Outdoor Adventure is Crucial for Healthy Development
The need for outdoor play and learning is essential for healthy development and overall well-being.
Customize an outdoor adventure for your school, summer camp, college, or other educational institution.
Scientifically proven benefits of outdoor adventure
Fosters resilience, problem-solving, and decision-making
Facing challenges out of one’s comfort zone increases self-confidence and resilience. On a guided adventure, participants can safely and securely improve their problem solving and decision making, individually and collectively.
Forms closer community bonds
Being in nature makes you happier and more focused while breaking down barriers and fostering bonding through shared challenge and awe. The collective experience of a day or overnight adventure encourages on-trail and in-camp collaboration, socializing, and a shared sense of empowerment when overcoming challenges.
Applies to all learning styles
The skills we teach in the backcountry are easily accessible to a wide range of learning styles, and our guides are experienced in delivering differentiated instruction to neurodiverse individuals.
Improves mental health
Time in nature has been scientifically proven to lower the physical markers of chronic and acute stress long after the adventure ends.
Provides essential technology detox
The average American child spends about 4 to 7 minutes a day playing outside and over 7 hours a day in front of a screen. Time outdoors is a pressure-free way to develop essential interpersonal skills and reset relationships to technology.
Valuable life lessons
Outdoor adventure experiences can provide transformative life experiences that students learn from far after the adventure ends.
Our youth are experiencing a convergence of stressors.
They are recovering from the effects of a pandemic in their formative years. They are navigating a world that is connected in a way that no adult can fathom, and they are doing so in a world that is less stable than it has been for a long time. An outdoor adventure is the perfect antidote to many of the challenges facing youth today.
Our Approach
Our wilderness experiential education programming guides students out of their comfort zone and teaches essential life lessons while building peer-to-peer bonding and providing students with a fun and exciting break from their day-to-day lives
Centered on principles of Positive Youth Development and the promotion of social-emotional learning (SEL), Destination Backcountry fosters safe and responsive opportunities for outdoor exploration and reflection that
Engage Authentically | Promote Peer Bonds | Expand Interests | Share Power | Challenge Growth
Common Topics
Ecology | Camping Skills | Leave no Trace Ethics | Outdoor Leadership | SEL Skills | Communication | Decision Making | The Psychology of Survival and more!
Previous Clients
Bard College
New Canaan Country School
Charter High School for Law and Justice
Eden Village Camp
C'E Montessori
"Besides being extremely experienced and professional outdoor guides, Dave and his crew from Destination Backcountry understand and connect with kids in authentic and meaningful ways. Each day we were with them, the guides, through both word and deed, helped our kids understand the importance of both independence and pushing yourself beyond your limits and interdependence and the importance of being a fully integrated member of a group."
Karl Palmgren
HEAD OF UPPER SCHOOL, NEW CANAAN COUNTRY SCHOOL