Meet Lauren Bond
Lead Canoe Guide & Founder
~Lauren, Lead Canoe Guide
Environmental Leadership MA (now called Resilient Leadership MA), Naropa
Transformational Wilderness Guide, Earth Based Institute
Our Expert Team
Monika Denise
(she/her)
Utah Guide
Monika Denise is a medicine woman of the soul, a songcatcher and grief tender at the intersections of stone and river. With a background as a board-certified art therapist and trauma therapist, Monika Denise founded Four Moons Howl LLC where she offers Soul Medicine for the Souljourner. Her offerings include 1:1 sessions, workshops, and collaborations. Since 2020, she has co-guided soulful canoe trips on the Green River in UT for The River’s Path. She comes alive in the red rock and is a grounding, healing presence that evokes transformation. Throughout every thread of her offerings, she is in service to inner liberation and healing—braiding together intuitive somatic support, sacred practices and therapeutic art as resources for individuals to live a life of authentic freedom in connection with body, earth, spirit and community. Learn more about her at fourmoons.earth
Gray Korslund
(they/she/he)
St. Vrain & Utah Co-guide
Hello, I’m Gray! I’m 19 years old as of March of 2025. I go by any pronouns, and I identify as nonbinary and transmasculine. I’ve been working on the water for 5 years now, and have fallen in love with everything weird and wacky about the river ecosystem. I’m your go-to unofficial expert about Colorado’s native reptile and amphibian species!
Guest Guides
Stasha Ginsburg
Threading The River Guide
Stasha guides people through threshold times using myth, embodied writing, and the wisdom of place. She holds a Master’s in Transformative Language Arts from Goddard College, is SomaSource certified, and has facilitated mythopoetic writing circles, seasonal celebrations, and rites of passage for over twenty years.
Her approach weaves fairy tales and folktales as initiatory maps with StoryBody and animist writing practices—tracking story through sensation, image, and movement. A former Waldorf educator, she creates brave witness circles where raw drafts become crafted prose, poetry, and spoken word.
At 19, she lived in Moscow during the collapse of the Soviet Union, an experience that shaped her understanding of story as a guide through upheaval. She founded The Wild Remembering, offering circles, mentorship, and seasonal gatherings. This river journey marks a new threshold in her own work.
Aealuz
Voices On The Water Guide
Aealuz is a soul folk vocal alchemist and song-catcher who sings for personal and collective transformation, spreading love and healing through her music. She serves a living ceremony of sound.
Her voice is a balm, a salve, and a sword that liberates illusion with sonic clarity and invites the listener into a space of wholeness and grace.
Weaving worlds of delicate acoustic nuance and earthy mama medicine, her voice and instrumentation blend themes of R&B, Jazz, Folk, and chant into a juicy and deeply immersive celebration of the sacred.
Aealuz creates a field that supports the discovery and exploration of our true nature as love, this light that we are at the core of all content and experience.
Her transmission offers a uniquely reverent and playful container that invites laughter, tears, movement, stillness, and the joining of voices in solidarity for the liberation of all.
Samara Jade
Singing The River Guide
Samara Jade is a writer and singer of catchy medicinal songs, holder of sacred space, spelunker of the underworld, and avid explorer and guide of the wilderness and inner landscape of the soul. Through her music, workshop facilitation and one-on-one “song doula” work, Samara stands in service to guide others through the processes of transformative creativity and animistic nature connection – while enchanting our inner and outer worlds through song. Samara lives in the Southern Appalachian mountains of North Carolina (Cherokee homelands), though strong tendrils frequently pull her to the Olympic Mountains of Washington State (s’Klallam/Chimacum). www.samarajademusic.com
Mica Sun
Singing The River Guide
Mica Sun works as an oral storyteller, actor, songwriter, musician, poet, playwright, producer, mythologist, stiltwalker, and clown for children and adults of all ages. Also a preschool teacher, permaculture certified landscaper, land-steward, and rites of passage facilitator, Mica is initiated in The Mankind Project. With creative partner Samara Jade, Mica has been touring an original two-person live mythobardic storytelling-and-song show across the country over the past year. Mica lives in Southern Appalachia, where he writes, performs, produces shows, and strives to develop better land-based community, while nurturing and carrying mythic and initiatory tales for the evolving world. www.micasun.com
Brighton Denevan
Rakes On The River Guide
I create large scale designs on the landscape, typically beaches, using simple tools and documenting with the latest drone technology. A rake is the primary implement of choice, though snow shoes, shovels and smaller fine detailing implements are used from time to time. I document these creations using a drone, capturing the steps of the process, sometimes catching the wash-away as the canvas is refreshed by the incoming tide. Snow, fire, and light designs are things I’ve briefly experimented with but would like to explore more in the future. I’ve always been fascinated by the natural world, spending great amounts of time in nature and working in gardens and on farms. Exploring the intersection of technology and nature, the precise and the organic, is the focus of my work.
For most of my life, my canvas was an 8.5 x 11” piece of paper. However, I watched my dad draw in the sand for almost 30 years and in 2020, I decided to pick up a rake and try transferring my art to a much larger canvas–the land(scape)! Since then I’ve produced over 1,000 projects, not only creating the compositions but also tackling the aerial photo/ video documentation/ storytelling. I’ve been flying drones for over 7 years and I am a commercially licensed UAV Pilot.
I’ve been hired for marketing campaigns, events, music videos, real estate, farms/ vineyards, video editing, etc. and use my aerial photography to help people get their story out to the world via video. I also have created precisely mapped logos and requested designs, using grids and graphs. One of my favorite things to do is execute a specific design that’s requested by the client and incorporate it into my own original design, mixing the commercially viable, ephemeral beach billboard, and the artistic esoteric whimsy.
Andy Pancakes
Rakes On The River Guide
Over the course of the last decade, Andy Pankakes has become a staple of the Santa Cruz music scene. From his early projects to his 100% Pure Maple record and through his current series of collaborations and projects, he has developed a personal sound and style that seamlessly blends elements of funk, soul, jazz, punk and folk. Throughout his musical ambitions Andy has maintained a poignant and purposeful voice, calling his listeners to be In The Moment, to Do Their Thing, and to feel a little Special sometimes. His shows are characterized by exuberance, audience participation, and a truly endearing and memorable personality and style.
Andy is a lover of Nature, and frequents the forests, rivers and beaches in his local Santa Cruz area. He’s been known to lead many a campfire jam and group participation is always encouraged. Popular Classics, Originals and spontaneous creations improvised on the spot can all be expected. As a team, Brighton and Andy have created one music video so far featuring Andy’s Music and they are excited to further explore this multimedia collaboration of recorded ephemeral art forms.
Recent career highlights include opening up for a sold out show at the Catalyst Club with Peter Cat Recording Co and the creation of his own Breakfast Themed event, Pankake Fest. 2024 saw the release of his debut album, “100% Pure Maple,” featuring Tammi Brown, Dan Robbins, Eddie Mendenhall and Javier Torres, who are among the creme de la creme of Bay Area session players. In 2025 he released the “Too Many Songs,” ep, a throwback to the angst of the 90’s, with a good dose of lighthearted humor thrown in.
Craig Childs
Utah Guide
Craig Childs is an author and a gap-toothed hopeless tracker of wonder. He was born in Tempe, Arizona and now lives between Telluride and the Utah border, married to a poet. He has a B.A. in Journalism from CU Boulder with a minor in Women’s Studies, and from Prescott College M.A. in Desert Studies. His work has appeared in The Atlantic, Outside, The New York Times, and he’s been featured on Radiolab and NPR’s Morning Edition. He has published more than a dozen books and is a contributing editor at Adventure Journal magazine.
Daiva Chesonis
Utah Guide
Daiva Chesonis was born in Baltimore, Maryland, and now lives off-grid in southwest Colorado. She has a B.A. in Russian Studies and an M.A. in Diplomacy & International Conflict Resolution. So naturally she moved to Telluride in 1992 as part of the team that built the Gondola transportation system. Was a snowboard instructor, Art Director at Telluride Magazine, and a traveling minstrel for Mountainfilm on Tour before becoming co-owner of Between the Covers Bookstore, where she co-founded the Telluride Literary Arts Festival. From 2019-21 she was San Miguel County Poet Laureate. In the fall of 2025, she and her writer husband Craig Childs were Writers in Residence at the Hemingway House in Ketchum, Idaho. Her first book of poetry is set to publish sometime this century.
John Roedel
Write Like The River Guide
John Roedel is an improv comedic who “stumbled” into writing a few years ago as his life began to fall apart all around him. During his dark night of the soul, John began to have fake conversations with “God” on Facebook to poke fun at his spiritual and personal crisis.
What began as a flippant way of making light of his doubts in the Divine turned into something he wasn’t at all prepared for: God wrote back.
Since creating the popular “Hey God. Hey John.” blog on Facebook three years ago, John has tackled such topics as his journey to mental health wellness, his lack of faith, the joy and pain of raising a child with autism, and grief, all in the form of a simple conversation with “God.”
Eventually, these conversations transformed straight into poetry that has touched people all around the world.
John has published four books: Hey God. Hey John., Any Given Someday, Untied, and Remedy
Past Guest Guides
Lyndsey Scott
The Way Knows Guide
As priestess of Earthkeeper Wisdom School, Lyndsey Scott weaves song through new-form ceremony in service of social justice. As a composer she catches and records earworm mantra with groove that nurture grounded spirituality. As Grant Wood Fellow at the University of Iowa School of Music, she invites students into the power of community singing as a technology of belonging needed for the liberation movements now being born. Learn more at www.lyndseyscott.earth
David Abram
Cultural Ecologist & Geophilosopher
David Abram is the author of The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World, and Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology. Described as “revolutionary” by the Los Angeles Times, as “daring” and “truly original” by the journal Science, David’s work engages the ecological depths of experience, exploring the ways in which sensory perception, language, and imagination inform the relation between the human animal and the animate earth. He was perhaps the first contemporary philosopher to advocate for a reappraisal of indigenous “animism” as a complexly nuanced and uniquely viable worldview – a broad reassessment which is now dramatically underway in many disciplines.
In the mid-1990s David coined the phrase “the more-than-human world” in order to speak of nature as a realm that thoroughly includes humankind, yet also necessarily exceeds humankind; the phrase has now been taken up worldwide within the broad movement for ecological sanity.
Currently the Senior Visiting Scholar in Ecology and Natural Philosophy at Harvard Divinity School, David recently held the international Arne Naess Chair of Global Justice and Ecology in Norway. He has received numerous awards, including Rockefeller and Watson Fellowships, and the international Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction. David is co-founder and Director of the Alliance for Wild Ethics (AWE), and a distinguished teaching Fellow of Schumacher College in England. He lives with his family in the foothills of the southern Rockies.
Fia
Voice Of The River Guide
Swedish artist and songwriter Fia has with her empowering music inspired hundreds of thousands of people around the globe. She is devoted to Goddess and on a mission to bring her medicine of the heart far and wide. Standing in solidarity with the Sámi people and their indigenous lands in northern Europe, she is a fierce earth guardian. Part of the profit of this journey will be donated to the Ute Indian Tribe whose land we will be traveling through, as a sign of respect and gratitude.
Anne Haven McDonnell
Poetry on the River Guide
Lauren Golten
Poetry on the River Guide
Caroline Lewis
River’s Wild Soul
Caroline is a storyteller, eco-therapist, leadership coach and facilitator of transformation in the wild.
She is the founder of Root Awareness, a community for highly sensitive women an non-binary folks choosing to step into their unique creative power and leadership during these threshold times.She is a humble expert on what it takes to holistically heal, transform, and align with who you truly are instead of what society has taught you to be.
She has worked with people around the world as a holistic and transpersonal psychotherapist, meditation teacher, podcast host, and wilderness guide. Her specialty is to support women and brave souls by connecting more deeply with inner and outer wildness and community in order to embody one’s inner creatrix.
She also believes that when sensitive folx choose to lean into the deep and joyful work of transformation and reciprocity, our Earth and greater collective community also heals and evolves.
Cate Burnett
Women’s River Rites Guide
Cate has a deep and soulful connection to wild places and all those who live there. She is a naturalist, wildlife tracker and wilderness guide, having spent over 25 years leading expeditions in the PNW and Hawaii. Her devotion to honoring the ‘wild and untamed’ stirrings within herself lends enthusiasm and passion to those she guides in the unfolding of deep self-reflection and discovery. She has trained with the School of Lost Borders, Rite of Passage Journeys and Animas Valley Institute and holds certifications in Wildlife Track & Sign, Native Plant Studies and is a Leave No Trace Instructor and Wilderness First Responder.