Sometimes meaningful change needs more space than a therapy office can provide.
Customized, multi-day wilderness sea kayaking trips offer an opportunity to step away from the routines, noise, screens, and demands of everyday life and spend several days immersed in Alaska's wild places.
These trips combine the experience of a backcountry expedition with intentional therapeutic work, designed around the needs of an individual, couple, family, or small group.
This isn't simply therapy transplanted into a kayak. The wilderness itself is part of the experience.
Days are shaped by weather, tides, wildlife, movement, meals, rest, conversation, and the practical rhythms of living outside. Therapeutic work can happen while paddling along a quiet shoreline, walking a beach, sitting around a fire, or talking over coffee in the morning. There is room for intentional conversation—and room for silence.
Why Wilderness?
Modern life provides very little true quiet.
Work, responsibilities, phones, information, entertainment, and constant availability leave remarkably little space to notice what is happening internally. Even recreation can become another stream of stimulation.
Wilderness changes the equation.
In an untrammeled landscape, many of the usual distractions disappear. Days become simpler and more immediate: weather, water, food, warmth, movement, sleep, and companionship. There is physical challenge without the contrived urgencies of modern life, and solitude without necessarily being alone.
Being immersed in wilderness for several days creates space for attentiveness and connection—to ourselves, to other people, and to the world immediately around us. Patterns that are difficult to see amid the noise of everyday life can sometimes become clearer when much of that clutter is removed. The majesty of nature reminds us that the world is much larger than our immediate problems, and helps us gain perspective on our struggles.
The goal isn't to conquer the wilderness. It is to spend enough uninterrupted time in it to experience what becomes possible when life gets quieter.
Wilderness Came First
My path to becoming a therapist began long before I entered the counseling profession.
I began guiding in 1997, leading backpacking, spelunking, and snowshoeing trips in the Four Corners region. From there, my work took me into increasingly varied backcountry environments.
I guided horseback trips in Denali and 26-day wilderness expeditions in Washington State that combined backpacking in Olympic and North Cascades National Parks with sea kayaking, sailing, and cycling in the San Juan Islands.
In Alaska, I guided multi-sport wilderness trips involving rafting, canoeing, glacier travel, hiking, and sea kayaking. I spent two years guiding sea kayaking out of Valdez and also taught sailing there. I then spent six seasons working as a backcountry sea kayak ranger in Alaska's Tongass and Chugach National Forests.
Along the way, I earned Level 2 sea kayaking certification through the British Canoe Association and certification through the American Sailing Association, as well as Level 1 avalanche safety certification. My professional outdoor experience has included sea kayaking, sailing, backpacking, rafting, canoeing, glacier travel, snowshoeing, cycling, horseback travel, and caving.
Those years weren't simply an earlier career that happened before I became a therapist. They helped lead me here.
Guiding puts you alongside people when they're outside their usual environments. You see what happens when plans change, people get tired, weather rolls in, confidence gets tested, someone discovers they're capable of more than they expected, or a group has to figure something out together.
You also see what happens when people spend enough time away from ordinary life that the noise begins to fall away.
Those experiences shaped my interest in people, resilience, relationships, coping, change, and the ways our environments affect us. Eventually, that path led me into counseling.
Therapeutic wilderness sea kayaking brings those two parts of my professional life back together.
Your Trip, Not a Preset Retreat
These are not large, scheduled retreats with a predetermined therapeutic agenda.
Each trip is developed around the people participating.
An individual trip might create space to work through a major transition, grief or loss, burnout, questions about direction, or something that has felt difficult to move through in traditional therapy.
A trip for a couple or family might focus on connection, communication, navigating change, or simply creating enough uninterrupted time together to have conversations that everyday life rarely allows.
A small group may come together around a shared experience or therapeutic purpose.
The itinerary, pace, degree of physical challenge, amount of solitude, therapeutic focus, and level of support can all be tailored accordingly.
And there doesn't need to be a therapeutic conversation happening every minute. Some of the most valuable parts of a wilderness experience occur in the spaces between conversations.
Supported Expeditions
Being immersed in wilderness doesn't mean participants need to spend the entire trip managing expedition logistics.
Depending on the location, group, and objectives, trips may include additional professional support such as experienced sea kayaking guides and camp assistants. A dedicated cook may also accompany the group, allowing participants to spend less time managing meals and more time immersed in the experience. That being said, it is important that all participants come prepared to work as a team, participate in the physicality of living outdoors, and come with a spirit of willingness to learn, engage, and be challenged.
Additional professional staff also allow wilderness safety, expedition logistics, and therapeutic facilitation to be appropriately supported rather than asking one person to do everything at once.
The intention isn't to create a luxury retreat in the wilderness. It's to take care of enough of the logistical burden that participants can be fully present while preserving the simplicity, participation, challenge, and authenticity of backcountry travel.
What a Trip Might Look Like
There isn't a standard itinerary.
A day might begin slowly with a check-in over coffee and breakfast on the beach before breaking camp. We might paddle for several hours, stop somewhere along the shoreline for lunch, explore on foot, watch wildlife, or stay put because the weather has decided that's today's plan.
There may be intentional therapeutic conversations along the way. There may also be long stretches when nobody needs to say very much at all. There may be time established for journaling, painting, meditation, or reflective thought.
We establish the purpose of the trip before leaving and build enough structure around that purpose to make the experience intentional - without trying to choreograph every moment of it.
Wilderness has its own agenda. That's part of the point.
"The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step"
-Lao Tzu
Therapeutic, But Still Wild
Remote wilderness environments carry inherent risks. Weather changes. Seas change. Wildlife appears—or doesn't. Routes and schedules sometimes need to change with conditions.
Every trip therefore begins well before launch day, with careful consideration of participants, location, physical demands, equipment, conditions, appropriate staffing, and emergency planning.
No previous expedition experience is necessarily required. What matters is finding an experience appropriate to the participants rather than forcing participants into a predetermined expedition.
Is This Right for You?
Therapeutic wilderness sea kayaking excursions aren't appropriate for everyone. Prospective participants are screened before a trip is planned to determine whether a remote, multi-day experience is clinically and physically appropriate.
These trips may be particularly well suited to people who are comfortable outdoors—or interested in becoming more comfortable outdoors—and who are looking for something more immersive than a traditional therapy session.
They are not a substitute for emergency, acute psychiatric, medical, detoxification, or other higher-level care.
Begin the Conversation
Every expedition begins with a conversation.
We'll talk about what is bringing you to this experience, what you hope to get from it, who would participate, your experience and comfort outdoors, and what kind of environment and level of challenge might fit.
From there, a trip can be built around the people taking it—not the other way around.
Location, duration, staffing, therapeutic goals, physical demands, and cost are determined individually during the planning process.