Southwest Lightweight Backpacking

Our school began in a small cabin in Sinks Canyon, Wyoming in 1965 as the National Outdoor Leadership School. At that time, we were primarily a wilderness skills school, doing our work in various mountain ranges and focusing on what teaching leadership in the outdoors meant. Today, we are NOLS, a multifaceted, wilderness school that supports thousands of students each year all over the world.

For us, it’s always been about how well we can serve our students. In the beginning, our founder Paul Petzoldt dreamt of nurturing leaders who knew how to live responsibly in the wilderness and teach others to do the same. One way we’ve evolved to better accomplish that has been by offering more diverse courses and trainings. Today, we focus on teaching leadership in many contexts, from leading during a medical emergency to a wilderness expedition, to training company executives, to helping our industry as a whole better manage the risks we face in the wilderness.

Our story since 1965 is one of resilience and determination, passion and pushing the limits of our expertise. We are thriving today because of the grit we developed by necessity in our early years. We invented outdoor gear when it didn’t exist, recovered from financial struggles that could have sunk the school, handled the loss and celebrated the return of our provocative founder, and reflected and learned when one of our community experienced loss or injury in the wilderness.

We’re also thriving because of the way our school has diversified and grown over the years. The wild forms the core of every aspect of the school, and the interrelationship of our various parts makes us stronger. NOLS Wilderness Medicine, founded as the Wilderness Medicine Institute, was instrumental in promoting and elevating the quality of wilderness medicine in the field's early days. It has enabled our wilderness medicine curriculum to be constantly tested and improved in the outdoors and led us to improved practices. Our years of managing risk for our own programs has become part of the expertise we share through risk management consulting and a yearly conference that promotes dialogue about risk in the industry. Being able to offer customized courses, in turn, has enabled us to reach larger audiences and test ways to keep our leadership curriculum relevant in many environments.

Today, our students are learning on oceans and in classrooms, in rivers and in conference rooms. Our curriculum resonates as much with a student just beginning high school as it does with an astronaut, entrepreneur, or outdoor program director; and each of these students shows us new ways to view and teach leadership.

As we strive to support growth in our students and continue to grow as leaders ourselves, we work together to leverage the strengths of each part of the school so we can continue to step forward boldly into the wild, no matter what that wild looks like, and help the world’s future leaders do the same.

NOLS is a non-profit school that seeks to help you step forward boldly as a leader.

We believe that anyone can be a leader; it’s our role to provide the environment and training to help you discover your full potential. We do that in classrooms close to home and in remote wilderness areas around the world.

We’re an organization with heart, expertise, and wildness, and these qualities help us support powerful, authentic experiences.

Our Mission And Values

Our mission is to be the leading source and teacher of wilderness skills and leadership that serve people and the environment. Our community—staff, students, trustees, and alumni—shares a commitment to wilderness, education, leadership, safety, community, and excellence