Robin Bliss-Wagner has dedicated his career to teaching and mentoring children, teens, and adults in deep nature connection, survival skills, bird language, and tracking since 2004. His favorite thing to do has always been to be in nature. His love of the wilderness has led him on many adventures. From the Kalahari Desert to the UC Santa Cruz campus, he has studied nature and mentoring youth in many contexts, both academic and experiential. He has even lived for a summer in the stone age. Stories, earth skills, and nature’s wisdom from these experiences are the foundation of his work. Robin is a Waldorf graduate, and received his BA in Bioregional Studies with highest honors from UC Santa Cruz. Robin is a certified Wilderness First Responder through WMA International (75+ hours of wilderness first aid and CPR training). Also a blacksmith and fiddler, he lives in Southern Oregon with his wife and their three sons. www.NatureSkills.org
Taylor Cary and Ben Alexander
We have new folks assisting with programs this Fall and Winter. Taylor and Ben have years of experience working with youth, farming, raising animals, and practicing nature skills, and they also play music. We're excited to have them on the team this year. Keep an eye out for them helping with our youth programs and skills classes in the future.
We have new folks assisting with programs this Fall and Winter. Taylor and Ben have years of experience working with youth, farming, raising animals, and practicing nature skills, and they also play music. We're excited to have them on the team this year. Keep an eye out for them helping with our youth programs and skills classes in the future.
Stella Beauchamp
Growing up on 12 acres and homeschooling with her 3 siblings supplied ample time to play in streams, with wildlife and explore the trails nearby while maintaining a large garden, orchard and chickens and ducks. Since she was 3 years old she has been camping and backpacking regularly, including trips through the Colorado Collegiate mountain range, the Sierra Nevada’s Mt Hood and Mt St. Helens
Constantly craving dirt under her fingernails, Stella spends much of her time in her many gardens growing soil and supporting nature’s brilliant ecology. Over the past 3 years she has immersed herself in herbal studies learning the intricate healing abilities of our plant life. Stella has a deep life long passion for tending to the Earth, making medicine, and cooking meals with wild plants. She is currently in the process of building a natural post and beam straw bale house and building a homestead from the ground up. Stella is enchanted with the magic that the natural world provides and excited to share her enthusiasm for tending to and living in balance with nature’s rhythms.
Growing up on 12 acres and homeschooling with her 3 siblings supplied ample time to play in streams, with wildlife and explore the trails nearby while maintaining a large garden, orchard and chickens and ducks. Since she was 3 years old she has been camping and backpacking regularly, including trips through the Colorado Collegiate mountain range, the Sierra Nevada’s Mt Hood and Mt St. Helens
Constantly craving dirt under her fingernails, Stella spends much of her time in her many gardens growing soil and supporting nature’s brilliant ecology. Over the past 3 years she has immersed herself in herbal studies learning the intricate healing abilities of our plant life. Stella has a deep life long passion for tending to the Earth, making medicine, and cooking meals with wild plants. She is currently in the process of building a natural post and beam straw bale house and building a homestead from the ground up. Stella is enchanted with the magic that the natural world provides and excited to share her enthusiasm for tending to and living in balance with nature’s rhythms.
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Julian De Rubira
Julian spends much of his time out on the land with his herd of goats, making beautiful and useful things with his hands, learning and playing an assortment of instruments, and in the ocean surfing and spearfishing. In the last 10 years he has especially focused on hide tanning, leather work, weaving with natural fibers, animal processing, subsistence dairying, animal tracking, friction-fire, carving, and getting to know his local backcountry. Julian is able to mentor kids in deep nature connection and ancestral skills because he embodies those things in his day-to-day life. Julian has been sharing nature with youth since 2014. He is particularly excited to help others explore their relationship to fire, where our food comes from, all sorts of land-based craft, and to help people feel comfortable and at home in the natural world. Julian has stayed up-to-date on his Wilderness First Responder training for the last 6 years. He has led after school programs, summer camps, and backpacking trips in Southern California for the last 6 years with Wilderness Youth Project. |
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Ruby Beauchamp
Ruby has always had a strong affinity for nature and sense of adventure. Ever since her childhood, growing up in a strawbale house nestled against the woods and homeschooling as well as going to Waldorf school where she was encouraged to play in the elements, she has loved to be outside and explore. She loves nothing more than being in and around trees, which she has made her main passion and work for the past few years. Ruby climbs trees to harvest pine cones for reforestation and works with tree planting crews to replenish areas of severely burned forest. Ruby also works in organic farming and prides herself on being a successful entrepreneur. Outside of work, Ruby loves backpacking, bikepacking, circus arts, fiber arts (knitting and sewing), and reading, especially fantasy. |
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Rosie Hope is a 6th grade teacher from the Santa Cruz mountains. She enjoys crafting and being in nature. She has been teaching for 11 years and has been working with natural dyes for about 8 years, sharing her passion for color with youth of all ages.
Caroline Moody
Caroline is a Virginia native who loves nature, deep talks and laughter. With a background as a Wilderness Therapy Field Guide, High Ropes Challenge Course Instructor and Rock Climbing and Spelunking Guide, she loves a good romp around in the woods with a group of people eager to immerse themselves in the next adventure. She cares deeply about facilitating a healthy and supportive group culture and strives to bring out both the goofiest and tenderest parts of people. From having dance offs to late night talks around the fire, she loves the freeing feeling one gets from sleeping under the stars. She is on the journey of relearning how to live in alignment with our Earth and loves to water the seeds of curiosity and stoke the fires of passions in herself and others.
Caroline is a Virginia native who loves nature, deep talks and laughter. With a background as a Wilderness Therapy Field Guide, High Ropes Challenge Course Instructor and Rock Climbing and Spelunking Guide, she loves a good romp around in the woods with a group of people eager to immerse themselves in the next adventure. She cares deeply about facilitating a healthy and supportive group culture and strives to bring out both the goofiest and tenderest parts of people. From having dance offs to late night talks around the fire, she loves the freeing feeling one gets from sleeping under the stars. She is on the journey of relearning how to live in alignment with our Earth and loves to water the seeds of curiosity and stoke the fires of passions in herself and others.
Sugi Lumina Grace
Was raised by the woodlands of Appalachia, and began seasonal wilderness living in 2008 in those abundant moist hollers. She began bringing her love of camp counseling to Earth skills subjects through Primitive Skills Gatherings in 2008 and has continued to work with various Nature Connection schools over time. She loves to get away from the roads, and share from her deep Soul connection with Wilderness, the depth of which was a 3 year focus on high elevation goat-packing in Northern California.
Sugi has been trained and working in Coyote Mentoring since 2016 at Living Earth School, VA and completed a 9 months Mentor Apprenticeship with employment at Twin Eagles Wilderness School in Sandpoint, ID.
She currently lives in Ashland, and can usually be found in the garden if she isn’t out hiking and wild harvesting.
Was raised by the woodlands of Appalachia, and began seasonal wilderness living in 2008 in those abundant moist hollers. She began bringing her love of camp counseling to Earth skills subjects through Primitive Skills Gatherings in 2008 and has continued to work with various Nature Connection schools over time. She loves to get away from the roads, and share from her deep Soul connection with Wilderness, the depth of which was a 3 year focus on high elevation goat-packing in Northern California.
Sugi has been trained and working in Coyote Mentoring since 2016 at Living Earth School, VA and completed a 9 months Mentor Apprenticeship with employment at Twin Eagles Wilderness School in Sandpoint, ID.
She currently lives in Ashland, and can usually be found in the garden if she isn’t out hiking and wild harvesting.
Ira Christian
When he's not making instruments or leading a theater workshop in another state or overseas, Ira can be found sharing his love of nature, ancestral living skills, and poetry with kids, teens and adults. |
JT Beggs JT's connection to nature was fully realized as soon as he was old enough to cover himself in dirt. Since then he has found nearly every excuse to deeply immerse himself in the ocean, the garden and the wild lands that he calls his home. JT discovered the potential to make this a lifestyle when he met an old bear in the woods named Tim Corcoran. Since then he has continued his study with Tim, the founder of Headwaters, as well as Tod Haddow, Lynx Vilden and countless others. He has been sighted in numerous locations around the country playing his concertina, herding sheep, tanning hides and absorbing natural history. He is constantly on the trail of new experiences and skills that will build stronger ropes between humanity and the earth. JT can be spotted at Headwaters but only if you really take time to look, for his dream is to guide children and adults deeper into their relationships as members of the earth community in a personal and empowering way. JT has spent over six weeks of his life living off of excusively wild foods and loves finding ways of getting wild plants into every aspect of his life. |