on community who wrote the seminal book, Bowling Alone, we have a treasure trove of data on how kids succeed among the tremendous inequality brewing in our country. One of his many conclusions is that it matters deeply who your kids go to school (and camp) with. He also stresses that non-cognitive skills (communication, collaboration, creativity, grit and resilience—the things we teach and practice at Adventure Treks) are very often the key to adult success.

Two generations ago, the vast majority of “our kids” went on to live lives better than those of their parents and society generally aided them. But their children and grandchildren (the current generation) have had less opportunity amid diminishing prospects and less help from the “bigger community.” Putnam tells the tale of lessening opportunity through poignant life stories of rich and poor kids from cities and suburbs across the country, drawing on a formidable body of research done specifically for this book.

Find the book here.

Responding to what he calls the culture of the “Big Me” (which emphasizes external success), David Brooks challenges us, and himself, to re-balance the scales
between our “résumé virtues”—achieving wealth, fame,
and status—and our “eulogy virtues”— those that exist
at the core of our being: kindness, bravery, honesty, or faithfulness—focusing on what kind of relationships we have formed. (Read more about how we focus on character development at Adventure Treks in this blog.)

Looking to some of the world’s greatest thinkers and inspiring leaders, Brooks explores how, through internal struggle and an understanding and appreciation of one’s own limitations, people have built a strong inner character.

Find the book here.

The author who brought us Mean Girls and Queen Bees and Wanna Bees, Rosalind Wiseman has now written the definitive book on boys: Masterminds and Wingmen. Using a panel of more than 160 boys (including at least one Adventure Treks alum), Wiseman exposes us to the world of teenage boys and gives us great insight into the lives our boys are experiencing, the rules of boys’ world, and how male teenage power structures work. She introduces the “Act like a Man Box” and the effects attempting to live up to these expectations can have on young male behavior. As school and the economy change, we are concerned that boys are falling behind, and we hope the culture we create at Adventure Treks will help our male students succeed in life outside camp.

Find the book here.

Below are books we still use frequently and have included on previous lists.

In Mindset, Stanford researcher Carol Dweck explains why it’s not just our abilities and talent that bring us success, but whether we approach challenges with a fixed or a growth mindset. Praising intelligence and ability isn’t the best way to foster self-efficacy and confidence, and may instead actually jeopardize success. Instead, understanding that the brain is malleable, and that we are all works in progress, leads to the development of a growth mindset. By encouraging and rewarding effort and hard work over innate talent, we can better motivate our kids to more eagerly approach new challenges while building resilience. We use Dweck’s book in instructor orientation to show staff how to encourage our students to develop a mindset focused on continuous growth rather than accepting our talents and abilities as fixed.

Find the book here.

Harvard professor Edward Hallowell gives us a
wonderful five-step program to help give our kids a childhood that creates a footprint for them to
become happy adults. In The Childhood Roots of Adult Happiness, Hallowell promotes childhood as a time to provide opportunities to feel connected to others, to play and be joyful, to practice and attain mastery in numerous activities, to fail and build resilience, and to receive recognition.

We use Hallowell’s model in our staff training and
wrote a blog about how his model applies to Adventure Treks.

We love this book!

Find the book here.

One of the Wall Street Journal’s “most important reads for 2013,” The Big Disconnect: Protecting Child and Family Relationships in the Digital Age discusses how technology is affecting family relationships and how parents’ involvement with technology at home affects family connections. Renowned clinical psychologist and author Catherine Steiner-Adair explains that families are now in crisis around this issue. Not only do chronic technology distractions have deep and lasting effects, but children desperately need warm interactions with the adults in their lives.

Drawing on real-life stories from her clinical and consulting work, Steiner-Adair offers insights and advice on how parents can achieve greater understanding and confidence as they come up against the tech revolution happening in their living rooms. When Adventure Treks students have an amazing experience and succeed beyond all expectations without any technology, they are often given a unique perspective on how technology fits into their lives. Read a recent blog we wrote about her book.

Find the book here.

T-minus 6 days until our first trip starts!
—Dock

Congratulations to our class of 2015! We are always impressed—but never surprised—at the remarkable colleges Adventure Treks students will soon be attending.

Below is the list of the colleges our students have chosen. We feel privileged and grateful to have been a topic of many of your college essays. We know that navigating through the college “sorting hat” has been difficult, and we want to applaud every one of you for all the hard work you have put into your successful high school careers.

We’re happy that our students have chosen schools that are a good fit for their personalities, abilities, and interests. We’d like to emphasize that what you will take away from your college experience has little to do with the prestige or rank of a given college, and everything to do with the mindset and attitude with which you approach your collegiate career. Success in college is about the effort poured into the experience, your desire to fuel your passions, the relationships formed with new friends and faculty, and your ability to thrive in new and sometimes ambiguous situations.

At a time when only 58 percent of students at four-year colleges graduate within six years, we’re proud that the graduation rate of Adventure Treks students remains consistently at 98 percent! We believe the resilience, social confidence, collaboration, and community mindset skills you’ve strengthened through your Adventure Treks experiences will help you thrive in college and in the world beyond.

Having talked to dozens of our graduates currently in college, here are some examples of how the Adventure Treks experience helped them prepare for college life:

“AT did a phenomenal job preparing me for the transition to college. I had the ability to adapt to new and changing situations. I knew how to meet friends and how to work with different kinds of people. I have seen many of my friends struggle with the transition, but it’s been easy for me.”
— Christopher, University of Richmond

“AT made me more comfortable in my skin; when I got to college, I didn’t have to try to be anybody but myself. It was refreshing and empowering.”
— Max, Stanford University

“At AT, you learn how to help out and look out for others, how to thrive when things aren’t easy, and how to see a bigger picture beyond yourself. AT gave me the confidence to lead a school organization my freshman year, and it means I am always the one doing more than my share in project groups.”
— Jake, University of Nevada, Reno

Here are the colleges many of our Adventure Treks students will be attending:

• Renee Hastings: University of Pennsylvania
• Chase Brown: Colorado College
• Matt Shepherd: Reed College, Washington University, or Northeastern University
• Mara Hoplamazian: Yale University or Gap Year
• Lilly Calman: Whitman College
• Bennett Hermann: Washington and Lee University
• Jeffrey Krasnow: University of Pennsylvania
• Sam Bartusek: Princeton University
• Isabel Licata: Scripps College
• Luke McGreivy: University of Vermont
• Kyle McGreivy: St Mary’s College
• Silas Crews: North Carolina State University
• Kendel Craig: Gap Year, than Oregon State University
• Vitaly Zaytseva: University of Toronto or Purdue University
• Lucas Gaylord: Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
• Kristian Gaylord: Columbia University / Sciences PO, French Campus
• Dylan Plunkett: Temple University
• Max Binder: Muhlenberg College
• Hannah Haines: Skidmore College
• Caroline Purkey: Arizona State University – Honors Program
• Jonathan Micay: Ryerson University
• Samantha James:  University of Alabama
• Isabel Licata: Scripps College
• Sidney Anderson:  Appalachian State University
• Elizabeth Duniec: University of Delaware
• Kyle Hennings: University of Arkansas
• Hannah Proudman: University of Denver
• Danny Nelson: Tufts University
• Sara Hakala: California Maritime Academy
• Avery Coombe: Carleton College
• Justin Friedman: Washington University, St Louis
• Kaylin Lattimer: Grand Canyon University
• Peter Baumbacher: University of Michigan, University of California at Los Angeles, or University of California at Berkeley
• Nicholas Moy: Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
• Patrick Callahan: University of St. Andrews in Scotland
• Dylan Torpey: St. Thomas Aquinas College
• Jack Hougaard: Boise State
• Nick Hougaard: Boise State
• Michael Bateman: University of Virginia – Jefferson Scholarship
• Adam Schwartz: University of Florida
• Dylan Butts: St  Lawrence University or University of Vermont
• Noah Perron: Queens College
• Jacob Sage: University of Central Florida
• August Howell: University of Oregon
• Eleanor Palmer: Appalachian State University
• Sasha LeTourneau: Queen’s College
• Matt Friedland: University of Indiana
• Cole Pierce: University of Iowa
• Erin Reisman: Providence College
• Sophia Laroche: University of Michigan
• Michael Lowry: Brevard College

Congratulations! We will always be proud of you, and we sincerely thank you for your contributions to our Adventure Treks communities over the years. We hope you will bring the AT culture of kindness and your strong work ethic to college. This next phase will be a time of intellectual exploration, meaningful contribution, and wonderful new friends. We hope that the lessons you have learned at AT will be a source of strength when you encounter the inevitable challenges that are part of the college experience. Please continue to pursue outdoor activities in college; you might consider joining your school’s outdoor club. Time spent engaged in outdoor activities is a great way to meet like-minded folks, and a wonderful way to stay grounded and gain perspective as you navigate the exciting whirlwinds ahead.

Here is some recent research you might find interesting:

• Students who get to know professors are the ones most likely to rate their college experience the highest.
• The sense of connection one feels towards their college community is directly correlated with one’s graduation rate.

We are excited to see many of you on Leadership Summit this summer and gratified that so many of our former AT students currently in college will be working with us this summer as counselors at our Camp Pinnacle campus.