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
Diane Laughlin
(she/her)
Day Trip Guide
I began canoeing rivers and lakes in Texas in 1972 and continued when I moved to Colorado in 1977. Many adventures followed in the Grand Canyon, Idaho, Utah, Colorado, and Alaska. Being a horticulturalist in my summer job and a birding enthusiast I’ve enjoyed seeing great plants/flowers and birds while boating. Teaching skiing is my winter love and boating is my summer joy. I’m a lucky person!
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!
Adrea Doré
(she/her)
Utah Co-guide
Adrea Doré is a ceremonialist, wilderness threshold guide, dream tender, intuitive shamanic guide, and photographer living amidst the ocean and forest canopy of the Quimper Peninsula in Washington State (s’Klallam and Chimacum homelands). She delights in deep presence with the more-than-human world and practices multidimensional listening as a way of inquiring into the mysterious depths of existence—and the sacred art of living and dying.
In rewilding her being and falling in love with Grandmother Earth, Adrea came to feel the deep tenderness and belonging to rivers, stones, animals and ancestors. From this place of remembrance, she invites others into sacred reciprocity—listening with the bones of their being and tending the Earth as kin.
Adrea draws on the wisdom of dreams, shadow work, somatic knowing, and pan-cultural practices of shamanic journeying and vision fasting. Her background includes yoga, somatic therapy, feminine mystery arts, eco-psychology, and shamanic healing. She also brings the grounded presence of an experienced Registered Nurse in Acute and Palliative Care, where she apprentices to the fragile, impermanent nature of life.
Learn more about her at rootedheartwisdom.com
Larry Soll
(he/him)
Utah Co-guide
Larry Soll has been guiding Canoe trips since the early 1990s, from the Boundary Waters of Minnesota, to the Florida Everglades, to northern Washington. He instructed for Outward Bound for over 10 years and has led trips for Colleges, High schools, and his local community wherever he lives. Larry is a licensed marriage family therapist, as well as an instructor in peer mediation. He is also a Somatic Experiencing practitioner trained in tracking somatic responses to emotional challenges. He’s excited to be back on the river and sharing adventure and tranquility, introspection and connection with nature.
Guest Guides
Eva Jahn LPC
Utah Guide
Eva is the executive director and co-founder of the Climate Emotional Resilience Institute and a licensed psychotherapist working at the intersection of trauma, gender-based violence and climate distress. She is an international experiential educator and speaker and her work is influenced by studies in complex trauma and resilience, climate psychology, ecopsychology, neuroscience, nature-based and contemplative mindfulness practices, the Work That Reconnects and her multi-cultural background. Eva is passionate about understanding the immediate mental health impacts of climate related disasters and long-term stressors of living with the reality of this polycrisis over time and how to move towards emotional resilience. Her love for rivers and the stillness and spaciousness that they provide, leads her to spend many weeks every year with the waters. Eva believes that developing a consistent nature connection practice with elements of somatic awareness — integrating a sense of the sacredness of the land and her inhabitants — can foster reciprocity with the more-than-human world essential to our personal and collective well-being.
Elizabeth Johnson MA
Utah Guide
Elizabeth is the co-founder and executive director of The Peaceful Presence Project, an Oregon-based nonprofit dedicated to cultivating community-centered death and grief literacy. With a Master’s degree in Community and Urban Planning, Elizabeth’s work explores the cultural, social, and ecological frameworks that shape human experiences of loss, transformation, and renewal. As a death doula and international educator, Elizabeth’s work draws upon The Work That Reconnects, focusing on building emotional resilience in the face of profound personal and planetary challenges. She serves on the leadership council for Public Health Palliative Care International and is a graduate and current faculty member of the Anamcara Project, where she emphasizes grief as a pathway to resilience and ecological belonging. Elizabeth’s work is deeply rooted in her personal experiences with loss and her belief in the transformative power of sorrow, gratitude, and connection. Growing up amid the wild hills and rivers of northern Montana, she has always turned to the natural world as a source of solace, perspective, and intervulnerability.
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
Sarah West
Wilderness Vigil Guide
Sarah West is a therapist, nature guide, writer, artist, and naturalist, living in the wild beauty of Moab, Utah. Her work bridges several disciplines, weaving together trauma healing, somatics, mindfulness, nature therapy, soul work, depth psychology, wilderness vigils, ritual and ceremony, and expressive arts healing.
Sarah’s diverse academic background in archaeology and human evolutionary ecology, along with her immersion in indigenous wisdom traditions, contributes to the depth and richness of her work.
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
Scout Wilkins (she/her)
Utah Guide
As a naturalist, intuitive, energy worker and life coach, Scout is a lifelong explorer and guide who uses nature to help people open and trust, so they can bridge the gap between the external world and their inner human landscape.
Her speciality is in facilitating conversation between all aspects of the human psyche: analytical, somatic and spiritual.
In this she is supported by WordTrails, the exploratory game she has created, which offers a space in which explanation is taken off the table, leaving wide open space for curiosity, wonder and awe.
Scout offers gentle guidance and tools that respect each person’s unique journey while fostering meaningful connection.
Scout’s personal coaching/guiding website: TravelingLight.life
Get a feeling for who Scout is, as well as a bit more about WordTrails at this recent podcast:
https://www.2lives.org/listen/scoutwilkins
Past Guest Guides
Craig Childs
Desert Writing Workshop Guide
Craig Childs has published more than a dozen books of adventure, wilderness, and science, including House of Rain and The Secret Knowledge of Water. His most recent is Virga & Bone: Essays from Dry Places. He has won the Orion Book Award, the Galen Rowell Art of Adventure Award, the Spirit of the West Award for his body of work, and thrice the Sigurd F. Olson Nature Writing Award. He is a contributing editor at Adventure Journal Quarterly, and his writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Outside, and The New York Times, the latter calling him “a modern-day desert father.” He brings a lifetime of experience field-writing in dry country.
Daiva Chesonis
Desert Writing Workshop Guide
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.
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
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.