Rites of Passage Wilderness Programs

My wife and I created our life-changing wilderness therapy company in 2009 and have had the opportunity to help a growing number of families in the past few years. I received my MBA in 2012 from Grantham University and am currently working towards my PhD. As a Captain serving in the US Army guard since 2004 and working as a pioneer in the Wilderness Therapy industry, I have been blessed with leading people through a variety of challenging and unique experiences. After seeing the suffering in Afghanistan, the second poorest place on earth, I decided to make a difference when I came back home. The experience of serving with soldiers and teaching students in the States has given me a gift and purpose of impacting the lives of others. It is a true blessing to see our ROP students grow and become emotionally mature and self supportive. There is nothing more rewarding than helping people and there is nothing more healing than the wilderness. Our professionals are amazing life changing individuals that I am so proud of. Our wilderness therapy program brings broken families together and implements healthy changes in individuals and in the whole family dynamic. We run both your child’s program and the family program simultaneously and in doing so, we achieve excellent results fast. I could not have created this experience without the help from so many other people over the years. I look forward to meeting you and being a part of this special process with you.

Kris has been working in the mental health field for 11 years. Her experience ranges from: working with children and adolescents in schools providing individual and group mental health counseling, providing suicide assessments for the local school district, working collaboratively with Children's Protective Services (CPS) as a Family Preservation therapist, providing mental health first aid for natural disasters, doing individual, group and family wilderness therapy for Rites of Passage and most recently, providing mental health assessments in crisis services within the emergency department at St. Peters Providence Hospital, Olympia WA. She has worked with people of all ages, from many walks of life and with many different mental health conditions. Her favorite way to spend free time is with her children and in the outdoors. She would always prefer to be walking, hiking, camping, rock climbing, swimming in lakes or the ocean, kayaking, canoeing, skiing or just sitting outdoors. She has faithfully been an outdoor enthusiast and has practiced yoga for the past 18 years. She is a passionate believer in wilderness therapy because she has seen firsthand its positive impact on people and how it changes lives.