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About

"I didn't know if the changes in my son would last, but they have passed the test of time."

Our Counseling Approach

We utilize proven treatment methodologies to help your teen and our time-tested approach fosters significant positive change in a short period of time. In addition, ours is the only therapeutic wilderness program in the country where a master’s level therapist, with drug and alcohol counseling experience, is a member of the staff team that resides in the field with the adolescents. This creates an unmatched therapeutic relationship resulting in remarkable outcomes for children. Outcome research indicates that 83 percent of teens report they are “doing better” after their wilderness therapy experience.

In our program, your child will take part in:

Individual Therapy

Our therapist and counselors work with your child to examine their thoughts, feelings, behaviors, and the relationships and patterns between them, so that they can better understand themselves and the issues that cause them to struggle. We also work to resolve frustrations, fears, angers, and felt inadequacies that may have led to your child's problems.

Counseling is individualized and focuses on:

Group Therapy


In group therapy a safe environment is established that creates trust and enables your child to openly express his or her feelings within a group of peers. The group sessions are staff directed and your child is encouraged to openly give and receive feedback. One of the biggest values of group therapy is that your son or daughter will be interacting with other participants who may be facing similar issues to the ones he or she faces. Your child can begin to see that they are not alone in their struggles and that there is hope and help. It is comforting to hear from other teens that may have a similar difficulty or have already worked through a problem that deeply disturbs another group member. The group interaction also offers your child the opportunity to learn more about the way they interact with others.

Psycho-education Groups


Psycho-educational groups focus on educating your child about a variety of treatment issues with the goal of helping them to understand and better cope with some of their challenges. Discussions focus on strengths and resources and coping skills are reinforced. Our groups are customized to meet the unique needs of the participants that make up each expedition.

Topics may include:

These topics are often explored further during group therapy where our staff emphasizes accountability and choice, along with encouraging an open and honest exploration of emotions.

Substance Abuse Intervention and Prevention Programming

We address issues of substance abuse by helping your child to understand the effects of substance use, how to identify addiction issues, and to look into the reason they are self-medicating. We offer valuable relapse and recovery information, helping your son or daughter to indentify triggers and to craft a life change plan to outline steps to recovery upon their return home. Your child will take part in two chemical-use assessments and we will introduce them to the Alcoholics Anonymous 12 Step process. In Phase II, your child will have the opportunity to attend several 12 Step meetings.

Therapeutic Journaling


Therapeutic journaling helps your child to focus on what troubles and frustrates them and to understand more clearly what is important to them. Journaling helps your teen improve his or her ability to gain insight. It shifts perspective so that your child may begin to see issues differently. Our staff provides your child with topics to write about that are thought-provoking and specific to his or her individual challenges.

Milieu Therapy


Milieu therapy is a planned treatment environment in which everyday events and interactions are therapeutically designed for the purpose of producing and supporting changes in behavior. The objective of the therapeutic milieu is to provide a clearly delineated set of expectations together with a secure, nurturing environment. In the special therapeutic environment of our wilderness therapy program, the wilderness setting and the processes of outdoor living are important factors in the therapeutic milieu. Here participants can develop a sense of trust in staff and other participants such that they can share and scrutinize their problems, feelings and beliefs. In the process, the milieu provides a means by which a participant can integrate new and positive experiences, using these experiences to increase understanding and self-esteem, and to practice new, adaptive living and relationship skills. All staff serve as role models to assist participants with learning improved problem solving, self-care, familial roles, and individual and community relationship skills.

Activity/Recreational Therapy

Activity/recreational therapy is built into wilderness living and is an important component of treatment. Activity therapy includes managing backpacks, hiking, setting up camp, fire-building, cooking, managing personal hygiene and human waste in the outdoors, and other activities of expedition life. These activities are designed to increase trust of self, willingness to take personal risks, and learning to assess the balance between risk and reward. Skill mastery improves positive self-expression and increases self-confidence. In addition, these activities will improve your child’s cardiovascular fitness, improving strength and conditioning, and developing coordination skills in both small and large muscles. Skill learning also contributes to intellectual development for adolescents, and is particularly useful for those with ADHD, ADD, or learning disabilities for whom traditional academic teaching, and sometimes the verbal interactions of clinical therapy, are less accessible and rewarding. Lifestyle-wise, we hope that camping, backpacking, and cooking skills learned will contribute to future positive recreation, and that the nutrition and self-care lessons will improve the daily health, independence and self-confidence of our graduates.

Family Therapy

We take a family systems approach to working with our teenage participants in the field. Our theoretical approach is structural family therapy, which is best designed to help adolescents understand how families are supposed to function so that they can grasp the areas of dysfunction in their family and work on how to deal with those. We think it is crucial to do this work directly with our participants, and to keep it active in the background of all our work with them, since our participants will soon return to living with their families or at least to being directly involved with their family system.

We consider it essential that parents are involved in therapy while their child is in our program and that they continue with this upon their child’s return home. We’ve found that when parents actively address the family structure, communication skills, and parenting consistency, that they are better prepared to support their child's personal growth and development and positively impact the outcome of their child’s wilderness therapy program. Our wilderness therapy program provides multi-family sessions at the beginning and end of each expedition. Some of the family meetings involve experiential family activities and initiatives that are designed to address a wide range of family dynamics.

Experiential Activities


Experiential activities are a proven and creative way to explore treatment issues in a non-threatening and dynamic way and they help your child develop a variety of strengths. For example, through a group initiative your child can work on communication skills and collaborative problem-solving. Your child will also have the opportunity to eventually lead an experiential activity and explore there own leadership potential. We also involve parents and their child in experiential activities that address common family dynamic issues.

Behavior Management

Behavioral management protocols are used for responding to a child’s dysfunctional behaviors within the therapeutic milieu. Interventions implemented to address these behaviors are tailored to the therapeutic needs of the individual participants. Unlike boot camps where behavior is typically managed in a punitive manner, our behavioral management strategies follow a progressive intervention model including redirection through verbal cuing, self-monitored time out, staff-directed time out in an area slightly apart from the rest of the group, and therapeutic holding. Therapeutic holding is used only when a participant is a danger to him or herself, others, the environment, or is resistant to necessary transportation. All of the above described de-escalation techniques or interventions, are implemented by staff who have completed our extensive training program or are supervised by the expedition therapist.