National Outdoor Leadership School
Petzoldt was also an early Outward Bound Chief Instructor, and he wanted to establish a school which promoted concentrating on refining outdoor leadership skills.
June 8, 1965 marks the date of the founding and the first trip beginning at the trailhead of Hidden Valley Ranch where 100 male students went into the Wind River Range.
In the beginning, NOLS struggled with finances to provide necessities for outdoor trips, so Petzoldt and his early team developed the “uniform” made of Salvation Army donations.
NOLS has facilities in Alaska, Washington, Arizona, Utah, New York, Idaho, Chile, Mexico, Canada, New Zealand, the Yukon Territory, Tanzania, Scandinavia, and India.
[6] NOLS partnered with the University of Utah to offer college credit for courses, and helped create the U.S. Leave No Trace program.
In the summer of 2001, the crew of the Space Shuttle Columbia completed a 12-day, 50-mile expedition in the Wind River Mountains of Wyoming with NOLS Professional Training.
The summit attempt was not successful due to weather conditions, but the outreach work that NOLS and Expedition Denali members did before and after the expedition expanded the awareness of organizations and individuals about people of color engaging in the outdoors and in providing youth of color with role models to pursue their own outdoor interests.
Author James Edward Mills wrote The Adventure Gap, a book chronicling the expedition as well as the history of African Americans in the outdoors in the United States.
With their Vision 2020 plan,[8] the organization has committed themselves to building a diverse community, both among staff and students, by reaching out and supporting underrepresented groups.
[12] The Leave No Trace National Program began in the 1960s as the USDA Forest Service looked for ways to help people take care of the public lands they were visiting in increasing numbers.
The seven principles are:[14] Founded by Melissa Gray and Buck Tilton in Pitkin, Colorado in 1990 as a western branch of Stonehearth Outdoor Learning Opportunities (SOLO), the Wilderness Medicine Institute (WMI) was purchased by NOLS in 1999.
In January 2007, WMI entered into a partnership with Landmark Learning of Cullowhee, NC in order to provide wilderness medicine courses in the American southeast.
The curriculum's goal is to push students to use leadership skills and teamwork to rise up to challenges faced while on remote, backcountry excursions.
The seven skills of leadership are: expedition behavior, vision and action, communication, judgement and decision-making, self-awareness, tolerance for adversity, and competence.
Self-awareness is defined as the skill to realize, interpret, and respond to one's own personal needs, as well as recognizing strengths and weaknesses, and compensating for them accordingly.
Classes include a framework for classifying objective and subjective risks encountered in the wilderness with an emphasis on making thoughtful decisions.
[18] Additionally NOLS, along with Outward Bound USA and the Student Conservation Association, sponsors the Wilderness Risk Management Conference.
[28] The National Society of High School Scholars and NOLS team together to encourage members of NSHSS to pursue leadership development.
