Hey Bro: Why wilderness work with young men is more important than ever

Summer 2025 will be our 11th season of WILD, and the work with the young men has never felt more critical.

‍
As we embark on another season, we take a moment to consider the context in which that work unfolds.
‍

For those who don’t know, WILD stands for Wilderness Immersion & Leadership Development. It’s our flagship rites of passage, backpacking summer camp, wilderness retreat, personal development experience for teenage boys in the Sierra Nevada Mountains of California.
‍

We take young men out for 7 and 10 day trips (depending on their age), and introduce them to a wide range of practices to cultivate mindfulness, develop leadership, and connect in intimate ways to the power and beauty of the natural world.
‍

It’s a chance for participants to contact their innate wildness, to spread their wings away from the familiarities of home and family, and to advance in the lifelong goals of individuation and actualization. Each trip is an opportunity to co-create small cultures of kindness and gratitude, to experience ourselves in new ways, to remember the ancient arts and contemporary pleasures of a life grounded in ritual practice, self-care, and a spirit of adventure. Together, through intergenerational council and dialogue, through a thousand daily acts of beauty and care, we aspire to inspire another generation of soul-centric, life-loving, gratitude-giving young men.
‍

And, for reasons I assume are clear to most, that work has only become more critical in the past decade.
‍

When we started WILD in 2014, we met lots of boys who were struggling in ways that were familiar to us from our own high school experiences. When we say they were struggling, that doesn’t mean they were failing to succeed. In the prevailing culture, in fact, it’s common enough for young people to be hitting all the high marks of what’s expected of them - good grades, athletic achievement, plenty of friends, on the path to college - and still be struggling mightily with the weighty human questions of how to feel good in one’s own mind and body; how to relate to the existential questions of purpose and authenticity; how to love one’s self.
‍

We also met plenty of young men who were, in fact, struggling to check the boxes of what the culture (and their schools, and their families) expected of them. Some were struggling to care enough about school not to fail out. Some were using drugs, alcohol and nicotine, not just in the ways that have become endemic in the culture (whole blog post coming on that subject), but that were starting to become genuinely worrisome as lifelong patterns. Many were hurt and angry, and taking it out, in ways big and small, on themselves and those around them.
‍

Most of all, we began tracking our guys’ mental health, and found that it didn’t really correlate one way or another with other, more legible forms of success or achievement. We, of course, knew adolescence to be a time of big emotions. (We were once hopeless romantics and angst-filled anti-authoritarians in our own rights.) But the prevalence of anxiety, depression, low self-esteem, in a variety of guises and expressions, surprised us. And in the years since, we’ve seen these struggles exacerbated by the disconnective properties of digital life, the dissociative haze of habitual dopamine overdose, the capture of the collective attention by powerful and psychologically sophisticated forces in the form of gaming, social media, and pornography, as well as the negative cycles of declining self-esteem that we all experience when comparing ourselves to others online. Needless to say, COVID didn’t help.
‍

And now, locating ourselves in the present conjuncture, here comes today’s toxic stew of anti-woke, misogynistic grievance, ranging from the casually unkind to the explicitly violent, egged on and profited from by a bizarre coterie of politicians, podcasters, pundits, authors, content creators, crypto enthusiasts, gamers, athletes, oligarchs, and influencers of all stripes. Bro culture, in its least savory aspects, is one of the ascendent cultural forms of the moment. Which is dangerous. It’s dangerous to the hearts, minds, and spirits of young men who absorb the lie that what’s wrong with the world is that they’ve been dispossessed of something they deserve - money, status, sex. It’s dangerous to women and girls, who must then navigate a cultural landscape rife with angry, aggrieved and entitled young men. It’s dangerous for people everywhere, because the aggrieved male ego, in its tendency to belittle, demean, and dehumanize, is inextricably linked to bullying, harassment, sexual violence, war, occupation, and imperialism. It’s dangerous for the earth, because a sense of entitlement rather than gratitude, and righteousness rather than humility, has always been a precursor to ecocide and the plunder of our precious planet.
‍

So that’s the context, the tough stuff. Stakes are high. The future is unknown. The good news, however, is that despite everything, the wilderness is there for us. The wildness inside of us lives on. Our actual tether to the source of life is intact; we can find it again, if we learn how to look. Anxiety and depression can lift. Confidence, authenticity, and self-love are ours to reclaim, continually over the arc of our lives, in ever more significant and textured ways. Lives of purpose, meaning, and service are ours to live, if we only catch the scent of the trail that leads their way. On each of these counts, time in nature helps immeasurably. The guidance of good mentors as well. We know from experience, on both sides of the coin.
‍

We know the mischief and mayhem that young men are capable of when untethered from intact nature and intact culture. We recognize the powerful economic and political forces seeking to capture young men’s attention and energy for their own profit and empowerment. It’s true at every age. But adolescence, as a time of searching, identity formation, new hormones, strong emotions, and still not fully developed frontal cortexes, is a particularly vulnerable time.
‍

We also know the beauty, courage, and genius of adolescence, especially when well trained and tempered, focused on something worth paying attention to. Lucky for us, the mountains are calling. And while they change only minutely from year to year, they remain infinitely worth paying attention to.
‍

Sometimes the simplest acts are the most profound. “Lay on the earth,” I tell my guys. “Let your mama hold you.” And they do. They lay back on the warm granite, find a little pillow of wildflowers, fall into a daydream, or even a soft slumber, lulled backwards and forwards into the truth of their best selves by the sound of clean water running in its ancestral river beds. Delightful nap, or sub-conscious rewiring of the cellular circuitry to align with life itself? The answer, clearly, is yes.
‍

Eli Marienthal is a founder and lead guide for Back to Earth’s Wilderness Immersion & Leadership Development program. You can check out the schedule for Summer 2025 here.

‍