ADULT Mountain QUEST

Ages 18 + | Dates TBA | Return to Adult Programs

Find and hold a strong sense of self, and a sense of meaningfully contributing to your community, in these times of change, strife and opportunity...

Program Details | Sample Itinerary | Program Staff | Other Programs

Claim Your Power in Changing Times

As our world grows more complex, confusing and divided, more and more of us find our lives feelingly similarly disjointed. How do we find or hold a strong sense of self, and a sense of meaningfully contributing to our community, in these times of change, strife and opportunity? For generations, around the world, the quest to answer these questions has looked to nature as a source of clarity and inspiration. The mirror of nature holds up for us a powerful, clear reflection about who we are and what we can offer the world. It is a doorway into a more fulfilling, more meaningful path through life.

Quests like these are always both deeply personal and at the same time collective. As humans, we require both inner clarity and also external acknowledgment from others whom we trust and respect. The magic of Adult Mountain Quest is that the mirror of Nature is coupled with the powerful mirroring you will share and receive from the other questers, and the guides, as you journey together into the mountains.

Your Journey

You will backpack five days into the high valleys of the Cascades or Olympic mountains, exploring the majesty and serenity of the high country, in preparation for your 72-hour Solo Fast experience. After your Solo, you will rejoin your group and spend a day of reflection and recuperation at your high basecamp. Four more days on the trail back down the mountain will provide you with many opportunities to understand and integrate what you received on your vision fast. A final welcome back ceremony from the Journeys community of fellow seekers will send you forward into your life with a firm anchor point, and skills and tools to carry what you have learned and become into the journey of the rest of your life.

Setting out to find a clearer reflection of yourself in Nature, and in the eyes of other longing souls, is exhilarating. But it is rarely an easy journey. Prepare to be tested and challenged! As you explore your story of who you are, who you are becoming, and who you want to be, the mirrors will constantly ask: “Are you sure? Who are you really?” Often, it is in the places where we are most assured about ourselves and our identities, that we find the greatest growth and transformation. Often, where we are looking is not the place we truly need to explore. A Quest is an adventure and an ordeal. The reward is measured mostly by the effort, and the willingness to accept the unexpected. Your journey will be ecstatic, frustrating and humbling.

Your Guides are an essential part of your Quest experience. They are deeply versed in the language of Nature, and will help you to expand your perceptions to be able to more easily see and hear (and smell, and touch) the ways in which Nature is speaking to you. Similarly, they are very familiar with the terrain of your inner journey, and can help you come to know yourself better — both in how they invite your authentic self, and by helping you to identify the habitual defensive patterns we all carry that resist your desire for fuller self-knowledge and expression. Perhaps most importantly, they understand how to facilitate a collective process of revelation and mirroring for a group of seekers — a process that requires people to feel safe enough to take the risk of being more than you have yet allowed or believed yourself to be.

registration opens oct. 15, 2024

PROGRAM DETAILS

Ages 18 +
All Genders

Dates TBA by 10/4/2025

Olympic Mountains
Program starts/ends at Journeys basecamp in Bothell, WA

Deposit $500.00
Financial Aid is currently available!

Food: Participants provide their own breakfasts, lunches and snacks, while dinners are provided for the group. Detailed guidelines available upon registration.

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registration opens oct. 15 2024

Questions? Check out our FAQ page or send us a message!

How is Adult Mountain Quest Different Than Adult Wilderness Quest?

There are two ways in which our adult quests are different by design:

Trip Format

Adult Mountain Quest (AMQ) is a backpacking trip, and participants will carry everything they need for the 13-day quest on their backs up into the mountains. Adult Wilderness Quest (AWQ) will be centered at a basecamp in the forest that is accessed by vehicle — car camping, basically. The main distinction here is that AWQ is designed to be less physically challenging, and AMQ explicitly incorporates the potential difficulty of the trail as a part of the “trials” of the quest.

Internal Orientation and External Orientation

Both of our adult quests are designed with the understanding that humans, in our quest to become more fully ourselves, require opportunities that are both internally and externally oriented. Internally oriented experiences are those that allow us to reflect on the stories and narratives that define us by creating opportunities to invite that story to speak itself — through quiet meditation, sharing circles and council, and writing practices. Externally oriented experiences are those that put us in direct contact with powerful, authentic forces such that our deeper self is called forth. By design, Adult Wilderness Quest emphasizes internally oriented experiences and the “crucible of council,” and incorporates more facilitated group and individual activities that invite participants into the terrain of their transformation imaginally. Adult Mountain Quest emphasizes the “crucible of the trail” — both the trials of the terrain, and also the trials of working together and relying on each other in the expedition setting. Both trips attend to both of these orientations, finding opportunity wherever it arises. And, the design of the trips are different on purpose. Some questers will thrive in a setting of sharing in council, and others will find enlivenment by dancing with the landscape on the trail.

Learn More about Adult Wilderness Quest

Important Note:

Adult Mountain Quest is not a Wilderness Therapy program, and is not intended to provide therapeutic support or counseling for those in need of psychological help. Our guides are deeply skilled in the process of soul exploration. Even those who may have formal training as therapists or mental health providers are not hired to engage in that practice out on the trail. Individuals struggling with emotional or psychological dynamics may find that a trip like this stimulates their underlying issues beyond the ability to manage them, and the trip and the guides are not trained to provide support in such situations. If you have concerns about this, especially if you are working with a therapist or counselor, we highly recommend you discuss your situation with us before registering for Adult Mountain Quest. We want to make sure that this trip is a good match for your current situation and capability.

Program Staff

Colleen bishop

Colleen is a doctoral student of Integral and Transpersonal Psychology with an emphasis in Somatic Psychology at CIIS, and holds a MA in Transpersonal Ecopsychology from Naropa University. She serves as co-director for Alchemy of Prana--a nature-based nonprofit organization fostering the liberation of deep consciousness and relationship with the natural world. . .

Colleen Bio

AMQ Program Guide

Colleen Bishop was raised in Philadelphia, PA. Her ecological identity was first birthed through the ocean and sand along the eastern coast of the USA. She began a career path in Elementary Education before hearing the call to nature. After living closer to the eastern coast in her mid-twenties, she eventually found herself in Landstuhl, Germany for two years, in which she discovered an affinity and profound loving connection with the Black Forest. In some ways, the connection began the path toward contacting the wholeness of the natural world, which eventually carried her to the "crazy wisdom" that Chogyam Trungpa founded Naropa University on and where she met and committed to deep loving with her beloved and now husband, Thompson Bishop. Together, they now call home a majestic narrow crystalline river valley within the Great Mysteriousing of the Western Slope Region of the Rocky Mountains in Colorado. Colleen is a doctoral student of Integral and Transpersonal Psychology with an emphasis in Somatic Psychology at CIIS. She is also a graduate alumni of Naropa University and holds a MA in Transpersonal Ecopsychology. She serves as co-director for Alchemy of Prana--a nature-based nonprofit organization fostering the liberation of deep consciousness and relationship with the natural world. Colleen is also an ultra trail runner, yoga instructor, and a trained wilderness rite of passage guide, in which she serves as a bridge for the meeting of flesh and spirit to help guide human beings through transitions and rites of passages using the vision fast model through the School of Lost Borders. Her work in the world interweaves a deep dive into understanding the relationships between psyche, body, nature, service, and spirit in a ceremonial & heart based way that give voice to the myriad of ways we practice consciously navigating surrender (severance), the unseen liminal space (threshold) and birth (initiation) again and again. Her vibrant presence and soft voice speaks to the fierce loving she embodies. Colleen's dharma involves *being* in conscious, loving, embodied, connected and sacred relationship with all of life and in midwifing/bridging the death-birth doorway with Earth-body and spirit through ceremony and ritual.