I grew up behind a screen.

Suburban kid. Anxious. The kind of anxiety that follows you — separation anxiety, OCD tendencies, the feeling that you were somehow not built for the world everyone else seemed to navigate easily. I studied Multimedia at university because it seemed like the right fit. It felt like it was slowly killing me.

Nature didn't fix me overnight. But it was the first thing that ever made me feel like I was in the right place. Not performing. Not managing. Just present, in a body that was actually doing something real.

The Army threw me in the deep end. Deployments to Afghanistan, Iraq, and Timor-Leste. What those years actually taught me had nothing to do with combat — they taught me what happens to human beings when conditions are real and the stakes are genuine. People find something in themselves in those moments. Or they discover what was never built. I learned that competence is the difference. Not confidence, not personality. Competence — the real kind, earned through preparation and experience.

When I left the Army I moved to Vancouver. For a decade I built Restore Human — the methodology, the coaches, the system for helping people rebuild physical capacity from the ground up. In 2022 I moved to Cortes Island. Not as a retreat from that work. As the next honest step in it.

I've spent the years since on this coast. Sutil Channel, Uganda Passage, Desolation Sound in October fog and building westerlies. I train regularly with senior coastal guides — not for their credentials but for the knowledge that only exists after fifteen years on the water. I hold skipper certifications for lake, big canoe, and ocean big canoe. I'm Wilderness First Aid certified. I know this environment the way you know something you live in daily.

What I actually believe:

People don't avoid the wilderness because they dislike it. They avoid it because no one ever built them for it — and somewhere along the way they quietly accepted that maybe they're just not that kind of person.

I was that person. I know exactly what it takes to stop being that person.

The path is competence. Real skills, genuine physical preparation, and a guide who will meet you where you actually are — not where it's convenient to pretend you are. Three days in genuine wilderness, properly prepared for, properly guided, changes something that doesn't change back. The research calls it the three-day effect. I call it what happened to me, and what I've watched happen to others.

I'm not trying to sell you an experience. I'm trying to give you back something you've been missing longer than you realize.

If that resonates, the first conversation is just a conversation.