A panel of three women educators with the Friends of the Boundary Waters gathered online Thursday to talk about their work bringing Minnesota youth, many of them for the very first time, into the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness.
The webinar, titled “Women Guiding the Next Generation in the Boundary Waters,” was hosted in honor of International Women’s Day and spotlighted the organization’s education program, No Boundaries to the Boundary Waters. Panelists Alison Nyenhuis, Rachel Hedlund, and Emma Singer spoke openly about the transformative power of wilderness experiences for young people, the particular challenges and gifts of being women educators in outdoor spaces, and why even a miserable camping trip can change a kid’s life.
Building a program from personal experience
All three educators described arriving at wilderness education through indirect paths. Hedlund, who is based in Ely, recalled putting a canoe on her shoulders as a child at YMCA Camp Menogyn and knowing immediately it would define her life. Her parents, she noted with a laugh, were not campers. She went on to guide for Voyager Outward Bound School for a decade, leading 50-day expeditions in the Arctic and racing in events like the Yukon River Quest.
Singer described herself as a “mud child” who came to the Boundary Waters through scientific research before realizing, during a trip with her own students from a South Minneapolis charter school, that you could simply go outside and play, no field notes required. “That was super transformational,” she said.
Nyenhuis connected with the outdoors through college and a series of camp jobs before guiding at Wilderness Canoe Base on the edge of the BWCA, sometimes learning right alongside her campers. “I think I’ve always been really connected to nature,” she said. “But finding what they’re excited about ... that’s the real goal.”
What wilderness does for kids
The panelists described watching students undergo changes that formal classrooms rarely produce. Hedlund spoke of a teenager she has worked with through Ely Community Resource whose bearing and confidence were visibly different by summer’s end, the result of back-to-back wilderness experiences.
“Literally how they held their body and themselves and how they spoke was completely different than three months earlier,” she said.
Singer described a student who spent years defaulting to storming out of class or escalating conflicts, behaviors that simply weren’t possible in a canoe.
“When you are sitting in a boat, you can’t just storm out of the room,” she said. By the following school year, the student’s relationships with staff had shifted noticeably.
The educators also stressed that a negative experience on the trail isn’t a failed one. Students who “hate every minute” of a trip, Singer said, sometimes come off trail saying it was the best experience of their lives. Even when they don’t, they often return to school with improved emotional regulation, new coping skills, and a point of reference for managing stress.
“Even if being outside for a week was miserable and horrible,” Singer said, “their whole ability to self-regulate transforms.”
Nyenhuis added that not every student needs to fall in love with the Boundary Waters to benefit. The goal is planting a seed. A student who learned fire-building in a school parking lot, she said, is less likely to immediately shut down the next outdoor opportunity they encounter.
“We’re propping the door open for future experiences,” she said.
The panelists also pointed to a quieter benefit: social media withdrawal. Students who spend a week without their phones consistently report it as a highlight of the trip. Hedlund said that conflict on the trail must be handled face to face, rebuilding a social skill many young people have lost. She shared the story of a group of close-knit high school basketball players who reflected at the end of their trip that they wouldn’t have gotten as close if they’d had their phones.
Women in the wilderness
With International Women’s Day as the backdrop, the panelists were asked to reflect on what it means to be women doing this work and the complications that come with it.
Representation, Hedlund said, is the simplest answer.
“Seeing themselves in a role model or a teacher or a leader helps prop open that door — like, that could be me.” She credited the female guides she watched as a teenager at Menogyn for why she’s still competing in the Ely Portage Marathon relay.
But representation isn’t a straightforward story. Nyenhuis and Singer both described navigating cultural pressure on women in outdoor spaces to perform toughness, to carry the heaviest canoe, to push the hardest. Nyenhuis said that pressure has never matched who she is, and that being honest about that with students matters.
“I think like just finding where you fall in that and being true to yourself ... that helps you relate to students navigating where they fit in this outdoor space,” she said.
Singer added that modeling physical vulnerability — she has a recurring back injury that requires her to ask for help on portages — sends its own message to students whose bodies also work differently. “Being able to show up with who I am and who my body is and what my strengths are, and communicating that really transparently, can be kind of powerful,” she said.
Hedlund described encountering outright sexism on the water, including men at a race in the Yukon who told her women’s team they probably wouldn’t finish. They finished first in their division. But rather than letting anger be the only lesson, she said the most important response is to debrief with students afterward. That’s when learning can be further solidified.