What happens to kids when they put their phones away for a week and float a river?
“Magic happens,” said Brett Hochmuth, executive director of GOALS Youth River Expeditions, a nonprofit that provides growth-focused river expeditions primarily for middle-school and high-school age kids. “Kids literally change their body posture between the put-in and the take-out.”
Hochmuth started the group in 2010 after a stint as a middle-school teacher in Idaho Springs, CO, a job that left his summers open to guide raft trips on Clear Creek.
“I’d come back to my classroom in August and hear these kids, who live in the mountains, brag about how much time they were spending in front of a computer screen. And it came to me that it wasn’t that they didn’t want to get out in this incredible recreational paradise. They just didn’t know how to.”
Hochmuth started a middle school outdoor education program that tackled the basics: How to pack for an overnight backpacking trip, how to set up a tent. At one point, he organized a five-day Desolation Canyon trip on the Green River for his eighth-graders. That’s when the transformation occurred that led to the formation of GOALS, an acronym that originated with the edict to “Get Outside and Learn Something.”
“I saw more growth in my students in five days on Deso than I did in 180 days in the classroom,” he said. “There’s something about the confidence and the camaraderie and the lessons that you can teach in the outdoors—in a relatively short amount of time—that are way more important than reading, writing, and arithmetic.”
On the bus ride home from that outing, he and a colleague determined that they needed to bring the experience to kids outside of Clear Creek County. What began as a school-sponsored outing for 15 kids in Desolation Canyon is now a program that offers river expeditions each year for 200 elementary through high school students on rivers in Colorado, Utah, Oregon, Idaho, and now in Chile, Peru, and Nepal. The organization also offers some specialty trips for adults as well.
GOALS partners with river outfitters throughout the Rocky Mountain West who provide guides, equipment, and river access. Costs for the expeditions are defrayed by financial assistance and fundraising opportunities.
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Leaving the phones behind
Every element of living and breathing the river trip experience contributes to the transformation that occurs during a GOALS trip. The students learn new skills as they work in teams to help with kitchen duties, camp setup, groover management, and boat maintenance. Each day, they engage in journal-based activities and lessons that Hochmuth and the GOALS team have developed and refined over the years with input from professional educators and the river guides themselves. They live in nature for several days among people they don’t know well—or are rediscovering in a new context. And because a cornerstone of the program is that the kids leave their phones and watches behind, they are completely disconnected from technology for maybe the first time in years. That’s how the magic happens.
“I could talk about brain science, the way parts of our brain operate when we’re out in nature—but don’t operate when we’re multitasking,” said Hochmuth. “But it comes down to making kids aware that the buzz they’re feeling has to do with living in a part of their head that is encouraging them to be creative and is encouraging them to forward-think and recount old memories. That is really a result of not looking at their phones.”
Hochmuth said that on the last night of the trip, the kids write a thank-you letter to the canyon, whatever they’re grateful for, or whatever change they might feel. The themes that resonate time and time again include “I’ve never been as happy as I’ve been the last few days,” “I didn’t realize how capable I was or how strong I was,” and “I thought it would be such a hurdle for me to spend the night sleeping under the stars, and here I am craving the ability to do that when I go back home.”
Few of the victories have anything to do with whitewater. A transformation occurs, Hochmuth said, when kids recognize that the way they’re speaking to one another, the way they’re being heard, and the relationships they’re developing are more authentic and profound than what they built after a year of sitting together at a cafeteria lunch table—keeping an “ego cloak on,” refusing to be vulnerable, and staring at a screen.
“One really beautiful thing that happens,” said Hochmuth, “is that there is always a groan at the put-in when we ask kids to leave their phones behind. But there’s a louder groan at the take-out when we try to give them back.”
Keeping the spark
Hochmuth’s intent is to extend the profound impact of the outdoor experience to helping students nurture the sparks that were ignited on the river.
“There’s stress, anxiety, and depression that plague this generation more than any that came before,” said Hochmuth. “GOALS aims to teach kids that being in wild places can help with that head space. But we don’t want to end with hugs all around at the take-out and then forget all that. We’re now developing what we call the Spark Calendar, knowing that every kid has a spark that’s focused on something creative, something athletic, something having to do with justice, and so on. We want to keep connected with the kids throughout the year and give them opportunities to nurture those sparks within.”
Another recent focus of the program has been getting kids from different backgrounds involved in the program. Through his mother, a Denver University professor, Hochmuth connected with the high-school-age nephew of a grad student who had fled war-torn Kabul. Asked whether he would be interested in going on a river trip with some of his classmates, the nephew’s face lit up with an “ear-to-ear grin.” That encounter eventually led to students from Afghanistan, Rwanda, Burma, and Honduras joining GOALS trips.
“And while we thought we were doing these kids a real service in forming these connections to North American teens and to the wildest parts of their new country, there was a real benefit to the U.S. kids,” said Hochmuth. “My own daughters were on those trips, and the discussions that organically came up around campfires raised awareness for them about what it means to be a refugee and why they fled their countries. I like to think that it changes some ideas that kids are getting around their dinner tables about immigrants and refugees.”
Hochmuth said that when he was developing a funding proposal, he realized that the benefits of the GOALS program were the same for white, privileged kids as for disadvantaged kids.
“What if we stop looking at this as ‘Here are the benefits for these kids, and here are the benefits for these other kids,’ and just say, ‘Here’s the benefit for the human race?’ It’s an opportunity to form new friendships with kids they might not otherwise interact with, to explore wild places that they otherwise would never see, and to share their cultures and traditions in a community that is safe and interested in hearing about them.”
Anyone who’s fallen for river running can relate to the transformation that occurs on the water, whether you discovered this phenomenon for the first time at 14 or 40. But earlier is probably better. The knowledge that the river can be a refuge for you—whatever storms you’re weathering—is profound.
The GOALS site includes an excerpt from a high school student from her thank-you note to the canyon: “I will always remember and cherish the connection that I felt when I touched my palm to your still water, or the comfort I feel exploring my own mind and soul underneath a blanket of your stars.”
That’s the power of the river at work, revealing that sometimes you need to get outside to better understand what’s inside.
How to Support GOALS Youth River Expeditions
Want to support getting more kids on rivers? Visit the GOALS Youth River Expeditions web site to become a sustaining donor.
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