The future is vast There may be a trip to Alaska in my future some day, and I doubt that you will move to Alaska and never leave it for a little vacation.

And I’ve been thinking about your question of how you get to do girls empowerment wilderness education, and I have a different answer than I did before. You do it the same way you get people to pay you for anything. You convince them that it’s something they need, and then you convince them that you are qualified to provide it. A lot of people already know that they are supposed to be doing things to make their daughters feel empowered, so that part society has already done for you (the same way that society tells people their cars should be clean, so all you have to do is show up with some flyers and some sponges). It’s remarkably easy to convince people that you are qualified to do things, as long as they themselves aren’t qualified to do it. For instance, I have no idea what qualifications Urban Scout has to teach Urban Scout’s Sunday School. Neither does anyone else, but teach it he does, and people come to it and learn cool stuff, so apparently he knows some shit.

So doing girls empowerment wilderness education is really not any harder than washing cars at an office building for the day. You show up somewhere where your target audience hangs out (the corner store? the mall? the skate park?) and hand out some professional-looking flyers with dates and contact information. Then you show up on that date and run around in the woods and talk about how to not act stupid around boys. That’s all there is to it.

I would LOVE to take pictures of you! I’m in Olympia, WA…about halfway between Seattle and Portland. Feel free to drop me an email (deandail at yahoo dot com) if you’re going to be in the area and you want some contact info.

And I would argue that you are a much more effective girls empowerment wilderness educator than I am, since I believe in modeling empowerment as a more effective teaching method than talking about it. But I understand your actual question, and the answer is that there are a few ways, but the easiest is by volunteering. That’s how I got into it. Specifically, the organization that I’m writing about in this essay is Passages NW. They are in Seattle, and they love having folks volunteer.

My true love is Wilderness Awareness School, and they offer classes on what they call “coyote mentoring” which is also a great way to get into it. I started out volunteering with them several years ago, and am now a regular instructor for them. Even as one of their instructors, I still have taken some of their classes and I highly highly recommend.

Which part is it that you want to do? Watch a sunrise? (I suspect you’ve seen a few.) Speak in tongues? (it’s not hard.) Work as a wilderness educator? (you already do.)